You Mean My Whole Fallacy is Wrong?

That's just like jello on springs.

2012-01-09T18:46:00.000-05:00

There are movie stars... and then there are movie stars. And then there was Marilyn Monroe. By 1956 she had already accumulated wealth and fame, as well as three husbands. In the summer of that year, she and that newly-acquired third husband, playwright Arthur Miller, made a trip to England. But it was no honeymoon. The two traveled to England because Monroe was set to work on a film called The Sleeping Prince (later changed to The Prince and the Showgirl). This is the subject of a new movie by Simon Curtis, My Week With Marilyn, based on the memoirs of Colin Clark.

Colin (Eddie Redmayne) had the great fortune of having Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) be a friend of the family and through that connection--and a determined persistence--managed to obtained a job on the actor's next project, yes, The Sleeping Prince. Olivier was also directing the picture and from the moment of Monroe's arrival was a thorn in his side. "I think directing a movie is the best job ever created, but Marilyn has cured me of ever wanting to do it again," he laments to Colin. The notoriously fragile Monroe had an array of handlers--coddlers, really--that allowed her to slow and sometimes simply halt the day's production of the movie. But Monroe, feeling alienated by Olivier and much of the rest of the cast and crew and also abandoned by her new husband after returning to the States, finds a new confidante in Colin.

Much of the film consists of Colin merely observing, sitting back almost unnoticed watching the drama between Monroe and everyone else unfold. For all of his assertiveness early on, much of the action in the narrative is thrust upon him. Monroe doesn't merely lure her into their friendship, she basically instigates it. He's merely clever enough to hang on for the ride.

And that's only part of the oddity of this film. For while his week with Monroe is Colin Clark's story, the movie is really Marilyn's. That is to say, the film belongs to Michelle Williams, who--and here's a serious case of burying the lede--plays the legend and does so in a way that nearly elevates what is a fairly pedestrian film. Monroe was an icon among icons and her presence not only in those great movies but also in the popular consciousness transcended even that of her fellow celebrities. Given she also died so young, the potency of her stardom proved that much stronger. It's as if she was dropped out of the sky; she existed in the periphery of what we could comprehend. The performance by Williams--who, it should be mentioned, is emerging as the best actress of her generation--exists in the same way. Her performance as Monroe almost belongs in another film--a better film. The movie is a period piece to be sure, but its world and a good number of its performances feel like they belong in a museum. Williams's performance is the only one that feels urgent, her Monroe is the only one on the screen who feels present. Everything else around her feels cold and distant. Olivier may have felt like he wanted to shake Marilyn into waking up for the shoot but I felt that way about the movie itself.

It makes for a particularly muddy film. If we are to see everything through Colin's eyes instead of Monroe's, then the stakes feel substantially low. The deep, scar-ridden psychology of Monroe gets subsumed by the thin nostalgia of Colin's celebrity tryst. By the end, it feels like nothing more than Colin's summer vacation. And, sadly, that does a disservice to both Ms. Monroe and Ms. Williams.

Check the rhime.

2012-01-09T18:45:00.000-05:00

As with many things, I am often a bit behind the curve when it comes to music. (My car radio is always locked on the oldies station for example). I caught on to hip hop when I was in middle school, at the height--or just after--of gangsta rap. And as with other genres, I find something I like, then work backwards. The first time I heard of A Tribe Called Quest was catching the video for "Award Tour" on MTV sometime in the early 90s. I was in love. It was not the aggressive and bleak stuff coming out of Compton at the time. It was laid back and jazzy; the video was sepia-toned. I bought the album, Midnight Marauders. That was their third album and, as I said, I had to catch up by going backwards.

That A Tribe Called Quest (and some of their hip hop brethren, especially De La Soul) represented an alternative to the harder-edged stuff coming out of either coast is not a new thought. In fact it's dealt with directly in Michael Rapaport's fascinating documentary, Beats, Rhymes, & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest.

The group was born out of the lifelong friendship between two Queens boys, Jonathan Davis and Malik Taylor (later, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg). When Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White joined, the lineup was complete. The doc revisits this formation, from the time Q-Tip and Phife were best friends as little kids through the former's attending of Murray Bergtrum High School in Manhattan, where he met Ali Shaheed as well as members of the Jungle Brothers.

The film goes even further, though, examining not just their musical legacy, but their personal histories, especially the strained relationship between Q-Tip and Phife. Like a lot of successful bands, there is a dynamic tension between its two founders that both animates the artistic identity of the group, but also leads to its inevitable disintegration. It's this aspect of the doc that makes it more than merely museum piece.

It becomes clear throughout the movie that there were two major reasons for Q-Tip and Phife's separation. One was the apparent emergence of Q-Tip as the leader of the group, which relegated the other members, at least as Phife sees it, to being regarded as the Supremes to his Diana Ross. The film does a nice job of never blaming either of the two for this fight, never taking a side. On the one hand, it's quite clear Q-Tip had his mind on greater and bigger individual things and his post-Tribe career would suggest as much. On the other, there's certainly a level of professional jealousy one could infer from the anger Phife displays in several of the interviews. Rapaport shrewdly allows us to determine for ourselves which is more true. It seems pretty likely that it's a combination of both.

The second factor causing fissure between the duo was less petty and of much more dire straits--Phife's diabetes. In reality, while the disease had some measure of fracturing the group in its first incarnation, it also brought them together--for a moment--and then led again to an even deeper separation. So as the group reunited specifically to help raise money for Phife's treatment, the close proximity only furthered and galvanized the animosity between the two.

Thankfully, the coda of the film offers a ray of hope for fans and, more importantly, for the friendship between Phife and Q-Tip. Phife not only has a successful kidney transplant but the group again tentatively reunites. The band will probably never be what it once was. They'll never have the impact they had in the early 90s. But at least there is the promise of these childhood friends repairing their relationship. And division is ultimately not the message of the band anyway--it's unity.

Please, no more days.

2012-01-09T18:44:00.000-05:00

At the very beginning of Lone Scherfig's One Day, a character is doing something that, say, if you've ever watched another movie, pretty clearly foreshadows a major incident later in the film. That the movie then jumps back about 20 years, just about confirms it.

Save for that jump back in time and a couple of other ones sprinkled throughout the film, the story propels forward in a standard, linear fashion. The story of Emma and Dexter (Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturges) begins--chronologically, that is--in 1988, when they meet during the night of their graduation from University. In a poorly edited sequence that thoroughly confused me, the two go back to her flat where they almost hook up, but end up not having sex--at least I think so. Instead the two part ways the best of friends, although their lives take on particularly divergent paths. Dexter becomes a television celebrity, hosting a late night dance show. Think of him as--and excuse the redundancy here--a cheesy Ryan Seacrest. Emma, the aspiring writer, is stuck--though reasonably happy at times--running a Tex-Mex restaurant. At the same time he's banging show dancers and groupies alike, Emma is being wooed by one of her waiters--Ian, an aspiring (and patently unfunny) comedian.

It's a peculiar trait Hathaway possesses that she can honestly and convincingly portray the ugly duckling phase of a woman's life--she did the same in The Princess Diaries and even The Devil Wears Prada. Sturges, on the other hand, brings very little depth to the character who sits at the center of the story. Granted, Dexter is meant to sort of just be a pretty face--a "himbo" in a sense--but if we're to empathize with him, as when his career goes kaput or when his marriage to another woman falls apart, there must be something there. There isn't.

Even in flawed or subpar movies, Hathaway will show great chemistry with her leading man. I'm thinking specifically of Love & Other Drugs with Jake Gyllenhaal. Here she and Sturges miss each other in the same way that Emma and Dexter continue to do. Yet Ian of course isn't a sufficient enough option for her either. Though a relationship occurs between them, he's nothing more than a Bellamy. It isn't quite fair that she only really gets to choose between the two (except for the brief fling she has with a Frenchman in Paris).

The film's conceit of each new sequence taking place on the same day also seemingly adds nothing to the story. That there is simply no apparent cosmic reason that every significant moment in these two characters' lives needs to happen every July 15 makes it come off as nothing more than a gimmick.

But in the end, the one thing that makes a film like this worthwhile is the romance between its central couple. It's too bad that in One Day, only one half of the party decided to show up.

It ain't over 'til it's over (or at least when the credits roll).

2012-01-09T18:43:00.000-05:00

Baseball people, and that includes myself, are slow to change and accept new ideas.

--Branch Rickey

Late in Bennett Miller's Moneyball, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) asks Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), "How can you not be romantic about baseball?" That's true of course because it is the most revered of American sports. Football may have the most fervent fan base. Basketball may be the most globally popular. But baseball is still America's pastime. And in a lot of ways it still has a lot of trouble letting go of some of its traditions.

Beane is the General Manger of the Oakland Athletics. As such he is in charge of all personnel decisions: which players to sign and which coaches to hire and, perhaps more importantly, for how much. The film begins over footage of the best-of-5 2001 American League Divisional Series during which his A's had a 2-0 lead over the New York Yankees. The subsequent loss of that series would be bad enough, but the team ended up losing three of its most important players to teams in bigger markets with bigger payrolls. He complains that they're a "farm team for the Yankees".

When you're on the bottom, all bets are off, every option must be taken. "There are rich teams and there are poor teams, then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's us," says Beane to his scouting staff. Baseball is like America. There's the 1%; the rich keep getting richer. He is determined to change their way of finding, signing, and paying players. Only, he doesn't exactly know how.

He finds his answer on a trip to the Cleveland Indians. While negotiating player trades with the Cleveland GM and his staff, he notices a young staffer whisper among the group, effectively rejecting one of Beane's offers. After the meeting he offers the young man, Peter Brand, a job on his own staff, pilfering him from the Indians in the same way A's players have been pilfered from him.

Turns out Brand follows the philosophy of Bill James, a pioneer of sabermetrics, which basically reduces players to a survey of statistics and places a certain amount of value on their contributions to a team's wins. "Your goal shouldn't be to buy players. Your goal should be to buy wins. In order to buy wins, you need to buys runs," Brand tells Beane. This flies in the face of old-school baseball thinking, a thinking still dominant among Beane's scouting staff and manager Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Brand's (and now Beane's) way of rebuilding the A's is not easily welcomed.

Now the decisions behind building a baseball team based on statistical analysis may sound drier than this sentence, but Moneyball was co-scripted by Aaron Sorkin, who made the litigation involving the founding of Facebook the stuff of high drama in The Social Network. And in the same way that earlier film wasn't ostensibly about Facebook, Moneyball is only in part about the sport itself.

Sports themselves already possess an inherent drama in a way that often doesn't lend itself to a fictional narrative. But whereas many lesser movies focus on the trite personal relationships between the athletes or coaches, teachers or management, Moneyball is smart enough to make it about the process of what Beane does, which is simply trying to build a winning team. It's as much a movie about business as it is about sports. The rest of the organization (frankly the rest of baseball) may like it or not, but Beane pushes his chips all in with the Moneyball philosophy.

The story of the 2002 Oakland Athletics isn't a secret--it's part of sports history now--but I won't reveal how the season plays out. You can look that up yourself, or better yet see the movie. And the legacy of Beane's Moneyball approach is still mixed. Teams since have won world series (and championships in other sports) adopting some of those philosophies and Bill James himself was hired by the Boston Red Sox the following season. Yet there are still the big market teams spending $200 million and winning world series. And it's likely they will continue to do so. But the spirit of challenging the status quo against all odds is part of the spirit of the American ethos. It's as fundamentally as, say, baseball.

Life, Interrupted

2011-09-03T07:48:00.000-04:00

Beginners begins with an end. (How's that for a sentence?) Oliver Fields's father, Hal, has just died. Three years earlier, his mother passed. In the interim, Hal had announced to Oliver that he's gay (and secretly had been his entire life) and thus proceeds to frequent dance clubs, join gay social groups, and even get a much younger boyfriend. He's finally living the life he never had the chance to do openly.

After his father's death, Oliver shuts down. Except for a couple of work friends, his only companion is Arthur, Hal's Jack Terrier who "knows up to 150 words, but doesn't talk"--though that doesn't stop the audience, nor presumably Oliver, from knowing what he's thinking. It isn't until his friends drag him (and Arthur) to a costume party that his life begins to show some promise of happiness.

It's at this party that the cutest of Meet Cutes occurs. Oliver, dressed up as Sigmund Freud, starts to play therapist to some of the other party guests. When a man dressed up as the Wicked Witch of the West gets up from the couch, Anna (Melanie Laurent)--dressed up as... well, I'm not sure exactly--lays down. But she has laryngitis and can't speak, so must communicate by writing on a notepad. She wonders why he's at a party if he's sad. Except that, all of a sudden--for a night's worth at least--he isn't sad anymore.

Between the "talking" dog and too-cute-for-words romance, this rundown might make the film sound a little twee for most, but that's all balanced by a seemingly unbearable sadness that pervades its romantic leads. Hal has already dealt with his and his life is now concerned with seeking pleasure. Oliver and Anna are weighed down by their past, by the way their family histories have shaped them. (At work, Oliver creates a series of sketches called "A History of Sadness"--for a band's CD cover, no less.)

In a way, much of what Beginners is about is how we all deal with our histories. The structure itself is built around the past. The two main story threads are not concurrent. Hal's coming out and subsequent battle with cancer obviously takes place just before the narrative involving Oliver and Anna. And the bulk of the movie jumps back-and-forth between the two. The film jumps even further back to Oliver's relationship with his mother. Even what seems to be the present-day story of Oliver and Anna is actually in the past: "This is 2003" he says in voiceover, not 2011.

Much of Oliver's voiceover is spoken in this manner: "This is 1955, this is what the sun looks like, this was the President." Except for when he speaks of Anna in this way, what we see are photographs. And it's not just the obvious things like the sun or the president, but a picture of a bathroom where gay men like his father had to hideout for their sexual trysts or a picture of the crime scene when Harvey Milk was killed. Everything we know of life is filtered through our memory; it's how we define our experience of it.

And when the weight of that history consumes us, it can be overwhelming--especially on relationships. Oliver confides to a friend that, at 38, he feels too old to be falling for a girl again, but of course his father shows that you're never too old to be doing anything. The romance between Oliver and Anna is at the same time joyful and melancholic. In between late night subversive trips to vandalize the streets and billboards of L.A. and runs in the park, the two talk wistfully of their childhood and their parents.

The performances by the three leads are all fantastic. McGregor, after last year's I Love You Phillip Morris and The Ghost Writer, has put together three of the best performances of his career. And with his work here, he for the first time posits himself as the sadsack everyman, but with enough charm and depth to keep you rooting for him. Laurent--seen by me so far only in Inglorious Basterds--is, well, the kind of girl you only find in these kinds of movies. Much of what she conveys is with her eyes and face. She's beguiling in the more comedic scenes and heartbreaking in the sadder ones.

But it's Plummer who steals the movie. Many actors have done their best to leap right off the screen and bring the tragedy of terminal illness to Shakesperean levels. Plummer, instead, decides to keep everything on an even keel. Hal doesn't wallow in his disease, nor does he show a Scarlett O'Hara-like pluckish resolve. He's happy with his life. And he wants to continue to be happy with what he's got left. Unlike Oliver and Anna, there is no room for "sadness" in his vocabulary.

Hal doesn't feel the need to worry about the new phases in his life. He's come to terms with it. Oliver and Anna have not adjusted to theirs. In a way, all life is is a series of false starts. And while the movie may be about beginnings and endings, those two are probably the simplest things to navigate. It's all the stuff in between we're still trying to figure out.

We're no angels.

2011-04-06T18:23:00.000-04:00

Are our lives made up of completely random moments, chance encounters and happenings motivated by nothing but our own choosing? Or is there some greater plan we must inexorably follow to its predetermined conclusion--a fate? It may be impossible to know (though I do have my theories), but in the world of The Adjustment Bureau, it is certainly the latter--and then, well maybe, the former.

The film (written and directed by George Nolfi, adapted from a Philip K. Dick short story) begins as David Norris (Matt Damon), a hot and rising politician loses his candidacy for a New York Senate seat. While practicing his concession speech in the bathroom, he notices a Elise (Emily Blunt) hiding in one of the stalls, who inspires him to go off book and say what he really feels. They kiss--passionately--and she runs off. The next morning they meet again on a bus--an encounter that should not have happened as two men in suits and fedoras (yes, these hats matter), Mitchell and Richardson (Anthony Mackie and John Slattery), previously decided that David will spill coffee on himself, causing him to miss not only the bus, but an important meeting.

Mackie as Henry Mitchell

Mitchell and Richardson are part of the Adjustment Bureau, a group that makes slight nudges over the course of everyday events, so that the world will all eventually go according to plan. But David is a wrench thrown into that plan. First it's unintentionally. When he gets to that meeting he was supposed to miss by ten minutes, he sees the Bureau doing its work, freezing time in the office, scanning and rescanning brains. But after the Bureau reveals how they work and that he and Elise can't end up together because of their decided paths, he actively chooses to go off course.

This may sound particularly science fiction-y and intricate and it is. But really it all simply provides necessary plot points for the real story, the soul of the movie, which is the romantic drama between David and Elise. From their initial encounter in the bathroom to their next meeting on the bus, from their reunion three years later to a truncated goodbye as David temporarily concedes to fate, Damon and Blunt create a palpable chemistry on screen. Every moment they are on screen together feels real. It may seem silly that someone would go to the lengths David goes through to just to be with Elise, but here we believe it and because of that the stakes feel that much higher.

It's also a movie about choice and the lack thereof. As a senate candidate, he was molded by his campaign--clothes are picked out for him, speechwriters gave him his words. When David falls in love, the Bureau intervenes. In both cases, Elise gave him that freedom to choose his path. And I was happy to see it broach the subject of how those choices have long-term, unintended ramifications. Particularly, how the choice of love means potentially the sacrifice of something else. Romantic symbiosis comes at a cost. That cost rarely gets considered.

The film is not without its flaws, certainly. Much of David's interaction with members of the Bureau involve a heavy amount of exposition. But as we approach a summer that will be overpopulated with comic book reboots and bloated sequels, this is exactly the type of movie at which Hollywood used to excel. From the noirish aesthetic to the old-fashioned romance, I can see a Michael Curtiz-type from the 40s or 50s making this type of movie. It's supported by solid character actors like Slattery and Mackie (who deserves to be a leading man by now, but that's another issue) and also Terence Stamp as another member of the Bureau. And, perhaps most importantly, it's built around the rapport of its stars. A classic movie character once said about old Hollywood, "We had faces!"^* In Damon and Blunt, The Adjustment Bureau has two great ones.

Matt Damon and Emily Blunt

^*I'm not giving you the title, you should already know it!

Shiny, happy people...

2011-02-27T14:05:00.001-05:00

You want your Oscar picks? I got your Oscar picks. (Along with who I think should win.)

The Illusionist... will not win.

I have no opinion/prediction on the shorts (live action, short, and documentary), given I haven't seen them. As for the rest, here ya go...

Animated Feature Film

“How to Train Your Dragon” Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois
“The Illusionist” Sylvain Chomet
“Toy Story 3” Lee Unkrich

I liked all three movies (and loved The Illusionist), but Pixar always wins this. Barring a major upset: Toy Story 3.

Documentary (Feature)

“Exit through the Gift Shop” Banksy and Jaimie D'Cruz
“Gasland” Josh Fox and Trish Adlesic
“Inside Job” Charles Ferguson and Audrey Marrs
“Restrepo” Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger
“Waste Land” Lucy Walker and Angus Aynsley

Exit Through the Gift Shop would be my pick and how could the Academy pass up the possible chance of seeing the mysterious Banksy accept an award?

Foreign Language Film

“Biutiful” Mexico
“Dogtooth” Greece
“In a Better World” Denmark
“Incendies” Canada
“Outside the Law (Hors-la-loi)” Algeria

Crazy, crazy Dogtooth

One of the big surprises leading up to the nominations was how Dogtooth made the shortlist. The next big surprise was that it ended up getting up nominated. Will we be surprised yet again after an Academy win? I sure hope so and why the hell not?

Makeup

“Barney's Version” Adrien Morot
“The Way Back” Edouard F. Henriques, Gregory Funk and Yolanda Toussieng
“The Wolfman” Rick Baker and Dave Elsey

I guess The Wolfman wins for having the MOST makeup.

Art Direction

“Alice in Wonderland”
Production Design: Robert Stromberg; Set Decoration: Karen O'Hara
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1”
Production Design: Stuart Craig; Set Decoration: Stephenie McMillan
“Inception”
Production Design: Guy Hendrix Dyas; Set Decoration: Larry Dias and Doug Mowat
“The King's Speech”
Production Design: Eve Stewart; Set Decoration: Judy Farr
“True Grit”
Production Design: Jess Gonchor; Set Decoration: Nancy Haigh

Will win: The King's Speech. Should win: True Grit.

Costume Design

“Alice in Wonderland” Colleen Atwood
“I Am Love” Antonella Cannarozzi
“The King's Speech” Jenny Beavan
“The Tempest” Sandy Powell
“True Grit” Mary Zophres

The King's Speech is again the likely candidate, though I could potentially see Alice in Wonderland sneaking in. My personal toss-up would be between I Am Love and True Grit.

Music (Original Score)

“How to Train Your Dragon” John Powell
“Inception” Hans Zimmer
“The King's Speech” Alexandre Desplat
“127 Hours” A.R. Rahman
“The Social Network” Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Desplat is a great composer, yet it's probably not even his best work this year (that goes to The Ghost Writer). Reznor and Ross should win this and I think they will.

Music (Original Song)

“Coming Home” from “Country Strong” Music and Lyric by Tom Douglas, Troy Verges and Hillary Lindsey
“I See the Light” from “Tangled” Music by Alan Menken Lyric by Glenn Slater
“If I Rise” from “127 Hours” Music by A.R. Rahman Lyric by Dido and Rollo Armstrong
“We Belong Together” from “Toy Story 3" Music and Lyric by Randy Newman

Errrmm... Newman?

Sound Editing

“Inception” Richard King
“Toy Story 3” Tom Myers and Michael Silvers
“Tron: Legacy” Gwendolyn Yates Whittle and Addison Teague
“True Grit” Skip Lievsay and Craig Berkey
“Unstoppable” Mark P. Stoeckinger

True Grit is my preference here and I see it just edging out Inception.

