Iron Man

Iron Ban (Jon Favreau, 2008) - B+

Very good -- really. If I'm not creaming myself like some other folks, it's because the action never quite reaches Raimi levels of transcendence, and because the movie indulges in a few too many winks to the comic book fanboys that just play like enormous red herrings to the rest of us. (I gather that the Clark Gregg character is somehow significant to the Iron Man mythos, but I had no idea what the hell he was talking about or why he kept showing up.) At its best, though, it's actually quite moving: if Spider-Man and its sequels have been about heroism and responsibility, Iron Man is about conscience, and holding on to it even if the System would have you throw it in a ditch. Downey's ceaseless sarcasm masks a touching fragility, and the screenplay gives the protagonist time to bloom -- his conversion from cynical arms dealer to justice-seeker is about as convincing as superhero character development gets. And I'm immensely grateful for the ending, which is note-perfect and brilliantly ties together the movie's theme while setting up a sequel. Well-played.

The Band's Visit

The Band's Visit (Eran Kolirin, 2008) - C

So deliberately understated that it's almost an affectation. Lots of pained silences and awkwardness played for laughs, pushing hard on how out-of-place these Egyptians feel in Israel's version of Podunk, Ohio, though of course the Israelis have all the same problems as the Arabs and maybe they can all help each other because we're all human, etc. Draws the obvious parallels (uptight colonel's son committed suicide because dad was too hard on him; cue scene where the colonel shares a tender, understanding moment with the wild, insubordinate young recruit whom he had previously threatened with firing) and never fails to make metaphors explicit (the speech about how the clarinet player's unfinished concerto = life is really rather shameless), but there's no real insight; everything's surface-level and aggressively wistful. Miscalculates weirdly in spots -- Khaled is supposed to be charming, but he's actually creepy; the scene where he coaches a hapless Israeli kid on how to flirt is more performance art than narrative cinema -- and can't even create a sense of place: it places so much emphasis on what a downscale suburban hellhole Bet Hatikvah is, but gives us no feel for it whatsoever. Couple of strong performances, and the clean, spare compositions look nice (especially in the first half-hour), but this is a pretty bland, stereotypically "arthouse" piece of business.

Storyville

Storyville (Mark Frost, 1992) - C+

Came to this due to Twin Peaks-related loyalty to Mark Frost, and for a while dug it as a Twin Peaks fan: Frost learned a lot from David Lynch, giving his version of New Orleans an airtight and totally singular sense of place, and sustaining a tone of subtle, something-is-wrong-but-it's-not-clear-what creepiness (the ambient noise and constant whooshing of ceiling fans on the soundtrack helps). When a mysterious Asian woman lures an old-money political candidate into a darkened Aikido studio for some steamy hot tub sex, I was gleefully on board. When the plot got going and the movie turned into a sub-Grisham courtroom melodrama, complete with a climactic shoot-out, I jumped off. Fun for setting and mood, but any number of movies have done this sort of dark-family-secrets-down-south thing better.

chills

Apropos of nothing except a current obsession, here is a pretty new video for one of the prettiest songs I've ever heard. Enjoy!



An mp3 of the song is here.

Step Up 2

Step Up 2: The Streets (Jon M. Chu, 2008) - C+

Graceful people piss me off, and there are dozens of them here, exhibiting a level of physical coordination that human beings simply should not possess. The filmmaking is not nearly so prodigious; in fact, when it comes to dialogue and plotting, it's dumb as a rock. But this in-name-only sequel is well-paced, energetic, and shockingly easy to watch (it's also slightly racist, but whatever). It's smart enough to lean heavily on the dance sequences to the point of essentially becoming a revue, which turns out to be fine because the dancing is legitimately spectacular -- distinctive, entertaining, and really fucking impressive. The semblance of a story stringing the dance sequences together is predictably turgid, but less so than the first film's; I liked how no one wasted screen time agonizing over the inevitable romance, and the movie wisely never lets the characters keep talking for too long. Performances range from sweet (Brianna Evigan) to bland (Robert Hoffman) to apoplectic (Adam G. Sevani), but everyone can dance, and everyone does, a lot. I almost wrote this one off as skippable; I'm glad I didn't.

Why?

Why are the people in this movie speaking English with vaguely Eastern-European accents? Why? If they're not going to speak Russian, can't they just speak English? Are we all retarded?

The Eye

The Eye (David Moreau & Xavier Palud, 2008) - C-

Moreau & Palud are clearly most comfortable with the mode of horror on display in the first half of the film, basically amounting to mysterious blurry figures appearing in the corneal transplant patient's nascent field of vision; this is much the same territory they explored in Them, their delightfully abstract debut. They also have a knack for creepy throwaway moments that suggests a strong preference for low-key, low-budget horror (spoiler warning): Alba suddenly asking "who's that" when shown a picture of herself (a good hour into the film); a stranger sensing Alba's connection to the spirit world and pleading, "that's my Tommy, isn't it?" just before the elevator doors close on her and the ghost of her son standing behind her. But more conventional set pieces are a no go, since Palud and Moreau are either disinterested in the big scares or just inept. Among other things, they use blatant visual cheats, e.g.: we see the protagonist in the foreground and something menacing/unnatural in the background; as the camera pans and the background object passes behind Alba, it disappears! A typical device, but for the fact that Alba is looking away from the camera and at the object the entire time, so that the way the film would have it, the object disappears before her very eyes. Normally when this tactic is used, the character would walk past a post, for example, and the object would vanish behind it, disappearing for her and for us simultaneously. The Eye ignores her perspective, and the result is just bizarre; this happens a couple of times. The movie also gets dumber as it gets less subtle, with a climax that furiously pitches boring exposition and a denoument that simply makes no sense. Bottom line: talented but disengaged filmmakers barely make a dent in a useless screenplay. Alba's presence has predictable effects.

