400 Screens, 400 Blows »
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Cruz Control
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm thrilled about Penelope Cruz's Oscar nomination for Nine (220 screens). I guess everyone hates this movie, and I know in my heart of hearts that it's not very good. It's frankly kind of a bad idea, although I haven't seen the stage play and I'm of the firm conviction that it is possible to make a good movie out of a bad idea. But that's not why the movie works. It works because it's so completely nutty, as only an all-star Hollywood extravaganza can be. (Plus, how many recent all-star extravaganzas can you name?) It's cheerfully clueless, and moves forward with pride and confidence. And Penelope is the best thing in it.
Penelope is the only one in the cast who seems aware that she's not making Great Art. Her "spitfire" character operates just left of the rest of the proceedings, and she's ready to go off if things get too sludgy or stiff. She draws your eye right to her: she's dangerous and sexy, but also funny and touchingly vulnerable. It's almost the same character that won her the Oscar last year, in Woody Allen's great Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and perhaps even similar to the role that earned her first nomination, in Volver (2006).
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Busy Bridges
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
Jeff Bridges has already been nominated and/or won several awards for his performance as "Bad Blake" in Crazy Heart (93 screens), including a SAG award, a Golden Globe and a Los Angeles Film Critics Award. And, of course, many people have pointed out the film's similarity to Tender Mercies (1983), the feature that finally won Robert Duvall an Oscar (after being passed over for things like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now) -- not to mention that Duvall is actually in the new film, too. These awards, and potentially an Oscar nomination, are just our way of suddenly waking up and saying, "you know who's really good? Jeff Bridges." Frankly, Crazy Heart is a "just okay" film, but he's great in it. I guess there's just something about sad country singers that captures the voters' attention (with the added bonus that Bridges' character is an alcoholic).
I won't begrudge Bridges his hard-earned Oscar, but it's a case worth looking at. The reason Bridges generally goes unnoticed (with four Oscar nominations scattered over three decades) is because he's so good, and because he works so often. He has worked in many leading roles, but he's not exactly what you'd call a big movie star, and he has worked in many supporting roles, but he's not exactly what you'd call a character actor. He disappears into each role, but he does it without calling attention to the disappearing act, as Brando did. Some actors choose to work less often, and thereby turning each movie into an event. Chaplin was a famous case, and Daniel Day-Lewis is a good example today; he has appeared in just fifteen major movies over a 30-year career. But Bridges works a couple of times each year, and it's easy to take that quantity for granted.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - A Guy Named Joe
Filed under: Foreign Language, Lists, Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
As a list junkie, I'm still having a great time combing over the lists of the best films of the decade. In particular, I'm enthralled by the polls conducted at Indiewire and Film Comment (neither of which I participated in). The polls agreed on seven of the top ten films, and they ranged from well-known films to a couple of titles that feel pretty obscure. One film that reached the top ten on both lists barely ever had any distribution or attention in the United States. It showed up in the spring of 2007 on no more than 2 screens at a time, and its total U.S. gross was about $16,000 (that's sixteen thousand, not million). I saw it on a DVD screener at my house, and to the best of my knowledge, it never opened for a regular run in my hometown. The film is Syndromes and a Century, from Thailand, written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. He studied for a time in Chicago, so if you can't pronounce his name, he doesn't mind being called "Joe."
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Calm and Rohmer
Filed under: Obits, Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
We lost another master this week, the former Cahiers du Cinema film critic and filmmaker Eric Rohmer, who was 89. He has long been a staple of art houses. If you were a cinema buff that came of age in the 1970s, you probably saw his "Six Moral Tales" series. If your time was the 1980s, you probably saw some of the six "Comedies and Proverbs" films. And if it was the 1990s, you may have seen some of his "Tales of the Four Seasons." As a critic, I was honored to review the last of these, Autumn Tale (1998), which I saw as a flat-out masterpiece. Although I felt bad when I reviewed his final film last year, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, and found it nearly unbearable. (Though many others have defended it. Maybe I was too hasty?)
Rohmer's films were known for their talking, and I believe there was once a crack about his films being like "watching paint dry." The real secret of Rohmer's films is that they're all about smart, well-spoken people. They are studious and know lots of things. They may even be "experts" on human nature. When they fall in love or get stuck in some kind of romantic tangle, their first reaction is to try to reason their way out, using logic and words. In the end, however, there are no words or reasons or logic that can withstand the power of love. The characters are silenced as the credits roll, but the emotions linger on.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Imagining the Imaginarium
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
I have written many times over the years about how the career of Terry Gilliam resembles the career of Orson Welles, including in my review for Gilliam's Tideland. Of course, the types of films they made are different -- Welles was more focused on the qualities of age and experience, while Gilliam is more interested in juvenilia and fantasy -- but there are certain stylistic similarities, as well as biographical ones. Both men attempted and failed to make a Don Quixote, both men's films have suffered from poor distribution and advertising, as well as various forms of studio meddling, and both men saw the death of a leading actor during a production.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - The Year in Small Films
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
Was it a good year, or a bad one? Sometimes that assessment just depends on what I saw last. Sometimes the majority of the holiday/awards movies can be dispiriting, but then sometimes the summer movies can be very exciting. One thing I have discovered is that after a few years go by, some of my most passionate picks tend to fade away in favor of other movies that just keeping hanging on. For example, at the end of 2004, I selected Martin Scorsese's The Aviator as one of the best films of the year, but I have never been struck by the urge to see it again. Two other films that did not make my list, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead have since risen in stature and have given me many more hours of enjoyment.