Sound Mixing

“Inception” Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo and Ed Novick
“The King's Speech” Paul Hamblin, Martin Jensen and John Midgley
“Salt” Jeffrey J. Haboush, Greg P. Russell, Scott Millan and William Sarokin
“The Social Network” Ren Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick and Mark Weingarten
“True Grit” Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter F. Kurland

The work in this category for The Social Network is kind of masterful. I don't know how it wouldn't win, although watch out for True Grit again.

Visual Effects

“Alice in Wonderland” Ken Ralston, David Schaub, Carey Villegas and Sean Phillips
“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1” Tim Burke, John Richardson, Christian Manz and Nicolas Aithadi
“Hereafter” Michael Owens, Bryan Grill, Stephan Trojansky and Joe Farrell
“Inception” Paul Franklin, Chris Corbould, Andrew Lockley and Peter Bebb
“Iron Man 2” Janek Sirrs, Ben Snow, Ged Wright and Daniel Sudick

The bone tossed to Inception seems like it will be in this category. And I think it's deserving of the award here.

Cinematography

“Black Swan” Matthew Libatique
“Inception” Wally Pfister
“The King's Speech” Danny Cohen
“The Social Network” Jeff Cronenweth
“True Grit” Roger Deakins

My two faves in this category are The Social Network and True Grit and I think the Academy will be deciding between those two as well. If you twist my arm, I'd go with Cronenweth's work in The Social Network for the win.

Film Editing

“Black Swan” Andrew Weisblum
“The Fighter” Pamela Martin
“The King's Speech” Tariq Anwar
“127 Hours” Jon Harris
“The Social Network” Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter

The Social Network will and should win this award.

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)

“127 Hours” Screenplay by Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy
“The Social Network” Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin
“Toy Story 3” Screenplay by Michael Arndt; Story by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich
“True Grit” Written for the screen by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
“Winter's Bone” Adapted for the screen by Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini

This might be the strongest category of all, but Sorkin's quick wit and jumbled structure will rise above the rest, as it should.

Writing (Original Screenplay)

“Another Year” Written by Mike Leigh
“The Fighter” Screenplay by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson;
Story by Keith Dorrington & Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson
“Inception” Written by Christopher Nolan
“The Kids Are All Right” Written by Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg
“The King's Speech” Screenplay by David Seidle

This looks to be another The King's Speech win, though The Kids Are All Right may be the sleeper. I also have an enduring affection for Leigh's Another Year, which would be my preference.

Actor in a Supporting Role

Christian Bale in “The Fighter”
John Hawkes in “Winter's Bone”
Jeremy Renner in “The Town”
Mark Ruffalo in “The Kids Are All Right”
Geoffrey Rush in “The King's Speech”

Christian Bale will win this category by holding off Geoffrey Rush. My vote would go to John Hawkes in Winter's Bone.

Melissa Leo and Christian Bale in The Fighter

Actress in a Supporting Role

Amy Adams in “The Fighter”
Helena Bonham Carter in “The King's Speech”
Melissa Leo in “The Fighter”
Hailee Steinfeld in “True Grit”
Jacki Weaver in “Animal Kingdom”

This is kind of a tough one to call. Melissa Leo (who was recently nominated as Best Actress for Frozen) looks to be the favorite. The Steinfeld/True Grit camp shrewdly campaigned her for the supporting category even though she's clearly the lead actress. Leo will win, Steinfeld should.

Actor in a Leading Role

Javier Bardem in “Biutiful”
Jeff Bridges in “True Grit”
Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network”
Colin Firth in “The King's Speech”
James Franco in “127 Hours”

No question this is Firth's to lose and he will end up taking the trophy home, though my vote would go to Eisenberg.

Actress in a Leading Role

Natalie Portman in The Black Swan

Annette Bening in “The Kids Are All Right”
Nicole Kidman in “Rabbit Hole”
Jennifer Lawrence in “Winter's Bone”
Natalie Portman in “Black Swan”
Michelle Williams in “Blue Valentine”

This is a no-doubt showdown between Bening and Portman. I think Portman will edge her out for the physicality of the performance. But to me the showdown should be between Lawrence and Williams, in which case I think I'd be happy for a tie.

Directing

“Black Swan” Darren Aronofsky
“The Fighter” David O. Russell
“The King's Speech” Tom Hooper
“The Social Network” David Fincher
“True Grit” Joel Coen and Ethan Coen

Hooper's DGA win puts him squarely as the favorite here and he'll win. Fincher should win though and, between the two frankly, it shouldn't even be close.

Picture

“Black Swan” Mike Medavoy, Brian Oliver and Scott Franklin, Producers
“The Fighter” David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman and Mark Wahlberg, Producers
“Inception” Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan, Producers
“The Kids Are All Right” Gary Gilbert, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Celine Rattray, Producers
“The King's Speech” Iain Canning, Emile Sherman and Gareth Unwin, Producers
“127 Hours” Christian Colson, Danny Boyle and John Smithson, Producers
“The Social Network” Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca and Ceán Chaffin, Producers
“Toy Story 3” Darla K. Anderson, Producer
“True Grit” Scott Rudin, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, Producers
“Winter's Bone" Anne Rosellini and Alix Madigan-Yorkin, Producers


The King's Speech

This will come down to a duel between The King's Speech and The Social Network. TSN seemed a pretty solid lock by sweeping up nearly all of the major critics' awards. But with the most total nominations, along with winning the top prizes at the Producers, Directors, AND Screen Actors Guilds, it is now starting to point in the direction of The King's Speech. The lead-up to this final award may point to who will win this category. Often, the editing and directing categories are harbingers of who will win Best Picture. By my predictions, the two films will split these awards. If something contrary to that happens, we may already have our answer. Sadly, it looks like The King's Speech will win, though I think The Social Network should.

Once, twice, three times a lady.

2011-02-21T18:15:00.001-05:00

Or: Three Weddings and No Funeral

It may be either in spite of or because of his status as Hollywood's most loveable curmudgeon that Paul Giamatti has turned into a bit of a national treasure. While movie everymen throughout the years--whether it be Jimmy Stewart or Jack Lemmon or Tom Hanks--have displayed the ideal that exists within all of us, the externalizing of the leading men we all think we might be, Giamatti shows us the flaws we all actually have. He often aims for melancholy before gregariousness. He's a bit schlubby and walks too hunchbacked. His characters don't always treat women well, but in their heart of hearts they certainly mean to, though weakness and selfishness often get in the way.

In a word, he's Barney--Panofsky, that is, in Richard J. Lewis's Barney's Version, adapated from Mordecai Richler's novel of the same name. The movie starts near the end and cycles back as we first see an aged Barney, worn and weathered through time, hitting some of the Montreal spots with which we'll eventually become familiar. We also quickly learn things about Barney that will come into focus as the movies flashes back: a child (at least one), a divorce (again, at least one), and a death for which he was suspected of murder but was never charged (thankfully only one).


Giamatti and Hoffman

Though the character is entirely fictitious, the movie follows your basic biopic structure--slightly episodic, hitting all the highlights of Barney's life, no real arc. And it sure is one hell of a sprawl as the movies covers approximately four decades of his life. Naturally with that you get a handful of memorable supporting characters, all gleefully performed by game actors. There's Scott Speedman as Boogie, Barney's closest friend--failed novelist, successful wooer of women. Minnie Driver as his second wife, sexy and shrill all wrapped up in one. Dustin Hoffman (there's another everyman for you) as Izzy, his father--formerly a cop, currently an old horndog.

And then there's Rosamund Pike as Miriam, his third wife, whom he meets and with whom promptly falls in love at his second wedding. They meet briefly at the reception. She tells him where the Monte Cristo cigar gets its name (yes, it is a literary reference) and that she doesn't follow hockey, but knows enough because she reads the paper. He tells her he runs a TV company called Totally Unnecessary Productions. To misappropriate a line from Izzy to Barney: "Many successful marriages have been built on far less."

Pike as Miriam

It may seem a stretch that Barney would attempt to leave his wife at their own wedding for a woman he's never met, but when Miriam is that girl (and, my God, when Pike is that actress), you get it (I did). And it may seem a stretch that a girl as seemingly well-to-do, smart, and beautiful as Miriam would fall for a slouchy, marginally successful TV producer, but when it's Barney, you kind of get it too. And despite the issues with the script--the movie's a bit too long and hits all the predetermined notes--you're pulled along by the two of them and their relationship. If the movie itself doesn't exactly earn the warmth you're supposed to give to them, the actors earn it themselves.

Barney's Version (Richard J. Lewis, 134 m)

The butter wouldn't melt, so I put it in the pie.

2011-01-24T18:44:00.002-05:00

Seemingly, at the end of every year, I hear how poor a year it was at the movies. From diminishing box office returns to a mere dearth of quality cinema, it's been a sad refrain that 2000-and-whatever was a down year for the industry. And each year, at least from a critical standpoint (box office performance means little to someone who is spending his own money actually going to all these movies), I'm incredulous at the assertion. When it comes time to make my year-end list(s), I often find myself sad at the exclusion of certain films because I can never find enough room for them and excited at the prospect of exploring the movies on other writers' 10-best lists that I hadn't had the pleasure (and opportunity) of seeing.

But as 2010 wound down, it seemed apparent that it actually was a weak year for movies and only slowly was I able to compile a list of movies I thought fit to include on such a list. Make no mistake, the movies that did finally end up earning their way onto the list are all terrific films and I'll stand by all of them, but on the whole, I would describe the 2010 movie year as... "Meh."

Smarter people may be able to come up with a reason why this is the case (if it even is such) and year-end analyses provide the perfect venue for that kind discussion. But as it were, these movies make my final list not because they've come to define something as arbitrary as a 365-day range on the calendar, but because they're still with me, lingering in slow motion.

So just to be a little different, here are my top 11 films of the past year, intercut with the added bonus of 10 of my favorite movie moments from 2010:

11. Made in Dagenham
(Nigel Cole)
Based on the real-life strike by the 187 female sewing machinists at the Ford plant in the London suburb of Dagenham, this film accomplishes the difficult act of preaching without being preachy. A vibrant cast, including a collection of terrific female actors, from Geraldine James to Rosamund Pike to Miranda Richardson, led by the resilient Sally Hawkins and a rousing 60s soundtrack make it the feelgood movie of this list.

Emma Stone getting a pocketful of sunshine, proving she may be the next great screen comedienne, in Easy A. She has also put herself squarely in the running to be my future ex-wife. (Though Tucci and Clarkson nearly steal this movie away from her.)

10. Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy)
Can we stop saying every year that it's been such a great year for documentaries? The documentary genre has never gone away and has always been fertile and vital, and that it continues to produce such varied work as the sobering Restrepo (which I loved) and the completely inebriated I'm Still Here (which I didn't), proves as much. But the best is Banky's maybe-fact-maybe-not look into the world of street art. As much a dissection on the process of being an artist as a meditation on the artistic process. As entertaining a movie made this past year--real, fake, or in between.

The museum scene in Obselidia, which I would dare say is nearly on par with the planetarium scene in Manhattan.

9. The Kids Are All Right
(Lisa Cholodenko)
But too bad the adults have some serious fucking issues. The first thing people think of when this movie is mentioned is that it centers around a lesbian couple. The last thing you think about when watching this movie is that it centers around a lesbian couple. They are a typical American family, which is to say that it's dysfunctional and emotionally fractured. There are no grand pronouncements about what it is to be an alternative family, except that life, whether you're a parent or a child, is a slog and that it's only your loved ones who can get you through it.

Stephin Merritt arguing with Claudia Gonson at the piano about time signatures in Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields. Movies about the craft (of anything) fascinate me. I can only wish the film explored this particular aspect of their relationship a little more.

8. Somewhere (Sofia Coppola)
When Cleo, a remarkably self-possessed 11-year-old is dropped off by her mother at the hotel room of her movie star dad Johnny Marco, she doesn't realize she's being abandoned. Their next few days and weeks together, where he takes her to skating practice, on a short working trip to Italy, and lounging about in the Chateau Marmont, is an extended vacation. Only Johnny's been on a permanent vacation and it's his real life that has come to take him away. Coppola is smart enough to criticize the lonely celebrity life without exactly condemning it. It's also a tender love story between a father and daughter, both of whom may only now be realizing how much they need each other, if maybe just a moment too late.

Men gazing out the window, across the street at women they don't know, but certainly will (and somewhat to their demise) in Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl and Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger, helping prove the Godard sentiment that the history of cinema is the history of men looking at women.

7. True Grit (Joel & Ethan Coen)

The Coen Brothers' remake of the classic John Wayne vehicle (adapted from the Charles Portis novel) doesn't necessarily possess anything new in regards to genre conventions. It is the simple, straightforward story of a young girl who hires a bounty hunter to avenge her father's murder. But it's also richly textured and superbly acted by all three leads, full of the acerbic wit and tight action we've come to expect from the Coens.

Hands down the sweetest first kiss of 2010. The tall Rebecca stooping down to smooch the much shorter Eugene on their first date that didn't include their grandmothers, in Please Give.

6. Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance)
There are really only ever two love stories: falling in love and falling out of love. That nearly all of our significant relationships will tell both stories is something of a tragic fact. Cindy and Dean's is no different and the film weaves both stories together with such striking precision that it can't help but break your heart. But a movie like this can't work without the two people at its center. And I think it can now be said that both Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are two of the defining actors of their generation.

Getting mind-fucked in Get Him to the Greek.

5. Obselidia (Diane Bell)

This is the smallest and quietest movie on the list, but it has made it's share of noise across the festival circuit over the past year. For me, it was the standout pic of the 2010 Florida Film Festival. The acceleration of technological breakthroughs (both large and small) makes life seem to travel at a fevered clip. Tomorrow's innovation is already in yesterday's trash heap. That may be bad (as George, a librarian creating an encyclopedia of obsolete objects, thinks) or that may be good (as Sophie, his brand new friend, might suggest). The answer, I imagine, is somewhere in the middle. But as I type on my laptop, post on this blog, check my iPhone, and fast forward my DVR, this film is the best reminder that sometimes it's important to just slow down and enjoy the ride.

Paul McCartney's "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey" as rendered by a drunk Greta Gerwig in Greenberg.

4. Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich)

Pixar's ridiculous streak continues with the third installment of Woody, Buzz, and the rest of the gang. Unlike some of the more recent Pixar features, which only made my also-ran or second-tier list of the year's best pics, this one finds the best balance between all its disparate elements, the sadness and loneliness, the thrills and the action, including...

A scene in a junkyard, with all the toys holding hands, facing the inevitable. That what is ostensibly a children's movie can broach a subject of such gravity is what elevates the Pixar releases from other standard Hollywood animation--think also Wall-E or the brilliant early montage in Up as well.

3. Winter's Bone (Debra Granik)

A 17-year-old's quest to find her missing father or else lose her house where she takes care of two young siblings and her incapacitated mother. Set in the Ozarks, at first glance it may appear to be more a work of cultural anthropology than dramatic cinema, but that's only partly true. Think of it as a displaced mob movie, but it flattens the operatic overtones and indulgences of that genre and centers on the everyday struggles of this kind of rural living and the strength of familial ties therein. It also has two of the strongest performances in movies this year, by Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes.

A dance between friends. Harry cheering up Hermione in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I.

2. The Social Network

(David Fincher)

The zeitgeist movie of 2010 is actually only tangentially about Facebook or social networking, really. Certainly, the specifics of how Facebook came into being and how it works are important to the minutiae of the movie, but it's a semi-Macguffin. It's more about things like ambition, friendship, honesty, even identity. Between Aaron Sorkin's rapid-fire dialogue and almost kaleidoscopic structure, Fincher's focused direction, and the propulsive Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score, this was also the tautest thriller of the year.

Fellas (Ladies, please look away), if the cinema of 2010 has taught us anything, it's that it gets us nowhere to go down on women. Ask Dorff in Somewhere, the Cloonster in The American, and Stiller in Greenberg. All of my future dates will now end in amicable handshakes. Such is the everlasting legacy of the last twelve months in movies. Which awkwardly leads into the title of our next movie...

1. Please Give (Nicole Holofcener)

Two sets of families: one a husband-and-wife team (with an acne-ridden teenage daughter) who buys furniture off the families of the recently deceased, hikes up the price, and sells them in their Manhattan store; the other, a pair of sisters tending (one significantly more than the other) to their ornery, 91-year-old grandmother, who the other family is waiting to die so they can expand their apartment. All save for a couple of the characters in the movie, both central and periphery, are essentially jackasses. Yet Holofcener and her actors make them likable. And it's those observations about human nature that it hits right on the nose. We're all some measured combination of asshole and sweetheart. Each character is in some way working out that dichotomy, each trying to judge the worth of what they're doing for themselves versus what they're doing to and for others. That the picture concerns neurotic New Yorkers who are acutely aware of their own flaws and shortcomings, it has garnered several comparisons to the work of Woody Allen, yet I think its combination of cynicism and warmth more reminds me of another master, Billy Wilder. (Also contains a superb supporting performance from Ann Guilbert, who I mention because she played the neighbor, Millie Helper, on my favorite TV show ever, "The Dick Van Dyke Show".)

Other movies I quite liked, but just fell out of the list: the aforementioned Greenberg and The American. Also, Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture and Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Another art doc, The Art of the Steal. Imports like Dogtooth and Mother also nearly made the list. I adored I Am Love and was surprised at how much I enjoyed The Fighter. So, alright, it was an okay year after all.

"The cars crawl past all stuffed with eyes..."

2010-12-25T13:58:00.003-05:00

It's oftentimes we're too preoccupied with carving out our own particular niches in life, going through the protocol of life, to realize that the point of life is actual living. Each day is a series of exchanges, business and otherwise--signed contracts, verbal agreements, shook hands. We set aside one group of priorities for others. For Zinos Kazantsakis, it seems as if that is all he does in Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen.

The film is Akin's follow-up to his more serious and more tragic, The Edge of Heaven--and what that film had in heaviness, this one has in levity. It's not that the situations he puts his characters in aren't difficult, it's just that they we never get the feeling that they're particularly dire.

Zinos is the owner/cook of a popular Hamburg dive, also called Soul Kitchen. Every relationship he has seems as if it is under contract. His brother, Illia, is essentially on a partial work leave from jail and needs a job (or at least the appearance of one) as part of his probation. He is a small-time crook--a hustler basically--who can't be bothered to do actual work, so his brother signs a release claiming he is an employee of the restaurant. His girlfriend, Nadine, is a journalist leaving on assignment to Shanghai who tries to negotiate his relocation to China with her. He hires a recently-fired chef, only to find out that his new cook wants to completely throw out his diner food for a more refined and highbrow menu--to the dismay of all the regular patrons. He runs into an old classmate who buys up local property and turns it into nightclubs. Of course, he wants to buy the building housing Soul Kitchen from Zinos.

But all these separate things pulling at Zinos is handled with such a deft hand and light touch, giving the film energy and life. There is a wit and warmth to the performances, from Zinos all the way down to the peripheral characters, including an old man who rents (although never actually pays for) a space in the same building and one of his waiters who uses the restaurant--rent free--for his band's practices before open hours. There's also the great, propulsive soul music populating the soundtrack. And the food cooked is regarded both from the side of craft and artistry as well as a sensation to be experienced. It's a shame though because certain plot developments involving the old friend buying his property are both obvious and uninteresting. And with it the film uneasily splits the difference between hilarious farce (a running gag dealing with Zinos's back pain is laugh-out-loud funny at times) and cheesy, awkward humor and pathos.

Soul Kitchen, then, is less than the sum of its parts. But the good outweigh the bad here in spades and the ride is a thorough blast. It's difficult not to smile at a film filled with this much bonhomie and goodwill not only towards it's characters, but also to us.

Harry Potter and the Raiders of the Lost Horcrux, Part Un.

2010-12-21T18:11:00.002-05:00

If a sword gets lost in the woods and no one is there to find it, can it destroy a piece of your soul?

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

The arrival of a new Harry Potter movie is always somewhat of a major film event. But with the release of the latest installment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, it's finally sinking in that we're approaching the end of a franchise as steadily as that train heads into Hogwarts. Up front I should admit to not being a big Potter-head. I have not read a single word of J.K. Rowling's original novels. I have enjoyed every single movie and have loved a couple, but I have also not revisited any of them since their theatrical release outside of catching a scene here and there when it airs on cable. And even after having screened the first five in a theater, I completely skipped the sixth movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and had to scramble to obtain a DVD to watch the night before having been invited by friends to watch the latest film. So while the world was awaiting with baited breath for the release of the first half of Deathly Hallows, I had a full three years of space in between my own personal Harry Potter experiences. Needless to say, the enthusiasm had sort of fizzled like a long-distance relationship. But after watching the sixth movie on DVD and then sitting in a sold-out theater for the seventh, I carry with me a new and rejuvenated affection for the series.


Hermione and an angry Ron in DEATHLY HALLOWS

This latest Potter flick picks up, naturally, where the previous chapter left us. Towards the end of Half-Blood Prince, Harry and Dumbledore have discovered that Voldemort has gained immortality by storing parts of his soul in horcruxes (horcruces?)--seven to be exact--and therefore begin a journey of seek and destroy. Deathly Hallows has Harry continuing this search, with the aide of Hermione and Ron. Voldemort, having gathered the rest of the Death Eaters, also engages on a journey of seek and destroy--of Harry. And along with those colliding plot lines, we get the requisite magic and spells and are introduced to brand new characters seemingly out of the blue.

It's the mythos of these films that have always interested me the least. The overarching story of this world feels pretty familiar and the layering of backstory has sometimes felt awkard and tedious. The best moments of each film, especially the more recent ones, regard the more human preoccupations of navigating the murky terrain of growing up. In Half-Blood Prince, Harry and Hermione had to deal with their initially unrequited crushes on Ginny and Ron. And the scene where Harry comforts Hermione when Ron goes off on a tryst with a new Quidditch groupie is particularly tender and Emma Watson's performance is unexpectedly moving.

In the woods.

In Deathly Hallows, the dynamic between the trio is put to the test again in an unusually extended middle section. After the three are forced to abandon the rest of the Order when they are attacked by Death Eaters at a wedding, they become literally lost in the woods, trying to figure out their next move, how to find and destroy the next horcrux. While punctuated with various actions scenes in between, including a clever bit breaking into the ministry in disguise, this section is essentially a mini chamber drama, where the three leads get to hash out whatever psychological angst and tension has been brewing between them or being caused by their isolation.

I've heard from others, including some friends who screened the movie with me, that have said that they were bored during these moments. But they're riveting. In particular, there is a short, wordless scene where two of the characters dance with each other to music coming out of an old transistor radio. It is both sweet and awkward and it points to a complexity amongst the three of them that heretofore hadn't been seen. It would be unrealistic to expect a film of this sort to explore these complexities to any real depth, but at least we know it's there. It connects us to them as people. It's my favorite moment of the entire series.

