A Year in Film

Quote: On Shame (2011)

2012-01-24T13:43:00.001-05:00

"'The occasion of shame [for example, when a woman feels defiled by a prurient male glance] is neither the thought of 'forbidden pleasure' nor the exposure of the sexual parts of the body.' Shame [...] is the embarrassment produced by a rather different kind of exposure; namely in this instance (of being made to blush by someone's prurient glance), by an exposure, both unwanted and unbidden, 'to the desirous thoughts of another who is not desired, and who compels, through his interest, the degrading perception of oneself as partner to an obscenity' (Scruton, 1986," as cited in Shweder, 2003, p. 1114).

Reference

Shweder, R. A. (2003). Toward a deep cultural psychology of shame. Social Research, 70(4), 1109–1130.

Announcement: The Oscar Nominations (2011)

2012-01-24T13:21:00.000-05:00

So, it happened: this morning(, while I wasn't even paying attention! - graduate school is obviously in focus,) the Oscar nominations were announced to some great inclusions (e.g., Demián Bichir and Gary Oldman in Best Actor, Janet McTeer in Best Supporting Actress, Woody Allen in Best Director) and other surprising ones (e.g., Rooney Mara in Best Actress). I've yet to peek at the full list - and, as I like to present them in as non-biased a casement as possible, I'll wait to peek until my nominees for the SpyGlasses Full are finalized soon - but I'm sure that there will be more inclusions of similar noteworthiness there, to be commented on at that later time.

Article: The Visual Effects of The Tree of Life

2012-01-23T08:37:00.001-05:00

Mekado Murphy of The New York Times presents a nice article on the visual effects of The Tree of Life (2011).

Review: War Horse

2012-01-02T11:22:00.001-05:00

Genre: Drama (Historical)

As a director, Steven Spielberg is a filmmaker by whose work, I can say surely, I am not infrequently offended. Never a filmmaker whose abilities for moving story-editing I doubt, he nevertheless abuses his abilities to a extent so consistent that I can't help but become viscerally charged by such adverse inclusions as that of the bookends in Saving Private Ryan (1998) and that of the core plot-point in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). However, notwithstanding these and other egregious indulgences into the maudlin - albethey timid in comparison with some of other directors like Clint Eastwood or Ron Howard - I have to say that by this film this year I was happily not brought to the breaking point by excessive sentimentality - of which, no doubt, there was much.

War Horse then is an able-bodied, if somewhat doe-eyed, film, charming for its technical achievements that are enthrallingly good though operantly imperfect. Janusz Kaminski's cinematography, for one, is gloriously moving and well-composed, though also more than occasionally clipping by its frame and supersaturated in its hues. Portraying succinctly the thrust of the tale as well as the beauty of its original story, Mr. Kaminski's images carry and compensate for the majority of the adaptation's flaws, most of which smack of incongruities of Mr. Hall's sassy realism (see Billy Elliot, 2001) with Mr. Curtis' overt saccharinity (see Love Actually, 2003). The images are helped, certainly, by Rick Carter and Lee Sandales' cooperative artistry, realizing the world of the story in details, sets, and stages, as well as by Mr. Williams' strong, if somewhat standard, original score, tinting that same world with vibrant emotional colors that hit the vast majority of the plot-points with an experienced hand's accuracy. Further supports are the visual and the audial effects by Ben Morris and Neil Corbould and by Richard Hymns, respectively; and, stitching everything together into a mostly coherent package - despite the intractability of certain elements (e.g., the goose) - Michael Kahn (see Saving Private Ryan, 1998) makes the narrative elements tight and strong. In these ways, War Horse is itself equine: a cherishable, steady, typically flawed vehicle for relaying a message or producing a result.

For this meta-level of technical achievement, the film may indeed be one of the year's best; however, the failure of Mr. Spielberg, namely, to be "an actors director" is enough to hamper the work from true achievement, as that of its decidedly folklore-rooted (see Black Beauty, 1994, or The Secret of Kells, 2009) ends. Though charming certainly, War Horse too often has only perfunctory humanity where it should have deep, almost anthropologically redolent lives.

Grade: B+/B

Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2012-01-01T13:28:00.001-05:00

Genre: Action

David Fincher as a director, we know, has a predilection for crafting subtly anarchical tales about curious people, living on the fringes of society either because of social isolation or behind it, (see Se7en, 1995; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, 2008; or The Social Network, 2010). It therefore came as no surprise to me, that he chose to helm this film, the second adaptation of the popular novel with the same title. Mr. Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is thus an agglomeration of the novel's elements that has been hand-smoothened into a black-toned ovoid with a polished veneer; the film takes the sinister-aspiring contrivances of the original plot into a streamlined vessel that is at once appealing yet imperfect.

The story's pacing is usually tight; however, it is especially packed with hearty content in the active portion of the film. For an action film, this shape is not surprising; however, for an action film by David Fincher the shape is surprising. It surprises, because it breaks the steady balance that he as a director seeks to create in all his compositions. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, as a result, is a curious departure from his past work, wherein methodical storytelling rather than expositive adventury ruled the day.

This break from past work is complemented but not masked by an insistent adherence to isolation as a motif throughout the narrative. Leading characters break from their societies, their regular modes of being, their principles, and even themselves in instances reinforced by lingeringly distant cameras and then images of images, all displacing the people involved in the work (i.e., all performers, director, and viewers) from their natural posts. It is this stylistic decision that does render some of the film's aesthetic appeal, that does give the ovoid film its thickly concentric layers, but it is moreover this decision that renders the storytelling obtuse and imprecise, that makes the connection with the heart of the matter a struggle against an ever rising tide rather than an artful challenge to be overcome. Unlike in The Social Network wherein the characterized isolates bond and rebond into telling compositions, in this film such telling bonding is limited, shunted into predictable tropes that actively stand against the director's best work (e.g., hastily abridged sex scenes [by whose edition one gets the sense of the director's being mired in his own puzzle], revelative murderous soliloquies), so that the abilities of the elements to develop a moving captivating picture are constricted and then only forced to fit.

Now, this critique is not to say that the action and the drama of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are horribly contrived, implausible, and anti-immersive or anti-engaging; no, rather, this critique is to say that the demands of this particular film's being told were apparently such that synchronizing rich and engaging storytelling became a challenge so great for the film creators, that they could feasibly produce only one (i.e., rich or engaging) and chose the latter for its visceral appeal. Such a choice is not wrong per se, and I would be hard pressed to ever say that choosing the other is necessarily better; however, I can say that making the choice, rather than emphasizing the difficulty, is divisive and ultimately deleterious to the product. The film cannot stand as a great work unless its shape and structure undergird with substance the attractive and well orchestrated tension on the surface. Mr. Fincher, judged on past work, does know this fact. He seems only to have strayed from it here, in this alluring but unsturdy piece.

Grade: B-

Poster: The Paperboy

2011-12-29T13:29:00.000-05:00

Review: The Artist

2011-12-29T12:39:00.000-05:00

Genre: Comedy

Writer and director Michel Hazanavicius presents polished work in his The Artist. Though his story and dramatic device are somewhat contrived (in a way that calls to mind the similar method of contrivance in The Reader [2008]), his ability to shape his narrative into a charming film, particularly one so dependent on nonverbal storytelling, is clear and strong. Jean Dujardin, as the eponymous character of the film, delivers through his director's ability a key performance, unlocking the depth and emotional resonance of the narrative that otherwise would have remained closed in the lesser acting of another. Beautiful make-up and, most important, an exemplary score round the portrait of a man in conflict with himself, to make a tale akin to the Beauty and the Beast tale in both content and effect. With greater depth only in the conflict itself could this self-assured, concerted film have improved on its comedic drama.

Grade: A-

Review: Young Adult

2011-12-26T23:15:00.001-05:00

Genre: Comedy

As Cate Blanchett so quippingly said playing the great Kate Hepburn, "Follow through is everything in golf, just like life. [Chuckles] Don't'ya find?" (The Aviator, 2004). Screenwriter and second-time collaborator with director Mr. Reitman, Ms. Cody should have paid closer heed to the line, one that she seemed to know so well in her earlier work for the screen (see Juno, 2007); for here, in Young Adult (an almost nonetheless enthralling adaptation of the popular version of the Snow White fairy tale, told in the cunning guile of a contemporary like Gregory Maguire [i.e., in the person of the traditional villain]), she loses the tight and controlled momentum that she sets barrelling toward inevitable splinters. True, the barrel does still reach a splintery end, but that end is far more a disintegration than a fraction: The rigor of the imposed endogenous drama loses its stiffness, sloshing back somewhat dilute into its glass instead of spraying forcedly over broken shards.

This type of restraint may be purposeful, indeed; the sacrificial lamb climbs onto its altar in fully willful ignorance of its own known demise. Yet, portraying such ignoble and blatant masochism, such quasi-psychotic self-administered anesthesia as what does happen to Ms. Theron's character, is a hard slip to let slide. Though unlike so many other scenarios in which the same criticism could be made, in this scenario the storyline nor its heroine becomes any less plausible than it or she had been previously. Rather, here the two lose their respective trajectories, meant to take them full arch (i.e., from preening Queen through haggard witch to ephemeral spirit, villainy vanquished). Shucking back into her isolated castle, content to shut out the world and self-caress in front of her magical mirror (however funhouse crazy), she swerves from effort and real growth and ceases her transformation cold, only to enable her regression to her original self. While arguably this path may be more "realistic" to both her character's true nature and people in general, can such post-modern realism manifest itself completely in a non-nihilistic way? If not, then - more pressingly - how can one critically evaluate the abandonment of classical tropes for nihilism: certainly not as the logical progression of the tale throughout the history of surrounding perceptions, but perhaps as the voguish overlay onto the conventional perception?

What more, then, do you have to say Ms. Cody than to throw your hands up at the state of certain parts of contemporary culture? Worse than suggesting that you no longer possess a stronger gift of storytelling than one could otherwise believe, you've suggested that you no longer see value in even wishing to attempt a recommendation of improvement. Do you believe that it's time for us all to throw in our towels and concede, or did you really have more to communicate that still went unsaid?

While Ms. Cody struggled to keep her rather brilliant first act vibrant and alert throughout the play's latter two acts, Ms. Theron and Mr. Reitman I must say were there contributing hugely to the cause. Mr. Reitman's distinct directive fingerprints are all over the symbols and the structure of the film, made all the smarter by his strict and consistent editorial choices. Mr. Theron then thrived within this constrained stylistic environment and found that her timing as well her ability to act facially only - an incredibly hard skill - can be extremely resolute under glass; she delivered a wonderful performance, embodying a difficult role (part Queen, part hag, part beauty, party beautician) with balance, strength, and control.

These impressive shows by the creative team as a whole made Young Adult the nearly quite enjoyable film that it was. Despite lost words (which one can hope were mistakenly retracted just this one time from a finished product by Ms. Cody), the film still remains one of the finest original works this year: No one else could surprise me with Snow White so plainly.

Grade: B+

Review: Shame

2011-12-23T18:25:00.002-05:00

Genre: Drama

Moving from visceral state (see Hunger, 2008) to self-conscious emotion, writer director Steve McQueen again deals us a blow through fortitudinous actor Mr. Fassbender, no stranger to A Year in Film (see the 2008 nominees for Best Actor here). Invoking parts of Mr. Bale's American Psycho (American Psycho, 2000) and of Mr. Wilson's baleful Mormon (Angels in America, 2003) and supplying a palpable tension of his own, Mr. Fassbender owns this film and is heartbreaking in it. His struggle is in turns arresting for its fealty and moving for its commonness, and it is the tension that results from these extremes, that allows him the strength to support the weighty material well.

Mr. McQueen's touch here seems a lot lighter than it was onto Hunger. Whether the change have derived from a complete confidence within one's actor now or from a sensitivity to the much greater proximity of the present material to its audience, the effect is understatement. Strings of minimalism run through the film, voiding color and connection unless when absolutely necessary. So reticulated a set of pieces, the film at times becomes formalistic, though never formulaic; it presses itself occasionally uncomfortably against the tight glass that it chooses as its container. This pressing is its only detractor. A loosening of the reigns, an allowance of penetration by the outside world, may have helped digest the isolation into devastation that Brandon, Mr. Fassbender's lead, experiences.

I give these comments with the greatest care, not sacrificing honesty, because I do admire the work - very much so. I only wish that it could have sustained the transcendence it did achieve, when the outside world was allowed inside in its climactic sequence of red and Goldberg.

Grade: B+

Review: Melancholia

2011-12-23T18:06:00.002-05:00

Genre: Drama

Playing the imploding black star at the epicenter of this operatic tale, Ms. Dunst moves with an ethereal solemnness and severity beautiful for its tranquility and disquieting for its tenor throughout Mr. von Trier's aptly named Melancholia, she a fragile disconnected form constantly pulling pulling on the other actors like a gaping mouth, certain of its prey's demise but not hurrying to achieve it. She is the veritable closing of day, the fading out of light from the world, and the sapping of all energy from nature. She is the terrible and wondrous, the physical and sublime, the corporeal and mythical, the fragrant and fragranceless; to drink from her cup is to touch tongues with ice that burns and never releases. She is intoxication born for naught but ending. She is complete, entire, perfect.

Into her it was the wisest choice for Mr. von Trier to invest the grave embryo of his idea, "a beautiful film about the end of the world" (http://www.melancholiathemovie.com). Her transcendent portrait of a woman broken and shattering at a snail's pace is captivating, and the characters that surround her in the film reflect and prod at her obsolescence with giddy unknowingness and plaint. Mr. von Trier was right then, to establish around her a solar system of planets self-absorbed and only weakly touching, playing a dangerous game with naïveté and ignorance, fixated all on the spit on which roasts plainly but hotly their would-be feast subtly poisoning them with every bite. Wagner's elegiac music completes the picture with god-fearing power in chords: the gathering predator in wait.