This is generally how I choose my list of favorites, with one eye on the future, even if there's no way to be sure. One of my favorite small movies this year, Jane Campion's Bright Star, will live on my heart. I even managed to see it twice. I usually hate costume movies, but I found this one uncommonly low-key and passionate and poetic. I often like to see the films of Claire Denis more than once, and I have not yet had that pleasure with her great 35 Shots of Rum. Agnes Varda's The Beaches of Agnes was the year's best documentary, and a fascinating personal project, but it has not been calling to me for a second viewing. And Nina Paley's fascinating animated/musical/essay film Sita Sings the Blues is also something that I may revisit. The year's best film, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, will be a permanent addition to my DVD collection.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Orson Welles and ?
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
"Who is the new Orson Welles?" someone asked me after a recent screening of Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles (64 screens). Certainly Christian McKay does a superb Welles in that movie, and if anyone wanted to have an Orson Welles-style narrator on a documentary, or a Moby Dick-style cameo in a feature film, McKay's your man. But what about Welles the director? Those are much bigger shoes to fill. Linklater is arguably one of the best American directors working today, but he's very much the opposite of Welles in style; laid-back and loose as compared to Welles' more stylized compositions.
The Coen Brothers (A Serious Man, 152 screens) are as visually formal as Welles, but they lack Welles' showmanship. They prefer to remain mysterious and nerdy and behind the scenes. Werner Herzog (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, 96 screens) has a very vivid onscreen/offscreen personality like Welles, but is far more reckless and exploratory in his subject matter. John Woo (Red Cliff, 42 screens) has skill, but is a much more humble, gentle soul in life and much more violent onscreen. Lars von Trier (Antichrist, 13 screens) is equally canny at promoting his own legend, but it's arguable as to whether or not the films actually hold up.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Wild Things
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
It's not too much of a stretch to suggest that most awards-season movies are a bit on the safe side. They come from famous novels or are based on some very serious topic, and they usually come with lots of familiar stars or at least a respected director. Many of these films are good, but very few of them really go very far in breaking the rules or opening up new horizons. So let's remember some of the nuttier films from 2009 while we can, before they're forgotten in the Oscar rush.
Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are (235 screens) may not have been so wild, but you have to admit, it was a bit crazy to adapt a classic children's book into something not quite definable. I'm sure some parents took their kids to see it and perhaps some kids liked it, but it was decidedly not a children's film -- or at least not one with the familiar "kids movie" sights and sounds that we've come to expect. (Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox achieved roughly the same thing; what a great double-bill!)
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Based on a True Story
Filed under: Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
This week's column is based on a true story. Did I get your attention? Why is it that all the awards organizations love true stories so much? So many of this year's award contenders are based on true stories: Public Enemies, The Damned United, A Woman in Berlin, Julie and Julia (229 screens), Coco Before Chanel (145 screens), Amelia (1975 screens), Bright Star (25 screens) and even The Informant! (62 screens), as well as up-and-coming contenders like Invictus and The Young Victoria. And even if they're not specifically "true" stories, we have movies like The Last Station, about a real-life person, or movies like Brothers and The Messenger with torn-from-the-headlines plots.
It's getting so bad that, while watching it, I was even wondering whether Up in the Air was based on a true story. And certainly Precious seems based on a true story, even though it's very clearly "based on the novel PUSH by Sapphire." But why do we need this? Is it a cushion? What happens if we're exposed to pure imagination for a change? Would Star Trek have been better if it had been based a true story? What about Up? Could those balloons have really hauled that house halfway around the world? Probably not, but nobody questioned it for a second, and it doesn't matter.
400 Screens, 400 Blows - Doc Flock
Filed under: Documentary, Columns, 400 Screens, 400 Blows
Lately I have been looking at some of my year-end awards screeners, mainly the documentaries. My critics' group votes for the year's best documentary; we each vote for our top five and then vote again from the top five finalists. It's not easy to figure out this year's front-runner as of yet, and most of the contenders have been huge yawners. For several years in a row, the big award-winners have always been about war in some form, either WWII or the more recent wars in the Middle East. But this year I have detected grumblings of ennui from the other critics, an ennui that i started developing years ago. This year the favorites appear to be a bit more lighthearted in tone, as well as more local in theme. Rowdy movies like Anvil: The Story of Anvil, Capitalism: A Love Story (52 screens) and Food, Inc. (5 screens) for example have captured the hearts of my colleagues.
The Academy threw a monkey wrench in the works when they announced their shortlist of 15 films that they would be considering for Oscar nominations. Following their bizarre rules, it was an odd list; it included many titles that no one has seen, and it eliminated many of the favorites, including Tyson (prompting an interesting response from director James Toback), Good Hair (38 screens), The September Issue (13 screens), It Might Get Loud (11 screens), Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg (10 screens) and More Than a Game (46 screens). The list also eliminated a couple of my favorites, both lively and spirited: Kirby Dick's Outrage and Not Quite Hollywood, about the history of Australian exploitation cinema.
Tom Cruise and J.J. Abrams Reunite for 'Mission Impossible 4'
'Big Top Pee-Wee': The Original Benicio Del Toro Wolfman
Spin-ematical: New on DVD and Blu-ray for 2/9
Watch This: Brilliant Oscar-Nominated Short 'Logorama'
Chris Nolan to Lead 'Superman' Reboot!?
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