Movie Recommendations, Rants and Ruminations
One of the main threads of Toy Story 3 is how the toys escape (while sending up virtually every convention of the prison movie genre). On NPR’s Fresh Air, Toy Story 3‘s editor Lee Unkrich and screenwriter Michael Arndt recently discussed how they watched many prison movies for inspiration. The interview is here.
The movie that they call the “most boring” is Le Trou, which actually tops my list of Best Prison Movies.
The best American studio movie of the year – Toy Story 3 – is now available on DVD. If you don’t have kids in your life, you probably missed it. That would be a mistake – it’s not just for kids. Adults will howl at the enhanced roles of Ken and Barbie, an impassioned duet of “Dream Weaver” and the funniest scene in movie history involving a tortilla.
Pixar understands that the best animation in human history is not enough by itself, and tells great, great stories. Pixar screenwriting is incredibly superior to that of other animation studios.
This is a significant achievement in film making and belongs in the elevated class of Toy Story and Toy Story 2. It’s on my list of Best Movies of 2010 – So Far.
For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is an acceptable final chapter in Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy and best as the showcase for Noomi Rapace’s final performance as Lisbeth Salander. If you’ve seen the first two movies, you should complete the trilogy by seeing this film.
Yet director Daniel Alfredson (who also directed the second film, The Girl Who Played With Fire) lets the film plod to its climax. Considering that Alfredson had a great page turner of a story and a singular performance from Rapace, it’s kind of amazing that he let his two movies drag.
This wasn’t a problem with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, directed by Niels Arden Opley. That movie popped off the screen. After Dragon Tattoo, I was worried that the Hollywood remakes would dumb down the story and soften Lisbeth. But now, I’m really looking forward to the American versions directed by David Fincher, and starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara. It’s easy to see how Fincher will improve the pacing of the second and third films in particular.
As with the first two films, Hornet’s Nest centers on Rapace’s Lisbeth, a tiny fury of a Goth hacker, damaged and driven. Lisbeth is always mad AND always gets even.
I’m surprised at the wide range of critical reaction to Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, a film that I admire. Hereafter now has a middling MetaCritic score of 56 – the same score as Jackass 3D.
Comfortingly, three of the critics that I respect the most reacted to Hereafter as I did. Metacritic assigned 100 points to reviews by Roger Ebert and Mick LaSalle and 90 points to a review by A.O. Scott. But enough midrange reviews along with a smattering of negative reviews brought Hereafter‘s average down.
I read several of the lukewarm and disapproving reviews. Some didn’t find the supernatural premise credible enough to suspend disbelief. Some expected an answer about what comes after death. Some were disappointed by the languid pace after the rock-em sock-em opening sequence. I think that they all missed the point. The movie isn’t really about whether there is an afterlife. It’s about how we living humans deal with mortality with grief, fear, avoidance, faith, questioning and belief or non-belief in an Afterlife. The richness of the movie is in the superb depiction of actual humans doing what we humans do – including grieving, longing, wondering, scamming, searching and ignoring.
As to the Afterlife, the one character in the movie who really knows that there is one, can’t work hard enough to escape any contact with it. What does that say?
As a side note, virtually all the reviews, even the most negative ones, praised the tsunami sequence at the beginning. Everybody loves a good tidal wave.
For the first time, Clint Eastwood ventures into the supernatural with the story of three people and their individual experiences with death. It’s also a departure for screenwriter Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Damned United). The most skeptical, nonspiritual viewer (me) finds this to be a compelling film.
The question of What Comes Next is unanswered, and less interesting than the film’s observations of what happens on this Earth to living humans. Eastwood’s genius is in delivering moments of complete truthfulness, one after the other, across a wide range of settings. Young boys enabling a druggie mother. People in a hostel watching for the last breath of a loved one. Experienced, skilled and loving foster parents facing a challenge that they cannot fathom. Every instance of human behavior is completely authentic.
Equally realistic is the big CGI-enhanced action sequence at the beginning of the film – an Indonesian tsunami, not overblown in any way, but frightening in its verisimilitude.
Eastwood is an actor’s director, and star Matt Damon leads a set of excellent performances. Bryce Dallas Howard has an Oscar-worthy performance of a woman achingly eager to move past the painful episodes of her life. The child actor Frankie McLaren carries significant stretches of the story with his unexpressed longing and childish relentlessness. Cecile de France ably plays a successful television anchor compelled by events to veer her life in a different direction. Richard Kind delivers a moving portrayal of a man seeking closure after the death of his wife.
