Three Colors: Blue - Kieslowski, 1993

If memory serves, I first watched Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Blue for the first time in 2005. Since then I’ve seen it three or four more times, and every time it feels like I’m encountering something rich, poetic, and thought-provoking. You can read some of my thoughts on Three Colors: Blue over at RELEVANT, where I’ve written about it for the Movies that Matter blog series. Click here to view the post.

The Gold Rush - Chaplin, 1925

I haven’t seen enough of Charlie Chaplin's movies to really claim I have a favorite--until last year, I’d only seen The Great Dictator--but on a lark, I watched The Gold Rush sometime last summer while in the middle of writing a review for Horrible Bosses. 

My feeling then was that while The Gold Rush wasn’t a laugh a minute, the laughs that are there are genuine and earned (can’t say the same for the movie I compared it to, though).

I’ve only come to enjoy it more since catching a 35mm screening of it at The Texas Theatre. For one thing, there was the simple joy of seeing an iconic figure like Chaplin on the big screen. Projected large in the dark, his shlumpy, bowler hat-wearing, penguin-waddling misfit felt almost mythic. I also had a greater appreciation, by the movie's end, for The Gold Rush as a drama instead of a comedy, which is closer to what it's identified as in the opening credits--a comedy-drama. A number of moments reverberate with a stirring sense of pathos, especially in those cabin scenes between The Tramp and Georgia (Georgia Hale), moments that were heightened by hearing Chaplin’s own score for the film in a newly orchestrated form. Compared to this version, the one I'd heard on Netflix was like something performed with a keyboard. But here the soundtrack included a full orchestra and the results were as gorgeous and pristine as the 35mm print itself.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy REVIEW

A common complaint running through some reviews of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is that it lacks coherence, or that it has too many subplots for its own good. But I have to confess that for me, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy would be a lesser film without these tangents. These small character moments are what make it the intelligent, character-driven spy tale that it is.

Gary Oldman stars as George Smiley, a former British intelligence officer who’s secretly brought back to root out a Soviet mole in the agency. Physically, there’s something tortoise-like about Smiley--whether it’s in the way he looks, with his curled upper lip and large-framed glasses, or the deliberateness of his movements and speech--but his mind is far from slow; he’s always keenly aware of his environment, alert to anything that doesn’t feel right, even if he can’t put his finger on why. The men Smiley’s been called in to investigate are an intimidating lot played by Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Ciarán Hinds, and David Dencik. They supply most of the film’s scowling, pensive looks, and their performances are nicely ominous, even if most of their scowls are no more than red herrings.

But such is the way Alfredson’s adaptation of John le Carré works. It’s a film that deals more in subtext, impressions, and atmosphere than in exposition and certainty. Every aspect, from its framing and lighting to production design, costumes, and music, hints at the portentous. You could call it a thriller I suppose, but it’s really more of a cut-and-dried mystery haunted by perpetual storm clouds. There aren’t any fancy gadgets or car chases here, and only a limited amount of sneaking around. Still, the overall effect of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is one of constant dread. It’s refusal to explain much of anything can result in some head-scratching, but it’s also the reason why it's able to move as nimbly as it does. To me, it seems that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is what more adult thrillers should be--intelligent, brisk but unhurried, and wary of what's overly familiar.

My Favorite Films of 2011

Because I'm not a full-time critic and (unfortunately) not part of any critics group, I don't have the kind of access to films that other critics have. I'm able to make it to a press screening from time to time, but living in Denton makes it much harder to do that on a regular basis, seeing as how they're all in Dallas, at least an hour's drive away.

Still, I did my best last year to see as much as I could, and as a result, I probably saw more new movies in 2011 than I ever have before. That doesn’t mean this list is authoritative in any way--these are simply the movies that captured my attention and imagination throughout the course of last year.

And now, the list (in alphabetical order):

Certified Copy

Of all the movies on this list, Certified Copy is the one I'm just getting to know. Directed by Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, it centers around one emotional afternoon shared between an antiques shop owner (Juliette Binoche) and a writer (William Shimell). At the film's start they appear to be strangers meeting for the first time, but by the end all our presuppositions about them will be called into question. Are they actually married, as the ending suggests, or merely playing out some elaborate game? Multiple viewings may (or may not) unlock the answer, but regardless, Certified Copy evokes a dreamlike feeling without relying on surreal imagery. Instead, its power is derived from the virtuosic performances of Binoche (who won the Best Actress prize at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival) and Shimell, as well as Kiarostami's painterly compositions. Certified Copy is realism at its dreamy best.

