Month In Review: June 2012

June was a pretty good month, with several good movies and, unfortunately, a couple of sad passings. Here's what I watched last month.

I enjoyed, I think, Snow White and the Huntsman more than most and it works as a surprisingly lean and efficient summer movie. My review here.

Ridley Scott's Prometheus was one of the most anticipated movies of the summer and then one of the most endlessly discussed. I myself considered it a mixed bag and it does certainly provoke long conversations debating both its merits and flaws. And that's always a good thing.

 

Jack Black gives one of his best performances in Richard Linklater's latest, Bernie, about an assistant mortician in tiny Carthage, Texas. When Bernie, probably the most-liked citizen in the small town becomes close friends with the much hated and newly-widowed Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine), scandal erupts. The movie is based on a true story and Linklater mixes the story with interviews of either actual Carthage citizens or actors playing them. The film also smartly toes the line between making fun of the small-town South without venturing fully into caricature.

Rock of Ages is dumb fun, which is either damning it with faint praise or feigning it with damn praise.

 

The Japanese Battle Royale was often referenced upon the release of the recent The Hunger Games adaptation, with the two having similarly themed plot lines. To compare the two based solely on that similarity is completely uninteresting to me. But what isn't uninteresting is Battle Royale itself. The movie, finally released in the US in non-bootleg form more than a decade after its debut, is more than its cult status suggests. Attending a midnight screening at the Enzian, I imagined a sort of B- or even campy midnight movie. While elements of those exist, the movie is much more than that. The actors never seem to be winking at the camera and are fully immersed in both the quieter scenes as well as the action sequences. Director Kinji Fukasaku also shows a keen eye for creating those intense and harrowing action scenes. It's a thrilling movie from beginning to end.

 

The announcement of a new female-led Pixar movie last year was met with great enthusiasm. After the release of Brave, some of that enthusiasm has waned, either for it's more standard story (versus post-apocalyptic robots, or talking cars, or cooking rats) or for what some say is a troubled use of said female lead, Merida. I happened to have loved it, especially the mother-daughter relationship and it earns what was for me a very moving moment when the two are faced with a life changing transition.

Wes Anderson's new Moonrise Kingdom exists, as all of Wes Anderson's movies do, only in the weird world of Wes Anderson. Here he maintains his typically rigorous style (symmetrical frames, smooth tracking shots, perfect right angles) with great discipline, but the distancing that keeps critics of his (including me, sometimes) cold is integral to this story of two kids trying to also distance themselves from the world from which they are attempting to escape.

There was a fair share of hootin' and hollerin' during the, ahem, dance sequences of Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike, as middle-aged women abound in my morning screening of the director's movie starring Channing Tatum as a stripper/woodworker (what?). It's a very entertaining film, despite a third act that seems too rushed and after 21 Jump Street, it seems Tatum is rounding out into a fairly decent actor. Matthew McConaughey is also very good as the strip club's owner and ringleader.

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Sadly, June saw the passing of two fairly large figures in the world of film. Nora Ephron, who was ultimately much more than just a filmmaker, died on June 26. I came across Ephron's work in my early teens. Back then, Showtime used to have double features for various movie stars on Saturday nights. One weekend it was Meg Ryan. So, without knowing what I was in for, I saw down to watch a two-fer of Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally... Instantly, they became a part of me.

It's been awhile since I've seen those movies, but I still know them like the back of my hand. When I made my first on-my-own, by myself, grown up trip to New York City, my best friend got me into the Met and when we walked into the Temple of Dendur room she asked if I knew where we were. I lit up with a big grin and said "I have decided, that for the rest of the day, we are going to talk like this..." (we didn't, but she laughed):

Just a couple of days before her passing, You've Got Mail was just starting on some basic cable network and I couldn't turn it off. I saw that film three times in theaters and owned it on both VHS and DVD. While watching it, I tweeted "You've Got Mail may not even be half as good as The Shop Around the Corner, but it is not w/o its fair share of charmingly quippy dialogue." And to me, that's the locus of Ephron's magic--charming and quippy. They were the conversations and arguments you wanted to have with your friends or with the object of your romantic affection.

In Sleepless in Seattle, Becky (Rosie O'Donnell) says to Annie (Meg Ryan): "That's your problem. You don't want to be in love. You want to be in love in a movie." Becky may have seen it as a problem, but Ephron never did. I sure as hell wasn't going to either. And Ephron was also clearly in love with movies. When Harry Met Sally..., Sleepless in Seattle, and You've Got Mail are as much about movies as they are about love itself. Everyone is the protagonist in the story of their own life and many of the characters in those movies are keenly aware of that idea.

On June 20, film critic Andrew Sarris died. Bringing the auteur theory to America after having absorbed it from his time mingling with the Cahiers du Cinema critics in France, he stands as a major influence on an entire generation of film critics here. Needless to say, this blog doesn't exist without him. His The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968, despite (or really because of) the arguments it may create, exists as an invaluable introduction for anyone looking for a deeper way into the art form.

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In TV news, we finally got around to catching up with Downton Abbey, the British series created by Julian Fellows. Not unlike the writer's Oscar-winning Gosford Park, the show features the upstairs-downstairs dynamic between an aristocratic family and the people who serve them. The first two seasons are richly textured and well-observed, focusing on a changing Britain during the years in and around the first world war. It's a soap opera certainly, but only on occasion does it seem to veer into a storyline that seems too over the top.

July has several intriguing high- and low-profile releases on the slate, so hopefully there will be some more quality pictures to discuss!