Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: John le Carre’s great whodunit

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is the new film version of the classic John le Carre spy novel.  The British have learned that the Soviets have planted a mole – their own double agent – near the very top of British secret intelligence service.  Only the old spymaster George Smiley, having been forced out to pasture, is beyond suspicion.  Only Smiley has the intellectual brilliance, institutional knowledge and ruthless doggedness needed to ferret out the traitor.  Gary Oldman plays George Smiley.

It’s a great tale, and the movie is good.  Oldman is joined by an impressive cast, inlcuding Colin Firth Tom Hardy, John Hurt, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds, Benedict Cumberbatch and Toby Jones.  Tom Hardy and Mark Strong are especially good.

I would be more enthusiastic about this film, but I harken back to the 1979 television miniseries version of the same book, starring Alec Guinness in perhaps his best role. That miniseries had even better performance by Guinness, of course, and Ian Richardson, Sian Phillips and Patrick Stewart.  It’s available on DVD, and I recommend that you rent it.

2011 in Movies: the year’s best movies

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INCENDIES

Here’s my list of the best films of 2011: 1)  Incendies, 2) Take Shelter, 3) The Artist, 4) The Descendants, 5) Poetry, 6) Midnight in Paris, 7) Beginners, 8) Source Code, 9) Young Adult, and 10) (tie) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Drive.

Continuing with my list of 2011’s best films, here are my honorable mentions: The Guard,  Project Nim, Buck, Tabloid, The Adjustment Bureau, Carancho, and Potiche.

(Note:  I’m saving room for some films that I haven’t yet seen, especially Roman Polanski’s Carnage and Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus.)

You can watch the trailers and see my comments on all these films at Best Movies of 2011.

According to Metacritic, all of my picks (except The Adjustment Bureau) were highly rated by prominent critics.  I did disdain some art films, most notably The Tree of Life, which made lots of critics’ end-of-year lists.  See 2011 in Movies: biggest disappointments, which I’m posting on Tuesday.

(Further Note:  Incendies was nominated for the 2010 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but was widely released in the US in 2011.  A Separation, which I and most folks won’t be able to see until after January 27, will contend on my 2012 list.)

Happy Anniversary to The Wife!

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Mryna Loy in THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES - the second best wife ever

Happy Anniversary to The Wife, also known as Lisa The Love of My Life!

Watching The Guard with her was my Most Fun at the Movies in 2011.  I also cherished her company at Midnight in Paris, The Social Network, Drive, Margin Call, Page Eight and The Ides of March.  And, at home watching TCM this year, I especially enjoyed sharing two of my classic favorite classics with her,  In a Lonely Place and Rope.

She’s the biggest fan and supporter of this blog, and I appreciate her and love her.  Happy Anniversary, honey!

Your Holiday Movie Guide

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THE ARTIST

As usual, some of the year’s very best films have been released for the Holidays.  I especially recommend these three:

The Artist:  A magical romance given us through the highly original choice of an almost silent film.

The Descendants:  Director Alexander Payne’s (Sideways)  family drama is set in Hawaii and contains a brilliant performance by George Clooney.

Young Adult, another of the year’s best.

Michele Williams gives a dazzling performance as Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn, a lesser but satisfying film.  Here are my comments on some other current films, the sex addiction drama Shame, the Japanese gangster movie Outrage and the Freud-Jung costume drama A Dangerous Method.

Happy viewing!

2011 in Movies: foreign films

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It was another year in which foreign cinema was essential (although not as great as years past).  Three of the nominees for the 2010 Best Foreign Language Oscar were released in the US this year: Incendies , Dogtooth and the Oscar-winning In a Better World.   Incendies earned a very prominent spot on my Best Movies of 2011.  Joining Incendies on my Best Movies of 2011 are The Artist from France, Poetry from Korea, Carancho from Argentina and Potiche from France.  That’s five films – down from ten on my list for 2010 and the lowest number of foreign films on my list ever.