Drive

For a long time I resisted Drive, in part because of its over-the-top violence and also because the story sounded so generic. I mean, how many times do we need a movie about a heist gone wrong? Don’t they ever go right? But of course, the point of a genre picture isn't so much to break new ground but to break similar ground in a different and surprising way, and Drive certainly does that. It’s an homage to genre, to archetypes, and it has a distinctly eighties vibe. The result of all these things combined is, strangely enough, quite beautiful and surprisingly complex. It would seem that by pairing Drive down to only its absolute essentials, director Nicolas Winding Refn and screenwriter Hossein Amini have managed to create a genre pic more captivating, nuanced, and disturbing than it might at first appear. This was my surprise of the year.

Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen's latest movie--his 41st-- is gorgeous, both in the way it's photographed and in the melancholic way it taps into a familiar longing for “the other side” (as in “the grass is always greener on…”). Also refreshing was its more upbeat, optimistic tone, as compared to most of Woody Allen’s other films, which can be more than a little soul-crushing. The tradeoff is that it may be more quaintly charming than anything else, but where’s the crime in that? A good story well told is hard to come by, and Midnight in Paris scores higher than most on both points. 

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

I can’t say for sure that the fourth installment in the Mission Impossible franchise has replaced the first as my favorite, but I can at least say it’s in the same league. Brad Bird, who previously directed the excellent animated films The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille, proves to be just as capable with live-action (emphasis on the action), while Tom Cruise’s willingness to perform his own stunts lends every major set-piece an air of credibility that CGI just can’t top. Ghost Protocol doesn’t have the most inventive of plots, but it has more imagination and genuine excitement than nearly all of this year’s big-budget blockbusters combined.

Of Gods and Men

What I remember more than anything about Of Gods and Men is the stunned silence of the auditorium as the end credits began to roll, and the palpable sense that speaking or even moving would be disrespectful. It was as if everyone in the room had all been transported away from our little corner of the movie theater to someplace holy, mystical, mysterious. What Xavier Beauvois and his talented cast have wrought in Of Gods and Men is not just a moving work of art but a transcendent example of what can happen when religious faith is portrayed with dignity, humanity, and above all, when it's not used to preach but to explore essential aspects of a character (or in this case, characters). I wish more films had the courage to explore the territory Beauvois covers here.

You can read my full review here.

Poetry

I've only seen two films by Lee Chang-Dong (Secret Sunshine and Poetry), but in both cases I appreciate the unhurried and surprising ways they unfold. They don’t appear to follow any set pattern but instead meander like a shallow brook, resulting in intensely character-driven and often perplexing stories that leave you feeling like you’ve only just skimmed their surface. It’s rare that a movie makes me feel this way, and to have had such an experience twice within two weeks (both films are currently streaming on Netflix) is incredible. Poetry in particular has a kind of fragile quality about it, marking it as the work of an insightful, humane, and detail-oriented craftsman. From beginning to end, it’s obvious that Chang-Dong sees the world in a vastly different light than most of us do. For him, it’s coated in warm, golden sunlight, even as it’s bordered by shadow.

The Tree of Life 

I resisted the urge to rank my end-of-the-year list, but I have to confess that The Tree of Life is by far my favorite film of 2011. To me, nothing else comes close to matching its beauty, wonder, and imagination. I’ve yet to go back and watch it on Blu-Ray, but when I do I suspect I’ll discover details and nuances I didn’t see before. Roger Ebert called The Tree of Life a prayer when he first wrote about it for his blog, and I’m not sure there’s a better way of putting it, whether you're talking about its lush photography, meditative voiceovers, or the way it explores mankind’s relationship to God and the universe. The 20-minute creation sequence alone is one of the most awe-inspiring sequences I’ve ever seen on the big screen.

You can read my full review here.

