Not nominated, but pretty damn good, is The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, another fine thriller from that franchise, with another amazing performance by Jennifer Lawrence. I also admire the compelling French drama The Past.
I’m not a fan of Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks (sentimental and predictable) or the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (about an unlovable loser – and I didn’t love the movie, either).
My DVD/Stream of the Week is Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Sundance Now and Xbox Video.
I’m pretty satisfied with this year’s Oscar nominations. The Best Picture nominees do represent the best Hollywood films of the year, which is the most that we can expect. I’ve seen all of them except for Dallas Buyers Club, and no stinkers got nominated. There’s a pretty strong overlap with my Best Movies of 2013, the 23 movies that I think are the very best – the ones that you think about in the days AFTER you’ve walked out of the theater. (Most of my choices are indies, documentaries and foreign films – not big Hollywood movies.)
Captain Phillips, which has the #10 spot on my top ten, is my favorite Hollywood film of the year. (And I’m particularly glad that the Academy recognized Minneapolis actor-limousine driver Barkad Abdi with a nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his performance as a Somali pirate in Captain Phillips.) Nebraska, American Hustle and Her also were among my 23 top movies. Although they didn’t make my list, I also liked The Wolf of Wall Street, Gravity and Philomena. I admired 12 Years a Slave – which is undeniably a fine film – but it’s not on my list because it is such an ordeal to watch.
My choice for the second best film overall in 2013 is the Danish drama The Hunt, which is competing for the Best Foreign Language Oscar with another film that I admire, Italy’s The Great Beauty. My choice for the very best movie of the year is the French film Blue Is the Warmest Color, but it was not released in time to be nominated by France for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
The Academy took a chance in nominating the uncomfortable and jaw-dropping documentary The Act of Killing (my #9) for Best Documentary Feature, but, in this year’s biggest Oscar mistake, failed to recognize my #4 film overall, the wonderful Canadian documentary Stories We Tell by Sarah Polley.
Her, the latest from writer-director Spike Jonze is about as inventive at his Being John Malkovitch – and that’s really saying something. Joaquin Phoenix stars as a lonely guy fascinated by his breathtakingly intuitive new computer operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johannson). This new operating system is SO intuitive that it molds itself to please him, constantly fine tuning itself into the image of his ideal companion – and he falls in love.
It’s set in a technologically not-so-distant future (but far enough in the future that everyone in LA lives and works in highrises and takes transit, even to the beach). Along with the absurd premise, Jonze sprinkles in some brilliantly funny touches. There’s a blind date with a knockout (Olivia Wilde) that spirals out of control with stunning suddenness. There’s an inspired bit with a waitperson interrupting the diners with “How’s everything?” (one of my personal pet peeves) at precisely the most awkward moment possible. A video game figure is cuddly looking but shockingly abusive. Here’s one more sly touch – a future male fashion of awkwardly high-waisted pants. Lots of smart laughs.
Her is one of the more thought-provoking films of the year – why did the main character’s most recent relationship fail? Does he really know what he wants and needs? Can he give enough to make a reciprocal relationship work?
Joaquin Phoenix is very good, as are Wilde, Kirsten Wiig, Chris Pratt, Rooney Mara and Amy Adams. Scarlett Johannson, however, is a revelation; equipped only with her husky voice, she dominates the film. It’s an extraordinary performance.
All this being said, Her is not a perfect film – it drags in places. But between Johannson’s performance and Jonze’s wacky but thought-provoking story, Her is a winner – and on my Best Movies of 2013.
This stunt HAS GOT to be better than the movie that it’s promoting. There is nothing about Devil’s Due, which opens Friday, that is promising – but this 1:49 video is a howl-and-a-half. It was posted on YouTube yesterday and already has almost 6 million views.
The skeleton of the story inAin’t Them Bodies Saints is simple – a Texas prison escapee goes looking for his wife and kid. But that capsule understates the totality of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, an atmospheric romantic drama that is superbly written, directed, acted and scored.