One of the glaringly obvious questions this series posed in terms of its screen adaptations of the books is how these kids would age from their neophyte years of the early films to young adult actors in these final ones. And it's in these scenes and moments that you get the idea how fully they've grown into their characters. It might be hard for them to ever come out from under the shadow of this enormous series, but with each installment, they've felt a little more lived-in, a little less like kids merely acting precocious.

From mere deduction and having heard so through the grapevine, the final film in the series will likely rely more heavily on pure action and spectacle and, fine, that seems inevitable. Almost every fantasy/sci-fi series will eventually disintegrate into these action sequences, yet I hope at least a kernel of the humanity shown in these previous two movies will remain and shine through. It will be a bone tossed to those of us who yearn for just a little more than lightning bolts flashing out of wooden wands.

#8: "Well, I say, f*#$ therapy!"

2010-12-21T18:10:00.001-05:00

If you've been keeping track, I turned 30 and completely laid this project to rest only 7 posts in. Around Thanksgiving, I figured maybe I could finished it before the year is over. I'd have to average a little more than two posts per day. Unlikely to say the least.

The age of 30 itself is an arbitrary milestone--as random a number as 27 or 44. And so I will eschew all goals and deadlines for this project and merely write them as time and inspiration permit. People who think I was overreacting to this birthday fail to realize that dissatisfaction with one's life, i.e. a crisis, can come at any age, that it need not be qualified by mid- or quarter- or other timeline defining term. As I wrote of in the previous post about "Freaks & Geeks", the trepidation of coming-of-age stories for those high school students resonated with me more fully not until my late twenties. In that same manner, the sadness of Miles Raymond--a failed writer in his forties, two or so years removed from a divorce--hit me where I lived in Alexander Payne's Sideways.

Sideways takes place during a weekend trip through the California wine country as Miles helps best friend Jack celebrate one last hurrah before he gets married. For Miles, a wine aficionado, the trip is simply to enjoy the wine and relax away from his job as a middle-school English teacher. For Jack, it's an excuse to get away and sow his wild oats before finally settling down. That particular relationship loudly rang true for me when that movie was released. At the time I had a bit of a falling out with a close friend, whose selfishness reminded me of Jack's. While I was busy being like Miles--wondering if my writing will ever get read or if that girl will ever like me back, my friend was like Jack--wild as ever, in what would also be the lead up to his inevitable settling down (though I don't know if anyone, including himself, knew that at the time). Since Miles knows wine country like it was his own backyard vineyard, he has his favorite places--including a favorite restaurant/bar and, more importantly, a favorite waitress, Maya. In typical fashion, he sort of secretly pines for her, but doesn't give it more than a second thought, dismissing the idea that it could even remotely happen between them. Jack, on the other hand, picks up the first hot bartender he eyes and also, later, a not-so-hot waitress, well, just because I guess. That dynamic is not a far cry from that relationship with my friend. In an article reacting to the critical reaction of the film, New York Times critic A.O. Scott discusses one of the major differences between the two friends:

The contrast between him and his friend Jack is partly the difference between an uptight, insecure epicurean and a swinging, self-deluding hedonist, but it is more crucially the difference between a sensibility that subjects every experience to judgment and analysis and a personality happy to accept whatever the moment offers.

It can sometimes be difficult to enjoy much of life when you are prone to critique it in some measure, even more so when that critical acumen isn't just applied to wine or movies or society, but piercingly onto yourself.

__________________________________________________

The great scene in the film, or at least the one that seems to get the most discussion, is a conversation between Miles and Maya after they have what is essentially a double date with Jack and Stephanie, one of the servers at a winery. Back at Stephanie's house, while she and Jack sneak off for a little nookie, Miles and Maya talk about how much they love wine. It's simple to understand that, while they pontificate (elegantly and touchingly, I should add), Miles and Maya are really talking about themselves. Again from Scott:

Criticism always contains an element of autobiography, and it is not much of a leap to suggest that more than a few critics have seen themselves in Sideways.

A couple of years back I discussed on this blog a similar issue, asking what movies define you. What we like, the things we watch and listen to, the things we read and buy, go a long way in defining us and how we present ourselves to the world. It's why we hold these objects so personally, why we wear them as some sort of badge of honor. It's also why we are embarrassed to admit to liking certain guilty pleasures. So even outside of the critical or scholarly realm Scott suggests, our consumption of culture as merely patrons of the arts is an almost autobiographical pursuit.

The argument for mindless entertainment, whether it be insignificant pop music or tent pole blockbuster summer movies, is that it allows us to escape--to get away. But I think the reason we fervently like certain songs or movies or TV shows or books is that it affords us some kind of connection, not just with something out in the world at large, but one with ourselves. Good or bad, it has a resonance that belies the apparent fleetingness of what passes before our eyes and ears. It has a way of galvanizing and distilling the things about what makes us, in the end, human. And like a fine wine, it can be enjoyed with friends, give solace in a quiet moment by yourself, and, in the elite instances, often gets better with age.

#7: "We climbed aboard their starship..."

2010-07-22T14:21:00.003-04:00

The nostalgia of high school isn't a particularly new thing--either as a pleasant remembrance of things past or a sad looking-back at growing pains. High school stories in general have flooded the marketplace since the perhaps slightly overrated oeuvre of John Hughes up to recent entries like Mean Girls or Superbad or "Dawson's Creek". But for capturing not only the pain and angst of high school, but the true feeling of being lost, like your equilibrium is out-of-whack because you can't locate yourself, "Freaks and Geeks" hits everything squarely on that thing holding up your glasses.

The Paul Feig-created, Judd Apatow-produced TV show came out a couple of years into my college experience, too early really to have any kind of thoughtful distance from high school. I absolutely loved the show and watched it every week (at least when I could find it, as NBC seemed to frequently change its days and time slots), but it wasn't until after rewatching it a few years ago did it have a more resonant impact.

From the geeky guys (Sam, Neal, and Bill) who ached for even a minor acknowledgment from the popular girls, while simultaneously tried to avoid from being physically abused, to the girl (Sam's sister Lindsay) who was fed up with the rigid structure of her life and joined the freaks, the show fully understood the perspective of the perpetual outcast. And not just from them. Nearly every person, from the core ensemble to the more secondary characters are given this particular kernel of experience. In some way, either briefly or as a full episode's storyline or even through the entire arc of the single season, everyone is acknowledged to be some kind of outsider--a trait which, in my particular opinion, might actually be the most universal of all.

One of the things you learn as you get a little older is that the dynamics of high school don't necessarily end once high school does. It's weird to find your navigating through some of the same types of cliques you did more than 10 years ago. People's lives change constantly even if their mentalities stay the same. Watching Sam and Lindsay Weir trying to figure out their way through and their place in high school reminded me not of high school but of my life since it. You don't realize it during high school, but, if you're lucky (and I was), you usually have a net. When you're out on your own and still trying to figure it all out, you can only rely on yourself.

It was a cause of sadness to many when the show was cancelled. But the one season and it's 18 episodes are as full and probably more self-contained than many other long-running series. Its final moments are almost perfect and it's probably better that it ended there than fizzle out under the trappings of episodic storytelling. I may even go as far as saying that if the only episode was the single pilot (as is the case with many failed shows), it would still be a significant television achievement. Oh hell, let's narrow this down even further. The final ten minutes of the pilot are transcendent. It somehow manages to include all of the trite and clichéd devices of the high school movie/TV show and imbue them with a wit, authenticity, and sloppiness sorely lacking in most other examples of the genre. In particular, Sam's interaction with Cindy the cheerleader seems so painfully awkward that it admittedly brought back so many memories of the million-and-one conversations I've had with a million-and-one Cindy Sanders--from high school to, well, now.

This summer, IFC will be showing the series every Friday at 11, and rerunning that episode some time during that weekend. If you've never seen it, this will be a good opportunity to find out what you've missed. If you have, it's a good opportunity to catch up with some old friends.

(Update: above video won't play embedded, but if you click the link, it will pop up on the actual YouTube site. It's worth it.)

#6: "I think she's buying us presents."

2010-07-17T17:35:00.000-04:00

As we approach this 30th birthday of mine, I'm reminded of one of my birthday presents 5 years ago, my 25th. My best friend decided to take me out to a movie, which makes sense because it's our shared love of cinema that threw us together in the first place. It was actually a couple of weeks after my birthday, on a late Thursday night, around 10:30 or so. I remember because it was the last showing of Me and You and Everyone We Know in town, so we had to go then.

I had heard about Miranda July's debut (and lone) movie toward the beginning of that year, as it won major awards at both the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals. So it was a movie I had been very much looking forward to at the time. As a late Thursday night screening, we weren't expecting much of a crowd, but a decently-sized one was present. And, usually, we tend to be the only ones who stay until the end of the credits, but most of the audience remained this time. We walked away thinking this was the perfect crowd to watch a movie with.

And what a perfect group of movie characters with whom to spend 90 minutes. It's difficult these days to find characters who are really specific and idiosyncratic, unless you glance at any number of independent films whose sole modus operandi is apparently to be as obviously and deliriously quirky as humanly possible. What's great about M&Y&EWK is how unselfconsciously weird all these people are. It's nice and refreshing to see a movie with people who organically exist slightly on the margins--and who do so without affectation and are treated in a movie with such affection.

There are scenes here that almost prescriptively shouldn't work. There's the quite awkward walk down the street where Christine and Richard ever so subtly up the ante on their desire for each other. The standard dance of the sexes is intended to be oblique and tangential. With these two, it's shy, yes, but direct.

There's also some very frank scenes of young, underaged kids talking about and engaging in sexual activities. I'll leave the specifics of those for you to discover if you have yet to see the movie. But it's a particular achievement of the film that there's never a moment in these scenes that feels exploitative or even creepy. Instead, somehow, it's innocent and sometimes actually very funny. The final frames of the film also possess that innocence and befits the idea you get throughout the whole film that--as the saying goes--people do actually make the world go 'round.

#5: "He romanticized it all out of proportion."

2010-07-08T23:48:00.000-04:00

If you were to ask me what I think is the greatest piece of music produced in the 20th century--and, let's face it, I know you want to--despite the fact that the majority of my music listening comes from the blues/rock tradition, I wouldn't say "Like a Rolling Stone" or "(I Can't Get No ) Satisfaction" or "Stairway to Heaven". I'd give my vote to "Rhapsody in Blue".

The George Gershwin masterwork should be pretty familiar to most. For most of my childhood I knew it as the theme song for United Airlines. It was also the music behind one of the Fantasia 2000 segments. But it really didn't start to resonate with me until I saw Woody Allen's Manhattan, which features the work in its opening scene.

I've lived in Orlando since I was a baby, but I was born in New York and so the city has a particular pull on me. I'd like to move back. It's a living, breathing city. The different scenarios Isaac (Woody Allen) goes through for the beginning of his book are all true, all valid ways to interpret the city. It's the breadth of experience that makes the city what it is and also what makes "Rhapsody in Blue" so dynamic. It's a collision of classical and jazz. There's the iconic clarinet intro. The bombast of the horns and cymbals. The cool and soothing piano that eventually becomes fractured, jumpy, staccato. It's full and dramatic, clean and elegant. It's also playful and (I think this sometimes gets lost) really flirty and sexy. It's all-encompassing. It is the city.

But enough talk, have a listen... [click on the pic]

#4: The shot.

2010-07-07T23:48:00.000-04:00

Similar to my comment regarding the Beatles in the previous post, I've loved sports just about as long as I can remember. My first love was baseball. I played little league and, at least for a kid my age, I was pretty damn good (or so my memories tell me). But on May 7, 1989, a new sport grabbed a hold of me, replacing the game played by the boys of summer as my new favorite pastime.

The sport is basketball. The event that particular spring day is simply known as "The Shot." I had been a passing fan of basketball for a couple of years previous and had slowly learned the nuances of the game, like all other sports, from my father. I recall the Lakers winning it all in '87 and then Pat Riley predicting they'd repeat the next year--which in fact they did thanks in part to Isiah Thomas's sprained ankle. But "The Shot" was the culmination of those few years as well as the culmination to a game and series. Also, it was the springboard for what many would say is the greatest individual career in American team sports.

By 1989, Michael Jordan had already solidified himself as the new face of the NBA, taking the torch held by Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. He was already a global star--featured in those great Nike commercials with Spike Lee's Mars Blackmon. Yet for the most part, he was still a great player on a young team that had yet to accomplish anything.

That changed in the first round of the 1989 NBA Playoffs, when his Bulls played the heavily-favored and heavily-talented Cleveland Cavaliers. The league was already put on notice when the young Chicago team took Cleveland to a deciding fifth game. And what a game it was--multiple lead changes in the final minutes, three such occurences in the last six seconds alone.

I remember it vividly. When Jordan hit that second-to-last jumper, I was celebrating, stupidly thinking there was no way Cleveland would score a bucket with only six seconds left. Then I sat there dumbfounded when Ehlo scored. "How could they let a guy (an inbounder) sprint to the front of the rim virtually uncontested for a layup?" I thought to myself. Then when Jordan got the ball for that final play and let it go just above the charity stripe, somehow I knew it was going in. He had made everything look so easy before that, that if he got a clean look anywhere inside the arc, he had to make it. Only in retrospect, did I realize that it was a tougher shot. He was drifting left (though looking at video shot from behind, he's remarkably balanced for how quick he had to make that move). He also had to double-clutch with Ehlo right in his face.

The Bulls were eventually eliminated by the Pistons, who would go on to win the title that year. But Jordan got his two years later; and then of course five more throughout the 90s. The following fall, a brand new team came to my backyard, the Orlando Magic. I finally had a professional sports team in my city and I never looked back. But the magnificent obsession with the game of basketball came from the greatest shot made by its greatest player.

#3: "It's too hard to sing."

2010-07-06T11:50:00.005-04:00

The greatest rock band of all time consisted of four lads from Liverpool. Don't argue with me on this. It is a fact. There are, to be sure, other bands who may have a reasonable claim to this title. The Rolling Stones come to mind, Velvet Underground and Sex Pistols too, Led Zeppelin and the Beach Boys. Different people will have different suggestions. That's not my point here. Let's accept the notion that the Beatles are it.

With that, it's sometimes easy to forget just how good they were, as if somehow the music was beyond them and they are merely the conduit for producing it. You hear a lot about that from artists of all sorts, but I think in a way that's bullshit. Yeah, I guess there's a thrust of inspiration when you create something that seems to come out of nowhere, but really it's simmering and floating underneath some hidden reaches of the brain and soul that just needed a reason to surface. (That's my unsubstantiated theory anyway.) And so we forget the process it takes to be great. The craft of it all is ignored. Perhaps that's due in many cases because we, as lay people, don't have that knowledge. But because of that, though we may tend to overpraise artists (and other entertainers and athletes) in terms of hype, we probably undervalue them in terms of skill.

And that's why the Beatles' Anthology series makes this list. I have a loved the Beatles since, well, as long as I can remember. If there is one indelible cultural hand-me-down given to me by my father, it is this love. But in a way, they were just songs, music recorded 10-20 years before I was born. In my head, there was no idea that they were made, they just... were. And to be perfectly honest, when the first Anthology CD was released in 1995, I sort of didn't get it. What were these weird-sounding, unfinished versions of songs I knew by heart?

It wasn't until maybe a couple of years or so later that it really started to grow on me. Suddenly, the false starts, alternate takes, and demos were fascinating. I was hearing the original concept of these songs and right in front of me I was hearing the band make a tweak here and another tweak there that turned it into the song I always knew. I was starting to realize that songs aren't created and finished out of thin air, but that it's a gradual process. It's an idea with which I still struggle constantly in terms of writing. I imagine that what I'm writing is the final draft, rather than something that will need to be edited and re-edited.

But that makes it sound like work. Listening to all these half-finished songs, you still come away with the notion that it was fun for them, especially in that first Anthology record. Missung lyrics were followed by laughter--so were notes sung off key. Even though we thought they were perfect, they weren't. And they were okay with that.

The original demo for "No Reply". Starts out a bit too fast. Paul has a great vocal on it though.

Take 2. A little slower, then Ringo goes crazy on the cymbal.

Final version on Beatles for Sale. Ringo's tighter and there's a better groove, especially when it picks up with the hand claps and the John and Paul harmonies.

Takes 2 and 3 of "I'll Be Back". John struggles to hit a high note.

Random outtakes.

#2: "Walkin' is most too slow."

2010-07-05T23:59:00.000-04:00

Naming your desert island discs (the 5 CDs you would take with you if you stranded on a deserted island) is always a fun game to play or a good argument-starter. I've thought about it many times and, like most things, it'll evolve depending on my mood or what I happened to have been listening to recently. But while it may not be my favorite album, I don't think I'd ever want to be stranded on an island and not be able to listen to Layla and Other Love Songs by Derek and the Dominos.

For those who don't know, "Derek" is Eric Clapton and it's the only album by the band he created after his time with the supergroups Cream and Blind Faith, then a short but important stint with Delaney & Bonnie & Friends. Not only can you hear the more rootsy, even soul-inflected rock sound of Delaney & Bonnie in the Layla songs, but a number of members of that band eventually joined Clapton to form the Dominos.

The album itself is a mix of blues covers and original materials. And it's a testament to Clapton and the band that the album maintains a very cohesive sound throughout. It also helps that joining the band was perhaps the greatest rock slide guitarist ever, Duane Allman. It's his slide, playing off what Clapton is doing that defines the style of the album. Here's the best example of them going back and forth:

It's also, famously, a sort of love letter to Pattie Boyd, then wife of Beatle George Harrison with whom Clapton was in love. Many of the songs on Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs are of unfulfilled and unrequited love. (I can already sense that this will potentially be a recurring theme through some of the things about which I'll be writing during this project.) Songs like "I Looked Away", "Bell Bottom Blues", "Have You Ever Loved a Woman", "I Am Yours", and of course the title track.

That mix--the intensity of the lyrical subject matter and the sort of distillation of the blues form by Clapton and Allman--that make the record essential to me. It's a bit sloppy in it's own way, but every single note is felt. And it's an album that can I can hear over and over again without it getting tired.

From the 2003 film, Tom Dowd and the Language of Music.

#1: "I've always said I like you without your nose."

2010-07-04T23:50:00.002-04:00

Any type of personal biography or description of my particular worldview would and should begin with my fully and eternally disgruntled attitude towards, well, everything around me. I think that's a strong influence on why I look to the past for the culture (across all media) that I seek to absorb on a regular basis. It isn't so much that the grass is greener on the other side, it's just that (for the most part) the grass has turned brown and died. You'll find that many of these entries will end up being older than I.

So with that, my first 30-30 entry will be a TV show that I began religiously watching in high school on Nick at Nite, though I first noticed it when I was much younger watching it on lazy summers before I would go out and play little league. In high school, which was--WOW!--approximately half my life ago, I don't know if I was as much of a curmudgeon as I am now and I would imagine there was more room for hope. A lot actually. And in it's own way, it was a television show that mirrorred the hope of an America in which it happened to be firmly entrenched. A Kennedys at Camelot for network television.

But here it seems I've buried the lede. The show is "The Dick Van Dyke Show", the story of Rob Petrie (Van Dyke), the head comedy writer of a television variety show, who lives in New Rochelle, NY with his wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) and young son. The other principle players are his co-writers, Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam) and Sally Rogers (Rose Marie). The show was kind of revolutionary for sitcoms at the time, but that's essentially a different discussion. And a terrific book by Vince Waldron on the show can explain that for you better than I ever could. But as it turned out, it was pretty profound on me personally as well.

In retrospect, I think the show hit me at the precise moment it would have had the greatest effect on me. If I had seriously watched it when I was younger or a little older, I don't know if it would have carried so much weight. Particularly, it was the show's particular brand of idealism that had me wide-eyed. Yet it was a completely realistic type of idealism. Never once did I think that these people couldn't exist or that one day I couldn't live that life.

By then, if I couldn't fully articulate it, then in the back of my head definitely, I knew that I wanted to write. I didn't know how or what (I'm not sure I still do), but I knew that I loved it and would be ecstatic if I could be paid for it. At times it seemed hard for Rob, Buddy, and Sally, but it almost always appeared ridiculously fun. If I knew something else at the time, it was that I wanted the perfect wife, family, and suburban home. People who know me now realize that that isn't the case anymore, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a 15- or 16-year-old who looked ahead and probably saw that in his future. Rob and Laura fought as much as any couple you might see on TV or even life, but how could you not want that relationship for yourself? (And how could you not want Laura Petrie as your wife?) From my perspective, if you can't have that relationship, then why have one at all? There's no point in settling when something like that is possible.

Things don't turn out the way you expect--they rarely do--but on those late school nights when I should've been getting ready for bed, you ignore those less upbeat aspects of life and let the joy wash over you. And a little song, dance, and humor certainly helps the medicine go down.

Laura "auditioning" for a PTA (?) fundraiser play, directed by Rob.

Rob mocking Laura after another talented parent nailed her own audition.

Laura in trouble for accidentally saying on national TV that Alan Brady, star of the sitcom Rob writes for, wears a hairpiece.

P.S. The entire series is available for streaming on Netflix. What are you waiting for?

Yes, we're gonna have a party, party.

2010-07-04T23:48:00.000-04:00

A slow crawl of realization has been inching its way towards and through the back of my mind that has now become a freight train of full-on panic consuming my every thought. What I'm referring to, dear reader, is the arrival of my thirtieth birthday (I spelled out the word because looking at the actual number is much too frightening right now).

Birthdays themselves have never held any real significance to me, either in terms of an excuse to have a party (social events in general never carried much allure to me anyway), as a timeline to measure one's success or accomplishments, or--more adolescently--as a countdown to certain age milestones (16, 18, 21, etc.). If anything, I did look forward to my 25th birthday because of the drop in my car insurance.

But, 30 (there, I wrote it) hovers over me in a way different than any--albeit--random age has previously. Why is that the case? It's difficult to tell. Part of what I'll be attempting to do here over the next month is work that out. There is a BBC podcast called "A History of the World in 100 Objects" that, as the title would lead you to suspect, tells the history of humanity through 100 physical objects. Think of this as "A History of Jason in 30 Cultural Artifacts (in 30 days)". Rolls off the tongue, no?