O, how slowly does she burn, how pressingly and how hard. The hyperphotographs of her and the cast and the setting and the sun and moon above the forest rain over the entire viewing. By the end your skin is soaked, your tongue inflamed, and your vision obliterated by the climax; solipsism never shone so brightly.

Grade: A

Review: Carnage

2011-12-23T17:22:00.000-05:00

Genre: Comedy

Alexandre Desplat's picaresque score opens Roman Polanski's newest work, an adaptation of a Tony-award winning play, Carnage with serious aplomb. The characters, like their staged predecessors, are the equivalents of pressure-cooked quarters: enslaved by the whimsical machinations of their offspring, constricted by the formalistic pretenses of their ideals, and driven by the hot-plate sears of constant application to aught else but themselves.

In successfully bottling this volatility within the fragile lens of the camera Mr. Polanski has succeeded; however, not only he but also his actors, who deliver fine performances all around, do honor to the original screenwriter's, Ms. Reza's, words and nuances. Of the four, Ms. Foster reads the most engaged; her performance is honestly the best work that I have seen from her in many years. She is the epitome of what the play means to tender: the raw-exposed figure beneath the slick veneer, one wild and untamed, frothing and bubbling even in moments of quietude and appealing to any emotion that may cross her path for relief from the intense selflessness that she must experience - must. She is simply beautiful to watch. Ms. Winslet, her second, is also startling good, shaking like the ice in her almost constantly held cocktail glass, while the men play supportive turns feeding the fire (and frequently being scalded by it too, though on them it shows less clearly). Truly, this ensemble is strong; and Mr. Polanski's success is in allowing its members the berths to do what they do best and in stepping in, to help conquer the limited space of the pressure-cooker, whenever necessary. In this task he is not, therefore, unlike the attendant cook, making sure the contents of his lidded pot do not blow over before they've finished being seared; though it sounds like a diminutive task, it from my perspective at least is surely not.

For all mentioned, even the tiniest misstep could set the whole thing asunder.

Grade: B

Reviews: The Descendants and The Ides of March

2011-12-23T16:58:00.001-05:00

It hasn't been since 2005, when George Clooney thrilled us both with his performance in Syriana and with his directing and producing of Good Night, and Good Luck, that Mr. Clooney has given us such a powerful double-feature. This year, when Mr. Clooney acts in Alexander Payne's The Descendants and directs and produces (and acts) in his own The Ides of March, he allows us to see the advanced yet fledgling auteur that he means himself to be.

The Descendants - Genre: Drama

In his own span since his even earlier previous feature, Alexander Payne too is maturing as an auteur. His focus shifts from his previous work Sideways (2004) to this new film, from the tribulations of finding romanticism in middle age to the tribulations of maintaining it into the future. His The Descendants is thus at once a loaded and valedictive film, simultaneously a paean to the absolute and dauntless sunshine of rich rich entanglement as a dirge for the opaque and fading glower of richesse lost. In short, his screenplay is a tender and personal story that is certainly one of the year's most explorative narratives penned.Yet, for this explorative nature, the film suffers for a lack of polish, or for the certain ruggedness onto which it holds much like its lead character, deftly quietly played by Mr. Clooney, holds onto his rustic garb and principled ways. The interweaving of the storyline tracing his family's legal embattlement at times ripples with artifice, while the pacing in general moves in flashes and starts. Most importantly, the tone of the film is as if its writer and director couldn't decide whether to wholly embrace its potentially comedic nature or to abandon it for pure earnestness; the dilute mixture that is the result of this ambiguity leaves one at a hazy distance from the action, when frames push or pull too far or too near to the characters in passion and when glimpses of the broader spectrum of the characters lives intercede piquedness (as it is wont to do) between otherwise consecutive moments of joviality.Yet, while not always perfect, the film nevertheless retains, much like its characters, the redolent romanticism of usefulness and usedness that make it charming; the well-worn treads of the minds of the characters in the film - with nary an exception - show what they intend to show: strife in nominal paradise.

Grade: B+

The Ides of March - Genre: Drama

Surpassing Mr Payne's work in artfulness and fluidity as well as in patent savoir-faire, Mr. Clooney's own The Ides of March is a classically assembled piece of solid drama. Impossible to mistake itself for anything else, the film strides confidently through its motions, which despite their best description are not idle procedures but rather living tableaux of tension within the political arena (both as it may appear inside and outside the bedroom). In this way Mr. Papamichael's cinematography operates coherently, displaying only the hard angles and half-lights that capture the tenor and the distress of the film's action.Filling this space, Mr. Gosling, Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Clooney himself, and Mr. Giamatti (a close cousin by Payne-association) deliver excellent performances that are both as tense as ivory teeth clenching down on steel and as troubled as towers of kelp, barely clinging with but few roots to the ocean floor. The current of the film tests their mettle by pulling and shuffling them, occasionally bound up in one another, and then sets them apart as if in clean observance of their differences for the audience even if the internal spectators inside the film cannot too witness them.Though perhaps a bit more systematic than Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), The Ides of March is nevertheless a strong presentation of the polished and cerebral work that Mr. Clooney favors doing. I only hope that it will be recognized for this strength by others than myself.

Grade: A-

Trailer: Jack the Giant Killer

2011-12-16T19:36:00.000-05:00

Interview: NYTimes' of Michael Fassbender

2011-10-18T08:55:00.000-04:00

Mr. Fassbender remarks to the NY Times on his character Brandon in the upcoming Shame, co-written and directed by Steve McQueen.

Trailer: God of Carnage

2011-08-22T07:53:00.000-04:00

Essay: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

2011-07-25T21:16:00.001-04:00

Ted Pigeon at The House Next Door (of Slant Magazine) has penned a wonderful short essay, exolling and exploring the virtues and the gloom of Alfonso Cuarón's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - by far the best film in the Potter series. Read the article here.

Review: Super 8

2011-06-12T00:07:00.055-04:00

Genre: Drama (Fairy Tale) / Sci-Fi

No doubt billed as one of the major blockbusters of this Summer, the Steven-Spielberg produced J. J. Abrams' film Super 8 nevertheless resists bearing such a "noble" mantle; to say that Super 8 was an attempt at recurring the past would be far more accurate an assessment of the film than to say that it busted any block or even single square of narrative storytelling. Dependent from the tropes that initially made Mr. Spielberg a commercial and personable success, the film by its film-makers fails to recognize that the manifestation of those tropes needs to be different now. The tropes, manifest originally among the technological and social conjunction of the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s, necessarily took on the popular characteristics of their sources; and, similarly, any manifestation now would need to become of the times. Social networks, plastics, even cell phones should be the devices turning this story's engine; resetting the clock to a time before all these elements and others is not just unchallenging story-telling but also niche nostalgia. To those few spectators whose childhood memories are synergistically stirred by the cliché '70s reprisals and industrial-aged futurism, the aesthetic and didactic consequences of the film may be comforting; but to the masses at large, they should just appear perpetuative of the thoughtless reshufflings of the deck that, highly stylized, now deal all forms of entertainment to gaping eyes. Needless then to say, a starving critical spectatorship fares no chance; quippy dialogue and a bit with a meta-medium are no sufficient stuffs for satisfying attraction. What could have been so much more distrusts itself to becoming so much less.

Grade: C+, simple simple sugar-tainment.

Review: The Tree of Life

2011-06-03T23:19:00.055-04:00

Genre: Drama

It's quite difficult for anyone to speak eloquently about such a simple topic as the one director and writer Terrence Malick approaches in his latest film, The Tree of Life: science v. religion; the argument makable there is plain, the story old, and the finer points mired in mud, dug up from each side's digging heels into the ground. So, Mr. Malick - either quite hopelessly or quite savvily - eschews speaking altogether; his writing places filamentary strings between points in time and space, bound then by shifting webbings that hang together with sap-like viscosity and flow equally heavily. Instead of a discourse through dialogue on the life-and-death nature of the debate, an emotional tide he rolls in and then pulls out and finally in again over the doings of a family bluntly divided themselves between "nature" and "grace." That this emotional, nostalgic, fanciful turning is effective is not really the undertow; that the narrative itself is emotional, nostalgic, and fanciful is. Mr. Malick's great exercise here is not that he's said anything new about the matter at hand, but rather that he's adapted his own personal style (see Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line), characterized best by the abstract camera and the hovering monologue, to the direction of saying the matter at hand novelly. Few feature-length films or filmmakers step so effusively outside of the bounds of typical, critical communication for the purpose of exploring the alternative colors of the spectrum that the medium film has to offer. Influences from Brakhage, Schlesinger (viz., Midnight Cowboy), and Kubrick are evident. For what he owns here, Mr. Malick is safe too; The Tree of Life, though practically a substantial project, does not make a substantial meal but has crenellated finery spelling throughout it.

Grade: A-/B+

Trailer: Sleeping Beauty (2011)

2011-04-14T21:49:00.000-04:00

Sleeping Beauty from Pollen Digital on Vimeo.

Trailer: Melancholia

2011-04-09T17:11:00.000-04:00

Melancholia from Zentropa on Vimeo.

Interview: Lindy Hemming on Topsy-Turvy (1999)

2011-03-24T13:34:00.000-04:00

The Criterion Current has just posted a great, short interview with Lindy Hemming, Oscar-winning costume-designer for Topsy-Turvy (1999), Mike Leigh's tremendous film about Gilbert and Sullivan's creation of The Mikado. The Collection is due to release both productions, The Mikado (1939) and Topsy-Turvy, on Blu-Ray and DVD this upcoming week.

The SpyGlasses Full (2010): Official Winners

2011-03-20T22:44:00.003-04:00

Best Live-Action Film (Feature-Length)

Animal Kingdom

Black Swan

Carlos

Madeo (Mother/Murder)

The Social Network

Best Director

Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan

Olivier Assayas, Carlos

David Fincher, The Social Network

David Michôd, Animal Kingdom

John Cameron Mitchell, Rabbit Hole

Best Actor

Jeff Bridges, True Grit

Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network

James Franco; Howl, 127 Hours

Édgar Ramírez, Carlos

Geoffrey Rush, The King's Speech

Best Actress

Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right

Nicole Kidman, Rabbit Hole

Hye-ja Kim, Madeo (Mother/Murder)

Natalie Portman, Black Swan

Michelle Williams, Blue Valentine

Best Supporting Actor

Christian Bale, The Fighter

Andrew Garfield, The Social Network

Tom Hardy, Inception

Kevin Kline, The Extra Man

Jeremy Renner, The Town

Best Supporting Actress

Helena Bonham Carter, The King's Speech

Barbara Hershey, Black Swan

Lesley Manville, Another Year

Sandra Oh, Rabbit Hole

Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom

Best Art Direction

David Graham Burt, Curt Beech, Keith P. Cunningham, & Victor J. Zolfo; The Social Network

Guy Hendrix Dyas, Larry Dias, & Doug Mowat; Inception

David Stein & Tora Peterson, Black Swan

Toy Story 3

Eve Stewart & Judy Farr; The King's Speech

Best Cinematography

Adam Arkapaw, Animal Kingdom

Roger Deakins, True Grit

Frank G. DeMarco, Rabbit Hole

Matthew Libatique, Black Swan

Andrij Parekh, Blue Valentine

Best Costuming

Colleen Atwood, Alice in Wonderland

Antonella Cannarozzi, Io Sono l'Amore (I Am Love)

Françoise Clavel, Carlos

Jeffrey Kurland, Inception

Amy Westcott, Black Swan

Best Make-Up

Rick Baker & Dave Elsey, The Wolfman

Judy Chin, Marjorie Durand, & Geordie Sheffer;Black Swan

Valli O'Reilly & Terry Baliel; Alice in Wonderland

Best Visual Effects

Richard Bain, Pete Bebb, Paul J. Franklin, & Rob Hodgson;Inception

Richard Bain & Frazer Churchill, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Dan Schrecker, Black Swan

Best Original Score

Alexandre Desplat, The Ghost Writer

Byeong-woo Lee, Madeo (Mother/Murder)

Clint Mansell, Black Swan

Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross, The Social Network

Hans Zimmer, Inception

Best Original Song

"I See the Light" by Alan Menken & Glenn Slater, Tangled

"Mother Knows Best" by Alan Menken & Glenn Slater, Tangled

"Threshold" by Beck, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Best Sound Editing

Richard King, Inception

Tom Myers & Michael Silvers, Toy Story 3

James Harrison, Ben Meechan, & Julian Slater; Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Skip Lievsay & Craig Berkey, True Grit

Larry Oatfield & Ren Klyce, The Social Network

Best Sound Mixing

Craig Henighan & Dominick Tavella, Black Swan

Skip Lievsay, Greg Orloff, & Craig Berkey; True Grit

Jeffrey Perkins & Gary Rizzo, Inception

David Parker & Michael Semanick, The Social Network

Best Editing

Luke Doolan, Animal Kingdom

Tom Fulford & Chris King, Exit through the Gift Shop

Ken Schretzmann & Lee Unkrich, Toy Story 3

Lee Smith, Inception

Andrew Weisblum, Black Swan

Best Screenplay (Original)

Michael Arndt, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, & Lee Unkrich; Toy Story 3

Olivier Assayas & Dan Franck, Carlos

Joon-ho Bong, Eun-kyo Park, & Wun-kyo Park; Madeo (Mother/Murder)

Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg, The Kids Are All Right

David Lindsay-Abaire, Rabbit Hole

Best Screenplay (Adapted)

Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, True Grit

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, Howl

Robert Harris & Roman Polanski, The Ghost Writer

Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, & John McLaughlin; Black Swan

Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network

Best Animated Film (Feature-Length)

How to Tame Your Dragon

L'Illusioniste (The Illusionist)

Toy Story 3
Best Animated Film (Short)

Teddy Newton, Day and Night

Jakob Schuh & Max Lang, The Gruffalo

Best Documentary Film (Feature-Length or Short)

The Art of the Steal

Exit through the Gift Shop

Gasland

Sweetgrass

Best Foreign-Language Film (Live Action or Animated, Feature-Length or Short)

Carlos

Kynodontas (Dogtooth)

Madeo (Mother/Murder)

Announcement: The Oscar Nominations (2010)

2011-01-25T09:07:00.000-05:00

All right, kids; let's keep this brief:

The (Major) Yeses:

James Franco, Actor in a Leading Role, 127 Hours;
Matthew Libatique, Cinematography, Black Swan;
Antonella Cannarozzi, Costume Design, Io Sono l'Amore (I Am Love);
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Original Score, The Social Network; and
Sylvain Chomet, Animated Feature, L'Illusioniste (The Illusionist).