Every filmmaker should watch the first ten minutes of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints for its extremely economic story-telling, which lets the audience piece together the setting and the cores of the characters without obvious exposition. Bob and Ruth are young lovers, and Ruth is pregnant. They are involved in a crime, for which Bob goes to prison before their child is born. When the daughter is four, he escapes from prison and everyone – Ruth, Bob’s old crime partners, the community and the cops – know that he’s headed back to Ruth. Both the cops and the criminals are awaiting – the story follows the path to the inevitable conflict.
The characters are unforgettable. Bob, played with ferocity by Casey Affleck (Gone Baby Gone and The Assassination of Jesse James blah blah), has an obsession to reunite with Ruth and the daughter he has never seen. He has framed this quest as his moral obligation to take care of his family – but, of course, they would be better off without him and the trouble he will bring. He’s not really capable of nobility, but he doesn’t know that.
Ruth has a profound passion for Bob, and she owes him for taking the fall for her. But, despite her loyalty, she is entirely realistic about the consequences of his return. We see Ruth’s steely determination and wilfulness in yet another searing performance by Rooney Mara (The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).
The complexity of the secondary characters contribute to the compelling story. With an unsettling mixture of decency and creepiness, the local cop (Ben Foster, equally good in The Messenger and Rampart) becomes very attentive to Ruth and her daughter. He had been wounded at Bob and Ruth’s capture, seems to be genuinely interested in the welfare of the little daughter and also clearly has a thing for Ruth.
Ruth has also been helped by a fatherly gentleman storekeeper (Keith Carradine), whom we later learn is the local crime lord. His actions seem rooted in all the right values, but, given his criminality, how benevolent can he really be? As a leading man, Carradine had an impressive run in the 70s where he starred in Robert Altman’s Nashville, Ridley Scott’s The Duellists and Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, all within three years. Now with 128 screen credits, Carradine’s performance here perfectly strikes every note.
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints looks beautiful – much like a Terence Malick film without all the confusion and boring parts. I also liked Daniel Hart’s atmospheric but unobtrusive music.
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is completely absorbing – and that doesn’t happen by accident. This is writer-director David Lowery’s first feature with a theatrical release. Who is this guy? Lowery edited two recent indies that I criticized for other reasons, Upstream Color and Sun Don’t Shine, but in which his editing was remarkable. It’s clear from Ain’t Them Bodies Saints that Lowery is a major talent.
So there you have it – a gripping story with brilliant performances by Rooney, Affleck, Carradine and Ben Foster in the debut of a promising filmmaker.
What does the title mean? I have no idea. And I hope that Lowery lets someone else name his next exceptional movie.
Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Sundance Now and XBOX.
OK, maybe I just shouldn’t keep expecting writer-director Lynn Shelton to make the first mumblecore movie that I will like. Touchy Feely begins with a promising premise – a massage therapist (Rosemarie DeWitt) suddenly develops an aversion to touching the human body, which understandably threatens both her career and her relationship with her boyfriend. Unfortunately, Shelton takes both the premise and the excellent cast and crashes them into a crater of boredom.
Shelton made last year’s Your Sister’s Sister (also with DeWitt), which was really good for about 58 minutes, until it petered out in a senseless musical interlude and a montage of rainy bike riding. In Touchy Feely, the massage therapist addresses her affliction by moping and yakking and encountering Ron Livingston and moping and yakking some more. There’s a fun thread about her quirky uncle’s dental practice, but that’s entirely disconnected from the protagonist’s story.
DeWitt was exceptional in Your Sister’s Sister and uniformly excellent in Rachel Getting Married, Promised Land and Margaret – and Touchy Feely is not DeWitt’s fault. The fine actors Ellen Page, Scoot McNairy (Argo), Alison Janney and Josh Pais are similarly wasted.