The Trip

On paper, The Trip doesn’t sound like the most exciting of movies. After all, how much fun can it really be watching two well-to-do British comedians crack jokes at each others’ expense while enjoying one fine meal after another. Well, it turns out it’s pretty fun. Directed by Michael Winterbottom, The Trip stars Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as fictional versions of themselves. Of the two, Coogan fancies himself the more successful (not to mention more talented), but in moments when he’s alone we can see he’s clearly not as content with life as Brydon is. These quiet character moments, combined with the hilarious one-upmanship between The Trip’s stars, add depth and a sense of sadness to what could’ve been just a flimsy comedy.

War Horse

If War Horse comes across as overly sentimental, I think it’s for good reason. As others have already noted (including Jeffrey Overstreet in this great review), Spielberg’s latest epic is based on a children’s story, and, stylistically, pays homage to Hollywood’s Golden Age. But beyond both of these reasons, I think Spielberg needed to show us such exaggerated innocence because of what was to come. War is ugly, and though War Horse isn’t as graphic as Saving Private Ryan, it doesn’t shy away from the horrifying realities of combat. We’re still brought face-to-face with the mud, the damp cold, and yes, the battlefields littered with corpses. How would these moments have looked to us if Spielberg hadn’t first shown us such pure innocence at the beginning? Would Albert and Joey’s journey still be as meaningful as it becomes? War Horse may have its sentimental moments, but it’s difficult to feel the impact of the Fall if you’ve never experienced the Garden in the first place.

Win Win

A great story is one that teaches us something essential about life without relying on simplistic moral arguments or preaching. Preaching's easy, after all--it’s much harder to convey with grace and humanity all the various complexities that can make life so challenging. And to me, very few movies from 2011 did this better than Thomas McCarthy’s Win Win. Paul Giamatti plays the main character, Mike Flaherty, a man we can identify with and understand even as we recognize his mistakes. But instead of making Mike unlikeable or letting him off the hook, McCarthy nudges him towards growth the way a loving parent might or the way God himself might. Right now, The Descendants is the family drama that’s grabbing everyone’s attention, but it pales in comparison to the riches of Win Win.

 

Other notables films: The Adventures of Tintin, The Artist, Attack the Block, Contagion, The Descendants, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, Hugo, The Muppets, The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Shame, Source Code, Terri, Tuesday After Christmas, Weekend, Young Adult

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives REVIEW

Uncle Boonmee is as unencumbered by the trappings of narrative as anything I’ve ever seen, which admittedly isn’t much compared to others. Still, I doubt there are many movies that have done so little with a 100-minute runtime. Uncle Boonmee won the Palm d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival (the festival’s highest honor), and on one level it deserves it--it is gorgeously photographed and evokes a half-remembered-dream feeling--while on another it’s almost unforgivably glacial. I’m thinking in particular of how slowly the actors deliver their lines, as if they were all half-asleep themselves.

 The story, such as it is, concerns a man named Boonmee, who has recently had a kidney operation but will be dead by the movie’s end. On his way to the grave he encounters the ghost of his dead wife and his long-absent son, who looks a bit like a black-haired Chewbacca (mating with a monkey lady will do that I suppose). Together with Boonmee’s sister-in-law and nephew, they’ll reminisce about, well, whatever comes to them.

The movie has a sizable following but to me it all seems rather aimless. What, for instance, does the opening prologue involving an escaped water buffalo have to do with a later tangent in which a catfish seduces a princess (you read that right)? On their own they’re interesting, but what is writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul going for? As far as I can tell, he’s talking about the relationship between humans and nature, and the ways they can become messily, sometimes supernaturally, intertwined. That's is all well and good, but what about that connection? What about that messy, supernatural relationship? Beats me.

I’m not the kind to dismiss slow, artsy, foreign films--if anything they’re my favorite kind--but Uncle Boonmee was simply not for me.

Shame REVIEW

In Shame's opening sequence, in which director Steve McQueen and editor Sean Bobbitt introduce us to the everyday routine of a lonely sex addict, there's a moment where Michael Fassbender's face is out of focus, exaggerating the shadows under his eyes, the hollowness of his cheeks, the sharp angles of his jaw.

The symbolism is obvious--his character, Brandon Sullivan, is not quite among the living but not quite dead. He's trapped in a no-man's-land of compulsive behavior, never satisfied, always hungry.