The Air I Breathe

The Air I Breathe (Jieho Lee, 2008) - F

New rule: Just because you shoehorn the line "there's no such thing as a coincidence" into your screenplay does not mean your movie will remain watchable if you then proceed to ignore all dictates of logic and decorum.

Teeth

Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2008) - C

Tries to do two things with the vagina dentata concept: construct an allegory about a young woman learning to harness the power of her sexuality, and imply that the abstinence movement, such as it is, is grounded in a subconscious fear of sex. But the subtext is so obvious it's barely subtext, and the movie is overbearingly sarcastic and smug; Lichtenstein prefers to get laughs at the expense of his protagonist instead of taking her twisted psychology seriously, but his screenplay isn't that funny and Dawn is never convincing. Every guy she encounters is detestable in predictable ways (uber-Christian crush turns out to be a rapist; nerdy second choice a date rapist; gynecologist a pervert; don't even ask about the random guy who gives her a ride), and they all get their comeuppance in exactly the way you'd think, without question or much suspense. Not much of a horror movie -- Lichtenstein turns up the gore in the second half, but in an annoyingly self-satisfied way, trying hard to elicit horrified laugh-groans from the audience by (e.g.) lingering on a dog as it considers a severed penis (one of many in the film), picks it up, then spits half of it back out. (Eew. Why?) Everyone who's seen Teeth seems to be as enamored of its premise as Lichtenstein is, but I'm not buying. This is a huge, largely artless disappointment.

Love and Death

Love and Death (Woody Allen, 1975) - A

Not sure I've ever seen a movie that takes so much joy in absurdity, really exemplified by the closing shot of Allen and the Grim Reaper jigging across the screen. Self-serious 19th Century Russian lit is vulnerable to the introduction of anything remotely modern, and Allen's sarcastic, hyperactive schlub is the perfect poison, dismantling the genre by introducing 20th Century neuroses (thereby also rebuffing, it seems to me, the view that Dostoyevsky et al. cannot be criticized except from the (necessarily imaginary) perspective of their contemporaries). Everything hits, from the straight-up Airplane!-style silliness ("No, YOU are Don Francisco's sister") to the often non sequitur wordplay ("Are you scared of dying?" "Scared is the wrong word. I'm frightened of it." "Interesting distinction.") to the bits that play more like Woody stand-up. Not a dull minute; endlessly energetic and pretty much perfect.

Silver Linings to the Strike

The obvious one, of course, is the cancellation of the Golden Globes, a.k.a. the gay second game of the Stanley Cup Finals. But one that would have flown under my radar had I not scanned Entertainment Weekly's terrible website this morning is that the only reality show I've ever enjoyed is coming back, baby.

As to the first point -- the "suck it, HFPA" point -- check out this fascinating Variety article on the collapse of the efforts to salvage the "ceremony." If nothing else, it makes it clear why the Globes are such a scam -- the last thing they were trying to save was the parties.

The Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect (Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, 2004) - B+ [director's cut]

Fun to watch this again; everyone wrote it off as "goofy" three years ago, but I think people were actually responding to its brazenness, the extent to which it was willing to follow its premise to some genuinely (and perhaps incongruously) dark and unexpected places. Some of the small details are actually pretty silly (Evan's disturbing second-grade drawing looks like the work of a young Picasso; Kaylie's smooching her boyfriend just after a despondent and armless (!) Evan confesses his undying love seems a bit insensitive; Ashton Kuthcer is as intractable a presence as ever; etc., etc.) and there are serious metaphysical problems with the way the film plays out its time travel conceit (Why, aside from storytelling convenience, do all of the memories of the "newly created" Evan get "loaded" into the version of Evan that we've been following? Wouldn't his life have just continued uninterrupted all those years? The movie seems to assume that he has some sort of primary soul and that everything else is filler, which is a hell of an assumption.), but the movie's made with undeniable skill and a lot of guts; the "blackouts," in particular, are a terrific suspense device that's actually given some substance later on, and the way the script fills in the holes is neat, if not always perfectly logical. The new ending would have played into the hands of those who called the film goofy, but it packs a punch if you're willing to play along. I liked it then and I like it now.