The Nos:

the absence of Andrew Garfield, Actor in a Supporting Role, The Social Network;
Amy Adams, Actress in a Supporting Role, The Fighter;
the absence of Lesley Manville, Actress in a Supporting Role, Another Year;
David O'Russell, Directing, The Fighter; and
the general dearth of nomination-worthy Original Songs.

Not so horrible are you this year, Academy. For remonstrations nevertheless, stay tuned; nominations on my ticket are to be announced anon.

Note: On the SpyGlasses Full (2010)

2011-01-24T23:38:00.001-05:00

Dear readers,

Though I usually have completed my own nominations by the time the Academy rolls out its each year, this year in film - with the "big announcement" coming tomorrow morning - my scope of the work from 2010 is still unfortunately incomplete. As a result, I shall be announcing my nominations after the Academy's, after I have seen all the films that want to be seen from this past year. Alhough changes will no doubt be made to the specific details of my ballot, here at A Year in Film no (additive) change regarding any film already reviewed or officially considered will take place.

On the flip side for a change,
R.

Review: Another Year

2011-01-24T08:43:00.001-05:00

Genre: Drama

Director's, Mike Leigh's, newest film is truly, as its name implicates, a chronicle from a British perspective of contemporary life. Embodying class-based struggles in a steady gaze upon birth and death, marriage and separation, Another Year places itself within the conservatory's daily wisdom that marvels at the apparently swift passage of time simultaneously as it lingers listless amid the ticking minutes, hours, and days. A treatise on relevance and responsibility, the film is a clearly commanding work; yet it is also somehow one that adds nothing but a false documentarian's commentary to an otherwise quotidian narrative.
Perhaps this simplicity is Mr. Leigh's aim, you say: dispense with pretense and show only the studied reality - and to the writer/director's credit I, considering the sequence of his works until this one, must agree that this ascetic tone is a natural step in the progression away from social and historical contrivances and into unadorned anthropological observation. However, picking up the pieces from this free-form drama, Mr. Leigh as both writer and director does retain a dauntingly high level of complexity in reaching over the fence, from interpretive fiction into microcosmically didactic reproduction. Evidenced by the trying silences of the film's fourth act, this layered structural intricacy is itself the wonder of the film; so tight in its composition that one could easily overlook it, the bedrock of Another Year does admit Mr. Leigh's having pushed himself farther into new ground, albeit as flat and inexorable as the "digging holes" descriptor is to the character's (Tom's) infrastructure-engineering geology.
Forgiving us all our professions - including his himself's - Mr. Leigh abandons the director's chair for the pottery-maker's stool; and by his unlearning hands, upon cyclical smoothening, a true clay-pot emerges - one just for the perennials in the flowerbed underneath the sill, which do in certain aspects take on the beauty of the situation but which mainly form in their motley collection a reflective personal accomplishment for him who views them just every morning.

Grade: B+

Review: Blue Valentine

2011-01-17T10:54:00.000-05:00

Genre: Drama (Romance)

Derek Cianfrance's [depicted] long-time project Blue Valentine begins with the perfect delicacy of a film-master's pervasively hand-crafted, spell-binding work; purposefully interwoven leaves of a quiet interpersonal drama confidently unfold an elaborate, visually narrated yet somehow still eloquent history. Aided greatly by Andrij Parekh's intentional and compassionate cinematography, this history lifts its action gently but immediately upon inception from the tangible grounds of commonplace occurrences, into the conceptual ether of meditative reflections, emotions and impressions. However, despite the long-time during which Mr. Cianfrance developed his work, the film unfortunately founders, loses its ethereal lift, and fumbles suddenly unnatural to its environmental details part-way through, about when Michelle Williams' Cindy contemplates the future of her pregnancy. Then, the film just gets too confused within its own plot, recombining the mechanics of the story with the purposes meant to alight from them. Though remonstrances for conclusion manages to recover a bit of the levity deeply imbrued into the film's former half, by last-minute expressionistic details belonging to the circumstances of the ending, the vitality drained from the work by the preceding latter half has already diluted so much of its vibrancy, vitality, and color.
Luckily, Ms. Williams is consistently brilliant throughout, exercising her growing talents by her instinctive and quotidian reactions, fraught with powerful explicative contrails, to every minute's new situations; in the smallest changes, complementary with Mr. Parekh's magnificative cinematography, she creates one of her best characters. Her partner in the film, Mr. Gosling wobbles a bit more than she, he forgetting apparently from time to time the full sincerity of his character's motivations; nevertheless, he too delivers a performance great for the year. Aptly together they carry the weight of the film beautifully (for the film's own changing ponderations) and step really across the (still primarily smart) screenplay, written by Mr. Cianfrance, to a horizon at their story's end.

Grade: A-/B+, so promising unentirely fulfilled.

Review: The Fighter

2011-01-17T10:52:00.003-05:00

Genre: Drama

Director David O. Russell reduces this intense family-based drama, concerning the liberation of the disenfranchised, to a quaint and localized character-study in which his actors may stretch their technical fortes. Produced rightly to the utter distastefulness of the demimonde on view throughout the film, The Fighter features momentous performances by Christian Bale and technically Melissa Leo but really stops there in excellence. Fraught by awkward musical cues, a dulling recursion of dramatic tensing, and a somewhat thrustless climax, the film limits itself unwittingly, half pandering to the invested crowd.

Grade: B-.

Review: The King's Speech

2010-12-30T00:43:00.000-05:00

Genre: Drama (Historical)

Fodder for actors, Tom Hooper's The King's Speech is an emotional, careful, and noble nod to what has of late become regarded as traditional awards-worthy cinema. No great achievement, the film plots the aided and gradual triumph of an admirable underdog, circumscribed by glitzy and forceful personages of his age. At the center of his circle, under much technique, Colin Firth (last year a solid nominee to Best Actor in film) taps in for a fair par, adding another respectable if unriveting performance to his credible repertoire in the profession. His sparring partner and (in all senses) coach, Geoffrey Rush, plays more admirably and brings a great supersession of humor to his lines that, read by another less nimbly tongued actor, could have fallen much flatter. However, of the adult trio who headlines the banners, Helena Bonham Carter, as the king's wife, is alone extraordinary, imbuing delicacy, empathy, steadfastness, and real charm into every nuance of her time before the lens; rarely than here has she been better.
Following them - somewhat idly - are Mr. Desplat's tidy score, Ms. Stewart and co.'s regally appointed environments, and Ms. Beavan's costumes to match. Remarkable only otherwise the supporting turn of Guy Pearce, it should nevertheless agglomerate further accolades as the "awards' season" rolls on.

Grade: B, fine, good, yes.

Review: 127 Hours

2010-12-24T09:45:00.000-05:00

Genre: Drama

Actor James Franco flies mostly solo in this never boring new feature by director Danny Boyle, would read my review if I were a boring writer. Fortunately, I am not and shall spare you reader the humdrum descriptors. All that really need be said about Mr. Boyle's 127 Hours is that, the considerable talents of director and leading actor aside, the film lacks creative verve. Because starry memories and pellucid flashes are the somewhat gaudy, somewhat hackneyed vehicles by which the film chooses to escape from its literally confined physical circumstances, it distances itself from rather than approximates the superpresent features of psychical, social existence that it needs to self-sustain, that he the protagonist needs to self-sustain. Now, I am not saying that this type of vehicle by its very nature is inconducive of psychosocial commentary relative to earthly-physical narration; I only contest that the vehicle is so inconducive at odds with a copresent narrative device, precedent by its greater diegesis within the story. This device, the post-modern self-testament delivered directly to the camera's camera by the protagonist in vain self-catalogizing, constructs a distinctive atmosphere, unfriendly to an iconographically friendly idolizing in earnest. Iridescent, halo-like framings of ideas manifest in supernatural space contrast against unrepressedly forcedly grounded double-imaginings of their necessarily embodied originator combatively, not collaboratively. This contrast is the film's macro-schematic pothole.
Otherwise:

Grade: B, good active cinema.

Review: The Social Network

2010-12-24T00:52:00.001-05:00

Genre: Drama

As not only a cinephile whose eager anticipation led me to attend a local screening of this film as soon as it was possible but also an alumnus of Harvard College from the years directly in which this film is set, I too would have thought that responding in a post to this film would have been a more pressing matter on my blogging mind than it apparently has become; not only has it been months since the film was released and I first saw it in theaters, but has it also been pages and pages of text since the film was still just a fantastic trailer on YouTube. Joining in this prolix conversation amongst the film-critical world at this late a stage, I am nonetheless challenged, for I have in all the text that I have seen not read yet any critical thought of the film as dedicated or incisive as I would like to accomplish here, in my own writing. Globally, it seems, the film is exceedingly well-praised, now the star on top of so many reviewers end-of-year cine-appreciative trees - and so mote it be: A capable and rich fiction, penned by the lover of gun-slung dialogue Mr. Aaron Sorkin, David Fincher's The Social Network is not only a marked improvement on the director's previous film (the still somehow puzzling The Curious Case of Benjamin Button [2008]), but also truly one of the best films of the year. However, here - unlike so many of my fellow reviewers, critics, and otherwise aficionados of film - I will diverge from the itinerary of the film's strengths, to inspect more closely its weaknesses and detractings.
While The Social Network excels in score, production-design, acting, directing, writing, and editing, it lacks sorely in structure and impact, positioning itself idly astride the wobbly pillars contemporary culture and perennial drama - not to mention the oddly hesitant cinematography. That the film is at heart yet another betrayal play of the same catalogue as the story of Cain and Abel and Julius Caesar is painfully obvious; dissecting and reinterpreting the nuances of complex and at least initially contrafactory human relationships is now as much a signature of Mr. Sorkin's oeuvre, which includes The American President (1995) and A Few Good Men (1992), as are the legal environments in which these relationships tend to occur (see also The West Wing [1996-2002]). However, being so anchored in the gravitas of a centuries' old plot-line, the film as a work necessarily takes onto itself the onus of transcending rather than reiterating the markers of its story. (Compare here The Social Network with Il Gattopardo [The Leopard, 1963], Brokeback Mountain [2005], or Black Swan [2010].) That Mr. Sorkin and Mr. Fincher knew this provision in their project is also patently clear; embracing the fictive aspects of the true story on which the play is based at the expense of an adherent's quest for veracity forms a dramatic arc, complete with tight opening and closing, that is bent away from the natural flow of events in life. (Compare here The Social Network with Lady Sings the Blues [1972], The Aviator [2004], or Milk [2008].) Contending with the onus via dramaturgy, Fincher and Sorkin compose action only tangentially dedicated to the events from which they drew, really just a common framework through which to reënact the elements of a canonical play, and serve only the trappings of contemporary culture - however immediately grabbing these trappings may be - as the dressings à la novelty and philosophical expansion. The question for the viewer then becomes, Is the invocation of a current social phenomenon firm enough complementary grounding to stabilize the high standing of such a hybrid, bipedal creation like this film? For me at least, the answer is 'no'. Despite the hard work that evidently went into creating The Social Network, the telling of its tale is only, from start to finish, a resituating that - purposefully or not - repudiates transcending its mold by make (i. e., concomitant address of the philosophical implications of youth in power, of the evolving dynamics of men in relationships, or even of the manifestation of a second world in the internet) or measure (i. e., boundary-pushing exposure of an unexplored facet of the tale; cf. Brokeback Mountain [2004, see here]). Leaving such richness untouched, the film contents itself with simply being a well executed restaging of events endemic in our culture and, so, almost predictable by their nature; with simply having only a spread of celebrity as a calling card. Meaning to bestride the past and the present, the film wastes too much energy in reticulating splines.

Grade: A-.

P. S. Mr. Fincher, a little more experiential accuracy wouldn't have hurt. Exhibit A: It does not take that long to run to Kirkland from the Square....

Announcement: The Criterion March Releases!

2010-12-15T15:07:00.000-05:00

Just amazing! I cannot even begin to say for how long I have hoped that Criterion would release the gem that is Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy (1999), and to complement it with the simultaneous release of the equally lapidary The Mikado (1939) is inspired. Bravo for March!

Review: Black Swan

2010-12-05T23:29:00.000-05:00

Genre: Drama / Thriller / Fairy Tale

Director Darren Aronofsky pierces the sky with his latest feature, Black Swan. A true cinematic experience, the film is so well done that it literally left me physically shaken as I was leaving the theater. Indeed, I thought to myself, This level of work is why I turn time and again to the theaters, why essentially I gamble my ticket's fare each time I see a new show: the hope that, when the screen illuminates and shows its imagery, a thing of this greatness will be elucidated from the dark. Mr. Aronofsky, Ms. Portman, cinematographer Matthew Libatique, composer Clint Mansell, and all others involved are all in complete control and in fervid abandon; like the dancer herself, they breathe "perfect."

Grade: A+.

Announcement: The Criterion February Releases!