In this particular scene he's eyeing a redhead on the subway, sizing her up, undressing her with his eyes. As for the redhead, she refuses to meet his eye at first, but then, still blushing, becomes bolder, not just meeting his stare but almost daring him with a coy smile. There's a ring on her finger, though, and soon a look of guilt crosses her face. She flees at the next stop, with Brandon following her but quickly loosing her in the crowd.

Is Brandon a willing predator, or a slave to something he can't control? In scenes like this, he seems to be fully conscious of what he's doing, but in others there's every indication that his addiction is legitimate. Sex to him is as necessary as three square meals a day--when it's time, it's time, and he's practiced enough to snare what he wants when he wants it.

The trade off is that Brandon doesn't have anything that you could remotely call a life. When he's not pursuing his lusts he's covering his tracks, keeping the sordid corners of his life hidden from view.

He's not a bad guy, after all. He is the type of suave gentleman who will hold the door open for you with a gracious smile. And unlike his obnoxious boss, he's not likely to hound a woman at a bar with pickup lines and obvious come-ons. His magnetic smile seems to naturally draw women to him, and when it doesn't, he has the money to pay for what he wants.

Still, his life is a solitary hell, devoid of love, and for whatever reason he wants nothing to do with the one woman who loves him and needs his love in return--his sister, Sissie (Carey Mulligan).

Sissie is damaged in her own right. "I love you, I love you, please!"she screams into her cellphone one night, as Brandon eavesdrops.To whom is she talking? He doesn't know and neither do we. All we know is that she doesn't have anywhere else to go, and so Brandon reluctantly agrees to let her sleep on his couch.

Reluctantly is being nice about it, though. He seems to genuinely hate Sissie, even as his eyes tear up one night while listening to her sing "New York, New York" in a swanky club. Whatever pain runs through their family runs so deep that neither feels the need to talk about it, though they obviously should. Sissie has scars on her arm and by the movie's end she'll have a few more. Brandon, meanwhile, will finally be brought to the brink, able to finally see himself as he really is--a broken man in need of something more than the empty sex and pornography he's filled his life with.

This is the second collaboration between McQueen and Fassbender. The first, Hunger, was the daring and austere story of a man's slow, agonizing death at the hands of a hunger strike. More than one critic has commented that Shame could just as easily have had the same title, and it's true, as Brandon's shame is more implied than overt, which is one of the movie's true negatives. McQueen and his co-screenwriter, Abi Morgan, may push Brandon towards his breaking point, but his journey would've been more powerful if there'd been a greater sense all along that he wanted to change but just couldn't find the strength.

Working against it, too, is the movie's emotional distance from its subject. This kind of distance can be exactly what's needed if what's on screen is sufficiently powerful enough. Such was the case with Hunger. In Shame, it's hard to escape the sense that we need just a little bit more. In the hands of a director like Terrence Malick, we would have been given Brandon's thoughts--his regrets, his longings, his inward cries for help. Instead we're left on our own to decipher the lines of Fassbender's face.

More often than not, his face is all we need. There are moments of such stillness, though, when Brandon's face is so eerily calm, that we can't be sure what's going on inside him. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything.

As a PS, I should mention that Shame is not easy to sit through. It's suitably unsexy, casting Brandon's life in a disgusting light, and the result is at times uncomfortable to watch. This, of course, makes Shame a hard movie to recommend outright. What saves it is its artfulness (the visual compositions are beautiful, as is the score by Harry Escott) and its moral center--which some critics have derided as too simplistically moralistic.

PPS: I don't typically say this, but Shame strikes me as movie crying out for a religious conversion. Brandon is so mired in the muck of his own depravity that I don't see how human willpower alone will do him any good.

Perhaps McQueen feels the same way. In the film's final scene, Brandon catches a glimpse of the same redhead from the movie's opening. She looks more assertive, more willing than before, even though that ring is still on her finger. Brandon, for his part, appears to be in great pain, torn between two sides of himself. If he was hungry before, he looks ravenous now, but not for sex--for grace. 

RELEVANT Magazine's Top 10 Films of 2011

My own top 10 list is still forthcoming, but a few of the picks that will end up on it made their way onto RELEVANT magazine's year-end list. You can read the feature, which I wrote, here.