I drink your milkshake

In an uncharacteristically half-assed rhetorical flourish, Mike D'Angelo claims that There Will Be Blood involves a "titanic battle between the worldly and the spiritual." This struck me as weirdly wrong-headed, since the spiritual never enters PT Anderson's masterpiece. It's clear to me that Anderson views Daniel and Eli as competing enterprises -- both surrender what principles they had (or claim to have had) for material gain, and then, in the film's view of capitalism, one has to destroy (or "eat") the other (hence the prophecy of the title). It's not clear whether Eli is sincere or a charlatan, and I don't think Anderson really cares, but there's certainly nothing "spiritual" about Eli as far as the movie is concerned. He's competition.

There are nuances and layers aplenty to the film, but I think the bird's eye view of it is actually a bit simpler than a lot of people are claiming. I could be wrong.

Year-End

My year-end feature, which includes my best and worst lists is now up here. For some reason there's currently a database error on the page, and I'm trying to fix it (the person who designed the site and is normally kind enough to help me with tech is on vacation; if you have any ideas please let me know), but the page should still display (give it a moment).

Let me know what you think.

As a bonus, here is my ballot for the nomination stage of the Online Film Critics Society awards:


BEST PICTURE
1. "There Will Be Blood"
2. "The Mist"
3. "3:10 to Yuma"
4. "Into the Wild"
5. "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"

BEST DIRECTOR
1. Paul Thomas Anderson, “There Will Be Blood”
2. Andrew Dominik, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
3. Quentin Tarantino, "Grindhouse/Death Proof"
4. Cristian Mungiu, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"
5. James Mangold, "3:10 to Yuma"

BEST ACTOR
1. Sam Riley, "Control"
2. Emile Hirsch, "Into the Wild"
3. Daniel Day-Lewis, “There Will Be Blood”
4. Philip Seymour Hoffman, "The Savages"
5. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, "The Lookout"

BEST ACTRESS
1. Laura Linney, "The Savages"
2. Jodie Foster, "The Brave One"
3. Anamaria Marinca, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"
4. Keri Russell, "Waitress"
5. Ellen Page, "Juno"

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
1. Philip Seymour Hoffman, "Charlie Wilson's War"
2. Casey Affleck, "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
3. Tom Wilkinson, "Michael Clayton"
4. Albert Finney, "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"
5. Paul Dano, "There Will Be Blood"

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
1. Amy Ryan, "Gone Baby Gone"
2. Marcia Gay Harden, "The Mist"
3. Catherine Keener, "Into the Wild"
4. Imelda Staunton, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"
5. Romola Garai, "Atonement"

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
1. "The Savages"
2. "Michael Clayton"
3. "Breach"
4. "The Lookout"
5. "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
1. “There Will Be Blood”
2. "3:10 to Yuma"
3. "Charlie Wilson's War"
4. "Control"
5. "The Mist"

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
1. "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
2. "Grindhouse (Death Proof)"
3. “There Will Be Blood”
4. "The Brave One"
5. "No Country for Old Men"

BEST EDITING
1. "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"
2. "No Country for Old Men"
3. “There Will Be Blood”
4. "Grindhouse (Death Proof)"
5. "Control"

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
1. "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford"
2. “There Will Be Blood”
3. "Beowulf"
4. "Atonement"
5. "The Mist"

BEST DOCUMENTARY
1. "The Devil Came on Horseback"
2. "Lake of Fire"
3. "My Kid Could Paint That"
4. "God Grew Tired of Us"
5. "Billy the Kid"

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM (Non-English language)
1. "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days"
2. "Vitus"
3. "The Host"
4. "Black Book"
5. "Them"

BEST ANIMATED FILM
1. "Ratatouille"
2. "The Simpsons Movie"
3. "Shrek the Third"
4. "Beowulf"
5. "Meet the Robinsons"

BREAKTHROUGH FILMMAKER
1. George Ratliff, "Joshua"
2. Tony Gilroy, "Michael Clayton"
3. Ben Affleck, "Gone Baby Gone"
4. Sarah Polley, "Away From Her"
5. Scott Frank, "The Lookout"

BREAKTHROUGH PERFORMER
1. Sam Riley, "Control"
2. Michael Cera, "Superbad"
3. Zoe Bell, "Grindhouse/Death Proof"
4. Brian Dierker, "Into the Wild"
5. Nikki Blonsky, "Hairspray"

Birdman of Alcatraz

Birdman of Alcatraz (John Frankenheimer, 1962) - C

A dose of earnest goofiness from the usually hyper-self-aware Frankenheimer, both straight-up silly (an actor portrays the author of the book about Stroud and speaks directly to the camera; square-jawed Burt Lancaster as an unmitigated badass) and almost charmingly quaint (warden to prison guard after Stroud beats a fellow inmate to a pulp: "I don't give up on a man that easy!"). A relic in the sense that it wants to have a debate about prison rehabilitation -- should the goal be cultivating obedience or dignity and independent thought? -- that's simply not relevant anymore, given that we've given up on rehabilitation entirely. That part is still sort of compelling, but the movie is awfully long at two-and-a-half hours; Stroud's rectitude wears, his conflict with the petty warden is a cliché, and his relationship with his mother scales heights of absurdity. The Oscar noms for Lancaster and Telly Savalas are interesting, since their performances seem so exaggerated today.