2010-11-16T23:50:00.001-05:00

OK, I just had to break back into the blogging world for a second, to issue some well-deserved thanks to The Criterion Collection for (finally) announcing its plans to release both Andrea Arnold's beautiful Fish Tank (2009) and Kore•eda Hirokazu's astounding 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking, 2008) - both award-winners here, at A Year in Film, last year. With Luchino Visconti's Senso (1954) and (the Blu-Ray image of) Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Double Life of Véronique (1991) also on this planned slate, I can't wait until February!

Trailer: Blue Valentine

2010-10-10T23:17:00.000-04:00

Via Yahoo! Movies:

Review: Inception

2010-07-18T14:30:00.001-04:00

Genre: Drama (Romance) / Action / Sci-Fi

Christopher Nolan's 2010 feature Inception bears the mark of the film-maker in its commitment to action, fervor, and tension in the narration but ultimately is a completely different type of film-work from that which the director has before given his audience. Though perhaps Inception is laced up front as a tight and intricate psychological construct proper, the underlying romantic cistern slowly swilling its defiantly nectary water verily belies this construct by supplanting its roots in the screenplay under those of the romance's own. And, if any should question this deep and most elemental romance, ballasting the entire work, one need look no further than the conclusive scenes for one's fait accompli answer: The narrative never mattered really, like the top spinning on its delicate axis the narrative was but the ballooned bell lathing itself over and over again on that axis in elegant yet beguiling design.

Mr. Nolan fortunately seems to be aware of this fact and does no unjustice to himself by trying to conceal it beneath casuistry or effrontery against the couple of lovers, played typically by Mr. DiCaprio and Ms. Cotillard; indeed, their abiding indulgence into one another is given its quite comfortable due even amidst the delicately engineered harry of the pinnacle sequence of the film - a sequence so well edited that it alone should stand for an end-of-year award, abashed be all its competitors. (Also particularly strong therein were Mr. Pfister's cinematography, especially in its capturing the suspended movements of Mr. Gordon Levitt in the set hotel, and Mr. Walsh's art direction and Mr. Kurland's costume-designs, which together never once faltered to the extent that I began to doubt in my mind the suspensive belief that each concentric sphere of simulated reality in the plot of the film would and could be for some characters, involved both inside and outside the screen, true.)

However, ultimately the romance that is the greatest part of the pitch on which this film rolls becomes the cliché that detains the film from fully escaping its otherwise impeccably (i. e., distantly) produced quality; savage cliffhangers that bluntly compel the viewer to question the finality of the narrative are adolescent filmmaking's stratagems, usually reserved by the studios for those films that have the potential to be or that already are set to become franchises/series, each part of which needs the springboard of its predecessor. And, like there was for Brazil (1985), I'm wondering, is this unclosed and potentially springboard ending the honest ending of the film or the studio's turgid recommendation for ultimate pizzazz? Only Mr. Nolan knows for sure, I suppose.

In any case, his screenplay was not without flaws outside this tacky ending. At the other end of the arc, the play suffers from the trouble that must plague every writer of an apud mundum alienum set film: How may I as a writer explain the premises and rules of my alien world to my audience as comprehensively yet unobtrusively as possible? In answer, a good and common tactic is to introduce as a necessary part of the cast a character who himself or herself is a novitiate into the alien world, so that by his or her learning its ways and wonders the audience may learn them too - and, in truth, Mr. Nolan does utilize this tactic well to a degree in his Inception, through the introduction and play of Ms. Page's character, the young and scrupulous architect Ariadne (obviously not unconsciously named in a nod to the A riadne of Classical myths). However, despite Ariadne's for the audience vicarious induction into the world of active dreaming that places Inception - or perhaps due to the relative lateness of this induction in the film's arc - Mr. Nolan troublingly still falters, opening the story with bald statements and declarations of the governing rules and principles of its dreaming-setting (assumedly lest his audience miss these core connections). These awkward declarations not only make for bad screenwriting in a general sense, but also undermine the credibility of his characters as permanent and enduring figures, familiar with the worlds in which they operate as they are familiar to each other, and - moreover - the credibility of a guiding premise of this particular screenplay itself: the premise that it is unimportant to the experiencer the means or method by which he or she has arrived at where and when he or she is here and now, that it is important to the experiencer only that where and when he or she is here and now is here and now and that a plot may from here and now continue un-broken or un-upset into the future. In short, by breaking the screenwriter's fourth wall and explicitly telling the audience the rules of his game, Mr. Nolan is not only giving in to sloppy and weak film-making but also and moreover letting go especially sloppy and weak this-film--making, because this film of all films relies on and takes pride in jettisoning out its characters into forays entirely en train de mise-en-scène. Straying from this premise, even if for the audience's confidence, is a high inconsistency in the crafting of this film.

Yet, this inconsistency is not the only inconsistency in the film's crafting. Another almost equally prominent inconsistency is visual, in that the mise-en-scène particularly in the dream scenes is oftentimes incoherently rigid: literal and physical. The film-makers, Mr. Nolan and Mr. Pfister primary here among them, seem strainingly unwilling to diverge from their ties of the conventions of filmic story-telling and indulge themselves - as they could have and should have - into the techniques and trappings of fantasy (i. e., by bending the realities of their images as they have bent and do bend the realities of those images' worlds). Indeed, aside from the few still physical (i. e., optical) special effects that the film carries, the film - excluding its pinnacle sequence's managing the zero-gravity environment - is almost entirely devoid of any permutation, quavering, or bending that one may expect from a film immersed in dream-fluid. Inception is radically different from your previous works (e. g., The Dark Knight, 2008; The Prestige, 2005; Memento, 2000), Mr. Pfister; it is not of a world tied down and limited by real physics. It was therefore disappointing for me to see you and your director so seldom treat it as such an exception; content-based distortions of reality were not enough; optical distensions and exaggerations, as most incipiently was captured by your slowed imaging of Mr. DiCaprio's early emergence from the water in the bath-tub (, could have added so much to your work.

One final critique, sirs: I was often worried throughout my viewing of the film by the degree to which Mr. Nolan let Mr. Zimmer's thumping score inflate the emotions that his other director's tools (e. g., actors, cameras, words, backgrounds) were there to convey. While I have to be hesitant in my making of this point since I have not seen Inception without its score, I nevertheless feel compelled to cite the director for leaning so heavily on his composer's emotional pounding to do the legwork in communication - for there was little indication that I would have felt as strongly the emotion of the action before me, if there had been no musical enhancements, as I did because there were. At its heart, this dearth of indication is pausing at best in my appreciation of the already evident abilities of the film-makers to perform well behind the lens.

The bottom line for Inception, then, is not that I disliked the work but that I - I believe, rightly - could have liked the work much more. Were it not for the limitations of creative vision that I have identified to be hampering the thorough coherence of the film, I believe, the film could have been an extraordinary addition to the medium's canon. The aptest quote of which I can think to succinctly summarize this jostled appreciation is Cate Blanchett's from Mr. Scorcese's The Aviator (2004), in which Mr. DiCaprio also starred (though to greater success): "You're not extending enough on your follow-through. Follow-through is everything in golf, just like life. Don't'cha find?"

Grade: B+, only partially realized.

P. S. Though I accept the persistence of the usage of the basic tropes of understanding that were excerpted in the 1950s from the "everyman's handbook of psychology" in today's film-making, I have to ask, why are these tropes and their usage still so persistent in today's art? I mean, doesn't anyone read the new psychology today? Ahem, Mr. DiCaprio (Shutter Island), why?

Review: The Kids Are All Right

2010-07-18T10:46:00.000-04:00

Genre: Comedy

Let me write plainly here, lest I misstate my primary conviction about directress' Lisa Cholodenko's rompous The Kids Are All Right: Ms. Bening is flawless. Yes, you read that adjective correctly: flawless. Rare be it the time that I bestow upon an actor from my lofty perch of this tiny blog an encomium so whole that I must use terms conveying perfection, now is such a time. Behold, all who may still have a lingering doubt about the aptitude and strength of this actress who has delivered stellar performances before (e. g., in American Beauty, 1999), the testament to an undying magnitude that confirms her as one of the greatest in her profession who is still professing. Truly, I have never seen Ms. Bening better, more confident and fuller in her actions and emotions, than I have seen her here, in this charmingly cool and moderne Summer film.

Now, what else is there to say about it.... Ms. Moore, playing Ms. Bening's spouse in the film, was wonderful for the most part as is normal for her, though for the rest of her part she did seem to be fumbling a bit with her character's coherence and thus upsetting the rhythm of her words and actions. Nevertheless, overall she was in control. Completing the adult trio, Mr. Ruffalo held his own against the women by playing his rollicking and somewhat desultory sperm-donor character loosely, jangly, and somewhat stuntedly - as were apt for the type. However, he too seemed to teeter at times on the verge of uncertainty and there, in his attempts to keep his character constantly moving lest like a target it be sighted and pinned down, he loses a bit of the credibility that he as a figure should otherwise have had. The two younger actors, playing the two catalytic kids of the title and the plot, react assuredly to the frequently dilemmatic tensions, caused in large part by their relatively puerile parents; they were well cast.

Beyond the acting, the film did suffer a bit from tendentiously spotty direction by Ms. Cholodenko, who though the brilliant writer of this work seemed at times not to know how to best make her jewelry shine, if you will. For prime example, instead of letting the focus of the film reside outside Mr. Ruffalo's character and exclusively inside the four-membered family where the final scenes reveal the heart of the film is, she voyages out, at times bringing Mr. Ruffalo's character to the center of the narrative and thus extending to that character a degree of empathy and provision that belies a later absolute dismission of him from the party. While one may argue, as does the family, so does the film; but such an argument fails to capture the perspective of the camera, which only once crosses the barrier, from third-person external to first-person omniscient in its plot-narration, and so such an argument lacks a consistent thread of support under the entirety of the production of the film to an extent that denies its plausibility.

Still, The Kids Are All Right but for these tepidly remarkable foils leaves the audience a bit richer than it found it initially. The writing, as I've already said, is concise and fun and the costumes were quite cool. And need I say any more about Ms. Bening's leading performance?

Grade: A-/B+, great Summer fare.

Trailer: The Social Network

2010-07-16T13:49:00.003-04:00

Like.

Review: The Extra Man

2010-06-27T23:27:00.006-04:00

Shortly after piquedly posting the trailer to the absurdist comedy The Extra Man on this blog this evening, I eagerly took the opportunity to watch the film itself On Demand - a great service to impulses and sales. While endeared - no doubt - to the film's quaint characters, who much more closely resemble caricatures (perhaps allegorical) than just characters alone, I became moreover disappointed by the film as a work whole, while I sat watching it, and was often befuddled often by the circuitous and tangential routes that the awfully patchy quilt of a film agglomeratively assembled. The protagonist, a rightly "milquetoast" waif of a twenty-something played tremorously by Mr. Paul Dano, was a feeble device, sillily pushed along into his zany situations by the pen of a hypothetical writer - that is, a screenwriter who apparently rather enjoys stitching together fumbling little ecosystems of humanity into a collage of the uncertain and the disenfranchised: A boy in the position of a man takes on the nagging inklings of a woman while he is residing with an underclass gigolo in a seedy Manhattan apartment for which this boy pays by trading his days for 'green' points to the devotion of a leafy and over-dramatic "activist" who would rather seek approval from her boyfriend than redirect her passions to the cliché-pasttimes that she does espouse, like guitar-based solo songwriting, guilt-promoting animal-activism, and indirect external flirtationism. (How does one make that tagline stick any shorter?) Did I mention that John C. Reilly plays a woolly chronic-masturbator who speaks in an abnormally high register but sings waltzes in a perfect tenor? Indeed, though more often than not the absurdist humor in The Extra Man worked, The Extra Man itself failed to hit a high comedic mark.
Such a review is short change perhaps of an otherwise decently delightful film, corner-stoned by the handsome performance by Mr. Kevin Kline, who does that for which he may be best known and earns again plaudits for doing it. Truly he has not been as good, in many years. Ms. Katie Holmes, however, a long way from her Pieces of April (2003) days, makes for an eery counterpoint in her vaguely transparent restoration of the ingénue's role: a poppy, over-lifted, and bewildering counter-culture-ette named (plainly) Mary. Limp between these distracting extremes, Mr. Dano supports himself until the script's all-too-nice yet still incomplete closure: rice at a wedding.

Grade: C+, a bon homme fine for a night on the town, when you can sneak in a little bubbly to springboard the evening. (With this film On Demand, doing so shouldn't be a problem.)

Trailer: The Extra Man

2010-06-27T19:55:00.001-04:00

I actually laughed aloud. Kevin Kline looks brilliant. I'm fully ready. Go: .

Cover Art: Videodrome Blu-Ray

2010-06-23T09:16:00.008-04:00

It looks like Amazon may even be getting previews of the cover art for, in addition to the to-be-released Criterion titles themselves ahead of the Collection's own official announce-and-release schedule. David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983), which has not yet even been officially announced as a scheduled release in its Amazon-proposed Blu-Ray format by the Collection, now has a modified version of its cover art (right) decorating the proposed Blu-Ray release on Amazon's product-page for the title. Though this art is not radically novel relative to the cover art that is currently decorating the DVD release of the title from Criterion, the art is definitely new, with shifted director's text, added spine information and coloring, added Criterion logo (at top left), and added circular Criterion--Blu-Ray certification (at bottom right). Though this novelty by no means makes it certain that this (proposed) version of the cover art for the title will be the cover art for the title in official Blu-Ray release - if such a release will even be at all(!) - it's interesting to speculate that this art may be the art, as far as Amazon has been correct in lucidly prognosticating the unannounced releases by The Criterion Collection for the rest of this year in film. To see these prognostications realized by our own eyes, we can only wait, for what the coming months' official-release scheduled announcements have in store. Huzzah!