So for each of the next 30 days (which will end on my birthday) I will try to post something new. Most, I would imagine, are going to be films. But music and television, books and essays will also potentially make an appearance. Part of why I'm doing this, certainly, is to hash out whatever psychic weight is pounding on me as I reach this moment. Another is to sort of figure out how I got here. Yet another would be to selfishly get myself writing again. And, perhaps, if I force myself to write on something--anything--it will get me to post more on here in general.

Which I know you guys are all hoping for.

Now we are joined in a cobweb of rainbows.

2010-05-26T23:00:00.007-04:00

For someone whose TV is constantly on when I'm at home, I watch a remarkably small amount of actual television shows. I don't know who should win "American Idol" or what the deal is with "Lost" (from what I've heard, people who actually do watch it don't know what's up). I never watched "The Sopranos" and have seen only a handful of episodes of "The Simpsons". On close analysis, it seems my TV must be tuned to some kind of sports telecast most of the time.

But it's dawned upon me during the last few months that I have returned to a mode of television viewing that has--now that I think about it--defined a lot of how I watched TV during my teen and even pre-teen years. And that is NBC's "Must See TV" lineup.

Television still has its zeitgeist moments. It still has its cliffhangers and networks still have their sort of pillar shows around which they program their entire night or even week. But it appears as if these are singular events built around individual shows. A "24" season finale, a "CSI" season premiere, or an "American Idol" showdown are water cooler events for sure, but they exist independent from any progression of shows.

Apart from Must See TV on NBC Thursday night, which had its real origin (before the term was coined by the network) I believe with "The Cosby Show" and "Cheers", then moved into its official incarnation with "Friends", "Seinfeld", and their cohorts, there was ABC's TGIF lineup with, among others, "Perfect Strangers" (a childhood fave of mine) and "Family Matters". A few years ago, NBC tried to rebrand "Must See TV" as "Comedy Night Done Right" with "The Office", "30 Rock", "Scrubs", and "My Name is Earl".

The slogan doesn't exist anymore, at least as an official piece of promotion, but it should. "The Office" and "30 Rock" have won multiple Emmys and have earned the right to anchor the lineup, but it's the addition of two other sitcoms, "Community" and "Parks and Recreation" that I think returns the Thursday night slate of shows to a certain degree of distinction.

What's crackin', boo?

There's an interesting symmetry to the way the four shows are put together. "Parks and Rec" was co-created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur. Daniels adapted the BBC version of "The Office" for American television and Schur is a producer/writer of the show as well. And the two possess the similar conceit of a documentary crew following the characters around, allowing them to interject directly towards the camera either as an aside or during a confessional-style talking head.

I have to admit I didn't like much of the first season of "Parks and Rec". After the first few episodes, I decided to take a pass on the show. It was only recently I returned to it. The comedy now is more self-assured and the characters are more fully-defined, especially Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler). Leslie is the counterpart to Michael Scott, the buffoon Dunder Mifflin (now Sabre) manager of "The Office". Leslie, though, is both a more realistic character and a more likable one. The buffoonery never ends with Michael; he's a never-ending escalating source of dumbass ideas. If it's not eating a giant bowl of chicken alfredo before (or was it while?) running a 10K, it's thinking he could jump off the building's roof onto a children's bouncy castle, or driving into a lake because he couldn't understand what his GPS was telling him.

But Leslie's misguided deeds and ideas are simply that--misguided. You never get the idea she's trying to undermine anybody else in her office by what she's doing, whereas Michael has repeatedly attempted to throw his employees under the bus for whatever idiotic transgression he has recently pursued. The farce that is Michael's interaction with the world around him masks his own selfishness, something more apparent in right-hand-man Dwight Schrute, or more pointedly, in David Brent, Michael's predecessor in the original BBC version of "The Office". Leslie's efforts seem to be born out of a genuine attempt to improve the community or help her close friends.

The other characters have filled out quite nicely as well. Ann and Mark were given a nice romantic storyline that filled the entire season. Same for April's crush on Andy. Even Tom was given a mini-arc, marrying a Canadian friend so she can get a Visa, then eventually falling for her.

Don't say family.

"The Office" does have its charms despite its lead character's inherent meanness. Much of that lies in the heart of the show, which has always been the relationship between Jim and Pam, a love at first unrequited that has now moved onto full-on family bliss. And that dynamic really extends throughout the entire office, allowing itself a sort of moral self-regulation. It's this particular balance that doesn't allow the show's more villainous characters (Michael, Dwight, some others at various times) to hurl themselves into fully irreparable unlikability or, perhaps worse, complete self-destruction.

And it's why, despite all the in-fighting and double-crossing, that a scene like Jim and Pam's wedding procession can work without being corny. Or, maybe, it works because it is corny. There's no reason that half of the office should have been invited to that wedding to begin with. But when it's all said and done, the people in the office are really a family.

I hate people too.

The bookend shows are similar to each other as well. While the two middle shows, "Parks and Rec" and "The Office", are ostensibly "reality" shows, "Community" and "30 Rock" exist without that type of pretense, reveling in their absurdities and goofy surrealism.

Similarly, too, is the way both shows are so postmodernly metatextual. "30 Rock" is, with its "SNL" alums Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan and producer Lorne Michaels, somewhat obviously a reference to that long-time late night variety show. It's also a satirical jab at network television and its corporate structure. It's also, I still think, consistently the funniest show on TV.

The goat's mustache is Cameron Diaz.

While the "30 Rock" angle is somewhat satirical, "Community" goes for full on parody. Everything from John Hughes to "Sesame Street", from buddy cop movies to ensemble network sitcoms suffers the slings and arrows of the show's ridicule/homage. One of the best episodes was a Goodfellas-inspired story of Abed becoming the brains behind a cafeteria, chicken-fingers, mafia-like consortium and the power struggle it causes between him and Jeff. (Yes, the episode is just as silly as the sentence that it just inspired, including its own "Layla" montage that includes a murdered... backpack.)

It's Abed, despite how Jeff and Britta seem to be the lead characters, who really drives the show. He acts not only as a conduit for the audience, putting into context the relationships among the other characters, but for the other characters themselves. It's as if he not only comments on the proceedings, but pushes it (and his study group mates) to fulfill the narrative tropes he thinks fits the situation. In a lesser-written comedy, or a lesser-performed character, this overt self-consciousness would fall flat, adding unnecessary narration. But because it's tagged with this winking metatext, it's somehow extra funny.

Now that the season has ended, the future of the current lineup looks a bit up in the air. Come this fall, "Parks and Recreation" won't appear until probably early 2011 (along with a couple of other debuts) as a midseason replacement for a new comedy, "Outsourced". Steve Carell has already said that next season will be his last on "The Office". (The show has been on a downward turn the past couple of seasons.) It's head-scratching that NBC would mess with a formula for sustained comedy that has finally worked ("Seinfeld" went off the air, amazingly, 12 years ago). This could mean that either this lineup is done before it barely got started or, if the other new shows are any good, that it is the beginning of a new golden age of comedy on network TV. I happen to think neither extreme will be the case.

But in the meantime, we still have a summer of awesome reruns!

Just for fun, here's some more funny:

I heard she likes to hit the chocolate... HAAAAAARD!

2010-04-21T22:49:00.005-04:00

Monday morning I woke up hazily, unhappily staggering toward a realization that I must return to real life after my nine-day vacation of standing (which sometimes turned into sitting) in long lines, driving between venues, listening to filmmakers and actors, eating a ridiculously insane amount of cranberry raisinets, and, yes, watching movies.

And the movies, on the whole, were superb. As a group, this was among the strongest roster of films I've seen in my nearly decade of attending the Florida Film Festival. The quality, neither, did focus itself in one area. Some years the shorts are great, while the narrative features lack. Other years, the documentaries clearly outshine the shorts. But this year, I could have easily picked favorites among shorts, narratives, documentaries, domestic, and international.

So here I go with some recommendations. Most may never get released at a theater near you. Some may not even get a DVD release. But these are among my favorites, so try your best to seek some of them out.

It's not a new thing in movies, especially documentaries, to explore the depths of the artistic process--either the overly romanticized version of it or the bludgeoning and frustrating side of it. But two wildly different documentaries do so in both refreshing and entertaining ways.

Troll 2 is considered by many to be the worst movie ever, to the point where actors who appeared in the 1992 film prefer to leave it off their resume. But nearly two decades later, the film has become a cult phenomenon, garnering an earnest and devoted following. The child star of the film, Michael Stephenson, has documented this phenomenon in Best Worst Movie. To be certain, Troll 2 (which I also screened during the fest) is an absolutely terrible movie. But, as a critic says in the movie, it isn't at all cynical in its motives. Like director Ed Wood, who the critic also compares this too, the filmmakers and actors are sincerely trying to make a good movie; they just fail miserably. And that's exactly the way Best Worst Movie treats its subjects. The stars here are not a source of ridicule and the cult status of the film isn't treated with backhanded irony. It has a genuine affection for the tiny nuggets of joy that can be found in such things as a truly awful piece of art.

The other standout doc at this year's fest was Kerthy Fix and Gail O'Hara's Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields. Daniel Handler, author of the Lemony Snicket series and friend to Stephin Merritt, mentions in a talking head that most (post-) modern pop music assumes the aesthetic of personal expression--that the idea of a singular voice behind a song as a result of some sort of reflexive psychoanalysis is the default mode for songwriting. But Stephin Merritt, lead singer of the Magnetic Fields, is the complete opposite of this standard. (I should admit up front that I knew nothing of Merritt or the Fields, outside of having heard the name, though now I look forward to exploring the catalog.) His songs reveal little if any about the songwriter. And in that same manner, the film reveals little if any about the person. But it's precisely that level of obliqueness that gives the film its fascination. Thus, the movie is more of a biography of an artist's career than of an artist's life and the sometimes overrated worth of psychology is stripped away in preference for the work itself.

The shorts programs were at times both satisfying and disappointing. The Florida Shorts Program, highlighting works from local filmmakers primarily from FSU, UCF, and the Ringling College, was a huge disappointment. The animated works from the Ringling College of Arts and Design were the clear standouts, while most of the others (with an exception or two) either fell flat or were flat-out ridiculous. The International Animated Shorts Program, on the other hand, was nearly across-the-board superb. The range of intellect, whimsy, and creative invention made it maybe the best shorts program I've ever seen at the festival period.

The two best narrative features, in kind of the same way the two great docs of the fest do, also find a way to mix both the old and the new, to draw out of familiar modes of movie storytelling a fresh and entertaining story.

Homewrecker (which won the festival's Special Jury Award; directed by Todd and Brad Barnes) is the odd romantic pairing between Mike, on work release as a locksmith, and Margo, a dizzying blonde who hires him to open the door to her boyfriend's apartment in the attempt to find out if he's cheating on her. Mike, of course, is upset when he finds out that the place is not exactly hers, if for nothing else that it may land him back in jail. But somehow, in that simultaneously scary and magical way a woman can wrap her way around a man, Margo convinces Mike to engage in an undercover operation that has him befriending her boyfriend. Despite its modern and thankfully unacknowledged multiracial setting, Homewrecker is a bit of a throwback to the old screwball comedies of the late thirties/early forties. Margo is the classic outspoken and unfiltered female driving the story, while Mike is the male simply trying to keep his head on straight, attempting to do nothing but go about his own business in the whirlwind that sweeps him up. Anslem Richardson and Anna Reeder are a great onscreen couple who are worthy of such a comparison.

If I had to select a favorite, or the film for which I had the most affection, it would be Diane Bell's Obselidia. George is a librarian. Well, he works in a library, though I'm not sure he's a librarian (and, believe me, there's a difference). In any case, George (Michael Piccirilli) is creating an encyclopedia comprised of obsolete or soon-to-be obsolete items. When he meets Sophie (Gaynor Howe), a film projectionist who too imagines her own profession to be eventually obsolete, they go on a trek to Death Valley in search of a reclusive scientist who believes the human race will be virtually extinct within a hundred years. In the same way that Homewrecker is a descendant of the screwball comedy, Obselidia has some of its roots in the classic road movie.

After a very abbreviated getting-to-know-you period--precipitated again by the aggressive female character--George and Sophie seem to be fairly compatible in their views on life. But when they hit the road and visit the fatalistic scientist, the two are confronted by their conflicting philosophies.

"The moment you're born, you begin dying," as the saying goes and would be an appropriate adage for the way George feels about the world today. He merely wishes things wouldn't become obsolete almost as soon as they're created. He merely wants life to slow down. The movie perfectly mirrors that philosophy, in its easy and languid pace. That's not to say the film is listless or even nihilistic. It's decidedly not. Being alive means something to George and Sophie and the steady disappearance of everything that will be documented in the Obselidia reaffirms that.

Sadly, I missed two separate appearances by Gena Rowlands--one for a women in film forum (for which I was too tired to wake up at 11 a.m.) and the other for a special screening of Faces (which was sold out). But that minor tragedy aside, it was another terrific festival and I'm already counting down to next year.

-----------------

Final tally: 14 features and 89 shorts, nearly 34 hours of movie watching; countless tiny bags of cranberry raisinets.

Like a chicken with its head cut off.

2010-04-10T00:20:00.001-04:00

I'm on vacation, which must mean it's time for another Florida Film Festival. The 19th installment of what is steadily becoming one of the premiere fests in the southeast will focus on what has long been one of its charms, Southern hospitality. With the Enzian as its main location, the dinner theater will once again be a host of not only movies, but a series of food and wine celebrations. And as is customary, an interesting slate of food-related films will populate the schedule.

A nice slate of special guests will be on hand to appear also, starting with tonight's guests for the Opening Night Film, Paper Man--co-director Michele Mulroney and stars Kieran Culkin and Emma Stone. But the guests I'm most excited to see are veteran actors Seymour Cassell and Gena Rowlands. The two are on hand to celebrate the life and career of the late director and actor (and husband to Rowlands) John Cassavetes with a screening of his 1968 now landmark film, Faces. Beyond the food and the wine and guests and the long lines and the running (or driving) back-and-forth between theaters, the Florida Film Festival (as with most fests) is about the celebration of independent filmmaking. To many, Cassavetes is the godfather of what we consider the independent movement in cinema in this country and it seems appropriate that as FFF, with it's welcome home theme this year, has brought it all full circle by welcoming the legacy of a such an important figure.

Faces is also one of the great retro films on hand this year. One is Chinatown. Roman Polanski, sadly, could not make it. Another is the closing night film, Psycho, a celebration of the 50th anniversary of one of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpieces.

But it's the new films, the ones few have seen, that make up the fabric of any given festival. As always some will be good, some will be bad. Hopefully, a couple will even be great. For the next ten days I'll be busy trying to figure which ones are which.

My Oscar Picks

2010-03-07T17:11:00.004-05:00

I got a little sick, so I'm getting this out at the last second.

Given I haven't seen any of the shorts, I'll go ahead and skip those.

Best foreign language film:

Ajami (Israel)
El Secreto de Sus Ojos (Argentina)
The Milk of Sorrow (Peru)
Un Prophète (France)
The White Ribbon (Germany)

I have yet to see any of these nominees either, but it seems like the run-up towards the Oscars have narrowed it down to two, Un Prophète and The White Ribbon. Haneke's German-language entry won the Golden Globe and he's the only filmmaker of the group with any large international recognition. However, I believe France's Un Prophète will pull the minor upset.

Best documentary feature:

Burma VJ - Anders Østergaard and Lise Lense-Møller
The Cove - Nominees to be determined
Food, Inc. - Robert Kenner and Elise Pearlstein
The Most Dangerous Man in America - Judith Ehrlich and Rich Goldsmith
Which Way Home - Rebecca Cammisa

I've only seen The Cove and I loved it. It would be interesting, given that the list from which I am copying this has "nominees to be determined", if the film would win, so who will walk up to accept? It seems to be the front runner, so I'll make that my choice, but I think Food, Inc. has a strong shot.

Achievement in makeup:

Il Divo - Aldo Signoretti and Vittorio Sodano
Star Trek - Barney Burman, Mindy Hall, and Joel Harlow
The Young Victoria - Jon Henry Gordon and Jenny Shircore

I've only seen Star Trek, but from what I know about the other films, I think it will win.

Achievement in costume design:

Bright Star - Janet Patterson
Coco Before Chanel Catherine Leterrier
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus - Monique Prudhomme
Nine - Colleen Atwood
The Young Victoria - Sandy Powell

My guess here is The Young Victoria, which is the only one on this list I haven't seen. My personal choice would be Catherine Leterrier's work in Coco.

Achievement in sound editing:

Avatar - Christopher Boyes and Gwendolyn Yates Whittle
The Hurt Locker - Paul N.J. Ottosson
Inglourious Basterds - Wylie Stateman
Star Trek - Mark Stoeckinger and Alan Rankin
Up - Michael Silvers and Tom Myers

Achievement in sound mixing:

Avatar - Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson, and Tony Johnson
The Hurt Locker - Paul N.J. Ottosson and Ray Beckett
Inglourious Basterds - Michael Minkler, Tony Lamberti, and Mark Ulano
Star Trek - Anna Behlmer, Andy Nelson, and Peter J. Devlin
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen - Greg P. Russell, Gary Summers, and Geoffrey Patterson

The sound categories are just one of groups of awards that will pit the two juggernauts of the night, The Hurt Locker and Avatar, against each other.

I think The Hurt Locker will win both and it should.

Achievement in visual effects:

Avatar - Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham, and Andrew R. Jones
District 9 - Dan Kaufman, Peter Muyzers, Robert Habros, and Matt Aitken
Star Trek - Roger Guyett, Russell Earl, Paul Kavanagh, and Burt Dalton

Really? Avatar will and should win.

Achievement in art direction:

Avatar
Art Direction: Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg
Set Decoration: Kim Sinclair

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Art Direction: Dave Warren and Anastasia Masaro
Set Decoration: Caroline Smith

Nine
Art Direction: John Myhre
Set Decoration: Gordon Sim

Sherlock Holmes
Art Direction: Sarah Greenwood
Set Decoration: Katie Spencer

The Young Victoria
Art Direction: Patrice Vermette
Set Decoration: Maggie Gray

Avatar will probably rack up a series of awards during the middle of the ceremony and this will likely be on of them.

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score):

Avatar - James Horner
Fantastic Mr. Fox - Alexandre Desplat
The Hurt Locker - Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders
Sherlock Holmes - Hans Zimmer
Up - Michael Giacchino

I'm leaning toward Horner and Avatar here, but my preference is Desplat and Fox.

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original song):

"Almost There" from The Princess and the Frog
Music and Lyric by Randy Newman

"Down in New Orleans" from The Princess and the Frog
Music and Lyric by Randy Newman

"Loin de Paname" from Paris 36
Music by Reinhardt Wagner
Lyric by Frank Thomas

"Take It All" from Nine
Music and Lyric by Maury Yeston

"The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)" from Crazy Heart
Music and Lyric by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett

"The Weary Kind" is probably not even the best song from Crazy Heart, but it will and should win this category.

Achievement in film editing:

Avatar - Stehen Rivkin, John Refoua, and James Cameron
District 9 - Julian Clarke
The Hurt Locker - Bob Murawski and Chris Innis
Inglourious Basterds - Sally Menke
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire - Joe Klotz

I think the scope of Avatar will win it this category, but I would vote for The Hurt Locker.

Achievement in cinematography:

Avatar - Mauro Fiore
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - Bruno Delbonnel
The Hurt Locker - Barry Ackroyd
Inglourious Basterds - Robert Richardson
The White Ribbon - Christian Berger

I've only seen previews of The White Ribbon, but it looks like something the Academy would vote for. Outside of that, again I would go for The Hurt Locker.

Best animated feature film:

Coraline - Henry Selick
Fantastic Mr. Fox - Wes Anderson
The Princess and the Frog - John Musker and Ron Clements
The Secret of Kells - Tomm Moore
Up - Pete Docter

Pixar, with Up, will continue its domination in this award (it's even nominated for best picture this year!), my vote goes to Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Adapted screenplay:

District 9 - Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell
An Education - Nick Hornby
In the Loop - Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire - Geoffrey Fletcher
Up in the Air - Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner

Reitman and Turner for Up in the Air will win and should win. Fletcher's adaptation is likely the only competition.

Original screenplay:

The Hurt Locker - Mark Boal
Inglourious Basterds - Quentin Tarantino
The Messenger - Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman
A Serious Man - Joel and Ethan Coen
Up
Screenplay by Bob Peterson, Pete Docter
Story by Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Tom McCarthy

Tarantino will win and he should.

Performance by an actor in a supporting role:

Matt Damon - Invictus
Woody Harrelson - The Messenger
Christopher Plummer - The Last Station
Stanley Tucci - The Lovely Bones
Christoph Waltz - Inglourious Basterds

Waltz will and should win this award.

Performance by an actress in a supporting role:

Penélope Cruz - Nine
Vera Farmiga - Up in the Air
Maggie Gyllenhaal - Crazy Heart
Anna Kendrick - Up in the Air
Mo'Nique - Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

No question Mo'Nique will win this. She probably should, but my personal preference is Kendrick.

Performance by an actor in a leading role:

Jeff Bridges - Crazy Heart
George Clooney - Up in the Air
Colin Firth - A Single Man
Morgan Freeman - Invictus
Jeremy Renner - The Hurt Locker

If I were a voter, this would be the hardest selection, as they're all pretty even in my eyes. I would probably vote for Firth, but I have no qualms with Bridges, who I'm predicting will win for Crazy Heart.

Performance by an actress in a leading role:

Sandra Bullock - The Blind Side
Helen Mirren - The Last Station
Carey Mulligan - An Education
Gabourey Sidibe - Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
Meryl Streep - Julie & Julia

Maybe the tightest race tonight will be between Bullock and Streep. By a nose, I think Bullock has the momentum and will win her first oscar. My preference would go to Mulligan or Sidibe (and I'm still wondering why Abbie Cornish didn't get a nomination for Bright Star).

Achievement in directing:

James Cameron - Avatar
Kathryn Bigelow - The Hurt Locker
Quentin Tarantino - Inglourious Basterds
Lee Daniels - Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
Jason Reitman - Up in the Air

Kathryn Bigelow has to win, will win, and without question should win. And in doing so, the Academy will only marginally begin making amends for nearly 90 years of neglecting to give any woman the statue in this category.

Best motion picture:

Avatar
The Blind Side
District 9
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
A Serious Man
Up
Up in the Air

Avatar looked to be the early favorite, but The Hurt Locker found a second wave of momentum. Then came Lockergate. I think The Hurt Locker still has the edge. I'd love Up in the Air to win, but it won't, so I'll be happy to see my second favorite movie of the year win.