Now I tend to like character-driven, talky movies. But I don’t like to watch self-involved twits obsess over their own avoidable, First World problems. That pretty much describes the mumblecore genre, especially when the male characters have bedhead. (This movie could have been even worse – the Gigli, Ishtar or Moment by Moment of mumblecore – had Greta Gerwig played Alison Janney’s role.)
There’s one really funny scene in Touchy Feely – where Alison Janney introduces the painfully awkward Josh Pais to Reiki. Other than that, just watch the trailer – it’s much better than the movie and it will cost you less than three minutes of your remaining lifetime.
Touchy Feely is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on Netflix Instant, Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play and XBOX Video.
In the French movie The Past, a French woman has requested that her estranged husband return from Iran to expedite their divorce; he obliges and walks into a family life that gets messier by the minute. Why does she suddenly want the divorce right now? Can she marry her current boyfriend? Who are the fathers of all of her kids? What happened to her current boyfriend’s wife – and why? As the answers are revealed one-by-one, our understanding of the events and characters evolve.
This shifting viewpoint is similar that into writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning Iranian film A Separation, which I summarized as “brilliant film/tough to watch”. Farhadi’s art reflects life at its messiness – especially how life resists our desire to make everything tidy and symmetrical. It all makes for a compelling drama – we care about each character and what’s going to happen. Each development further complicates the story – all the way up to the movies final shot, which adds another pivotal complication.
The Artist’s Berenice Bejo won Best Actress at Cannes for playing the woman completely overstressed by the pressures that her own choices have brought upon her; (her careworn character is just about 180 degrees from Peppy Miller in The Artist). The acting is uniformly excellent, and especially by the child actors.
One more thing – in writing and directing the part of the teenage daughter, Farhadi shows that he has a superb understanding of teenage girls. He captures the mix of self-absorption, volatile unpredictability and the paradoxical yearning for both independence and parental protection, while avoiding turning the character into a sitcom brat. Indeed, he’s done it before, having directed his own teenage daughter to an excellent performance in A Separation. This is one of his most notable gifts as a filmmaker.
The realism of The Past may cause some viewers to reflect on their own family drama, so not everyone will find it enjoyable. Nevertheless, it’s an admirable and thought-provoking story told so very well – right up to that final shot.
American Hustle is the most gloriously entertaining movie of the year – with Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Jeremy Renner at their best.
The Angel’s Share is an endearing tale of a hard luck guy’s life changing after a visit to a Scotch whisky distillery. Released back to hardscrabble Glasgow after doing prison time, a young man becomes a father and determines to change his life. As focused as he is, that wouldn’t be possible without the encouragement of the guy who leads his community service work crew and the prodding of his girlfriend. The odds are against him, but he gathers an oddball team from the work crew and devises an ingenious (and funny) heist.
The story begins with a clever court sentencing montage that only gradually settles our attention on the protagonist. This young man (Paul Brannigan) is terse and always potentially destructive, yet we root for him because of his single-minded commitment to acting on his good intentions. His potential is not apparent to any other characters (or to the audience for a long time). His mentor (John Henshaw) has seen it all, but isn’t so jaded as to write off every unemployed and unemployable ex-con; more complex than he seems, he lives a lonely life, sparked by a single hobby.
The movie’s accessible tone surprised me because militant British director Ken Loach is known for far grimmer socialist realist films; here, Loach’s filmmaking skills and his unvarnished depiction of Glasgow slums enhance his warm story and hopeful characters.
Fortunately, because the Glaswegian accent is very difficult for we Americans to follow, The Angel’s Share is subtitled. The Angel’s Share is a fun and heartwarming movie that a wide audience will enjoy.
The Angels’ Share is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, YouTube and XBOX.
Some of this week’s recommendations are on my Best Movies of 2013. Recommended:
American Hustle is the most gloriously entertaining movie of the year – with Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Jeremy Renner at their best.