Still, the French had a fine historical drama in Sarah’s Key, the costume epic The Princess of Montpensier, the sexy comedy The Names of Love and the arty head scratcher Certified Copy.   Stylized violence characterized both the Japanese gangster film Outrage and the Samurai movie 13 Assassins.  There was a sly Mexican dark comedy, Norah’s Will.  Attenberg was a better Greek comedy than Dogtooth.

The Polish documentary War Games and the Man Who Stopped Them was excellent. Hungary delivered a small drama, Question in Details.  The Aussies gave us a very violent contemporary Western, Red Hill.  Germany and Austria produced a contemporary crime drama in The Robber.  Even the Bolivians gave us a pretty solid Western:  Blackthorn.

Here’s the trailer for Poetry.

The Ides of March: an engrossing story about ambition, loyalty and betrayal

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Here’s a belated comment on The Ides of March, released earlier this fall.  George Clooney directed, co-wrote and stars in this contemporary political drama. It’s an engrossing story about ambition, loyalty and betrayal.  The story revolves around an up-and-coming political consultant (Ryan Gosling).  He is working under a veteran campaign manager (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in a Democratic Presidential primary.  He is wooed by the campaign manager (Paul Giamatti) for the opposing candidate, and the intrigue begins.

Two performances stand out.  Philip Seymour Hoffman perfectly captures the old school politico, now jaded, but able to access the idealism that first drove him into politics.  Ryan Gosling can soar in any kind of role.  Here he is smart, but is he smart enough?  He is well-intentioned, but can it overcome his ambition? Gosling keeps us on the edge of our seats as he navigates a snake pit of betrayals.

The rest of the cast is good, too:  Giamatti, Evan Rachel Wood as an ambitious intern and Marisa Tomei as a hard-nosed reporter.

It’s a movie that MOSTLY gets the politics right.  The fundamental truth of the movie is that an utterly cynical veteran politico can still fall in love with candidate, as Hoffman’s campaign manager does with Clooney’s candidate.

In another dead on accurate touch, Hoffman and Gosling need a room to privately pass on some bad news to Clooney.  Instead of finding a cramped office, the three men sit on folding chairs knee-to-knee in a room that could accommodate 200.  That stuff really happens.

Unfortunately, Ides gets some things wrong.  Would never happen:  A veteran strategist like Hoffman would never be surprised by the possibility of “mischief voting” in an open primary.  Real life campaign consultants would never discuss policy positions with a candidate in a room full of thirty 20-somethings, all itching to leak what they know.   And no veteran politico worth his salt would tell a reporter about a deal that is not done.

Nonetheless, it’s a movie that I recommend.

The Artist: silent yet magical

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The Artist is a magical romance that writer-director Michel Hazanavicius gives us through the highly original choice of an almost silent film.  Set in Hollywood from 1927 through 1929, it is the story of a silent film star who is left behind by the startlingly immediate transition to talking pictures.

The French actor Jean Dujardin won Cannes’ best actor award as the silent star, a charismatic and ever-playful guy whose career is trapped by the shackles of his own vanity.  While on top, he treats an ambitious movie extra (Berenice Bejo) with kindness; she remembers when she becomes a star of the talkies.

Dujardin’s star, whose films resemble those of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.,  is a joker with a knack for the grand gesture.  He also has an adorable Jack Russell terrier that serves as his companion and co-star.

Hazanavicius is so skillful that audiences that have never seen a silent film soon become enraptured by the story and invested in the fates of the characters.  It’s a visually and emotionally satisfying film.

John Goodman and James Cromwell are excellent in supporting roles. 

(BTW, in real life, Berenice Bejo has two children with Michel Hazanavicius.)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvifS2QOun4]

The Descendants: beginning a quest, stunned and clueless

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In director Alexander Payne’s first film since Sideways, George Clooney seeks to care for his daughters in Hawaii after his wife is hospitalized, but then learns that she has been cheating on him.  That news sends him on a quest that he defines along the way.  To complicate things, his daughters are cooperative to various degrees.  The heat is turned up even higher by a potential land deal that could make Clooney and his many entitled slacker cousins wildly rich, but the deal’s deadline looms and he is pressured by his VERY interested relations.