Let me write down a line of glorious tone

2010-03-07T17:02:00.001-05:00

No introduction, other than to say, "here you go":

10. Two Lovers

Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) lives with his parents in their New York apartment when he meets and becomes obsessed with the upstairs neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow). In the meantime he begins a relationship with Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of his father's potential business partner. James Gray's writing and three absolutely pitch-perfect performances by the three leads (as well as extremely well-cast supporting roles from Moni Moshonov, Isabella Rossellini, and Elias Koteas) override some of the traditional aspects of this love triangle story and turn it into the most emotionally present American drama of 2009.

9. Summer Hours

Olivier Assayas's French drama is the first of two foreign family dramas on this list--both of which center around family reunions. In short, the main thrust of the film revolves around the death of the family's matriarch and the question of what to do with both her large collection of expensive antiques/art and their old country house. But it's also a film about national identity and how our lives revolve around ceremony and the possession (and accumulation) of inanimate objects.

8. Adventureland

Greg Mottola's follow-up to 2007's Superbad may lack what that earlier film had in sheer belly laughs. But it makes up for it by being a more honest and realistic portrayal of post-grad languor than Superbad's farcical (albeit incredibly funny and entertaining) look at high school senioritis. Also, any movie that kind of makes me like Ryan Reynolds has accomplished what many have failed to do.

7. Inglourious Basterds

One part spaghetti western, one part The Dirty Dozen, one part revenge thriller, one part revisionist history. All parts Quentin Tarantino. The Basterds of the title actually figure little into the overall arc of the story (though the film ends with them). Instead it's the story of Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent), whose family was executed by Col. Hans Landa, "The Jew Hunter," (a great Christoph Waltz) in the brilliant--and unsettling--opening scene that serves as the driving force behind the film. What sometimes gets lost in all of the trademark pyrotechnics of Tarantino's mix of dialogue and violence is how strongly and precisely he writes for women. From Pulp Fiction to Jackie Brown, Kill Bill to Death Proof, Inglourious Basterds certainly continues in that mode.

6. An Education

Like Adventureland, Lone Scherfig's An Education is its own type of coming-of-age story, in that it's protagonist seems smarter than the world that immediately surrounds her (and knows it), yet there seems to be no way out. Jenny's emergence as a character matches Carey Mulligan's here as an actress. This is her coming out party.

5. Medicine for Melancholy

A lot has been made in recent years about the independent movement called Mumblecore. (The name itself has even been a point of contention.) What separates this particular entry into the movement from the others is that it gives you the view from the young black experience. What sometimes comes off as young twenty-somethings lamenting (or even reveling in) their own ennui in these films is, if not ignored, then pushed slightly to the margins as Jo and Micah (Tracey Heggins and Wyatt Cenac) spend the day together after a one-night stand. Instead it becomes an exploration of class, interracial and sexual politics, and even local (San Franciscan) culture and economics.

4. Bright Star

When John Keats teaches poetry to Fanny Brawne, he describes it as "an experience beyond thought." Director Jane Campion's visual approach seems to subscribe to that same philosophy. The beauty of the cinematography, set design, and art direction is sumptuous and perfectly accompanies the words of Keats, which we often hear either through his letters to Brawne when they are separated or in someone reciting his poetry. Like the brilliant Joe Wright adaptation of Pride & Prejudice a few years back, Bright Star is a period romance that doesn't feel at all like it came out of some distant past, but a living, breathing, fully alive story of two people working out what it means to fall in love.

3. Still Walking

Still Walking, where adult children and their families visit their elderly parents on the fifteenth anniversary of their eldest brother's death, exists as a sort of new millennium companion to Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu's 1953 masterpiece). And like Hirokazu Kore-eda's previous and devastating Nobody Knows (which made my 2005 top ten), it's quiet and soulful. It's spare and empty in the ways many of its characters feel. But it's more than simply a family drama. It deals with issues of unfulfilled promises and personal repression. It tackles issues of aging and masculinity. It fits in a lot of humanity within the confines of the parents' tiny box of a home.

My top two exist in a virtual tie, so I rank them according to personal preference, the one to which I had a more purely emotional response. For that is the only way I can make the distinction between what I feel are the two best films of 2009:

2. The Hurt Locker

At its core--and this might be particularly reductive--cinema is a visceral experience. And no movie immerses you in its world so fully than Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq war drama, The Hurt Locker. From the moment Staff Sergeant Will James (Jeremy Renner) takes over the Bravo Company's Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) unit, it is clear that he is won't handle things predictably (to the dismay of Sgt. J.T. Sanborn--played by a great Anthony Mackie). And it is that tense unpredictability of war, of being out in the field, that Bigelow unfolds her craft masterfully. What is also distinguishable about the film and Mark Boal's terrific screenplay is how it completely eschews all of the divisive politics that have dominated not only the rhetoric of the war itself, but of the sub-genre of these recent Iraq war films. It is a pinhole, a focused look at simply the soldiers and the physical and psychological bludgeoning they take at battle.

1. Up in the Air

I've already written about this movie at length (too much length probably), so I won't expound too much here. Yesterday, I had a discussion with a close friend about, among other things, love and relationships. I won't go into my deliriously fucked-up point-of-view on the subject--my sometimes alternating, pendulum-like philosophy. But what I will say is that it's rare for a film to take a serious and honest (and without condescension) look at a character whose own philosophy on the subject doesn't necessarily conform to ideas of what they should be. If I'm being frustratingly vague here, I don't want to spoil the movie for you if you haven't seen it. Nor do I want to engage in a bit of self-indulgent narcissism. So as I said above--and shoving complete objectivity aside--this is a purely emotional response. 2009 was, in my opinion, a great year for movies, but Jason Reitman's film is the one that will live with me the longest.

So little time, so many movies.

2010-02-25T01:09:00.006-05:00

Okay, so it's near the end of February and I haven't given you my roundup of the best movies of 2009. Not that I haven't been thinking about it or been putting my nose to the grindstone to see movies with a later release or catching up with movies just now on DVD (or Blu-ray or On Demand or whatever new technology is at our disposal). But the laziness ends here. Or at least it does so in part.

Before I give you my ten best movies of 2009, here are the honorable mentions. The ones that barely missed the elite--my almost top ten (in no particular order):

It was a particularly good year for animated movies, so much so that my least favorite of the four that will be included in this almost-list is Pixar's Up. That isn't a criticism of the film--although, like last year's Wall-E, the best moments come toward the beginning of the picture, most notably and brilliantly, a devastating and moving four-minute silent montage that is as touching as any piece of filmmaking of the past calendar year. But it's a testament to how, perhaps, that others have caught up, and have done so in such striking and varied ways.

Delightfully simple, certainly when compared to the work of Pixar, is the DIY Sita Sings the Blues. Interweaving stories from the epic Ramayana to a contemporary narrative and musical interludes based around Annette Hanshaw records of the 1920s, all the while being interrupted and commented on by a type of Greek chorus (think of them as the Muppets' Statler and Waldorf, plus one), Nina Paley's feature debut was one of the standouts of last year's Florida Film Festival and deserves a mention with the more known animations discussed here and elsewhere.

Henry Selick's Coraline is a daring and beautiful work, much darker than many feature-length animations, but full of just as much wonder and magic. I know many who are strong Wes Anderson fans, but I've found much of his career to be terribly uneven. Outside of the categorically brilliant Rushmore, his films have made me alternately chuckle and wince. I think that is partially because the world in Anderson's brain is so idiosyncratic and self-contained that it doesn't exist in any logical reality. So what better vehicle for him to express that world than in a cartoon? Better yet a Roald Dahl adaptation, Fantastic Mr. Fox, a consistently hilarious film with, despite being nominated for other films, arguably George Clooney and Meryl Streep's best performances of 2009.

It seems to be an annual lament that we see a dearth of interesting, three-dimensional portrayals of women coming out of the Hollywood machine. I certainly don't disagree with that assessment, but I would suggest we look elsewhere for the kind of filmmaking that Hollywood is oft-criticized for lacking. With that, 2009 seemed to be quite a good year for female characters and, perhaps more importantly, women behind the camera. Two, Wendy and Lucy (by Kelly Reichardt) and Treeless Mountain (by So Yong Kim), are simple and spare, similar in their plight (of a woman and her dog in the former, two very young sisters in the latter) of characters who are figuratively and literally lost. It's the quiet moments in these movies, the alternating looks of hope and despair that are the most moving. Another is Anne Fontaine's biopic, Coco Before Chanel--a film, as the title would suggest, that tracks the journey leading up to the fashion designer's emergence as a world icon. Going to see it, I sort of expected to be underwhelmed by the traditional trappings of your standard movie biography, but instead the film explores the life of a modern woman determined to carve out her own identity (portrayed wonderfully by Audrey Tatou).

Sugar, the second feature from the duo of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (Half Nelson) and Goodbye Solo, the third film from Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart and Chop Shop--my #10 movie of 2008), are incredibly strong follow-ups to previously heralded works (and only two of many examples) that suggest that the future of independent American cinema should thrive in the years to come.

I'm as surprised as anyone that I Love You, Man makes this list. The past several years have seen these sort of male-bonding movies come out of the pipeline with seemingly diminishing returns. But what distinguishes this one from the rest of the pack (besides being more consistently funny than most) is that while those other movies--either the successful ones or the lesser so--are only obliquely homoerotic and pretend to be something other than part of what is essentially a boys' club, John Hamburg's film takes that subtext and makes it text. And in that way, the film really gets to something about the manner in which male friends interact. It's not only a bromantic comedy, it's the bromantic comedy.

I've realized now that I've reached ten films and wish I could talk about others that won't make my top list. Others such as the quietly insane A Serious Man by the Coen Brothers or the decidedly not-so-quietly insane Werner Herzog picture Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Or how about Lynn Shelton's Humpday? Or Chan-wook Park's Thirst?

I'll reveal my ten best picks soon, but as this list would hopefully suggest, 2009 was a pretty damn good year for movies. I hope you'll take the time to see some of these.

Simple though love is...

2010-02-23T22:34:00.004-05:00

The plate of fries (?), the Temptation-like choreography--

pretty much the coolest guy ever, no?

We are not swans.

2010-02-20T03:02:00.001-05:00

About a month ago now, I went to the local IMAX theater to finally see Avatar in 3-D. And as is sometimes customary, I lollygagged and left a little late. Waiting in the longer-than-I-expected line, everyone in front of me was waiting to get tickets to the same film. As the gentleman behind the glass reminded each person that the movie was going to start in 5 minutes, then 3 minutes, then one minute, I resigned myself to the fact I would need to see something else. As I surveyed the red lights of the showtimes displayed behind the single box-office attendant, I landed on Up in the Air. I had seen Jason Reitman's third feature, which stars George Clooney, around Christmas and had already held it in high regard after that first screening. So I decided to give it a second look.

George Clooney's character, Ryan Bingham, is not unlike the public persona the actor himself possesses--charming, confident, perpetually single. Ryan works for CTC, a company hired out by businesses to fire or layoff its employees. Ryan is one of a couple of dozen CTC employees who fly all over the country for most of the year to do the face-to-face terminations. Like many of us (at least those of us who are lucky to have a job), Ryan's life is his work. "To know me is to fly with me," he says. "This is where I live." When a pilot asks him where he's from, he says "here."

Two complications arise that threaten to figuratively and literally ground Ryan's way of life. The first comes in the form of the arrival of a young upstart named Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick). Natalie's proposal that CTC conducts all of its terminations through video conferencing will effectively end his traveling ways and keep him in the company's home base of Omaha, where he keeps an apartment furnished with little more than a toaster, a toothbrush, and some extra sets of matching suits. But first he must show her the ropes, going city-to-city, sitting face-to-face with the people they must fire. Then midway through their travels they hook up with the second complication, Alex (Vera Farmiga), a business woman who Ryan met earlier and shares his jetsetting, sex-with-no-strings-attached lifestyle.

Natalie and Alex represent two separate phases of woman adulthood--in fact, two different ideals. Natalie, early 20s, recently graduated from college, wants the traditional life: husband, kids, dog, SUV, suburbs. She admits (and only slightly begrudgingly so) that she defines herself by her relationship with a man. Alex, in her late 30s, is successful, worldly, and independent. She's essentially the female equivalent to Ryan. "Just think of me as you, but with a vagina," she tells him over the phone.

Yet while the movie sets up the two women as binary opposites, their characters are so fully drawn that we begin to realize that there is significant overlap, that they don't represent two ends of a spectrum, but a gamut of emotions in between. And the movie doesn't condescend to any of the varying degrees. There is a nice conversation between the two of them shortly after they first meet where they talk about what they want, the kind of future they envision, they kind of men they are looking for. Ryan is present and interjects occasionally, but we really get to know Alex and Natalie.

The film has a genuine affection for all of the people who inhabit it and all of their points of view. For instance, Ryan's sister Julie and her fiancé Jim at first come off as a bit goofy and oddball, but we slowly get to know them and even understand an apparently cheesy wedding project they've asked their friends to undertake. Ryan even, the perpetual bachelor, must come to the rescue when Jim gets cold feet. And his attempt to get him to the altar is similarly genuine, even if he doesn't necessarily subscribe to it as it applies to himself.

To me, the magic of Hollywood doesn't exist necessarily in its ability to transport you to new and faraway lands or offer tales of wonder and grand adventure. Don't get me wrong, there is greatness to be found in those types of films, certainly--films such as The Wizard of Oz, or Star Wars, or, yes, Avatar. But I believe the classics of Hollywood cinema come out of a tradition that finds a balance between the serious matters of its contemporary world and light, frothy entertainment.

Up in the Air has already been compared by many to the works of Preston Sturges and Frank Capra, directors who made the wittiest and most enjoyable comedies in the history of film, all the while engaging with the social realities of the depression, during which many of these pictures were set and made. I'd even include some of the works of Billy Wilder, who deftly mixed sarcastic cynicism and a weary, guarded optimism.

As reticent as I am to immediately anoint contemporary films to the level of these established classics, I have to say I kind of agree with it here. That all of this happens over the sobering reality of the downsizing I feel may seem to some as dismissive or even smug, but instead of being what could have been a garish collision of these two sensibilities--the light, almost screwball threesome of Ryan, Alex, and Natalie and the darker moments of the layoff scenes--the film is a smart and tasteful mix of the two. I'm not sure the film has anything new to say about the world we live in today (the current state of the economy, anyway), but it does seem to get the breadth of human experience--the range of it allowed us. In that way, Up in the Air isn't so much deep as it is wide. But that's a big reason why I see it as the movie of this particular moment--the one Hollywood movie that most captures how broad life is today. And that the film is open to that sentiment is a bit of a miracle.

Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, 109 m)

Social What-now?

2010-01-11T23:18:00.003-05:00

Want more ways to keep track of this crazy brain of mine?

Fan me: http://www.facebook.com/pages/You-Mean-My-Whole-Fallacy-is-Wrong/185120983004?ref=ts

Follow me: http://twitter.com/jtaningco

A hobby is a hobby.

2010-01-07T23:22:00.003-05:00

Early in Lone Scherfig's An Education, Jenny is seen reading a copy of Albert Camus's existentialist tome, The Outsider, while sitting with her classmates in an English cafe. In a way, this is everything you need to know about Jenny, a 16-year-old Twickenham schoolgirl. She’s a bit of an outsider herself. Not that she doesn’t have friends or even the attention of the boys in her class. It’s that she’s better than all of it. She’s a big fish in a small pond. Her ambitions to attend Oxford are to experience the finer things in life. She wants to listen to good music, eat at good restaurants, watch French movies, discuss--obviously--existentialist novels. But to her father, a post-secondary education is simply the most practical alternative in the event she doesn’t find a husband to support her. When David, an older, richer, more worldly man drives up to her at the bus stop on a cold, rainy English afternoon, she finds her way to a bigger pond.

The story of a thirty-something seducing a 16-year-old in pre-hippie London may sound more like a TV movie-of-the-week, but An Education is smarter and more subtle. At its surface (and what a slick, shiny surface it is), the film tracks Jenny and David's courtship and the whirlwind of opportunity it creates for her to live a world outside the doldrums of her Twickenham existence. Through David, she gets to experience her ambitions first-hand, bouncing from art auctions to jazz clubs to fancy restaurants to a visit to Oxford. Instead of listening to French records in her bedroom or watching French movies at the cinema, she actually gets to visit Paris.

But underneath it, An Education explores what it means to be complicit in the lifestyle you choose (or choose to turn your back on). Complicity seems to be the oft-overlooked component of the perpetually dissatisfied. Our lives, despite the certain presence of unchangeable social, economic, and physiological factors, are of our own making. It may or may not turn out as planned but we all have some sort of hand in creating and changing it. When Jenny decides to overlook some seedier aspects of what David does for a living or contemplates not attending Oxford at all, they are life-defining moments of her own choosing. When Jenny's parents allow their daughter to date a wealthy man more than twice her age, they are complicit in whatever the resulting fallout may be.

At the center of the film is of course Jenny, in a performance by Carey Mulligan that will almost certainly earn her an Oscar nomination. It's one that requires her to display quite a range--from idealistic to cynical; from poised to wide-eyed and back again. In so many movies these days, we are required to laugh at the characters. We look down on them for their stupidity or ignorance and, in many cases, these films want us to find these traits acceptable or even endearing. It is rare and refreshing to see a character as intellectually present as Jenny, one who--despite her obvious youth and naïveté--just sort of gets it all:

JENNY
I’m still trying to work out what
makes good things good. It’s
hard, isn’t it?

DANNY
The thing is, Jenny, you know,
without necessarily being able to
explain why. You’ve got taste.
That’s not even half the
battle. That’s the whole war.

It means never having to say you're sorry.

2009-11-21T20:32:00.000-05:00

There's a scene in Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer in which Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) attends a house party thrown by Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel) and we see in split screen the difference between his expectations of what will happen at the party (which, more accurately, are his desires) and the reality of it.

Intermittently during Nicholas Jasenovec's faux documentary, Paper Heart, elderly couples recall the stories of when they fell in love or how they first met à la When Harry Met Sally. But instead of simply talking heads, Charlyne Yi, the film's protagonist/subject, recreates these scenes with paper cutout puppets and landscapes.

(500) Days of Summer and Paper Heart are two distinctly different films. The former foregrounds its own artifice, with its broken narrative and fantasy sequences. The latter, while ultimately a pretty thinly-veiled ruse, keeps up the pretense of being a documentary. But in their own way (as in the two episodes above, for example), they find mutual ground, arriving at a similar point about the uniquely nebulous idea of love--or, should I say, LOVE.

In Paper Heart, Charlyne Yi--comedienne and all-around goofy gal--isn't so much in search of love in the same way many of us are. Instead she is looking for some kind, any kind, of definition for love and then whether or not any of that can apply to her. When she meets Michael Cera (Superbad, Juno), the quirkiest of couples emerges and the question of whether true love is in the cards for her is put to the test. In (500) Days of Summer, the question of true love is never in doubt for Tom. True love is the destiny of all, most certainly him. So when Summer floats into his orbit, it's a fait accompli--the two will spend the rest of their lives together. Well, at least he thinks so.

Their stylistic differences aside, on some level these characters are interchangeable. Tom could have easily been wooing Charlyne instead of Summer; and Summer would have been just as reticent to engage in anything serious with Michael as she was with Tom. It is the classic inversion of the gender stereotype--the hopelessly romantic male and the wild, cynical female he attempts to tame. And as both films are essentially false constructs, they point to a fundamental aspect of love--especially to that of love in the movies. Love isn't so much an actual thing, even a feeling, inasmuch as it is itself a construct, no more than an idea that people create in their heads. Like film itself, it's a mere projection. Any number of Summer Finns could have waltzed into Tom Hansen's life and the story would have played out similarly. When Michael enters Charlyne's world, it isn't really their emotional status at stake, it's the movie's. The premise of the film asks whether love has a place in Charlyne's world, not if Michael does.

I'm beginning to think that this is the ultimate fallacy of love. The marginally humble opinion of this writer is that one of the major reasons love tends to fail is that people are unwilling to recognize the large distance between expectation and reality. At their core, both films are significantly more hopeful than this cynical (realistic?) stance, but the inclusion of the episode in (500) Days above or the reenactments in Paper Heart make them more fully engaged with the nuance of adult relationships than most of their mainstream counterparts and, resultingly (or maybe unwittingly), more critical of it. Oh, and they're hilariously funny. What else do you want from a romantic comedy?

I leave tear stains on the ground.

2009-11-08T13:54:00.003-05:00

When Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, one of the oddest chapters in modern popular culture ended nearly as abruptly as it burst onto the scene. In the weeks and months prior to his now controversial passing, Jackson was working on a massive concert tour called "This Is It." The director of the series of concerts was Kenny Ortega and, culled from the significant amount of backstage footage, he also directed the behind-the-scenes look, Michael Jackson's This Is It.

The film isn't at all about Michael Jackson the man. None of his childhood, his personal demons, the controversies, the scandals are in this film. It isn't the biography of a life or even a career. Rarely in the past 15-20 years has the name Michael Jackson been mentioned purely in terms of his artistry. Instead, through his own actions and our own need for salacious headlines, we tend to bury the lead. But in This Is It, that's all pushed aside and we see the musician and performer, the talent that first put him under the spotlight.

I'm a big fan of these sort of inside looks. Whether it be a movie, the recording of an album, the story behind a great novel, or the production of a concert, there's something I find immeasurably satisfying by having the curtain pulled back and observing how art is created. I love listening to early demos of my favorite songs, or hearing the outtakes of studio sessions of my favorite albums, or watching a DVD with the director's commentary playing.

In a roundabout way, it's like a distant cousin to criticism, except it's traveling in the opposite direction, heading towards each other. Criticism, at its core, is really a type of deconstruction. It takes the work apart and tries to make sense of it. Things like the Beach Boys' Pet Sessions, and The Beatles Anthology series, and "Project Greenlight", are what I would call pre-constructions. It shows what goes on before the work is complete, the false starts, the misguided rewrites, the trial-and-error. And the final product is where the two streams meet in the middle, or from where they depart.

Ortega is to be commended for how he assembled the footage in the film. As a doc, it's episodic, yet thoroughly focused. There's very little filler here, not much in the way of extraneous material. It's simply about the work that goes into putting on a show of this proportion. "That's why we rehearse," Jackson says a couple of times in the movie as they perfect the show.