My pick for 2010’s best movie to date is Winter’s Bone, which is just now available on DVD. A 17-year-old Ozarks girl is determined to save the family home by tracking down her meth dealer dad – dead or alive. The girl’s journey through a series of nasty and nastier Southern Missouri crank cookers is riveting – without any explosions, gunfights or chase scenes. Every moment of this film seems completely real. Winter’s Bone won the screenwriting and grand jury prizes at Sundance.
With just her second feature, Debra Granik has emerged as an important filmmaker to watch. She presents an unflinching look at this subculture without ever resorting to stereotype. Granik hits a home run with every artistic choice, from the locations to the spare soundtrack to the pacing to the casting. I’ll be watching for her next film.
As the protagonist, 20-year-old Jennifer Lawrence is in every scene. With a minimum of dialogue, she creates a lead character of rarely seen determination.
Dale Dickey is exceptional as a criminal matriarch. John Hawkes (the kind Sol Star in Deadwood) also gives a tremendous performance as the ready-to-explode Uncle Teardrop.
For my recent DVD choices (including trailers), see DVDs of the Week. Winter’s Bone is on my lists of Best Movies of 2010 – So Far and 5 Great Hillbilly Movies.
Charles Ferguson’s brilliant documentary Inside Job may be the most important movie of the year. It is a harsh but fair explanation of the misdeeds that led to the recent near-collapse of the global financial system. Unexpectedly, the film begins in Iceland, setting the stage for the collapse and kicking off the easily understandable explanations of the various tricks and bamboozles that have hidden behind their own complexity.
Like this year’s other best documentaries, The Tillman Story. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work and Sweetwater, Inside Job gets out of its own way and just lets the story speak for itself. There is no need for a Michael Moore to portray the financial sector as criminally greedy and reckless – the facts speak for themselves and the audience can be trusted to “get it”. At the showing I attended, there was general applause at the end.
Besides the obvious villains at the investment banks (Goldman Sachs, etc.) , the insurers of credit default swaps (like AIG) and the rating agencies (e.g., Moody’s), Ferguson also takes aim at these thieves’ political enablers and economist apologists. There are some 60 Minutes-style ambushes, but they are far less interesting for the squirming of the subjects than for exposing the completely clueless entitlement of the financial sector and its governmental and academic lackeys.
Inside Job exposes our Wall Street government, and is unflinchingly bipartisan in meting out the blame.
Matt Damon narrates.
One of my Overlooked Masterworks plays on TCM on October 25th. Set in England just before the D-Day invasion, The Americanization of Emily (1964) is a biting satire and one of the great anti-war movies. James Garner plays an admiral’s staff officer charged with locating luxury goods and willing English women for the brass. Julie Andrews plays an English driver who has lost her husband and other male family members in the War. She resists emotional entanglements with other servicemen whose lives may be put at risk, but falls for Garner’s “practicing coward”, a man who is under no illusions about the glory of war and is determined to stay as far from combat as possible.
Unfortunately, Garner’s boss (Melvyn Douglas) has fits of derangement and becomes obsessed with the hope that the first American killed on the beach at D-Day be from the Navy. Accordingly, he orders Garner to lead a suicide mission to land ahead of the D-Day landing, ostensibly to film it. Fellow officer James Coburn must guarantee Garner’s martyrdom.
It’s a brilliant screenplay from Paddy Chayefsky, who won screenwriting Oscars for Marty, The Hospital and Network.
Today, Americanization holds up as least as well as its contemporary Dr. Strangelove and much better than Failsafe.
Reportedly, both Andrews and Garner have tagged this as their favorite film.
One of the “Three Nameless Broads” bedded by the Coburn character is played by Judy Carne, later of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.
I finally caught up with Date Night on DVD. Steve Carell and Tina Fey are very funny , but this movie isn’t. A running gag about Mark Wahlberg sans shirt is amusing, but a chase scene with an embedded taxicab is the only LOL moment.
This is a light and wry coming-of-age comedy set in a locked psychiatric facility by Directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (Half Nelson, Sugar). It’s hard for me to find humor in psych wards, but this good-hearted fluff had a few chuckles. Keir Gilchrist and Emma Roberts star as the teens. But the film is more of a showcase for Zach Galifianakis’ restrained and textured performance, less Wild Man and more heartfelt – who knew?