Review: Nowhere Boy

2010-06-21T12:25:00.001-04:00

Genre: Drama / Biopic

Last year's Orange-British-Academy-Film-Awards nomin ated reinvention of the musically formative years of rock-icon John Lennon stirs up a lot of perhaps inspirational angst within and amongst its characters, as it now reaches States' side, yet it remains restrained enough to not tizzy itself completely beyond balance - a British virtue almost certainly.

In fact, most stabilizing of the film are its central performances, particularly those two (also nominated) by the supporting women in John's life: his absent mother, played with aplomb by Anne-Marie Duff, and his overly present aunt, played with tenderness by Kristin Scott Thomas. In terms of structure within the history of adolescent tales, these two women serve as the traditional feminine bookends: the permissive and the dismissive maternal figures respectively, whom a literate anthropologist may assign to the respective pleas and plights of developing children, attempting to reconcile their myriad with their limitations. In terms of between-spectator-and-spectacle interaction, these women serve as tacks, primarily by means of which the viewer may access the emotional contusions of John's particular coming-of-age tale. Subtly infecting this delicate balance between permission and dismission, affect and effect, is the uneven-handedness in the salience with which each of these women's roles in the film is portrayed in relation to the other's: While the novel daring of Ms. Duff's Julia Lennon is rejoiced even rapturously in impression's depth and duration in John's portrayed life, the surveilling caution of Ms. Thomas' Mimi is deferred often discourteously in impression's depth and duration in the same portrait. The effect of this imbalance is, yes, a more exciting film in the short run - exciting as small squirts of dopaminergic responses from indulging in fast food may be exciting - but, moreover, a plainly lopsided representation of John's key influences during his adolescence and in Ms. Duff's case an overrepresentation of the her character's. Though perhaps an honest depiction of the ratio of one to the other in this period of John's actual life, the audience the majority of which will not be so knowledgeable of his biography that they know this period's fully can not, without explicit appreciation of this fact, experience the full dramatic tension - indeed, the pivotal tension of this story - wrought by the motivational conflict between these two influential characters' personal quotidian philosophies. A balance more considerate of this fact than this imbalance in the film would have done wonders to improve it in spectral impact and impression - particularly in the long run.

Nevertheless, Nowhere Boy is a completely fine work that conveys the information that it wanted to convey about this particular period in John Lennon's adolescence. Actor Aaron Johnson, doing his female tutelaries fair justice in his own right, skillfully enough steers his protagonist through a minefield of potential hazards for maudlin clichés; does so with style, in and among costumes and sets of high order and craftsmanship; and walks away, having shed off most of the jeunesse that befell him early on. Directress Sam Taylor Wood hopefully in reality has done the same; we attend for her next film, to be sure.

Grade: B/B-.

Review: Howl

2010-06-20T23:22:00.000-04:00

Genre: Drama (Biography)

Directors' Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's biographical adaptation Howl, exploring the personal and social implications of the eponymous poem by Allen Ginsberg onto his life and his culture, is at its best a finely acted and illuminative exposition of the work, set to the tones and times in which it was written. Leading actor's James Franco's performance is expressive and facilitative of the narrative back- and front-story of the author's personal and intellectual life. Though necessarily constrained by the circumstances of his appearances, Mr. Franco delivers in subtle ways that make the audience appreciate the sincerity of his efforts as much as they may the dedicated insights into his character's poetry, which is used as the template structure for the entire piece. Delicate and colorful animations realize the lyrical verse in timed interludes between the ontological and manifestly lexical conversation of the retrospective Ginsberg, being interviewed alone in his cluttered New-York-City apartment by an almost entirely unseen and unheard interviewer, with the philosophical trial, assaying and assailing the title poem for its perhaps brusk honesty to its permissively libertine characters. Favored actors and actresses (e. g., Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker) dot the trial's landscape with their own rather individually neurotic plays on perspectival archetypes, better written in the screenplay than perhaps given credit here, and the sea of faces, ever present in the eye of the lens by these actors and actresses' appearances and by the appearances of those others who form the audiences at that trial and at Ginsberg's reading, reinforce the notion of inclusion that the poem, it is argued, proposes to make (both of its characters as cultural touchstones and of its readers as the culturally touched). Negative elements, detracting from these aforementioned positive, may only be the rather simplistic triangular device, used to apportion the film to the three primary plot-lines that advance and together complicate its theoretically simple (i. e., straightforward) story, and the rather stiff way in which Mr. John Hamm (of Mad Men celebrity) insisted on comporting his character, a lawyer but not an altogether unfeeling man. Still, these instances of misguidance or misdirection are rather indulgent criticisms for a film that is otherwise an accomplishment of its major aims. For all this merit, Howl deservedly receives

Grade: A-/B+.

Review: Io Sono l'Amore (I Am Love)

2010-06-18T23:39:00.003-04:00

Genre: Drama / Romance

In her review of director's Luca Guadagnino's Romantique Io Sono l'Amore (I Am Love), Manohla Dargis of the Times invokes the phrase, "it’s almost a surprise everyone isn’t wearing period costumes." In my review of the same film, I'd like to open by invoking the palpabilization of the turn-key of that phrase - that is, I open by invoking the appreciation that Io Sono l'Amore is for all its luxe beauty and imagery a period piece - albeit one that perhaps has not yet had its brass knob shon by history, but a period piece anyway.

Indeed, even as though the characters in the film revolve around its impressive interiors and flush exteriors, they exist only in their period, suspended far above the relatively quotidian boorishnesses of the contemporary public whose members are theirs and our common guests. In no instance in the film is this observation clearer than that instance in which Emma, played openly by Tilda Swinton, and Tancredi, her husband played by Pippo Delbonno, report to the tiny green and cloistered room, to receive the confirmation of their sons passionate demise, where outside lingers, disaffectedly low in his chair, a swarthy youth in loose denim, chalky white sneakers, and a rumpled headset. There, the confirming doctor shuts the door on the young man, the antithesis of the polished aristocrat who their son was, as if the rumpled common man, the labile background to their gilded and alchemical dramatizations.

However, expounding upon the status of the film as one of capsulization and explication nevertheless does not approach the certainty of a critique upon the work in it, nor an assessment of its strengths and weaknesses - its accomplishment of its clearly high ambition. No, to address these aspects of the work one must regard the opulence as setting, the dramatization as core, and the rumpled headset of a stint a fleeting hint of noise in an otherwise cream-like production. Yes, cream-like. Even creamy, were it not for the sloppy conception with which that term goes. Director Guadagnino seems unable in truth to resist dairy richness in crafting this piece; he samples breasts, desserts, clouds, puffs, lips, rounds, swirls, whorls, and - as Ms. Dargis also wrote it - "Tilda Swinton’s alabaster face" as if the sensuality of absorbing and preserving such living and lulling luxuries were as comforting to him as erotic. He urges the viewer to feel the same. Yet, while these urgings manifest in the forms of tight shots, wide arrays, sparkling diamonds, blurry sex, and an epic score, his almost cold remotion of himself and the viewer from all the interstitial moments among these swoons prevent the viewer's full entry into the rhythm of the passion and the drama as much as, I suspect, he was intended to do. Miscellaneous objects and extras block the frame and distract attention from the subjects; cinematographical clippings err badly here and there, lobbing off content almost willy-nilly; and frigid, practically deathly blues surprise and dismantle otherwise ecstatically wrought situations of fantasy. In fact, the dichotomy is so striking in terms of color-choice that the entire opening of the film, alternating from the wintry exteriors of December's snowy Milan to the flourishing interiors of the Recchi's decorous manse, suggests to a literal reader the passage of the family's arriving patriarch from outside to inside as much a phantasmagoric visitation as an invited one.

Yet, nevertheless, there is wonder here, and there is beauty. The baroque opulence that does decorate the characters and their surroundings compels a reading of those characters and their story as much a textural fabric as those that the Recchi family's business produces: smooth, cherished, woven, shapable, and occasionally velveteen. Sensually relentless, the film wends its way through loops and glides, extending caresses for food, gazes, and woozy tableaux along the way. To our the viewers' eyes, it is like watching the tailoring of a very fine suit from this fabric being expended: slight marks by chalk, a shuffing and smoothening, long slips of conformity, cutting, realigning, and finally sewing finitely with threads.

It is a beautiful suit. Hold it against your face, anyone, to imagine yourself being dressed by its decadent feeling; but put it on your self, only you, to fit its personalized couturier's style.

Grade: B.

Trailer: Somewhere (2010)

2010-06-17T21:01:00.002-04:00

Writer-directress', Sophia Coppola's, newest work Somewhere, to be released this year in film December, has a beautiful new trailer to whet every Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette fan's appetite. I particularly enjoy the trailer's treatment of Julian Casablancas' "I'll Try Anything Once", an alterna-rock rendition of The Strokes' (great) "You Only Live Once" (2005). Enjoy the audibles and the visuals via Apple's trailers' site: here(, though don't try to access the film's official site just yet as it seems to be incomplete despite the address' inclusion in the trailer's credits).

Announcement: The September Criterion Releases - and Amazon Is onto Something

2010-06-15T23:17:00.006-04:00

The Criterion Collection has just today announced its slated releases for September 2010, and with director's Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line (1998) making the list, it looks like Amazon is onto something, the online retailer having accurately forecast the recent title (among others) before its official today's announcement:

SEPTEMBER TITLES ANNOUNCED!

Two of the greatest—and most unusual—films about World War II are coming to Criterion, in Blu-ray and DVD editions: Terrence Malick’s staggering The Thin Red Line (right) and Nagisa Oshima’s bold POW drama Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, starring David Bowie. And you probably haven’t heard of Canadian director Allan King (called a “great artist” by Jean Renoir), but once you witness his amazing documentaries in Eclipse Series 24, you’ll never forget him. Plus: Blu-ray Breathless and Charade!

Let's see if the other forecast titles show up in October, November, and/or December!

Announcement: The August Criterion Releases - and More?!

2010-06-01T17:23:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago The Criterion Collection announced its future releasing of Crumb (1995) and Black Orpheus (1959) on Blu-Ray; Three Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg (1927-1928), Louie Bluie (1985), and L'Enfance Nue (1968) on DVD; in August and I atypically for myself neglected to relay their announcement by posting it here, at A Year in Film. Partially this neglect was due to my atypical business, partially my outsider's indifference to the majority of those titles - Black Orpheus excepted; however, neglect is neglect and I hereby aim to make up for it now.

Essentially, the heart of this post therefore lies not in the mere recapitulation of the names and links of those filmic titles that the Collection will be releasing in August, but rather in the related news that follows: It seems that, although no official announcements by the Collection have been made, future releases will include The Darjeeling Limited (2007), director's Wes Anderson's only live-action film not yet released by the Collection, which will presumably also include its complement Hotel Chevalier (2007) as a special feature; The Thin Red Line (1998); and Antichrist (2009), which was implicitly announced in April's edition of The Criterion Collection Newsletter and slated for a Fall release; as well as new HD transfers of Seven Samurai (1954) and Videodrome (1983). If you've followed any of the links to find out the source of this apparent news, you've already discovered that these additions to the Collection new from Amazon, the online retailer that has possibly let slip the forthcoming plans well ahead of the Collection's own schedule. Though of course these retail pages may be purely speculative and therefore should be understood with variability, they nevertheless make for exciting(!) prospects for the future months beyond August for Criterion. Yet, despite however exciting these potential releases may be, I still have to wonder, 'When is Still Walking (2009) being released?' Hm, Criterion? You promised....

Announcement: The July Criterion Releases!

2010-04-15T19:59:00.003-04:00

From the Collection's homepage:

In July, Criterion is dealing in pairs. First, a double feature from Ozu, whose moving early films The Only Son and There Was a Father are coming to home video for the first time. Then, a matched set from cinema’s preeminent twosome, Powell and Pressburger: the Technicolor dazzlers Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes, in Blu-ray and DVD editions. Add the breathtaking French drama The Secret of the Grain and the Eclipse series Presenting Sacha Guitry, and you’ve got quite a summer bounty.

Plus, check out this incisive, if brief, essay by Eric Kohn on the viewing experience of the more immediately upcoming Criterion release, Summer Hours.

Announcement: The Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film Honors Kore•eda Hirokazu

2010-04-09T19:42:00.000-04:00

So, this news is kind of old news but it's nevertheless fun news: The Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film, a film group based here in Boston like I am - at least for the time being - also chose to honor director Kore•eda Hirokazu as the Best Director of the Year in Film 2009 like I did. It's wonderful that this director and his stunning film are getting superlative recognition beyond the limits of this tiny tab in the universe, this my blog, A Year in Film. Congratulations, Mr. Kore•eda; exceptional work!

Trailers and Things: Wild Grass, Bluebeard, Spike Jonze, and Carey Mulligan

2010-03-27T23:30:00.000-04:00

Apple's always fun site featuring the latest upcoming-films' trailers has recently posted two trailers whose films are definitely on my list: The former, Les Herbes Folles (Wild Grass), premiered earlier last year at the Cannes Film Festival to great acclaim for its director, the prolific and enduring Alain Resnais, and the latter, Bluebeard, was featured last year on The Criterion Collection's blog, The Criterion Current, for its admirable synergy between story and storyteller (i. e., directress Catherine Breillat, whose interview with the Current is the central content of that posting). Watch both trailers here and here, respectively.

In other news, director Spike Jonze has released a short film I'm Here - A Love Story in an Absolut World online, at www.imheremovie.com. I watched the film earlier today and, while I had to admire the film for its skillful direction and innocent tenderness, I ultimately had to take pause at the extent to which the melancholy drama pushed its limits bordering on the preposterous and the maudlin. An entirely selfless and robotic protagonist, oppressed not only by his solitude but moreover by his society, is practically beyond credulity, not because he is robotic but rather because he is so entirely selfless hat he will literally surrender himself to his affections. Allegorical, yes, but saccharine too, the film seemed too bent on romanticizing what amounts to a destructive partnership and thus lacked a smooth cohesion with the softness and fluidity of its techniques.