But beyond the filmmaking technique, a documentary is only as strong as its subject and Jackson is the drive behind all of it. What's apparent after stripping away all of the controversy is that he still had it as a performer. He sounds as good as he ever has and it's riveting to see someone maneuver in such a focused manner. In a way, it's better than the concert could've been. Here we don't get to see all the bloated effects and pyrotechnics. What's left is a portrait of a performer as lean as the man himself. And that's the way he should be remembered.

The vocal-only track of probably my favorite Jackson song.

Happy days are here again.

2009-08-05T23:30:00.004-04:00

From the "Thank God somebody came to their senses" file, the Chicago Sun-Times reports that A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips, film critics for the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, respectively, will replace the two Bens (Lyons and Mankiewicz), after their one-season experiment as hosts of "At the Movies", the movie-review show originated by Roger Ebert and the late Gene Siskel.

After a couple of episodes of the Bens' version of "At the Movies", it was clear to me that the show that had as much to do with my love of movies as anything else had turned into a joke and apparently the execs at Disney-ABC only needed a season to see things the same way. (I'm sure the infinitesimal ratings had something to do with it too.) Read my full diatribe on the initial hiring of the Bens here.

But why did it take a disastrous season for anybody to realize this was and would be the case? After Mr. Ebert lost his ability to speak, both Scott and Phillips (who, by the way, are in my opinion two of the very best mainstream film critics this country has to offer) filled in and co-hosted with Richard Roeper. And both were as articulate and insightful on camera as they have been in print.

Now I realize a syndicated television show reviewing movies isn't going to win a large Nielsen share, but when (legitimately or not) there seems to be a constant lament about the death of film criticism or the dwindling relevance of film critics, this feels like something more than a minor victory.

And now for something completely different.

2009-06-11T21:18:00.004-04:00

The NBA Finals have come to Orlando for the first time since 1995 and only the second time ever. The city is dressed in blue and white and Orlando, a city I often criticize, has rallied around a cause in ways I've never seen. What slightly irks me is that this surge of pride for its home team, the swarm of #12 jerseys littered across town, is just happening now. Where is this city during the lean years? Where were they when they won 21 games in '04? Were they wondering if the team would draft Emeka Okafor with the #1 pick instead of Dwight Howard?

The Magic are the only Orlando team in any of the major professional sports and sometimes I feel as if this city doesn't realize they exist. Maybe Orlando just isn't a sports city, but neither is Green Bay, who also has only one professional team, yet their city shuts down every Sunday during the fall and winter for their beloved Packers. Granted, that team has a tradition we don't have yet, but traditions start somewhere and ours should start here and start now.

However, as I said recently to a friend, I'll take this fair weather fandom as long as my team is winning. And to my next point, it illustrates how much sports has this ability to galvanize a city, a community, a family. There's a scene in City Slickers when Helen Slater's character asks Daniel Stern's about why he loves baseball so much. He says that even when he was 18 and couldn't communicate with his father, they could still talk about baseball. I'm not 18 and I can talk to my dad about a lot of things, but 9 times out of 10, the first thing we talk about when we meet is sports. It's part of the fabric of a relationship between a father and a son, or between friends, or among a community.

In my most immediate circle of friends, I'm really the only sports fan and I think they often wonder why I care so much about it. This is why. When people who having nothing in common, when a city that seems to have no actual direction can come together to support and rally around their local team, then it becomes bigger than the game itself. It may be fleeting--in fact it often is--but it's better than nothing.

A little catch up...

2009-06-04T21:18:00.004-04:00

I've been sick here for about a week and have yet to visit the brand new downtown Orlando theater, the Plaza Cinema Cafe. So far it seems as if the buzz has been mixed. My parents and sisters went and, while they liked it, weren't particularly blown away. I'm sure the less-than-stellar lineup didn't help.

I was able to sneak away to the Enzian to see the slightly redundantly-titled Anvil! The Story of Anvil. The documentary documents (see what I did there) the once-famous metal band whose name I'll spare you in reiterating and their attempts at a comeback. Anvil is essentially two men, it's guitarist and lead singer, Steve "Lips" Ludlow, and his drummer and oldest friend Robb Reiner. If, to my knowledge, he is of no relation to This is Spinal Tap director Rob Reiner, this film is certainly a kindred spirit to that earlier mockumentary. But beyond the tongue-and-cheek tone to much of it, the film is carried by how earnestly and honestly Lips and Reiner approach their work and their friendship. It's difficult not to smile all through the movie and hope that these two crazy kids work it out.

This weekend I will attempt to finally visit the Plaza Cinema Cafe as well as see the premiere of the new Jim Jarmusch film, The Limits of Control, over at the Enzian.

Over the past week, I watched another altogether different documentary, Spike Lee's latest release on ESPN, Kobe Doin' Work. What separates this one from other sports docs, especially ones you often see on ESPN or other sports networks, is how focused and in-depth it is.

The smartest thing about the film is not that it just follows Kobe during one game day or that it gets unlimited access to the court and the lockers, but that Kobe himself provides a running commentary while we watch him doin' work. It's as enlightening a look into what a great athlete really does during a game as anything I've ever seen. And even as a die-hard basketball fan (and sports in general), I learned a great deal about him and the sport.

Too bad for his Lakers, my Magic are going to win the Finals!!!

(I'm watching Game 1 right now and already feel like I'm going to eat those words.)

Not exactly the happiest place on earth; or, don't eat the corndogs.

2009-05-23T17:11:00.001-04:00

The coming-of-age movie has been a fruitful genre for directors and Hollywood has certainly gone to that well more than its fair share of times. Traditionally, our protagonist is either going through puberty or is in high school. He often has trouble dealing with girls, his parents, and often bullies. (As a corollary, it's more-often-than-not a he instead of a she--but that discussion is for another day.) As the Judd Apatow fraternity has dominated recent American film comedy, the current crop of coming-of-age films has its adolescent/teenagers projected onto fully-grown, adult males. Like their much younger counterparts, these men are in many ways emotionally stunted and still need hand-holding, either by other, more experienced men, or by their smarter, more secure female partners.

But what of the in-betweeners? What happens when the teenager graduates to adulthood and realizes he still doesn't have a clue? Well, if your James Brennan, and it's 1987, and you just graduated college, and it turns out your dad got laid off and can't pay for your graduate school at Columbia, you search for a summer job. But the comparative lit major who "read[s] poetry for fun... sometimes" can't find a job. "I'm not even qualified for manual labor," he laments. So the only place left for him to go is the local amusement park, Adventureland.

Adventureland--the park and the movie--are populated with your standard cast of characters in a story of this type. There's the awkward lead, the a-little-too-nerdy sidekick, the older, more-experienced male figure, the hottie, and the girl he pines for. It also has your typical schtick--the crotch punching, kids puking, pot humor, etc. Yet Adventureland is grounded in a reality that is often atypical in the coming-of-age film. It's sloppier in the way these things tend to actually happen in real life.

A close friend of mine wrote on her blog:

There are people out in the world who do not realize they are already part of the world. I don't like how at graduations people always say you will be going forward into the "real world". I don't know about you but I have been living in the real world the whole time.

She's right; and what Adventureland also gets right is then when you're preoccupied with starting your life, you slowly begin to realize that it's happening right before you and you better damn well sure take advantage of that. Or as a much better writer than either one of us put it, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

And while the Apatow hero is a man-child who is really too immature to make sense of what is going on around him, James has his head pretty squarely on his shoulders. He can engage in childish activities for sure (there's a decent amount of pot smoking on the job for one), but he's fairly secure enough in who he is that he doesn't need the hand-holding. He's a 22-year-old virgin, not a 40-year-old one and that makes a difference.

One of the other criticisms often levied on the Apatow-produced films is that the overgrown boys that populate them always end up with these smart, beautiful women who are generally out of their league. It's a criticism with which I don't fully agree, yet it's a point-of-view I can understand. Here, and despite his minor social awkwardness, you never feel that James couldn't end up with his work crush, Em, or get a date with the park beauty, Lisa P.

Thus, Adventureland drifts away from the sort of slacker/loser comedies into which many of these films cross over and it evolves into a more sincere (and damn funny) exploration of a time in a young person's life when he realizes that while some doors close, others will open at the same time. Or as a fellow I once knew put it, "Life is a roller coaster, just make sure you have a bag to throw up in along the way." I never really liked that guy.

Adventureland (Greg Mottola, 107 m)

These are things I think about when I'm bored.

2009-05-23T16:36:00.004-04:00

Notes on a mashup:

Explore the evolution of media through the transition from radio to TV via the music of the bands Television, Radiohead, and TV on the Radio.

But will they have parking?

2009-05-12T23:43:00.004-04:00

Downtown Orlando will finally get a full-fledged movie theater later this month, when the Plaza Cinema Cafe opens to the public on May 29. It's the first downtown cinema of any kind in The City Beautiful since the Downtown Media Arts Center (DMAC) closed its doors a couple of years ago.

From May 25-27, the theater will also have a pre-opening celebration during which they will give away five "Golden Tickets" a la Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, one of the six films that will play before the theater's official opening. The winners of these tickets will receive a behind-the-scenes tour of the new place as well as, more importantly, free movies for a year. The pre-opening lineup and the others listed after its official opening seems to be a decent mix of classics, smaller indie/arty films, and more mainstream blockbusters.

The locus of any serious attempt at bringing independent and foreign cinema to the area has for years been in the Winter Park/Maitland area, mainly the Enzian Theater, the host of the Florida Film Festival. But downtown Orlando has recently made a push to become a hub for arts and culture and this, along with the relatively young Orlando Film Festival (which the theater will supposedly begin hosting next year) is a pretty significant step forward, at least in terms of movies.

One of the questions it begs is will this mark the beginning of a shift from Winter Park to downtown Orlando as the center for alternative cinema in Central Florida? Or instead will it cater to a more mainstream crowd and only play the standard fare at the rest of the multiplexes? Winter Park still has Full Sail University and the Regal at Winter Park Village consistently includes foreign and independent movies year-round. But the growing Orlando Hispanic Film Festival has made Premiere Cinemas (the closest movie theater to downtown) it's main venue and conducts other screenings and educational seminars at the Orlando Public Library just a couple of blocks away from the new Plaza Cinema Cafe.

I don't think I have the answer to it, nor do I think it has to be an either/or. I can't imagine ever not wanting to go to the Enzian or attend FFF, but I adore the idea of having the potential to go see a smaller movie at a theater right in my backyard. Ultimately, it will be a comment on the city and the community whether a downtown cinema can survive or be another one of those failed Central Florida projects. My fingers are crossed.

--------------

Info courtesy of:

http://www.orlandoslice.com/page/get-your-golden-ticket-to-the

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_arts_letter/2009/05/downtown-movie-theater-has-a-preopening-party.html#more

http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment_movies_blog/2009/04/plaza-cinema-cafethe-opening-week-details.html

You kiss your mother with that language?

2009-05-05T23:47:00.003-04:00

This is great:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/movies/03darg.html?_r=1

FFF Days 8-10

2009-04-05T23:57:00.002-04:00

Sunday night brought the 18th Florida Film Festival to a close. I didn't watch anything that final night, but the previous two days did allow me to screen some terrific films. The only narrative feature I watched was Em, a love story whose journey hits a speed bump due to the woman's bipolar disorder. It isn't an easy movie, it's as tough as its two main characters. It's intimate, never maudlin, and as moving a film as there was at this year's fest, thanks to two great performances by Stef Willen and Nathan Wetherington.

I just realized that I did watch another feature--one of the midnight movies--Deadgirl. I think I forgot about it because I hated it. For those who don't know, the midnight movies at FFF are slightly demented. They appeal to lowest sensibilities. I say all of this in a good way. They are usually wildly entertaining and a blast to attend. And knowing this, I still could not get past disliking Deadgirl. It's sadistic and mysogynistic. I kept waiting for it to somehow, someway to redeem itself. It didn't. Maybe I've lost my sense of humor, but I don't think so.

The rest of the screenings were either shorts programs or docs. This year's documentaries were something spectacular. Art + Copy was a fascinating look at both the show and the business behind some of the most memorable advertisements. The Wrecking Crew showcases a fraternity (plus one girl) of West Coast musicians who defined an era of rock 'n' roll as the session band behind a series of hits in the 60s and 70s. The Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, Frank Sinatra, Sonny & Cher, Sam Cooke are just some of the names Hal Blaine, Plas Johnson, Carol Kaye, Tommy Tedesco, and company played for. Like Motown's Funk Brothers (who were featured in the excellent Standing in the Shadows of Motown a few years back), these great musicians may finally get the recognition that has long been overdue.

Maybe my favorite doc of the fest though was School Play, a film about a year in the life of a 5th grade class's production of The Wizard of Oz. (The school, by the way, is in Mamaroneck, New York, not too far from where I was born--but whatever.) It's a film very much in the tradition of recent documentaries like Spellbound or Mad Hot Ballroom, where it's as much about the kids than it is spelling, dancing, or performing in a play.

The final tally:

This year I saw 14 features and 60 shorts. And I must say that the overall quality of the films were quite good. From We are the Mods to Em, from School Play to Pickin' and Trimmin', from Treeless Mountain to Sita Sings the Blues, the playlist for this year's FFF was one of the best.

FFF Days 5-7

2009-04-03T00:08:00.008-04:00

The middle three days of the festival had me seeing four movies on Wednesday bracketed by two single-screening days on Tuesday and Thursday. Tuesday night I saw Nina Paley's altogether delightful Sita Sings the Blues an animated interpretations of the Indian myth, The Ramayana. It's got great (great I say!) music, whimsical animation, and the three most hilarious narrators this side of "Mystery Science Theater".

Wednesday I saw a couple of shorts programs, including the Animated Shorts Program in which filmmakers Bill Plympton (again), Signe Baumane, and Lev Yilmaz attended. All three have had films here in previous years and their entries here were as always among the best of the program. Later that night I screened We are the Mods, which may not be the best movie of the festival I've seen so far, but may possibly be my favorite. Like Sita Sings the Blues, it also had great period music and a great visual style (especially costume design) and a nice young cast, two of whom were in attendance with the director. We also learned that it was the first time either of the two actors who were here had seen the film.

Thursday I saw a doc double-feature of Smile 'Til it Hurts: The Up With People Story, a film about the cultish phenomenon of the massive teenage singing troupe/religious-social movement. As much as I liked it, I was more impressed by the doc short that preceded it, Matt Morris's Pickin' & Trimmin', about a small-town North Carolina barbershop that also hosts a kickass bluegrass band in its backroom. Music seems to be the recurring theme these three days and that's certainly the case in this short, but the film also exists as a wonderful affirmation of slowing down and appreciating the things that make life, well, life.

Animator Lev Yilmaz, director of the Tales of Mere Existence series. Photo courtesy of Samantha.

My very blurry picture at the Q&A for We are the Mods. Actor Lance Drake, director E.E. Cassidy, and actress Melia Renee.

FFF Days 1-4

2009-03-30T00:08:00.007-04:00

Here's my quick, little synopsis of the first third of the festival:

My planned six-movie marathon on the opening Saturday of FFF got truncated to only three movies due to (gasp!) exhaustion. I must learn to pace myself. This year's fest began for me with the animated Battle for Terra. Though it was predictable and the politics and message a bit heavy-handed, I did end up falling for it because of it's gorgeous animation and quite a good voice-over performance from Evan Rachel Wood as the lead, Mala. This was followed by the very solid Shorts Program #1: "Lost in Space", of which Flat Love and Happy Birthday were my faves.

This was when I got tired and decided to go home and sleep through part of the NCAA tournament and return for the midnight showing of Not Quite Hollywood, Mark Hartley's entertaining doc on the heretofore, unknown-by-me sub-industry of Australian exploitation movies. Although I'm not a necessarily a huge fan of the normal grindhouse fare, it was an interesting peak into an era of world cinema of which I was utterly ignorant. I am now currently on the search for some of these flicks! Looking for you, Alvin Purple!

Anyone remember when the Chuck E. Cheese on I-Drive was a Showbiz Pizza Place? Remember that the house band was an animatronic band of, um, animals called the Rock-afire Explosion? Well, a handful of rabid fans who have kept the memory of the band alive certainly do and they--and the band--are the subject of Brett Whitcomb's documentary also named The Rock-afire Explosion. The band was created by Aaron Fechter, whose business was based here in Orlando, and he, director Whitcomb, and many of the engineers and technicians were in attendance, not to mention the reunited "band" were performing just outside the Enzian theater.

The weekend concluded with the newest feature from Oscar-nominated animator, Bill Plympton, an FFF regular. After his very, very good Idiots and Angels, Plympton stayed for a short Q&A and then commenced to draw a picture and sign autographs for everyone in attendance.

Monday had me at two screenings, the entertaining Italian Shorts program and what is so far the best narrative feature I've seen this year, So Yong Kim's Treeless Mountain. Kim's second film was featured in an excellent article by New York Times film critic A.O. Scott about a new wave of independent films that have been released in the past couple of years. Also featured in the article was Kelly Reichardt's latest feature, Wendy and Lucy, which played at the Enzian the week before the festival.

The rain and traffic looks to limit my movie watching on Tuesday, but I look to get back on the train Wednesday and Thursday. Stay tuned!

Thanks to my sister Samantha for the Bill Plympton pics!

18 and life to go...

2009-03-27T00:17:00.006-04:00

Friday night marks the beginning of my vacation and, not coincidentally, the opening of this year's Florida Film Festival--the 18th such event. As always, I dive head first into nine days of nonstop movie watching not knowing if the next screening will make me laugh, cry, think, or piss me off for wasting my time and money when I could've been watching something else. And of course, that's the best part. That, and listening to filmmakers young and old, expert and novice, talk about a movie you've just witnessed and, hopefully, loved. That, and being surrounded by genuine movie fans--those whose collective excitement about a shared love give you the adrenaline to stay up for your fifth movie of the day at midnight. That, and knowing that there are still movies out there that aren't filtered through a committee before their made or picked apart and prodded until they lose their identity.

That, and the fact I don't have to go to work for 10 days.

Stay posted for my periodic updates. See you at the movies!

http://www.floridafilmfestival.com/

Pack up all my cares and woes...

2009-02-21T20:32:00.008-05:00

It can be a critically dangerous act to reach for any tangible links or themes between a year's great movies--even more suspect to make a link between a year's movies and the real world in which they were produced. Certainly any movie is in large part a product of the world that surrounds it, but to find an overarching theme that connects a spate of disparate films can be an act of critical laziness.

But if you'll allow me this mild generalization, the characters in a large majority of the best films of 2008 were lost souls. They were men, women, and yes sometimes children trying to figure a way out of their situation--or into a new one. Recent history and today's news would suggest that we are doing the same. Yet in all these films, there seems to be at least a glimmer of hope, that the trouble we take to get out was and is worth the struggle. They are not the bleak laments of many of the better films of the past couple of years. Maybe it's because we now have hope ourselves. But here I go generalizing again.

Before I get to my top ten films, a few that just missed the cut. A little primer:

Slumdog Millionaire is perhaps the most talked-about movie of the past year--and perhaps the most polarizing. It's detractors are as staunch as those that sing its praises. I happen to agree with the latter. Danny Boyle turns what is actually quite a traditional story by using his kinetic and frenetic style and giving us a glimpse into a culture many of us don't often see in films. It's glorious and exciting. And what many find cliché about its story and themes are comforting and familiar.

Nearly a year ago now, I attended the 17th annual Florida Film Festival, three movies in particular stood out to me. One was the charming and funny black-and-white romantic comedy In Search of a Midnight Kiss (Alex Holdridge) about a couple who meet off an ad on Craigslist and spend one unpredictable night together--New Year's Eve. On the flip side was Chris Eska's quietly observed August Evening, centering around the strained and difficult familial relationship between Jaime, an undocumented Mexican worker in South Texas, and Lupe, his widowed daughter-in-law. Holdridge's film has echoes of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise/Sunset movies and Eska's of some of Yasujiro Ozu's work, yet each manages to create something fresh and original. (The third FFF standout you'll read somewhere below.)

Last summer I wrote about Anton Corbijn's Control and Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor in terms of their meditations on art. What I didn't mention was how they are both carried by two smart and carefully modulated lead male performances, Sam Riley and Oscar nominee Richard Jenkins, respectively. While Riley's is intense, Jenkins's is subdued. One's a newcomer and one's an old vet, but each is able to register emotion often without even uttering a word.

The idea of the circle of life is as old as The Lion King. Actually, I'm sure it's before that. Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven is not without its share of tragedy, but like I said above, it's also not without its share of hopefulness. Life has its way of flipping you upside down and a way of helping you land on your feet at the same time.

The most unlikely romance of 2008 is also probably the most touching because it takes place between two 12-year-olds. Well, one's a 12-year-old and the other is actually a vampire. It sounds creepy and, well, it is. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson), though, avoids being either smarmy or cloying by understanding the loneliness and awkwardness it is to be a 12-year-old and what I guess would be the same for a supernatural being who is trapped in the body of one.

The first half of Andrew Stanton's Wall-E is so sublime and beautiful that I sometimes wish it was the entire movie. It stands up as one of the truly great extended set pieces of modern cinema. I freely admit to being a person who has never been that big a fan of animation, but Pixar to this day, without exception, has never let me down.

Two otherwise mostly dissimilar films have the unique distinction of being about men who age backwards. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher) is for the most part a generally straightforward Hollywood epic romance. Youth Without Youth (Francis Ford Coppola), on the other hand, is a challenging, slightly experimental work. I happen to think neither of them fully work, but it's interesting to see two master directors tackle a similar topic in such different ways that it would be a bit of a shame to dismiss either.

Now the top coat...

10. Chop Shop

Unflinching and matter-of-fact, the dreams of youth collide with the bitter reality of adulthood, as Alejandro, a child who works in a garage saves his money to buy a mobile food van he wishes to run with his sister, Isamar. Ramin Bahrani's camera doesn't sensationalize--it barely even comments. It simply observes.

9. Milk

Biographies are always difficult films to pull off. They often tend to simply be a laundry list of the highlights of the subject's life. Often they tend to reach for some buried meaning, some big bang theory that explains the trajectory that his or her life would take. But Milk, about the first openly gay man to be elected to a major public office, does none of that. From the beginning, director Gus Van Sant, writer Dustin Lance Black, and actor Sean Penn create Harvey Milk as a fully lived-in human being. In the film, he doesn't exist as some unreachable icon, some paper moon we admire from afar, but instead as three-dimensional character whose purpose in life was bigger than his own. The film pays its reverence to be sure, but only after it is earned, for there were more important things on the agenda.

