Month in Review: August 2012

 

One of my favorite films from this April's Florida Film Festival was Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister, also the opening night movie at this Spring's Tribeca Film Festival. I was happy to revisit it during it's release here this summer. Mark Duplass plays his typically aimless man-boy, but it fits his character here. But Emily Blunt and especially Rosemarie Dewitt are the reasons to see this movie, which is funny and sweet, and whose final frame is just about perfect.

Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild may go down as the most divisive movie of the year. If you don't believe me, read Matt Singer's Criticwire post calling it "the most divisive movie of the year". Of course, as with everything, I fall squarely in the middle. Okay, not the middle. I'm mostly positive on the film, if not entirely rapturous. I enjoyed the film very much during most of it, until it started to lose steam about two-thirds or so of the way through. But once it caught its footing again during its final sequences, I found myself genuinely moved. The movie's internal politics may be troubling as it relates to real-world events if you choose to see it that way, but I think the way it spins what is a completely dream-like fantasy world out of those events is actually quite lovely.

It's been a good few years for Jeremy Renner. After his Oscar-nominated turn in The Hurt Locker, he became a fixture in the action franchise genre, appearing earlier this year in The Avengers and tapped as an heir apparent to Tom Cruise in last year's Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. He's also taking over Matt Damon's Bourne franchise in Tony Gilroy's The Bourne Legacy as another super spy, Aaron Cross, going through a somewhat similar identity crisis. For a 2 hr and 15 min movie, it moves along at a fairly steady clip, including an epic car/motorcycle chase through the streets of Manila. But the movie curiously ends almost without notice, setting up the inevitable sequel. Regardless, Renner makes for a very good replacement in the series and Rachel Weisz, as a doctor who helped "create" him, makes for a similarly good counterpart.

If I called Robot & Frank cute, that would probably both be accurate and a bit dismissive of its other quite laudable attributes. My review will post when the movie is released here locally, but let me just say that one of its many charms is how it takes a fairly gimmicky concept and gives it real resonance and depth.

In preparation for a new feature here, I'd been catching up with some movies from 1980. I briefly wrote about Ordinary People in the previous month. I continued in August with two more, starting with Michael Apted's Coal Miner's Daughter, about the life of country star Loretta Lynn. It follows what is a now-typical biopic trajectory, but is buoyed by a well-deserved Oscar-winning performance by Sissy Spacek. The other was Roman Polanski's Tess. A three-hour long epic based on the Thomas Hardy novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the movie feels stuffier than some of Polanski's other works.

Speaking of Polanski, having just screened Tess, I decided to watch the HBO doc of a couple of years back, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. It's a fascinating look at the details behind the aftermath of Polanski's arrest and conviction of statutory rape in 1977. The movie walks a fine line and never vilifies Polanski nor does it excuse his behavior.

I tried to clean up my ever-expanding Netflix queue by watching several documentaries available on for streaming. Two of them were musical biographies, Cameron Crowe's Pearl Jam Twenty and a PBS American Masters doc, The Doors: When You're Strange. If you're a fan of either band, they're well worth a look.

Word Wars is a documentary I missed when it screened several years ago at the Florida Film Festival. It follows four competitive Scrabble players on their road to the National Scrabble Championship. It's very much in the mode of Spellbound, that film from a decade ago that documented the lead-up to a Scripps National Spelling Bee. Word Wars is a much more modest effort than that Oscar-nominated documentary and really only treats its subjects as a cursory compilation of odd ticks rather than fully-fledged human beings.

FREAKONOMICS

Two others I screened in August were movies based on nonfiction books, Freakonomics and The Botany of Desire. Both are quite entertaining and informative, but given the restrictions of a feature-length movie, each could only go into so much depth. Freakonomics, for example, has been turned into a weekly podcast and can devote an entire episode to one subject. As much as I liked the movie, I highly recommend the podcast, which has become one of my favorites.

Lastly among the documentaries on Netflix Instant was Give Me the Banjo, a brief survey of the musical instrument from its modern beginnings in the 1800s down through today, narrated by actor Steve Martin, himself an accomplished player. I'm an amateur guitar player myself and now plan on being an even more amateur banjo player.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt probably made a lot more money appearing in this summer's earlier The Dark Knight Rises than he did starring in Premium Rush. (If box office returns suggest anything, then maybe he earned more in the former than the latter made itself in ticket sales.) But as pure action spectacle, Rush is infinitely more successful than Nolan's trilogy closer. My review here.

I've always admired the type of career Edward Burns has carved out for himself, mixing work as an actor in larger films (Saving Private Ryan, 27 Dresses) and as a director for smaller, more personal films (The Brothers McMullen, Sidewalks of New York). His latest at the helm is Newlyweds, the story of a newly-married couple, each previously divorced, and the conflicts that arise when their respective siblings infringe on their life together. Burns use of The Office-style faux documentary approach doesn't fully work, but it does have some nicely observed things to say about relationships and family. Caitlin Fitzgerald (It's Complicated, Damsels in Distress), who's steadily becoming one of my favorite actresses, is terrific as Burns's wife.

Early Hollywood starlet, Jeanette MacDonald was featured one night for TCM's annual Summer Under the Stars. One of those gems was Ernst Lubitsch's gallant musical, The Merry Widow. MacDonald stars opposite the one-of-a-kind actor Maurice Chevalier as a Lothario hired to woo the titular character played by MacDonald so their (fictional) country of Marshovia doesn't lose her money, which controls 52% of their business. The movie, typical for many other musicals of the era, hinges on misunderstandings, which means it must also feature the ever-exasperated Edward Everett Horton in a supporting role. The proceedings are a pure delight.

Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris follow up their successful feature debut Little Miss Sunshine with the romantic fantasy Ruby Sparks. It's a charming film about a lonely novelist who literally writes his dream woman into existence. The basic storyline may be somewhat familiar, but Zoe Kazan, who wrote and stars in the film, seems to implicitly criticize the popular Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope common in many of these types of movies.