Finally, in future film news, Carey Mulligan, winner of 2009's Best Actress SpyGlass Full, it has recently been announced, has been cast in the leading role in the upcoming Emma-Thompson(!) adaptation of My Fair Lady (1956), an adaptation itself of George Bernard Shaw's classic Pygmalion (1913). To earn the part, Ms. Mulligan surpassed both Natalie Portman and her former co-star Keira Knightley in consideration, reports say; here's to celebrating that the casting director(s) has(ve) made the right choice!

That's all for now. Reviews for a handful of current films are to come soon.

Announcement: The June Criterion Releases!

2010-03-15T20:44:00.002-04:00

From The Criterion Collection's homepage:

Directors from the world over will make June a truly eclectic month at Criterion. Get on track with Jim Jarmusch’s and Carol Reed’s Mystery Train and Night Train to Munich, an ode to Memphis and a spy thriller, respectively. Along the way, check out the much-anticipated release of Antonioni’s Red Desert [...], Kiarostami’s amazing Iranian fiction-doc Close-up, and Everlasting Moments, the lyrical latest from Swedish master Jan Troell. All this and Visconti’s divine The Leopard on Blu-ray disc!

From Bringing Up Baby (1938): "The leopard! David, THE LEOPARD!"
Cheers, Criterion. :)

Failer, Which Equals Fake plus Trailer

2010-03-12T09:56:00.005-05:00

Via AwardsDaily comes this rather hilarious 'failer' for what its producers think is sure to make its (presumedly non-existent) referent film an Academy-Award winner. Well done!

Aftermath: The Academy Awards for the Year 2009

2010-03-08T09:38:00.005-05:00

Well, it's happened: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) has committed yet another (see here) devastating assault on its own integrity, when it last night chose to present its statuettes designed to recognize "achievement" to several individuals all of whom achieved less than a cheese grater's end-product: cheese cheese and more cheese. Monumental self-immolations on the part of AMPAS like last night's statuette-presentations are, unfortunately, about par for the course nowadays; and so, while perpetually aggravating and embarrassing, such vulgar commissions nevertheless register now with a grotesque familiarity, much like a lactose-intolerant individual's familiar groan-inducing rumbling after having indulged quite deliriously in similar dairy-based products instead of having soberly abjured from them for the infinitely wiser choice of soy greens and Carey Mulligan.

The saddest effect of this self-devastation is that there now will be people who simply by the reputation of the indulger's prudent mask earnestly believe that Geoffrey Fletcher did adapt what became "the greatest achievement in screenwriting" in the year in film 2009, that Argentina did proffer what became "the greatest achievement in foreign-language film-making" in the year in film 2009, and - travesty of travesties - that Sandra Bullock did display what became "the greatest achievement in acting by a leading female" in the year in film 2009. How utterly misguided such people will be, duped by the mask of earlier years and more prudent statuette-presentations that seals the Academy in the minds and the hearts of such an adoring public ad perpetuum, away from any serious critique, any well-reasoned lambaste, and any plucky revile wherefore repeated demerits would not be shuffled under the carpet or else rebranded into "that high-shelf classic" that deserves its gathering devotees. And how the public willingly accepts such misguidance year after year, when the seriously deserving nominees (e. g., Kate Winslet, Peter O'Toole) must jump through hoops to even hope to receive what the likes of Ms. Bullock have received merely by having a hit smile, is beyond my comprehension.

How similarly would either group feel, I wonder, AMPAS or its duped devotees, if the Golden Raspberry Awards, also annually held, too presented its statuettes, designed to recognize utter lack of achievement, nationally publicly and on TV and too made it known that its counterpart statuette (for the least achievement in acting by a leading female in the year in film 2009) has been presented to none other than the woman very same? I shudder to think that they wouldn't even care:

The Oscar to the Razzie-winning actress this year, AMPAS? A new low? Well, OK, if you're sure....

The 11 Best Films of the Year in Film 2009

2010-03-07T10:08:00.006-05:00

OK, kids; now, when the 82nd Annual Academy Awards' ceremony with its goofy list of 10 Best Picture nominees is nearly upon us and after I've finished announcing the winners of my SpyGlasses Full, is it time for me to reveal my list of the 11 Best Films (see last year's list here) of this year in film 2009 (in order alphabetical; with grades):

歩いても歩いても (Still Walking), A
Avatar, A-
An Education, B+
The Hurt Locker, A-
Inglourious Basterds, A-
L'Heure d'Été (Summer Hours), B+
The Messenger, A-
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, B+
Un Prophète (A Prophet), B+
A Single Man, A-
Up in the Air, A-/B+

Congratulations to all the winners and here's to the year in film 2010!

Article: "Photopost: Lust, Caution [2007] and Mahjong"

2010-03-03T11:39:00.002-05:00

Colin Low at Against the Hype has recently posted an incredibly illuminative article about the games of mahjong played in director's, Ang Lee's, 2007 film 色, 戒 (Lust, Caution) - illuminative for those viewers of the film who are not already familiar with mahjong's rules of play. Essentially, Mr. Low describes how one critical game of mahjong in the film underwrites the action - both diegetic and non-diegetic - of the superficial plot; as Mak Tai Tai (artfully played by Tang Wei) finds her inlet into a seductive affair with Mr. Yi (played by Tony Leung), the mahjong tiles encode his complicity with her advances and the affair. Read Mr. Low's full piece at Against the Hype, here.

The SpyGlasses Full (2009): Official Winners

2010-02-28T11:42:00.020-05:00

Alright, kids; even though I still haven't yet had a chance to see Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles, the calendar dictates that the awards must be issued and so issued the awards will be. I think, I'll proceed into issuing them in the same way as how I did two years ago, when I announced their winners in daily installments for the week.

To begin then, I now announce the winners of the sonic and technical categories:

Best Sound Editing
Christopher Boyes & Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, Avatar
Jason George & Geoffrey G. Rubay, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Brent Burge & Chris Ward, District 9
Paul N. J. Ottosson, The Hurt Locker
Michael Silvers & Tom Myers, Up

Best Sound Mixing
Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson, and Tony Johnson; Avatar
Joe Barnett, Todd Beckett, & Mathew Waters; Crazy Heart
Michael Hedges & Gilbert Lake, District 9
Paul N. J. Ottosson & Ray Beckett, The Hurt Locker
Ren Klyce, Where the Wild Things Are

1 March 2010: Make-Up and Visual Effects
Best Make-Up
Barney Burman, Mindy Hall, & Joel Harlow; Star Trek
Leon von Solms, Sarah Rubano, & Joe Dunckley; District 9
Sarah Monzani, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Jean Ann Black & Fríða Aradóttir, A Serious Man
Kate Biscoe & Cydney Cornell, A Single Man

Best Visual Effects
Volker Engel & Marc Weigert, 2012
Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham, and Andrew R. Jones; Avatar
Dan Kaufman, Peter Muyzers, Robert Habros, and Matt Aitken; District 9

2 March 2010: Music - Original Score and Original Song
Best Original Score
Michael Galasso, Séraphine
Michael Giacchino, Up
Marvin Hamlisch, The Informant!
Rolfe Kent, Up in the Air
Abel Korzeniowski with Shigeru Umebayashi, A Single Man

Best Original Song
"Hideaway" by Karen O. & the Kids, Where the Wild Things Are
"Sirens of the Sea" by Bruno Coulais, Michele Mariana, and Bernard Paganotti; Coraline
"Up in the Air" by Kevin Renick, Up in the Air
"The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)" by Ryan Bingham and Joseph Henry 'T-Bone' Burnett, Crazy Heart
"You've Got Me Wrapped around Your Little Finger" by Beth Rowley & Ben Castle, An Education

3 March 2010: Writers - Original and Adapted Screenplays
Best Screenplay (Original)
Pedro Almodóvar, Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces)
Olivier Assayas, L'Heure d'Été (Summer Hours)
Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker
Kore•eda Hirokazu, 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

Best Screenplay (Adapted)
Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach, Fantastic Mr. Fox
Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, & Tony Roche; In the Loop
Neil Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell, District 9
Scott Cooper, Crazy Heart
Jason Reitman, Up in the Air

4 March 2010: Sets, Shirts, and Shots: Art Direction, Costuming, and Cinematography
Best Art Direction
Philip Ivey, District 9
Nelson Lowry, Fantastic Mr. Fox
Anastasia Masaro & Dave Warren, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Mark Ricker, Julie & Julia
David Wasco, Inglourious Basterds

Best Cinematography
Barry Ackroyd, The Hurt Locker
Greig Fraser, Bright Star
Robert Richardson, Inglourious Basterds
Robbie Ryan, Fish Tank
Yamasaki Yutaka, 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)

Best Costuming
Janet Patterson, Bright Star
Sandy Powell, The Young Victoria
Monique Prudhomme, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Anna B. Sheppard, Inglourious Basterds
Casey Storm, Where the Wild Things Are

5 March 2010: Editing and Animation
Best Editing
James Cameron, John Refoua, & Stephen Rivkin; Avatar
Julian Clarke, District 9
Chris Innis & Bob Murawski, The Hurt Locker
Kore•eda Hirokazu, 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)
Barney Pilling, An Education

Best Animated Film (Feature-Length)
Coraline
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Secret of Kells
Up

Best Animated Film (Short)
The Cat Piano
La Dama y la Muerte (The Lady and the Reaper)
French Roast
Partly Cloudy
Runaway

6 March 2010: The Actors
Best Actor
Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart
George Clooney, Up in the Air
Colin Firth, A Single Man
Tahar Rahim, Un Prophète (A Prophet)
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

Best Actress
Yolande Moreau, Séraphine
Carey Mulligan, An Education
Robin Wright Penn, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee
Saoirse Ronan, The Lovely Bones
Meryl Streep; It's Complicated, Julie & Julia

Best Supporting Actor
Robert Duvall; Crazy Heart, The Road
Michael Fassbender; Fish Tank, Inglourious Basterds
Woody Harrelson, The Messenger
Stanley Tucci; Julie & Julia, The Lovely Bones
Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Best Supporting Actress
Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air
Kiki Kirin, 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)
Julianne Moore, A Single Man
Rosamund Pike, An Education
Blanca Portillo, Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces)

7 March 2010: Director and the Live-Action Films
Best Live-Action Film (Feature-Length)
歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)
Avatar
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
The Messenger

Best Director
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker
James Cameron, Avatar
Kore•eda Hirokazu, 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)
Jason Reitman, Up in the Air
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

Best Documentary Film (Feature-Length or Short)
The Beaches of Agnès
The Cove
Food, Inc.

Best Foreign-Language Film (Live Action or Animated, Feature-Length or Short)
Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces)
歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)
L'Heure d'Été (Summer Hours)
Un Prophète (A Prophet)
Séraphine

Review: The Last Station

2010-02-17T15:13:00.003-05:00

Genre: Drama

I have to say, I wasn't quite sure of what I was expecting of this film when I was purchasing my tickets at the electronic kiosk this past weekend. I knew, of course, that two of its prominent actors, save the seemingly forever over-glanced Mr. McAvoy, had been nominated for the golden man in their respective categories; however, knowing also the rather shoddy choices that the people behind that man can and do often make (see here for starters), I didn't put too much stock in the promise of those nominations. Rather, I think, if I had been putting stock into any part of this film that may have been knowable before seeing it, I put it rather in the promise of the actors themselves, whose work I know in other films has been quite good (see The Queen [2006] and - duh - Captain von Trapp [The Sound of Music, 1965]).

Perhaps it was this expectation that led me to the distinct feeling of disappointment, creeping upon me like a puce liquid tide, briny and cold like salted Russian fish, while I sat watching the film. It wasn't exactly the performances per se that were so disappointing; no, rather it seemed to be settings of the performances that in comparison, like poor settings for decent precious stones, dulled and awkwardly exaggerated the nuanced features that went into each rôle. No doubt, in film studies, this bastardizing setting is aptly called the director and screenwriter, Mr. Michael Hoffman, who attempts to salinize an already sensationalized minor stop in history as if attempting to impregnate an old ovary that was scraped almost inadvertently from the bottom of a barrel.

Are these overly harsh words that I post onto this film? Perhaps; the work as a melodrama isn't really all that bad - Mr. McAvoy particularly stood out well to me and the art direction was certainly embellished enough. Still, watching an otherwise nearly endless repetition of hollow trades of ambition among rather unimpressive and relatively 2-dimensional characters was just winnowing on the eye and on the ear. I longed for the fully mature version of such tugs-of-war-like antics, for the great The Lion in Winter (1968), in place of what can best be comparatively characterized as the blind and utterly squashable pupa The Last Station.

So, Dame Mirren, Mr. Plummer, congratulations on your nominations this year; but let's try to really do something, more than just flaccor-redemptive work, in our next project, shall we?

Grade: C; meh.

P. S. Good lord, casting director Leo Davis, what ever possessed you to think that Paul Giamatti was in any way the right man for the rôle of Vladmir Chertkov? It's not that I know very much about Chertkov, but obviously obviously - yes, two "obviously" - a Mr. Giamatti he was not....

Quote: On the Animated Short Films (2009)

2010-02-15T10:54:00.003-05:00

Ed González of The House Next Door has recently posted his take on this year's Oscar-nominated films in the Animated Short category, a take which - despite its typing error(s) - more often than not accurately describes also my take on these 'quaint' short works. In particular:

"In the last few years, [the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences] has accorded spots in this category to quite a number of films fixated on death. [...] This year's The Lady and the Reaper [English title; hyperlink added; lays] on the sentiment thick in its early moments before devolving into a familiarly anarchic spectacle of opening and closing doors that poorly tips its hat to the infinitely more inspired work of Warner's Dadaïst impresario Chuck Jones.
"Infinitely worse, though, is Nicky Phelan and Darragh O'Connell's meaningless trifle Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty [hyperlink added], in which a bizarrely voiced granny inexplicably terrorizes her sexually ambiguous granddaughter with the banal bedtime story of a mean old fairy who damns a curvy lot of younger ones to death should they ever lay themselves to sleep.
"Bound to get more attention is Nicolas Scherkin's apocalyptic Logorama[hyperlink added;, ...] impressive insofar that the filmmakers incorporated over 2,000 logos into their story [yet still] crudely drawn, with its message - that we live in a world so saturated by media and advertising that it's only a matter of time [until such saturation] gets the better of us [...] - feeling easily and predictably delivered."