8. In Bruges

A ballet of curse words and a symphony of violence, In Bruges (Martin McDonagh) is the classic buddy film turned on its ear. It's sad and tragic, funny and exciting. Its beauty exists in its cacophony, yet its heart exists in its growing friendship created between Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson.

7. The Fall

Part Wizard of Oz, part Pan's Labyrinth, director Tarsem Singh's overdue follow up to The Cell, is as visually sumptuous as that earlier film, but possesses a whimsy the other lacked. Catinca Untaru's performance as Alexandria is at times hilarious and heartbreaking. A lovely not-quite-fairy tale.

6. Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)

What could have easily been an over-the-top or two-dimensional performance ended up being my favorite individual piece of acting all year in the body of Sally Hawkins. Unyieldingly positive, Hawkins's Poppy is a force of nature and she never once makes you feel like she's putting on an act. And Eddie Marsan as the bitter and angry driving instructor is the perfect gin to her tonic. I'm still chanting "En-ra-ha!"

Before I give my top five, let me say that the rest of the films exist in a virtual tie for my favorite film of 2008. The following will be ranked, yes, but it's like throwing them all in a bag and randomly picking them out. If you asked me tomorrow, they might be in a different order...

5. Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Woody Allen's best movie since a string of great ones in the early to mid-90s, it explores issues of sexual morality familiar to many of his other works, but does it in a way that's fresh and new even for him. The change in scenery and the projection of his artistic and romantic psyche onto and in between two very different female characters add a different slant to both the typical romantic comedy and the typical Allen film.

4. Disfigured

To me the standout of the 2008 Florida Film Festival was Glen Gers's film about two women who become friends after meeting in a fat acceptance group. Lydia is actually overweight, but Darcy joins because she's a former anorexic. This is the type of movie that teeters of the edge of being smug or condescending, pretentious or maudlin, but at every moment takes the right turn. It's surprisingly smart and delicately written and acted. It's a small, modest film and may be difficult to find, but I implore you to search it out.

3. Synecdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman out Charlie Kaufmans himself in a movie about a play about a play about a... well, you get it.

2. Man on Wire

James Marsh's documentary has a style, confidence, wit, and certainly bravado matched only by its subject, tightrope walker Philippe Petit. Dubbed the artistic crime of the century, Petit walked across a high wire tied between the two towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. And then he walked back and stopped in the middle to hang out and walked back again. A combination of talking head interviews, re-enactments, and found footage, Man on Wire is endlessly fascinating both as the biography of a "heist" and as an affirmation for living in the clouds.

1. Rachel Getting Married

Kym, a recovering 12-stepper temporarily leaves rehab to attend the wedding of her older sister, Rachel. This tag line could've left us with a broad wedding farce or a morose tragedy about addiction. That Jonathan Demme's film (from a brilliant script by Jenny Lumet) is able to pull elements from both and explore everything in between is only part of the reason this ranks as my top film of the year. Another is Anne Hathaway's Oscar-nominated performance as Kym. And as great as Hathaway is, the movie is made by its unequalled ensemble, especially Rosemarie DeWitt as her sister Rachel, Tunde Adebimpe as her betrothed, Sidney, and Bill Irwin as their father Paul.

For a movie full of tragedy, sibling rivalry, family dysfunction, and angst-ridden emotional blowups, no other movie was full of more love, affection, and bonhomie. It's a movie that attacks you with open arms, waiting to embrace you. And that's all we can hope from any movie.

WTF...

2009-01-22T08:44:00.005-05:00

The good...

Richard Jenkins's slightly surprising (yet utterly deserving) nomination for Best Actor for his performance in The Visitor.

The bad...
Really, the awful. How the hell is Sally Hawkins not nominated for Best Actress in Happy-Go-Lucky? It wasn't until I heard Mike Leigh's name for his original screenplay nomination that I realized I didn't hear hers in the Actress category.

The ugly...

Ben Lyons. I hate to pick on him, but seriously, he just says some stupid things when he's plugged into a microphone.

The people ride in a hole in the ground...

2009-01-20T12:19:00.001-05:00

Where to begin with scribe Charlie Kaufman's latest masterwork, Synecdoche, New York? I could start at the beginning and work my way forward. I could start at the end and work my way to the beginning. Better yet, I could jump in the middle, start spinning and flailing my arms around in the hopes of hitting something.

Where Kaufman begins is with Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman) unhappy in work and unhappy in life. He's a director of a local theater, whose most recent production is an uninspired version of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. It's premier goes unattended by his wife Adele, who eventually grows tired of their marriage and moves to Europe, bringing along their daughter Olivia. He decides to pull his life together by embarking on a new play--a new more personal one--after finding an abandoned building, cavernous and seemingly endless, waiting for him to fill it.

But here I go giving you a cursory rundown of the events. The glory of a film like this can't be found in a plot synopsis. It's not a movie you can figure out while you're in it. You don't know where it's going and neither does Caden. His play is full of false starts, misguided middles, and missing endings. But like a shark that needs to keep swimming or else dies, Caden keeps building. Rather than stop the play he has yet to actually produce, he continuously adds to his apparently bottomless proscenium, building larger sets and creating more characters. The process subsumes him, literally, as he becomes a character in his own play--three or four times over.

It's familiar territory for Kaufman. Think of Being John Malkovich, especially when the title character enters his own brain. Or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, when Joel ends up trying to outrun the erasure of his own memories. Or certainly Adaptation, a movie written by Charlie Kaufman (the person), in which Charlie Kaufman (the character) happens to write himself into his own screenplay, while his real life explosively intersects with the fiction he is trying to create.

I have to admit that while watching the movie (and Caden) descend into its madness, folding layer upon layer onto itself, I wondered what it all meant or if it had any point at all. It seemed to keep on spiraling in no particular direction. But as with those other films, Kaufman knows exactly where he means to take us. And when he gets there, it's one of the most beautiful and fully realized meditations on the intersection of art and life--as well as art and, well, art.

"James Bond Will Return"

2008-12-20T20:02:00.001-05:00

Those are the last words we see as the credits to Quantum of Solace roll to an end. It begs the question: Where has he gone? Or perhaps, more appropriately: Where is he going? With this latest movie, the world's most famous spy seems to be at a particular crossroads.

With Daniel Craig as the new Bond, the makers of the series have turned him into a more violent hero. The action is more visceral, the energy more kinetic, and it's as if these two movies--Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace--are playing catch up with the Matt Damon and the Bourne films. Bond is grittier, sloppier. Roger Moore he ain't.

Bond was always cooler than those around him. Not just in a smooth, debonair way (although that too). But he was always above the action, possessing an aplomb and nonchalance that gave him a sort of ease. Here he is still figuring things out. In Casino Royale, it was acceptable. That first movie was almost like an origin story. They were playing with house money, so to speak. They could reinvent the wheel if they chose to. And in a way they did.

But Quantum of Solace isn't so much a sequel to Casino Royale as it is a tacked on, overlong epilogue to it. And rather than fleshing out the underbelly of Bond's character laid out in that initial film, Solace is hampered by it. The dead weight of the earlier film leans on the entire proceedings of this one. [Casino Royale spoilers...] Here, rather than Bond being haunted by the spectre of Vesper's death, he is overwhelmingly driven by it. But the vengeance pulsating through his veins has barely a tangential relationship with the story in front of us.

Another problem with Solace, as well as with Casino Royale, is that neither possess any real narrative drive. What's weird is that each movie accomplishes this misstep in completely opposite ways. In Casino Royale, while Bond was in a sense leaner and more stripped down as a character, the film itself was bloated and too tightly-packed. This was highlighted by one of the most boring poker sequences in recent memory, effectively halting the movie in its tracks.

Quantum of Solace, however, is one of the shortest Bond movies. And it feels rushed and empty. I hope that by the next installment, Bond and his makers figure things out.

Precious memories keep lingering on...

2008-10-17T21:22:00.003-04:00

Just today I was talking to somebody about how much I loved listening to Motown growing up. To this day, it's still the music I consider mine, the one that makes me the happiest. Later I found out that Levi Stubbs, the lead singer of the Four Tops had just died at the age of 72. One of the most distinctive voices of the Motown factory, Stubbs and the Tops were inducted in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in 1990... R.I.P.

"I have vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals."

2008-09-27T22:20:00.005-04:00

There are a lot of movie stars and a lot of very good actors. Only sometimes, and nowadays more rarely, do we find the two in the same human being. Friday we lost one of the best of both when Paul Newman passed away at the age of 83.

He was closely linked with Robert Redford, another person who fit both categories and in the same way that you're either a Fred Astaire guy or a Gene Kelly guy, I think you may be either a Robert Redford guy or a Paul Newman guy. I was always a Newman guy. Make no mistake, I love Redford. But he was almost too perfect, too good-looking. Newman had an ease about him, a nonchalance that was self-effacing. Redford seemed like a God, Newman seemed more damaged. He was a heartthrob as well, but he often played a character that would get in his own way. The joy of watching him onscreen was watching how he would get out of his way, how he would somehow manage his plight.

I wonder if people my age know Newman as something more than the guy on the salad dressing or the guy in the race cars. I wonder if they know that while Britney Spears gets married and divorced within 55 hours, Newman defied all Hollywood logic by celebrating his 50th wedding anniversary earlier this year. (It does help that he was married to Joanne Woodward, an actress as talented and beautiful as he was.) I wonder if they've seen that moment in Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid where he rides the bike with Katharine Ross on the handlebars while "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" plays on the soundtrack. I wonder if they've seen the part in The Sting where he out-cheats Robert Shaw in that poker game on the train.

I want to stop wondering and suggest you go out and rent those two movies... and Hud, and The Hustler, and The Verdict, and Cool Hand Luke, and Sweet Bird of Youth and, well I could go on and on.

I got a woody.

2008-09-03T22:27:00.007-04:00

Midway through Woody Allen's latest release, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Penelope Cruz's Maria Elena says to Scarlett Johansson's Cristina--and I'm paraphrasing here--that unfulfilled love is the only kind of romantic love, that once something is realized it loses its allure. (Whether I agree with this sentiment is fodder for an entirely different post--in fact, perhaps, an entirely different blog site--but I will say that in my younger days I often liked to say that "consummation breeds contempt".)

In a way, that line (Maria Elena's, not mine) comes to fruition in every relationship in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a film whose plot is a blurry convergence of intersecting love triangles, quadrangles, and more. The film, as suggested by its fully matter-of-fact and un-ironic title, is the story of two twenty-something friends, Vicky and Christina, enviably spending their summer in beautiful Barcelona. But their altogether breezy vacation is quickly upended when they meet Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), a painter whose failed, trouble marriage with Maria Elena (Cruz) has become a bit of a local legend ("She put a knife in me," he calmly tells the two American women.).

Directly and without pretense, Juan Antonio propositions the two to join him in a weekend trip to the Spanish town of Oviedo to "eat good food, drink good wine, and make love." Yes, to both of them. Needless to say, a great deal happens--longing gazes, chance encounters, a good amount of sexual activity--between here and the end, only complicated by the arrival of Maria Elena into the mix. As for the sordid details of these shifting encounters, I'll leave that for you to hopefully discover.

There are many who would say that Allen's films possess in them a great deal of misogyny. That criticism doesn't stop with Barcelona in some of the reviews I've read. To be fair, I think that is a legitimate opinion of his films, though I tend to have a more tempered reading of this issue. Though he may deny this, of just about all mainstream American directors, Allen is the most philosophically apparent in his own work, the one whose intellectual perspective is the most visible. First, let me say that I think all men are to some extent misogynists. I think it's part of our nature. It isn't always malicious (it probably only rarely is), but it's there even if it's latent.

It only seems obvious that Allen is playing a bit of fantasy fulfillment here: the soulful artist living out his every whim among a collage of beautiful women. But the real center of the film exist in the two women. The real projection of Allen's psyche lies in Vicky and Cristina, not Juan Antonio. All the familiar elements of the Allen oeuvre are apparent, but it's this slight rack in focus where he begins to move into slightly different territory.

Vicky and Cristina lie on almost opposite ends of the sexually emotional spectrum. Cristina is the hopeless romantic, willing and able to be picked up by the unknown Spanish artist. Vicky is reluctant, settling for her safe, comfortable relationship back at home. By the end of the summer, they meet up somewhere in the middle... sort of. The point is that Allen is exploring issues of romantic and sexual identity universal certainly among the genders, but I think specific more to women. Where Annie Hall famously ends with that bit about "needing the eggs," Vicky Cristina Barcelona tries to figure out whether those eggs should be scrambled, poached, or sunnyside up.

foil yogurt lids

2008-08-14T22:31:00.002-04:00

I know it's been awhile since I've blogged here, but I've been busy with... well you know... life, as it were.

We're about at the midway point during the Summer Olympics as I write this and every four years (and to a lesser extent, every two years when the Winter ones come around) I am not to be bothered by other issues. Only my fantasy football draft this Saturday will take me out of the house for something that isn't work, food, or sex. (To be clear, those three things are in reverse order of importance.)

But as I look at some of the movies that will be playing at local theaters this weekend, before me lies a slew of movies that may tug me away from my living room and into a darkened theater. A quick survey:

Pineapple Express
Tropic Thunder
Bottle Shock
Star Wars: The Clone Wars
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (yeah, I said it)
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Hancock
American Teen
The Wackness
Tell No One

And of course at the top of the list is Woody Allen's new film starring Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz, and Javier Bardem, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. For a weekend in the middle of August in Orlando, this is a pretty nice lineup. Too bad it had to coincide with a two-week major international sporting event.

But while we're talking about the Olympics, I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly ask Nastia Liukin to marry me. Nastia, I know you're in Beijing right now, but please give me a call when you get back.

P.S. I just heard Dan Hicks say in a piece about why Michael Phelps is so physically gifted in the water. One of the important traits he says is his flat backside. If that's the case, why the hell don't I have 10 gold medals in swimming either?

Two Thumbs Down

2008-07-22T21:46:00.007-04:00

One of the reasons this blog (and I guarantee you countless others) exists is from the influence of a show that started out as "Sneak Previews" on PBS in 1975 featuring two local Chicago film critics, each writing for competing newspapers. That show eventually turned into "Siskel & Ebert," and after Gene Siskel's death in 1999, "Ebert & Roeper." Now the show, at least in its current and comfortingly familiar incarnation, will cease to exist.

From Roger Ebert's website:

After 33 years on the air, 23 of them with Disney, the studio has decided to take the program named "Siskel & Ebert" and then "Ebert & Roeper" in a new direction. I will no longer be associated with it.

Here's Richard Roeper's take, from a Yahoo! News article:

Several months ago, Disney offered to extend my contract, which expires at the conclusion of the 2007-08 season. I opted to wait. Much transpired after that behind the scenes, but an agreement was never reached, and we are all moving on.

Replacing them will be TCM host Ben Mankiewicz. He's a reasonably likable fella, though he's not as good as primetime host Robert Osborne. He also comes from a fairly formidable pedigree: his great uncle Joseph L. Mankiewicz wrote and directed the classics A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve; his grandfather Herman Mankiewicz co-wrote arguably the greatest movie ever, Citizen Kane.

Also replacing them will be current E! News movie correspondent, Ben Lyons. His pedigree includes his father, Jeffrey Lyons, long-time film critic and current host of the syndicated "Reel Talk," one of the many "Siskel & Ebert" knockoffs. A better way to describe the Lyons is not through their television credits, but through the fact that last year eFilmCritic.com named them two of the top 10 "Whores of the Year" among film critics. Jeffrey astoudingly was named the #4 whore of the year and, not falling far from the whorish tree of film criticism, Ben came in at #7.

I have not seen Ben Lyons criticize a film, for he in fact is really a film journalist, and I even use that term loosely. His appearances on E! amount to little more than marginal insider knowledge and good deal of useless industry/celebrity gossip, such is the function of the E! Network as a whole. I do believe there is a place for this kind of (puffy) movie reporting, but not on the show that introduced intelligent and entertaining film criticism for a whole generation of people who may not have been exposed to it otherwise. Is Ben Lyons really good enough to replace the late Gene Siskel or the inimitable Roger Ebert? If the powers that be at Disney who are turning the show in this new direction think so, I have some advice as to where they can stick their collective thumbs.

Charles H. Joffe, 1929-2008

2008-07-16T22:45:00.003-04:00

I'd be remiss today if I didn't take the opportunity to note the passing of Charles H. Joffe. He may not be a household name but if, like myself, you are a fan of movies directed by Woody Allen, then I'm sure you've seen it. In that unmistakable white, Windsor font, plainly laid on a black title card, the name has flashed consistently at the beginning of Mr. Allen's films for the past forty years and in the process is partly responsible for the one the best and most influential body of work in the second half of twentieth century American cinema. R.I.P.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/movies/15joffe.html?ref=movies

I joined the glee club.

2008-07-05T18:36:00.001-04:00

"Art is made by the alone for the alone."

--Luis Barragán, Time (May 12, 1980)

In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. ...Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of effective communication between people."

--Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (1896)

The two seemingly disparate conclusions made by the above quotes together, oddly, serve to elucidate both the dichotomy between the creation and reception of art and, also, the nexus upon which they come together. Art is an emotional shorthand, a distillation of feelings and ideas too deep and wide to express in any complete way. In the past few weeks, I have seen a trio of films which speak to this notion of how art unites vastly different people as well as unites what is fractured and incomplete within oneself.

Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) has emotionally flatlined since the death of his wife, existing in an intellectual and professional malaise in Thomas McCarthy's The Visitor. At first Walter takes piano lessons as a means of trying to connect with the memory of his late wife, who was an acclaimed classical pianist. This quest for solace and meaning in art works to no avail until he is forced to temporarily moves to his New York apartment to speak at an economics conference. It is there he meets the "visitor" of the movie's title, Tarek, a Syrian-born immigrant. See, Tarek and Zainab, his Senegalese girlfriend, have been renting Walter's apartment unbeknownst to Walter, who is a professor in Connecticut and hasn't occupied the place in years.

Tarek plays an African drum, practicing it in the apartment (Walter has by now allowed the two to stay with him), performing in jazz clubs, and playing with others in Central Park. Slowly, but surely, Walter begins to show interest in the music, wanting to play and Tarek abides. Certainly Tarek teaches and encourages him as an act of good faith for giving him a place to live, but there's also something intoxicating about another human being showing interest in what you create. And while Tarek is thrilled that his new landlord not only tolerates but revels in the music he makes, Walter is given a hand to draw him out of his doldrums. Two men who shouldn't (and don't really) have anything in common are bound by an abstraction.

Back to the first quote by Barragán. Movies may not work fully here because of its propensity to be collaborative (though in a way I still think it does fit), but there is something solitary and introspective about being an artist, about going through the process of creating your work that is peculiarly your own. This solitude is what permeates Anton Corbijn's biopic about the late Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis, Control.

The film thankfully skirts the usual pitfalls of the musical biopic by refusing to reduce the subject's life to a series of high- and lowlights. And even more so, by refusing to explain it through the superficiality of pop psychology: an abusive or overbearing parent, a downtrodden upbringing, a wandering libido, or some other seminal moment that can exist easily as a narrative scapegoat.

What remains is actor Sam Riley's quiet internalization of Curtis's anguish. With all the turmoil surrounding him, the film is as uniquely pensive as Curtis is. And what Curtis retreats to amid these storms is his art--his music. The film fails to penetrate his psyche and while I initially wished the movie explored more about the process of writing and creating the music, ultimately that would contradict the mood and tone of the picture. For just as the film keeps Curtis at a distance from the other people in the film, he is also kept at a distance from us. The only way into him is through his music--the lyrics a tunnel to his mind, the art a conduit to his soul.

But where the two above quotations funnel together into a single point is in Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening. The movie begins with Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), a college student, interviewing long-forgotten novelist Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella) for her thesis. What transpires throughout the film becomes a treatise on the nature of art, the critical analysis of it, and the emotional toil it creates within the artist and on its audience.

Schiller embodies the idea of the solitary artist, the writer sitting endlessly in the silence of his lonely room, having nothing to keep him company but the unmistakable clicks of his pounding typewriter (yes, he still composes on a typewriter). At his advanced age, the only self-proclaimed goal he has left in life is to finish his final novel. Initially, he rejects the notion of helping the young grad student because of the distraction from his work. But since Schiller isn't entirely a curmudgeon, he relents, allowing Heather to conduct a series of interviews at his apartment for research.

A writer puts a wall around himself. It's easier and in his nature to look inward and crumble within himself. It is until he implodes and out come the words (or images or sounds or whatever). Schiller most certainly has this wall and the first few interviews between he and Heather contain moments that are quite tenuous. Midway through the film, he even says to another writer, "There's something about collaboration that brings out the worst in writers." It isn't until she tells him why she loves his work, the story of her first discovery of his writing does he begin to open up and to be more honest about the nature of his craft. It's only when the personal and private efforts of his work connect tangibly to something in the public world can he learn to fully engage with, well, anything really.

Thus the collision of the two quotes also highlights one of the most revealing and intriguing traits of the artist: he (or she) is a massive hypocrite. For the creation of art is at the same time a selfless, giving olive branch to the world around us and a highly selfish and self-indulgent pastime.

A good friend of mine (not to mention a writer I admire) once wrote that men are assholes, that they are driven by ego. I reacted personally and violently to such a harsh assessment. But in the end, I think she was right. I would extend that specifically to the artist, for he is defined by ego--consumed by it. Schiller, despite his elevated and reserved demeanor, is such a person. It's a quiet arrogance he possesses; an elitism that seems particular to people who create. To be fair, I don't mean this necessarily as criticism, but something I think is quite indispensable to the process. It's the oddest of juxtapositions: the quest to connect through whatever medium the person possesses is guided by an air of superiority. Even kind and likable Walter Vale in The Visitor isn't immune to this type of haughty behavior, as evidenced by his response to a woman who asks him what he writes about: "It's difficult to explain to someone who isn't a writer." He immediately apologizes to her--such is his mien--but the mentality is still present, no matter how latent.

Yet the talent to create is a remarkable aphrodisiac and contains the allure of connecting in ways that don't involve regions nether the belt buckle. In all three of these films, the main characters forge new relationships both platonic and romantic by way of art--sometimes their own, sometimes that of others. As I said before, it is a form of emotional shorthand and listening to someone else's song, or watching someone else's movie, or reading someone else's short story they sent you via email, it invariably reaches you in a way that is unique. It has a way of wading through the muck, a way of pushing through the bullshit that a (dare I say) "normal" conversation can't.

