As usual several documentaries made my list of Best Movies of 2010: Inside Job, The Tillman Story, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, and Sweetgrass.
And there were still more excellent documentaries. Ken Burns augmented his brilliant Baseball with The Tenth Inning. PBS’s Earth Days told the story of the modern environmental movement through the voices of key players. The Most Dangerous Man in America brought new texture to the story of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. The fine PBS series Independent Lens brought us Lost Souls (Animas Perdidas), in which filmmaker Monika Navarro trailed an uncle deported to Mexico and discovered secrets in her own family.
It was another year in which foreign cinema was essential. Three of the nominees for the 2009 Best Foreign Language Oscar were released in the US this year: Ajami (Israel/Palestine), A Prophet (France) and the Oscar winning The Secrets in Their Eyes (Argentina). Those three made my list of Best Movies of 2010, along with Mademoiselle Chambon, The Girl on the Train, and The Ghost Writer from France, Carlos from France/Germany, Fish Tank from the UK, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo from Sweden. If I couldn’t see foreign films, I wouldn’t have a Best Movie list.
France also gave us the Mesrine films. Ireland offered Kisses. Italy had the food-centric I Am Love and Mid-August Lunch. In a tremendous year for crime drama, the Aussies added Animal Kingdom and the Koreans contributed Mother. Police, Adjective was another bleak, cynical drama from Rumania.
This month, British filmmaker Mike Leigh delivers what could be one of the best films of the year, Another Year. Leigh has been nominated for four screenwriting Oscars and two directing Oscars, and is best known in the US for art house favorites Happy-Go-Lucky, Vera Drake, Secrets and Lies, Topsy-Turvy and Career Girls.
Leigh is known for outlining a story, rather than writing a word-for-word script. He then develops the scenes and dialogue with his actors in rehearsal. He is especially notable for directing actresses to Best Actress recognition. Sally Hawkins won a Golden Globe for Happy-Go-Lucky. Imelda Staunton was Oscar-nominated for Vera Drake, as was Brenda Blythen for Secrets and Lies.
In my opinion, Leigh’s masterpiece is his 1999 Secrets and Lies.
Another Year was uniformly celebrated at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The film observes a year in the life of a happily married couple (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen). They and we pick up insights about themselves and their family and friends.
Let’s see if you can help a Hollywood studio with a marketing problem. Suppose you have made a highbrow, smart, quirky film about a man who emerges from a disabling depression by communicating only through a beaver hand puppet. And the film is titled The Beaver.
Now suppose that the guy’s wife is played by the eminently respectable, sympathetic and likable Jodie Foster, who also directs the film. Everybody always likes Jodie Foster, right?
With me so far? Wonder what the marketing problem is? Well, the problem is that the audience must sympathize with the husband and root for him to learn how to express his feelings appropriately. And that husband is played by Mel Gibson.
See the problem?
To make things worse for poor Jodie Foster, her film was already in the can and awaiting a Fall 2010 release when the tapes of Mel threatening his real life ex were splattered across the global media.
The Beaver reportedly had a $19 million budget and finished shooting in November 2009. The release date is now the vague “2011”. But, never fear, the trailer is here!
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.
The Social Network tells us something about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – not about this year’s Swedish version, but about next year’s Hollywood version to be directed by David Fincher.
First, The Social Network shows that Fincher (Fight Club, Zodiac) is still operating at his best. The Social Network is essentially about some annoying, immature geeks writing computer code and getting financing for a company – but Fincher makes it rock! Fight Club and Zodiac are two of my favorite contemporary films, and Fight Club‘s desperate violence and Zodiac‘s whodunit relentlessness translate directly to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. So there couldn’t be a better director for this project than Fincher.
Rooney Mara in The Social Network
Second, the success of the Stieg Larsson trilogy depends on the portrayal of Lisbeth Salander. The Swedish version has been amazing because of the Danish actress Noomi Rapace’s jawdropping Lisbeth. But in Fincher’s movies, Lisbeth Salander will be played by Rooney Mara. The good news from The Social Network is that Mara nails her scenes as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s soon-to-be ex-girlfriend. And we get a glimmer of the intensity that Mara will need for Lisbeth. Plus Mara is used to working with Fincher, who is notorious for his scores of takes; reportedly, Fincher required over 90 takes for the opening scene between Mara and Jesse Eisenberg.
Tony Curtis has died. He was a very handsome and sexy guy, and the first half of his career was at the tail end of Hollywood’s Studio Era. As a result, he played the pretty boy leads in lots of mediocre action movies. He and first wife Janet Leigh (parents of Jamie Lee Curtis) made up one of Hollywood’s most glamorous couples ever.
But Tony Curtis could act if he got the right role, and he made at least three great movies. The fact that these movies come from three very different genres (screwball comedy, contemporary drama, sword-and-sandal epic) is a testament to his ability.
Some Like It Hot (1959): This Billy Wilder masterpiece is my pick for the best comedy of all time. Seriously – the best comedy ever. And it still works today. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play most of the movie in drag (and Tony is kind of cute). Curtis must continue the ruse although next to Marilyn Monroe is at her most delectable. Curtis then dons a yachting cap and does a dead-on Cary Grant impression as the heir to an industrial fortune.
Sweet Smell of Success (1957): This has Curtis’ most subtly acted role as a Broadway press agent who is completely at the mercy of Burt Lancaster’s sadistically nasty columnist. Many of us have experienced being vulnerable to the caprice of an extremely mean person – Curtis perfectly captures the dread and humiliation of being in that position.
Spartacus (1960): Once in a while, a grand epic is a really good movie , and Spartacus qualifies. Curtis plays a slave who is hit on by Laurence Olivier’s Roman patrician in a scene of BARELY implicit homosexuality. “Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral?”, Olivier leers from the bath. It was a gutsy scene for a studio actor at the end of the 50s.
After thinking so more about Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (and getting more annoyed), I have updated my first assessment of the movie.
The screenplay keeps raising the issue of moral hazard (whether to bail out people from the consequences of risks that they knew they were taking). Yet, at the end, the two flawed main characters each get exactly what they wanted at the beginning of the film despite making risky or evil choices throughout. The movie’s payoff (things turn out OK no matter how badly or foolishly you behaved) is exactly opposite of the movie’s sermonette.
That’s a pretty famous football quote, often attributed to Vince Lombardi. Lombardi did say those words as early as 1959. But the quote was originated by UCLA football coach Red Sanders in 1950.
It turns out that the famous line was also spoken in a 1953 movie – by John Wayne! In Trouble Along the Way, Wayne plays a gleefully corrupt football coach who buys players in an attempt to build up the football program overnight at a small Catholic school.
I’ve added Trouble Along the Way to my discussion of football movies in my Best Sports Movies.
You would think that I wouldn’t have to write this. But, indeed, when I saw The Town, there in my row was a mom and her three-year-old. What was she thinking? Was it too much trouble to watch the trailer? How was she going to explain the armed robberies, abduction, murders, head shattering battery by rifle butt, spraying AK-47s, the two scenes of sexual intercourse and the threatened rape. Oh, and how about the castration by pistol shot? And the car torchings – do you really want your three-year old to learn how to set your car on fire?
Now I’m not a prude. I often criticize movie ratings as too restrictive. I think that high schoolers can handle more sex than many parents are comfortable with. I don’t like cartoonish movie violence without consequences, but I often think that even tweens can handle realistic film violence. I like to challenge kids with films.
But, GOOD GRIEF, show some common sense. What is a toddler going to gain from an adult-themed movie? Yikes!