Though I don't conclude by sharing Mr. González' views on the deserving winner of this group of five films - especially in my own awards (see my nominations here), primarily because Aardman Studios' A Matter of Loaf and Death had qualified for nomination in this category last year (see here) - I did appreciate the accurate majority of his observations of these films, observations which were also fairly funny - idea(l)s of sexual conformity in appearance (e. g., "sexually ambiguous granddaughter") aside.

Announcement: The May Criterion Releases!

2010-02-12T17:27:00.004-05:00

From The Criterion Collection's homepage:

In May, Criterion will take viewers on wild rides—way out west, to the outback, to the darkest corners of the outlaw mind and the outermost regions of experimental film. There’s a Blu-ray and DVD bounty: John Ford’s seminal western Stagecoach, fully restored; Nicolas Roeg’s spellbinding Walkabout; Fritz Lang’s M, now high-def; the long awaited By Brakhage, Volume Two on DVD, and the definitive Brakhage Blu-ray collection. Plus, an Eclipse set of five of Nagisa Oshima’s most subversive films.

Excitment!

Interview: Quentin Tarantino

2010-02-12T10:35:00.004-05:00

Great(!) interview between Quentin Tarantino and Rachel Maddow, bubblingly exposing the historical allusions built within his 2009 film Inglourious Basterds and fantastically lodging that film within the historical spectrum of not only the actual events, the martial strategies, and the cinematic tendencies of World War II but also the same of the periods both before (e. g., Apache terrorism) and beyond (e. g., contemporary parallelism) - watch it here.

Quote: Jeremy Renner

2010-02-03T13:15:00.002-05:00

Via Awards Daily, Jeremy Renner comments in a pinch about what it really means to receive an Oscar-nomination: “A blazing stamp in the passport of an artist that can never be taken away and will always be cherished.”

Thoughts: Charlie Rose, 2 February 2010

2010-02-03T00:42:00.005-05:00

I'm sitting here, watching Charlie Rose discuss the Oscar nominations (announced this morning) with a panel of film critics, and I'm feeling compelled to post a thought that I'm having while doing so. I'm feeling compelled to post, namely, that it's ridiculous for the guest critic from Salon.com to try to sidestep her way around the racial issues at the very core of The Blind Side while giving a plot-synopsis of the film. I mean, I know race can be a delicate issue for some people, especially when it is dealt with in such a class-linked manner as it is in The Blind Side, but come on, lady: loose yourself of your petty, over-sensitive, race-averse spoken mantras and dig into it. Excerpting the racial elements from that film is like excerpting the cooking from Julie & Julia or, more comparably, the unemployment from Up in the Air; doing so is just flat-out embarrassing for you - or it should be. Are you that culturally oppressed? Can you not even confront an obvious and plot-essential trait of a story - that, yes, may be a tad socially awkward - in an intelligent and academically dispassionate way? If you can't, why why why are you a film-critic? and, moreover, how does someone (i. e., your editor at Salon.com) give you the official 'O. K.' to keep being one? Ugh, I'm so bored with you, it's painful. Go back to your cubicle and write about how Brokeback Mountain (2005) was a beautiful Western about camping ranchers and nothing else, or - better - about how Juno (2007) was a fun flick about teen angst and nothing else, or - best of all - about how Lolita (1962) was cerebral piece about unrequited affection and - yes, you guessed it - nothing else. Gosh, step up or stop commenting on art.

That's all.

Announcement: The Oscar Nominations

2010-02-02T08:55:00.006-05:00

Note: Due to an internet difficulty, my original posting (below) has been delayed from the time of its original submission.

Well, I suppose, it was to be expected; I mean, from the moment of its announcement one couldn't really enjoy the prospect of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) nominating 10 films, instead of the long-standing 5, for its Best Picture award without resigning oneself to the fact that there would be at least 1 film surprisingly included that would reek of the sheer maudlin mediocrity, predicability, and banality that have characterized some of this group's most characteristic flubs. This first time around, there is no doubt, that such a film is The Blind Side. (Precious was, sadly, not a film surprisingly included.) Now, I won't say that The Blind Side was truly abominable, just completely awful, F-grade cinema; but I will say that its quality was just about par with that of the other Bullock-featuring, AMPAS-nominated entry from 2005...{shudder}.

And, speaking of Bullock, let me say, "WHAT?!" I mean, she's relatively charming and all (as a person) and, I suppose, she did hit a lot of precursive awards - which mystified me too - but come on! How could you nominate her for Best Actress? and for The Blind Side?? I mean, even in her own bubble wherein she is her only competition, she was far better in 2009's The Proposal than she was in that ooky, racial drivel. Ugh, AMPAS has no self-respect, but then we sort of knew that already.

Other surprises include:

• Maggie Gyllenhaal making it in amongst the Supporting Actresses for her work in Crazy Heart, which was heartening a bit because she was worthy for it (as well as for her work in Away We Go) and because the nomination wasn't entirely expected but which was also disheartening more than a bit because it ostensibly ousted Julianne (Moore; see my nominees) from the category who, I believe, was doing some of her best work in A Single Man;

• Bruno Delbonnel making it in amongst the Cinematographers for his work on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which was quite overamped;

• Hans Zimmer and Buck Sanders & Marco Beltrami making it in amongst the Composers for their scores to Sherlock Holmes and The Hurt Locker respectively, which may not be all that surprising - given the relatively erratic track-record of the voting members of the Music branch of AMPAS;

• Reinhardt Wagner and Frank Thomas making it in amongst the Song-Writers for their song for Paris 36, which - oddly? - is a film that I don't think I've ever noticed before today;

• and the writers of (500) Days of Summer not making it in amongst the Original Screen-Writers, which is actually a good surprise as Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman are much more deserving nominees for their play The Messenger than the (500) duo ever was.

Sadly, however, Mr. Camon and Moverman apparently weren't deserving enough for their film to have preceded The Blind Side in the 'main event'. I'm still befuddled; I shake my head.

For more dirt on the many items that, I think, AMPAS got totally wrong, do a quick comparison-check of their list here with my list here.

Nominations: The SpyGlasses Full (2009)

2010-02-01T22:54:00.022-05:00

Huzzah; another year, another list: Below, please, find my official list of nominees for this year in film. Congratulations to all those who are so recognized, and thanks to all others who showed consideration-worthy work this year.

Small disclaimer: As I have not had the chance to see a handful of potentially nominable feature-length films (i. e., ~~Coco avant Chanel~~ [~~Coco before Chanel~~], ~~The Last Station~~, Me and Orson Welles, ~~Nine~~, ~~Un Prophète~~ [~~A Prophet~~], ~~The Secret of Kells~~, and ~~The White Ribbon~~), as well as a larger group of potentially nominable short films, future viewings of such films (before the actual awarding in each relevant category) may not be considered ineligible for effecting revisions of this list.

Best Live-Action Film (Feature-Length)

歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)

Avatar

The Hurt Locker

Inglourious Basterds

The Messenger

Best Director

Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker

James Cameron, Avatar

Kore•eda Hirokazu, 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)

Jason Reitman, Up in the Air

Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

Best Actor
Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart

George Clooney, Up in the Air

Colin Firth, A Single Man

Tahar Rahim, Un Prophète (A Prophet)

Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

Best Actress

Yolande Moreau, Séraphine

Carey Mulligan, An Education

Robin Wright Penn, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Saoirse Ronan, The Lovely Bones

Meryl Streep; It's Complicated, Julie & Julia

Best Supporting Actor
Robert Duvall; Crazy Heart, The Road

Michael Fassbender; Fish Tank, Inglourious Basterds

Woody Harrelson, The Messenger

Stanley Tucci; Julie & Julia, The Lovely Bones

Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds

Best Supporting Actress

Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air

Kiki Kirin, 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)

Julianne Moore, A Single Man

Rosamund Pike, An Education

Blanca Portillo, Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces)

Best Art Direction

Philip Ivey, District 9

Nelson Lowry, Fantastic Mr. Fox

Anastasia Masaro & Dave Warren, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Mark Ricker, Julie & Julia

David Wasco, Inglourious Basterds

Best Cinematography

Barry Ackroyd, The Hurt Locker

Greig Fraser, Bright Star

Robert Richardson, Inglourious Basterds

Robbie Ryan, Fish Tank

Yamasaki Yutaka, 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)

Best Costuming

Janet Patterson, Bright Star

Sandy Powell, The Young Victoria

Monique Prudhomme, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Anna B. Sheppard, Inglourious Basterds

Casey Storm, Where the Wild Things Are

Best Make-Up

Barney Burman, Mindy Hall, & Joel Harlow; Star Trek

Leon von Solms, Sarah Rubano, & Joe Dunckley; District 9

Sarah Monzani, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Jean Ann Black & Fríða Aradóttir, A Serious Man

Kate Biscoe & Cydney Cornell, A Single Man

Best Visual Effects
Volker Engel & Marc Weigert, 2012

Joe Letteri, Stephen Rosenbaum, Richard Baneham, and Andrew R. Jones; Avatar

Dan Kaufman, Peter Muyzers, Robert Habros, and Matt Aitken; District 9

Best Original Score

Michael Galasso, Séraphine

Michael Giacchino, Up

Marvin Hamlisch, The Informant!

Rolfe Kent, Up in the Air

Abel Korzeniowski with Shigeru Umebayashi, A Single Man

Best Original Song
"Hideaway" by Karen O. & the Kids, Where the Wild Things Are

"Sirens of the Sea" by Bruno Coulais, Michele Mariana, and Bernard Paganotti; Coraline

"Up in the Air" by Kevin Renick, Up in the Air

"The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)" by Ryan Bingham and Joseph Henry 'T-Bone' Burnett, Crazy Heart

"You've Got Me Wrapped around Your Little Finger" by Beth Rowley & Ben Castle, An Education

Best Sound Editing

Christopher Boyes & Gwendolyn Yates Whittle, Avatar

Jason George & Geoffrey G. Rubay, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Brent Burge & Chris Ward, District 9

Paul N. J. Ottosson, The Hurt Locker
Michael Silvers & Tom Myers, Up

Best Sound Mixing

Christopher Boyes, Gary Summers, Andy Nelson, and Tony Johnson; Avatar

Joe Barnett, Todd Beckett, & Mathew Waters; Crazy Heart

Michael Hedges & Gilbert Lake, District 9
Paul N. J. Ottosson & Ray Beckett, The Hurt Locker

Ren Klyce, Where the Wild Things Are

Best Editing

James Cameron, John Refoua, & Stephen Rivkin; Avatar

Julian Clarke, District 9

Chris Innis & Bob Murawski, The Hurt Locker

Kore•eda Hirokazu, 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)

Barney Pilling, An Education

Best Screenplay (Original)
Pedro Almodóvar, Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces)

Olivier Assayas, L'Heure d'Été (Summer Hours)

Mark Boal, The Hurt Locker

Kore•eda Hirokazu, 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)

Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds

Best Screenplay (Adapted)
Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach, Fantastic Mr. Fox

Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, & Tony Roche; In the Loop

Neil Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell, District 9

Scott Cooper, Crazy Heart

Jason Reitman, Up in the Air

Best Animated Film (Feature-Length)
Coraline

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Fantastic Mr. Fox

The Secret of Kells

Up

Best Animated Film (Short)
The Cat Piano

La Dama y la Muerte (The Lady and the Reaper)

French Roast

Partly Cloudy

Runaway

Best Live-Action Film (Short)

Best Documentary Film (Feature-Length or Short)
The Beaches of Agnès

The Cove

Food, Inc.

Best Foreign-Language Film (Live Action or Animated, Feature-Length or Short)

Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces)

歩いても歩いても (Still Walking)

L'Heure d'Été (Summer Hours)

Un Prophète (A Prophet)

Séraphine

Quote: On Screen-Writing (Avatar)

2010-01-30T10:27:00.003-05:00

Unlike my most recent post in which I recognize a quotation about screen-writing for its aptitude, in this post I aim to recognize another quotation about screen-writing for its ineptitude. That is, I ran across this quote earlier today, while I was trolling the hillocks of film-land, and I thought it ostensible enough to warrant reposting here:

I whacked Monsters and Aliens (US#4) and Avatar (US#38) for borrowing extensively from other films, but my problem was that the writers of those did not leave their thumbprints on them. In fairness to James Cameron—yes, that’s a line I never thought I’d write—my eight year-old grandson loved Avatar, because as he wisely pointed out when we discussed it, he had not seen all those movies it borrowed from and so it seemed fresh to him. (Tod Stempel, "Understanding Screenwriting #39", The House Next Door)

While on its surface the recognition that material so reprocessed - as James Cameron's Avatar (in written form) - will nevertheless be fresh and new to one who is unfamiliar with the originating source material sounds like a major revelation from a perspective jaded by its own past, at its core such a recognition is but an overexaggerated falsehood that equally substitutes one subjective perspective - albeit jaded - for another - albeit not yet jaded. In order to truly take an objective stance on this issue of novelty and quality, especially in the area where lives the screen-play of Avatar, one must sidestep locating oneself in anyone's particular, jaded or not yet jaded, subjective perspective and must instead locate oneself firmly in the only objective anhuman perspective that there is: that of history (and time). From such a perspective, that not only knows all events in the great canon of filmmaking in the 20th and 21st centuries but also knows all events in the compendium of human story-telling art of all time, it is obvious to see that it is impossible to declare the merely selectively subjective novelty of any work to be an apt or accurate measure of that work's true objective novelty or quality, as well as to see that any pretensions at doing so are severely (similarly) naïve. From such a perspective, it is obvious that to see such pretensions as otherwise is tantamount to declaring that any contemporary European emigré's first glimpse of America is as novel, exciting, and worthy of (historical) recognition as was Christopher Columbus' - or even the Vikings' for that matter. Clearly, any principle that inherently allows for such dramatic errors in judgement is one that is dramatically misguided as a whole. Thus, to say that Mr. Cameron's screenplay is anything but sadly derivative - even in consideration of those potential millions of people who never heard the 'Tale of Pocahontas' or one of its many many reiterations before seeing Avatar - is itself a dramatically misguided judgement. Perspective, Mr. Stempel (and others who would insouciantly espouse his above musing), please.