But the best way to understand that is to not listen to someone like me talk about it, but actually going out there and experiencing it for yourself, so I'll see you at the movies! Or as David Bowie more succinctly and wittily put it: "Talking about art is like dancing about architecture."

Storytime

2008-07-05T18:28:00.004-04:00

I meant to post this link when it first came out, but I was busy trying to do my own post. I've often thought about this topic and would write about it, but Emerson puts it much more elegantly that I ever could. If you even remotely like the stuff that is written on my blog, I highly suggest reading his post as well as everything else he writes on here. (If you scroll down far enough, you'll find my comment and reaction to his thesis.)

http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2008/06/tell_me_a_story_or_dont.html

It's that time of year again...

2008-06-11T23:40:00.003-04:00

The American Film Institute will unveil its next list on Tuesday: 10 Top 10. These are, according to the AFI panel, the ten greatest films in each of ten classic movie genres. Looking at the list of celebrities who will host a section for each of the categories during the CBS telecast, one can't help but wonder if the folks at the AFI have tipped their hand.

Clint Eastwood is hosting the "Western" section. Can we assume that Unforgiven will make the cut? Could The Outlaw Josey Wales sneak in? Doubt it, as I would venture to guess that the AFI will strive for plurality. Sigourney Weaver will host the "Sci-Fi" category. Hello, either one of the first two Alien flicks (I'm leaning towards the first one). Kirk "I AM SPARTACUS" Douglas will host the "Epic".

Those seem obvious, but how about some of the others? Cuba Gooding, Jr. will host the piece on "Sports." Does that mean Jerry Maguire will be considered one of the ten best sports movies in American history? God, will it be Radio instead? "Mystery" will be hosted by Gabriel Byrne. The Usual Suspects appears to be, well, the usual suspect here. But how wonderfully surprising would it be if they put the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing instead? Jessica Alba will host the "Romantic Comedy" section. Just in case you read that wrong, I'm going to cut and paste. Jessica Alba will host the "Romantic Comedy" section. If she appears in any movie that appears in this list, the AFI will have lost its collective rocks.

Anyone who knows me knows I love me some lists (just look at the right-hand side of this blog!). But I can't help but wonder when the AFI will run out of things to throw into a new special. This is the 11th straight year, since their inaugural 100 Years... 100 Movies special in 1998. Last year's 10 year reunion was even a redo, a mea culpa of sorts, changing the rank of some films, including new ones, dropping others. (My post about it is here.) I'm still waiting on the 25 (or even 50) greatest American directors list.

All I know is that I can't for the life of me make the connection for having Jennifer Love Hewitt host the "Animation" part of the special. I swear those things weren't hand-drawn or CGI!

--

P.S. If you can guess the #1 film in each of the ten genres on their website, you can win some sweet cash-like prizes. I'll show you mine if you show me yours!

I need the eggs.

2008-06-06T21:57:00.002-04:00

My break is over.

The hiatus was brief, I know. (Actually the almost three weeks of my unofficial vacation was shorter than the time in between some of my posts!) But it was long enough to realize what is and isn't important to me. What is and isn't worth worrying about when there's nothing you can do about it. To quote a line from a song (from a movie I will be writing about soon): "I exist on the best terms I can."

Writing about movies (or anything well, and of any consequence) can be difficult when at the end of the day it really is just a hobby--when you have other things to deal with. (I'm gonna quote again) At the end of Annie Hall, Alvy remembers an old joke:

This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy--he thinks he's a chicken." And the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs."

Blogging for the sake of something other than blogging can be a draining task. As passionate as I am about the things I write about and my desire to share that with others, it's overwhelming, frustrating, and time-consuming... but I guess I still need the eggs.

Like girls have done so many nights before...

2008-05-20T00:10:00.004-04:00

This past weekend I saw Elvis Costello open for some band called The Police. This posting is not about that concert. Nor is it about that weekend which pretty much sucked for me all around. This post is about me putting this blog into semi-retirement.

I mention Costello because his music has been a fairly accurate soundtrack to my life ever since I really started listening to him and the song from the YouTube video below sums up how I am feeling right now.

To reference my previous post, I have to get off this train. I really thought I was headed somewhere, but it looks like I need a break. I need to get away from the blood on the tracks. Maybe someday I'll get back on, but for now it's too much. I may wake up tomorrow morning and change my mind or I may never write a word on here again.

There have been some sly remarks about me elsewhere that I happen to find particularly unfair and rather than engage in them, I am deciding to take the cowardly route and simply run away. I guess I'll sign off by giving Elvis the last word:

When the cows come home...

2008-05-15T02:39:00.014-04:00

Continuing this whole "defining" movie thing, I wanted to respond to some of the comments on the initial blog. A couple of people mentioned Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride. I have to admit that while I enjoy the movie very much, I don't love it as much as many of my friends do. But a recent viewing at a "movie night" at my apartment recently made me realize how the film is a good example of how movies (and books and stories of all kinds) hold our imagination--and, by extension, how these movies come to color our own personality, our own personal cultural history (which is of course the whole point of this little experiment I'm trying to conduct).

Most of my friends can quote the film ad nauseam and the humor and fantasy elements I think are what hold it in the high esteem of a lot of the people I know. But what I find particularly interesting about The Princess Bride is its framing story. With all the swashbuckling and throwaway one-liners, it's easy to forget that The Princess Bride is not about Westley, or the Dread Pirate Roberts, or Inigo Montoya, or even Princess Buttercup. Really, it's about the story of these characters. It's about "Columbo" telling the story to his grandson--you know, the one who'd go on to date Winnie Cooper. And throughout the film, the child stops his grandfather from telling the story, redirects it, and makes him skip the bad parts.

Isn't that what we do with all the movies we love anyway? We relive them in our heads and we make our ideal of them fit our particular psyche; we rewrite these movies in our memory. How many times have you talked about or thought about a movie you loved when you were a kid only to watch it again and not feel the same way about it?

It's a fact of nature (unfortunate perhaps) that once a work of art--a movie, a novel, a pop song--hits the world, it ceases to become the property of the artist and instead becomes the property of its audience. Each of us brings a bit of our own emotional history to the work, our own personal experience, and that can't help but color our own reaction to it. As a result, we are in an ongoing dialogue with the film, an intellectual back-and-forth between our mind and the screen--a give-and-take that continues, theoretically, for the rest of our lives. Or at least for as long as we continue to watch a particular film over and over again.

And that brings me to the next film on my list.

The first time I saw Federico Fellini's 1953 film, I Vitelloni, I was a young idealist, a 19-year-old college student. The five "vitelloni" (literally, "big calves" or more loosely, "big children"), though almost a decade older than me at the time, were people I looked down upon. "How could men of their age act like such boys?" I thought. Of course at the time I didn't get the irony of my own arrogance. Here I was an adult (technically) still with the mentality of a child, still a dependent, still unaware of what was out there beyond the scope of the existence I knew my entire life. I believed I was more mature than these adolescents trapped in men's bodies; I believed Fellini was pointing the finger at them, castigating them for their insouciance. I watched it that first time with an emotional distance I didn't quite earn.

Cut to four years later at the 2004 Florida Film Festival, where the film had a special screening. I was now 23, graduated from college for two years and the movie held an entirely different meaning to me. Instead of looking at the characters with superiority, I began to see myself in them. Four years later, the movie had not changed one bit, but I did. And I realized that Fellini was now pointing the finger at me. It was a complete slap in the face. "How did I get here?" I wondered. "How did I turn into one of the 'vitelloni'?" More than that, I began to see specifically how I was like some of them: the laziness of Fausto, as well as his simultaneous selfishness and ambivalence towards the opposite sex; the artist Leopoldo, who in some ways is more worried about playing the part of a writer than actually being one; the sad clown, Alberto.

Toward the end there is a character who gets on a train and finally leaves this scene of ineffectualness. He looks back in sadness down the railroad tracks, sure, but it's the right move for him. The only move really.

It's now another four years later and I haven't seen the movie since then. I wonder what the movie will mean to me now. In a way I feel like I'm at a particular crossroads in my life (for more than one reason). But unlike the character in the train, this time I hope I'm looking forward, instead of looking back.

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Does anyone have a movie or movies that have drastically changed for you in this way?

Oh, and I'm still waiting on the initial list of movies from some of you. And you know who you are.

With a thousand smiles she gives to me free...

2008-05-04T18:00:00.004-04:00

On a warm Florida night (is there any other?), I drove to Tampa to attend the Eric Clapton concert at the outdoor Ford Amphitheatre. I also saw him about a year-and-a-half ago here in Orlando and, while last night's show was very different from that one, it was no less amazing.

For one, as I said, the Ford Amphitheatre is an outdoor facility and even though there is a roof over the main seating area, there is no roof over the lawn, which is where I sat. Also, Clapton's band is slightly different. Gone is drummer Steve Jordan and slide guitarist Derek Trucks. The setlist was also a little different and unexpected (in a good way). Among the songs he added to his list were some more of his recent blues covers like "Motherless Child" and Robert Johnson's "Little Queen of Spades" and "Traveling Riverside Blues," as well as some of his Derek and the Dominos tunes like "Tell the Truth" and "Little Wing"--which is steadily becoming one of my favorites songs of his.

"Little Wing": From a performance at Madison Square Garden this February with special guest Steve Winwood.

What remains of course are the standards: "Crossroads," "Cocaine," and obviously "Layla," the latter still being one of the greatest songs, well, ever. What I did miss about that song from his '06-'07 tour was the slide work of Derek Trucks. Of all the times I've heard Clapton play "Layla," that performance in Orlando was the best I had ever heard, in no small part because of Trucks, who might be the best American blues slide guitarist since the late Duane Allman, who--hello--played slide on the original record.

"Layla": From his previous American tour, with Derek Trucks on slide.

Having never been to the Ford Amphitheatre, I was a little skeptical. What would it be like to sit on a lawn chair without a roof, susceptible to the elements? Well, it was great. My rented chair was perfectly comfortable and even though I was far, there were many big screens so I could still get a close-up of what was happening on stage. And underneath the dark, starry sky, with all that amazing music, I couldn't have been happier. Like that now legendary sign said, Clapton is God.

It's all wrong, but it's alright...

2008-04-24T23:04:00.002-04:00

So I've been feeling ridiculously shitty for the past two days and the song in this video pretty much encompasses how I feel. But the way these two kids--these two eight-year-olds--play and sing it put a giant smile on my face. At least for five minutes I feel a little better.

Hey, these guys should find that teacher from the Langley Schools Project!

American Idol

2008-04-22T21:42:00.005-04:00

Roger Ebert has officially entered the world of the blogs. In recent years, he has completely revamped his website (with the help of his editor Jim Emerson, whose own blog is a favorite of mine) and archived the bulk of his television reviews with Gene Siskel and Richard Roeper, so this seemed like the next logical step.

Of all the people I look up to--Woody Allen, Billy Wilder, Francois Truffaut, etc.--it was maybe Mr. Ebert, through his TV show and then my subsequent discovery of archived print reviews on the Chicago Sun Times website, that had the most profound impact on my love for film. Not that I always agree with him (or with Emerson, or A.O. Scott, or Nathan Lee, or Wesley Morris). In fact, more recently, the more I've discovered my own voice and my own approach to thinking critically about film, the more I find my way away from all of these great writers. And in some ways that's the point. As the great films also do, Mr. Ebert's reviews do have a personal point-of-view and possess something of great worth to say, but also challenge the reader (or viewer in the case of film) to engage their own mind and not just sit there passively. I've learned more in reading his weekly print reviews than I have in any film class.

The world of film-blog criticism is inundated with the uninformed and the ill-conceived, the prosaic and uneducated. Maybe I'm one of those, who knows? I hope not, but I will continue to toil underneath the huge shadow Mr. Ebert's work casts and continues to cast. What I do know is that online film journalism just got a whole lot better.

Belatedly, FFF Day 9 & 10

2008-04-09T01:26:00.003-04:00

I ended this year's Florida Film Festival on a chilly, rainy night by screening Snow Angels by director David Gordon Green, whose debut feature George Washington I feel is one of the best American independent movies of the past decade.

From A.O. Scott's review in the New York Times:

With both his subsequent films, "All the Real Girls" and "Undertow," Mr. Green has retained just enough of that idiosyncrasy to keep the promise of "George Washington" alive in the minds of his critical admirers. But these movies have also felt uneasily caught between his poetic nonconforming impulses and the requirements of sustaining a career as a midlevel, specialty-division auteur. Each one is less special than the one before.

To add, I think Green's movies have, at least overtly, become increasingly more structured--their narratives more focused on its trajectory towards a specific conclusion, rather than languishing in the nuance of character and place.

But to say that is not to diminish the film's strengths, of which there are many. One of the parallel stories involves Arthur (Michael Angarano) and Lila (Olivia Thirlby, Ellen Page's best friend in Juno), two high school teens navigating that most tenuous of young adult terrain: having a crush on a classmate. Cute without being cutesy, this budding relationship is the real soul of the film that partially takes a back seat to the eventual tragedy of the film, heavily foreshadowed in the film's opening scene. The problem with this tragic part of the storyline (of which I'll reveal nothing else) is that it seems coolly distant without seemingly trying to be. It lacks the fully lived-in feeling of the young romance and thus feels emotionally stunted, whereas the other is emotionally satisfying.

The night before I screened Young @ Heart, the British documentary about a choir of senior citizens who tour performing classic and newer rock and pop songs. There seems to have been a spate of movies recently that deal with the pairing of rock 'n' roll with unconventional performers--Richard Linklater's School of Rock, and the documentaries Rock School and Girls Rock! (the latter of which played at FFF this year, but unseen by me). Either one of these films would make a good double-feature with Young @ Heart, but watching the film, I kept on thinking about a short TV documentary on VH1 I saw years ago on an album called Innocence & Despair by The Langley Schools Music Project.

A recording on the completely other end of the spectrum than the seniors of Young @ Heart, Innocence & Despair is a collection of songs by a chorus of elementary school children from Langley, British Columbia during the late 70s. Ranging in material from David Bowie to The Beach Boys to ABBA, these songs are sparingly orchestrated and incredibly lo-fi in quality. The wonder of it all is how moving these songs can be even when their sung by kids who don't even really understand what they're singing about. I mean, how can a 9-year-old kid fathom the longing of a song like the Eagles' "Desperado" or the loneliness of The Beach Boys' "In My Room"? Well, maybe kids get a lot more than we think they do.

From the juveniles to the seniors and all other kids from 1 to 92, The Langley Schools album and Young @ Heart capture one of the great things about rock 'n' roll, which is its populism and egalitarianism. To put it more succinctly, as Hans Fenger, the music teacher who started the whole Langley project, said in the VH1 doc:

There's probably no better way to have people understand each other than to have them make music together. As cliché as it is to say that [music] is a universal language, it's in fact the truth.

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All-in-all, this year's Florida Film Festival, despite some mishaps and stumbles, was as fun as it was exhausting. In order, my three favorite movies at the fest were Disfigured, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, and August Evening. Other highlights included my mom meeting and getting an autograph from A Clockwork Orange actor Malcolm McDowell. I'm not entirely sure, but as my mom tells it, I think he might've been hitting on her! Another slightly surreal moment occurred during the Midnight Shorts program. For those who don't know, all of the midnight showings tend to skew--how shall I say it--to the more depraved, the slightly dysfunctional. The filmmakers of one of the shorts entitled Dirty Words: The Letter C were in attendance and were passing out raffle tickets to win a vibrator and throwing out tiny bottles of lube to the entire audience.

And I find it incredibly inappropriate to tell you whether or not I've used my bottle so I'd appreciate if you'd stop asking me.

Take me to the magic of the moment... FFF: Day 7 & 8

2008-04-04T21:38:00.004-04:00

A quiet two days had me attending only three screenings, but they were among the three best of the week so far.

Late Thursday night I watched the very funny romantic comedy In Search of a Midnight Kiss. Wonderfully shot in black and white, the film is like a more modest, L.A. version of the Before Sunrise/Sunset movies. At a Q&A afterwards, director Alex Holdridge mentioned that he was good friends with Richard Linklater, who of course directed those Before movies, so the connection is tangible. In Search of a Midnight Kiss doesn't possess the lofty ambition of those films, but in its own way, it has as much to say about love at the particular age these characters are in, the loneliness of living in a big city, and of dreams that go unfulfilled.

Friday afternoon, I screened Chris Eska's August Evening, an ultra low-budget movie that was nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards this year. Like Holdridge for the previous film, Eska was in attendance and participated in a Q&A. Echoes of classic Ozu, especially his masterpiece Tokyo Story, the film centers around the familial relationship between Jaime and his widowed daughter-in-law, Lupe. The leads, Pedro Castaneda and Veronica Loren, are nonprofessional actors and, on top of that, also translated Eska's screenplay into Spanish from its original English.

Sometimes the best part of going to festivals is that the filmmakers get to participate and attend and answer audience questions. I often complain to some friends about how I don't like to hang around "film-y" people. I find that a lot of them are pretentious. [Your joke about me here.] I find that a lot of them are self-consciously quirky, edgy, and artsy. I find that many of them are just as fake as the Hollywood people they would presume to oppose. But after listening to both Holdridge and Eska, two people who seem both modest and unassuming, it renews my faith in independent cinema, both the culture of the indie world and the artists who help create it.

Quick note: Both In the Search of a Midnight Kiss and Situation Frank (part of the terrific International Narrative Shorts program) end with the old Scorpions' tune "Winds of Change". These movies couldn't be any further from each other save for the fact that they were both screened at FFF. Are the Scorpions going on a reunion tour or something?

FFF: Day 5 & 6

2008-04-03T01:28:00.003-04:00

After a much needed day off, I went headlong into another couple of days and six more screenings. I was prepared to talk about some of the highlights. How much I was charmed by the Israeli film Jellyfish. How I enjoyed The Cake Eaters, whose director--actress Mary Stuart Masterson--was a special guest and was just as lovely to listen to as her movie was to watch. How surprised, after a tedious and clumsy first few minutes, I was at how affectionate I felt toward Tom Gustafson's gay fantasia (that sounds like porn, but it's not) Were the World Mine.

But instead I am compelled to relay two stories. The first comes after watching The Cake Eaters and the subsequent Q&A with Mary Stuart Masterson. So I go to the bathroom to, you know, use the bathroom. For people who have never been, the Enzian theater has a fairly small one. Anyway, I open the door and what I assume is a line is actually a couple of guys waiting to pass by because a guy in a motorized wheelchair is somehow stuck in the little nook behind the door. What exactly the problem was I couldn't figure out, but there was another man helping the guy in the wheelchair and eventually he was able to get out. After a couple of seconds, I realized that the guy helping out was actually the director of a short called Shrinks. I'd seen him at a Q&A earlier when I saw a shorts program and, while I also gave him a good score on the audience ballot, I'd like to give him a good samaritan shout out. Not only did I like your film, Gregg Brown, I admire your citizenship!

On a less happy note, a terrible incident happened at the Animated Shorts program I attended. Five of the filmmakers whose shorts were being screened happened to be sitting in front of me. After A Letter to Colleen started, I heard Carolyn London--one of its directors--say to one of the house managers that there should be audio that isn't being played correctly. They shut off the movie and tried to fix it so it could be started again from the beginning. This started to take awhile and since it was the second-to-last short in the program, people got impatient and decided to leave. The film got rolling again--sound on this time--but after a few minutes just cut off completely. More people left and the directors, Carolyn & Andy London, understandably looked even more upset than they already were. Their film was in competition, up for a jury award and an audience award. With maybe a quarter of the people gone, that's a quarter of the people in the audience who won't even vote for their movie (and the one after it) while all the other movies got votes. I find this massively unfair and I am just as massively disappointed that this festival--my festival--would conduct itself in this manner. I walk around wearing my various festival t-shirts this week and all year-round with pride, proud to even be just a participant in a 10-day event that celebrates something I love dearly. Maybe tomorrow I'll decide to wear a different t-shirt.

FFF: Day 2 & 3

2008-03-31T01:28:00.002-04:00

The first weekend has come to a close at the 17th annual Florida Film Festival and, though I'm ready to pass out after a marathon two days, it's off to a pretty good start.

I started this year's fest with a double feature of two food movies: This is My Cheesesteak and Hamburger America. It's kind of unfair to critique movies on what you expected or wish for them to be, but both of these films skirt the larger issues of food as it exists within our culture. Both films are essentially a roll call of great places to eat these foods. We can get this everyday on the Food Network and in a feature film, you'd hope for a little more depth.

A shorts program was next on my itinerary and four more features. Flight of the Red Balloon is the first film by master director Hou Hsaio-Hsien to be set outside of Asia, but many of the familiar elements are there. Also like the other films of his I have seen, I greatly admire them for their technique, but am left a bit cold by them at the same time.

On Sunday, I only (!) went to three screenings, including the hilarious Kabluey starring Lisa Kudrow and the stellar Shorts Program #3: Shuffle, which included three films I rated a 5 on the audience ballot (a rating I rarely give).

But the real revelation here is Glenn Gers's Disfigured, a movie about Lydia and Darcy--the former a member of a fat acceptance group, the latter a recovering anorexic who tries to join the same group because, well, she also thinks she's fat. What emerges is an exploration of body image, addiction, and friendship. A movie like this could have either been exploitative or have gone for the easy "rah-rah" girl power approach, but Disfigured refuses at every turn to take the easy way out. So many films that deal with serious issues pretend to explore them with any depth and end up doing so only superficially, too naive or smug or stupid to do anything but pile cliché upon cliché in the guise of saying something meaningful. This is the 7th year I've been coming to FFF and Disfigured is among the very best I've ever seen here. If the rest of the films come even near this one, I think I'm in for a good week.

If you got bad news, you wanna kick them blues

2008-03-30T13:16:00.003-04:00

Happy 63rd Birthday, EC! See you in May when you come to Tampa.

No particular place to go

2008-03-28T13:39:00.002-04:00

This isn't at all film related, but I thought I'd relay this to whoever's out there.

As I was driving to work this morning, the radio reported the weather forecast for the day, after which the announcer told us that "'Weather' is brought to you by Central Florida Toyota [or some other car dealership]." I had no idea! I'd like to take this opportunity to personally thank Central Florida Toyota [or some other car dealership] for giving us the gift of weather. And here I was blaming God for all the hot and muggy that is Central Florida.

Speaking of which (not really), the Florida Film Festival 2008 officially starts tonight! A woo-hoo!