The situation is promising enough, but Payne takes the story in unanticipated directions.   And, as you would expect from Sideways, there are many funny moments in The Descendants.

Clooney’s performance is brilliant.  Here, he does not play The Coolest Man on the Planet.  Instead, Clooney is a grinding workaholic who is so clueless about his kids that he doesn’t realize how clueless he is.  He is stunned by news of the affair that he never suspected.  Perhaps for the first time in his life, he must work through his situation figuring it out as he goes along.

Shailene Woodley’s performance as the older daughter is even more essential to the success of The Descendants. It’s not just that she perfectly plays a bratty teenager, but that we can see that some of her brattiness is hormonal and some of it is entirely voluntary and manipulative. Woodley had to convincingly play a character who is at times self-centered and shallow, but who can rally and reach within herself to serve as the family glue and support her dad and little sister.

The Descendants approaches being a perfect movie but for two things: 1) the daughter’s stoner boyfriend is just too oblivious to be credible among the other colorful yet completely authentic characters; and 2)  the audience can never believe that there’s any chance that George Clooney is going to allow bulldozers on thousands of pristine Hawaiian acres.  Still, almost perfect is pretty good.

Drive: noir action in vivid LA

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Drive is a movie that you haven’t seen before – a stylishly violent noir tale unfolding on a brilliantly filmed canvas.

Ryan Gosling stars as a stunt driver by day, criminal getaway driver by night.  He hardly talks and doesn’t emote.  Indeed, his character is listed in the credits as “Driver” and sometimes referred to in the dialogue as “The Kid”.  He is motivated only by his pursuit of adrenaline rushes and the opportunity to do something good for a vulnerable mom (Carey Mulligan).  Indeed, Gosling is superb.

But the real star of Drive is its Danish writer-director,  Nicolas Winding Refn.  The film has a noir plot but Refn eschews the shadowy black and white of traditional noir for especially vivid scenes of Los Angeles.  For example, early in the film, Gosling enters a convenience store and the screen is filled with the garish colors of junk food packaging.  It’s one of the most artfully lit and photographed scenes in the last year.

Drive abounds in nice touches. While being hunted by the cops, Gosling’s driver is listening to both the police scanner and a radio broadcast of the Lakers game; unexpectedly, it turns out that there is an essential reason that he’s listening to the Lakers.

This movie contains some extreme violence – violence that is intentionally extreme for its effect.

The cast is excellent, with especially memorable turns by Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) and Oscar Isaac.

(I admired Refn’s 2008 Bronson, the story of a Britain’s “most dangerous convict” who parlayed a seven-year sentence into 34 years (30 of them in solitary) by repeatedly taking hostages and beating up the SWAT teams that rescue them.   Roger Ebert called Bronson “92 minutes of rage”.)

2011 in Movies: documentaries

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PROJECT NIM

As usual, several documentaries made my list of Best Movies of 2011:  Project Nim, Buck and Tabloid.

Werner Herzog gave us the wonderful 3D Cave of Forgotten Dreams.  Page One highlighted David Carr of the New York Times.  The Polish documentary War Games and the Man Who Stopped Them was a great find.  I also admired Thunder Soul (about a Houston high school stage band in the 60s), Magic Bus (featuring actual footage of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters), American Grindhouse (about the grindhouse films of the 40s, 50s and early 60s) and These Amazing Shadows (about the National Film Registry).

PBS had stellar year, especially with Woody Allen: A Documentary, Jimmy Carter, Stonewall Uprising and Troubadours.

HBO delivered Bobby Fisher Against the World.  And ESPN has entered the documentary arena with the surprising The Marinovich Project.