P. S. Otherwise, Mr. Stempel, your views on screen-writing, especially on the screen-plays of Broken Embraces and It's Complicated from this year, are quite informed.

On Cinematography This Year (2009)

2010-01-26T11:05:00.015-05:00

I believe, I'm going to make these posts (i. e., this and last year's) the first two editions of an annual early-year tradition: selecting my favorite still-frames from all the motion pictures that I have seen in the past year. Like most of my traditional lists (e. g., Most Eagerly Anticipated), this newly traditional list will have 10 items, plus one eleventh extra mostly for fun (see last year's #11, Oogway's transcendence from Kung Fu Panda [2008]); and, in a small effort to add a bit more content to this log, I'll explicate each item verily. So, without any further ado, I'll dig in:

Fish Tank by Robbie Ryan- In this beautifully shot British independent film, the natural light and the squarish framing create some tightly acute and illuminative images, completely coherent with the spirit of the piece, (e. g., the young protagonist Mia watching her mother dance in her underwear through the tiny squared portal into their kitchen, the newly caught fish puckering for its life on the sodden riverbankside); but the lead of these images is this #1 item, a fluid portrait of Mia, sitting in quiet consternation, from the beginning of the film.

Bright Star by Greig Fraser - With her able cinematographer Mr. Fraser, directress Jane Campion opens her film by pointing us to the Romantic sweeps of the pastoral hillsides, dotted by sheep and expertly costumed actors, in this image among others that aptly recall the landscape works of the then contemporary Dutch master-painters and set the stage for her dreamy historical tragedy.

A Single Man by Eduard Grau - Director's, Tom Ford's, début A Single Man contains a plethora of list-worthy images, from which I've selected this one to recognize his and his Mr. Grau's captivating work. This still, a reflected collage of Mr. Firth's Professor George Falconer's trimline briefcase and his young neighbor's turquoise shoes and skirt reflected by the earthy brown of the local bank's marble floor, was all the image that I needed to see, to make me interested in seeing the whole film - spectacular.

The Secret of Kells by Tomm Moore - The surprisingly stunning animated feature The Secret of Kells is the former of two films on this list that well exceeded my initial expectations of visual aptitude in the feature. Fittingly described by guest-blogger José at The Film Experience as a dazzling confluence of influences from all eras and media in art-history (see here, ¶ 6), this Irish animation, like Mr. Ford's début, offers many instances worthy of inclusion in this list; however, I have selected this most particular of those instances: that depicting young protagonist Brendan, combatting with the diamond-eyed snake-god that willfully blocks his success, in a nebulous and chalk-inspired dreamscape, where the beast and he both as here pictured mimic the tension inherent in a densely clustered neural network, vying for balance between desire and understanding - yes.

The Hurt Locker by Barry Ackroyd - In creating a list such as this one, one simply cannot ignore this signature image from directress', Kathryn Bigelow's, hot-topic The Hurt Locker. A succinct and fateful allegory for the inextricable puzzlement weighing down upon the men at the heart of her film, this image depicts her protagonist (played skillfully by Jeremy Renner) unearthing a literally explosive network of bombs from underneath the dusty and dry Iraqi soil.

The Messenger by Bobby Bukowski - Director's, Owen Moverman's, also surprisingly (visually) adept feature The Messenger was the latter surprise-feature of this year in film 2009 for me: Delicate, sensitive, honest, earnest, and entirely captivating, the film is a work of serious, gracious mettle. The image that I've selected from it depicts the quiet, ochre-stained removal of the film's protagonist from his world, both a world of feeling and of people; alone thereby in his sparsely decorated bedroom, he plays at disguising himself, even in the dark and solitude, while trim memories of his history figure awkwardly in the lamp-light.

歩いても歩いても (Still Walking) by Yamasaki Yutaka - Perhaps the most perspicacious film of the year 2009, Hirokazu Kore•eda 's 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking) richly observes the extremely delicate interpersonal threads, weaving together a rather disparate family on the anniversary day of a beloved family-member's past death. Though few images from the film recapitulate the natural breath-taking-ness that possesses many other images on this list, such that those other images can almost stand as stills on their own, this image from Mr. Kore•eda's film is certainly one that does achieve equivalent power, by sparing nothing and attending to everything: The image here at #6 depicts the altar, sustained for and ritually honored by the family of the deceased, where it stands deceptively as a superficial common-place fixture in the family's house, deceptively as a deep and literally and figuratively central pivot-point in all the family's emotional turns.

Antichrist by Anthony Dod Mantle - The images of Antichrist may to the rather cursory observer seem like the finely tuned vacuities of an eye, connected with hands in possession of lustily high-tech. gadgetry, through which there can be only the desire to exaggerate and have fun; time-lapsed, highly defined specters of misty etherea waft in and out in almost clinically exact extractions and colors hit saturation-points thick with sticky dyes. However, there is - or, at least, there attempts to be - beyond this cursory superficiality always a visual steam, like a fluid, guiding and shading and solving the fantastical figments and pigments that compose each scene; the images' intention resides behind the eye, connected with the hands in possession of the lens. In no still more than this still is that intention clearer, in which an exhausted She contracts fetally, pressed against the dry and fallow boards of the cabin at Eden and situated at the feet of 'The Three Beggars', who like spectral familiars both become tutelaries and yeomen of her lament, while the referential snowy window blows quietly in the back - captivating.

L'Heure d'Été (Summer Hours) by Eric Gautier - While perhaps not an architecturally formal film in its cinematography, the images of director's Olivier Assayais' contemplative work, much like the images of Kore•eda's 歩いても歩いても (Still Walking), communicate nevertheless deftly by including in coherent fashion the passing affections that its characters allot toward their fellow others as well as toward their artefactual surroundings. In perhaps the epitome of this style of passing depiction, this image, from the third act of the film, centers (in constant revolution) around a desk that had once been integral in life but since has been quite displaced - even from its accompanying chair - in the cold and artificial podium of museum, whose relics and reliquaries are dimly acknowledged by the touring hoards, featured at back from the back, in passing. At frame's left, a member of the coterie who knew the desk before its current state looks on, herself quite displaced, at the creation of artifact - bravo.

Inglourious Basterds by Robert Richardson - Half too structured, half too quick, Mr. Richardson's cinematography for Quentin Tarantino's spaghetti-Western vacillates between gorgeous absorptions of the stunningly executed sets and art-direction and gratuitous divulgements of the brass and comedic quippery that really sets this top of a film a-spinning. Though impossible to say whether either approach is exactly wrong or exactly right - really neither alone is, which is quite the point - the resultant images as a better whole did stay with me well past the first viewing. For that stickiness alone, the work deserves a place on this list, but all the more it receives such a place here for this #10 image of Marcel, Shosanna's Black lover confidant and accomplice, standing silently in the half-lit space behind the film-screen, where the eye of film trains on him - a deliriously reflexive and bountiful still.

Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces) by Rodrigo Prieto - Not an especially visually pleasing film, Los Abrazos Rotos, written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, nevertheless does have one image poignant enough to merit placement on this list, in whimsical slot #11: the temporally tense, essentially self-referential still of protagonist's Mateo's now aged hands vainly groping for the faintest wisp of textural revision the staticky frames of his last fleeting kiss with his muse and lover (Penélope Cruz), a kiss remembered now only by himself and by the film, two mutually exclusive eyes that hinge on the same image yet exist in radically different spheres. (While the addition of the wristwatch on Mateo's wrist does feel a bit heavy-handed,) the electricity of this shot cannot be dissuaded (by such hyperconscious details.)

Honorable Mention: Where the Wild Things Are by Lance Acord - Director's Spike Jonze's 2009 feature-adaptation of the controversially classic children's book of the same title certainly was a mixed bag of highs and lows for both myself and the general viewing audience. Whereas moments in the film to be loved were plentiful enough, the equally plenteous rest was also there, in sorry counterbalance. Nevertheless, cinematographer Lance Acord, when he did deliver those moments to be loved, delivered them in royal heaps, on top of which is in my opinion this #8 image (not shown) of protagonist's Max's visual exploration of his new friend's artistic masterpiece, a sculptural miniature of his world entire.

Quote: On Screen-Writing

2010-01-20T00:20:00.002-05:00

I ran across this quote earlier today, while I was trolling the hillocks of film-land, and I thought it smart enough to warrant reposting here:

Writing screenplays must be a bizarre practice, as if building a sturdy enough skeleton that will one day be able to sprout the efficient internal organs and developed musculature of great filmmaking and contain the throbbing heart and stunning facial features of great actors. (Nathaniel Rogers of The Film Experience, 19 January 2010)

Though I hesitate to fully share Mr. Roger's subsequent views on this year's screenplays, I admire his personal conception of the screenplay (as stated here) and admire his stated reasons for his subsequent views, despite my own personal opinions at variance to the contrary. In short, "throbbing heart" = apt description.

Announcement: The April Criterion Releases!

2010-01-15T22:26:00.005-05:00

Earlier today The Criterion Collection announced its April-expected inductions into its canon of film with the following post on its very own blog, The Criterion Current:

This April, the best classic and contemporary cinema keeps coming: Godard’s visually stunning New Wave masterwork Vivre sa vie; Sidney Lumet’s brilliant Tennessee Williams adaptation The Fugitive Kind (certainly overdue for a renaissance), starring Marlon Brando; Olivier Assayas’s Summer Hours, voted 2009’s best film in a poll of over 100 critics at indieWIRE; and the Civil War epic Ride with the Devil, now reconstructed to director Ang Lee’s original vision. Plus, Essential Art House, Volume V!

Bravo!

Essay: The Lady Vanishes (1938)

2010-01-13T14:14:00.002-05:00

Having just seen Alfred Hitchcock's early film The Lady Vanishes (1938) for the first time, I was struck by how spot-on a closure this great essay, linked to the film's page on The Criterion Collection's official site, was to this great film. Enjoy it too here.

Addendum: The Best of the Ones

2010-01-12T21:36:00.003-05:00

Of the many blog's lists of 'Bests' that I've read (mentioningly in my original post on the subject), the following two are a couple that I just couldn't keep myself from linking here for their incisive, clever, and simply fun takes on their included items, which - I admit unashamedly - either complement or coincide with the items on mine:

Nathaniel Roger's at The Film Experience, whose favorite moments include calling the included foreign-language films by their original languages' titles, placing all the films (and film-makers) that he did place in his Top 10 in his Top 10, and preluding the "Tier 1" (i. e., Top 6) films with his phrase "As sustaining as oxygen or water or pets or friends[:] If you try to take them away from me, I will cut you." (Bonus points for also tackling actors' performances [male here and female here].)
Peet Gelderblom's at The House Next Door, whose favorite moments include making his list a list of the possibly overlooked rather than a list of the 'best ever,' inadvertently favoring romanticism, and numbering Mr. Glazer's Birth (2004) 1.

P. S. The House Next Door also provides the most noteworthy review of Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire that I have read of all that film's many reviews and mentions:

So Precious, a quiet, obese, African-American sixteen year-old goes home to her apartment in Harlem in 1987. We meet Mary, her mother from Hell. Mary spends most of her time watching television and yelling at Precious. A little of this goes a long way. Mary is a one-note character and gets just as tiresome for us to watch as she must be for Precious to deal with. Yes, she does have some reasons to be angry with Precious, since her boyfriend, Precious’s father, has raped Precious and gotten her pregnant. Twice. The first baby has Down’s syndrome and lives with Mary’s mother. But Fletcher has not given Mary any counterpoint to play. Mo’Nique, the comedian and talk show host, plays Mary as well as she can, which is considerable, but the script limits what she can do. How about a moment, before the big scene at the end, where we get some sense that Mary loves Precious in one way or another. That would not only be more interesting for Mo’Nique to act as well as for us to watch, since it would make her even scarier than she already is—we and Precious would never be sure which Mary is showing up.

[...]

So Precious has her second baby and we get a couple of nice scenes in the hospital when her classmates come to visit. Then she has to go home and Mary goes full-tilt psycho, throwing them out and dropping a television set down the stairwell that nearly kills Precious and the baby. Meanwhile Precious has been telling her life story to Mrs. Weiss in the Welfare office and we are sneaking into Oprah country. The actress playing Mrs. Weiss is someone named Mariah Carey, only one of whose previous movies (The Bachelor [1999]) I have seen, and I don’t remember her from it. Like Mo’Nique and Paton she does what she can and does it very well. If she can resist Hollywood shaving off her moustache and trying to turn her into a glamor girl, Carey may have a future.

The big finish is an extended scene in the Welfare office in which Mary confesses that she let her boyfriend have sex with Precious, starting when she was three. The scene goes on forever, like an episode of Oprah, and not in a good way. There is very little drama to the scene (Mary would like Precious to come home, Precious understandably does not want to), just relentless confessing of how everybody feels. There is a reason why most therapy scenes are so boring to watch on film: they are all talk, and very little happens. That it happens here is part of the Oprah-ization of our culture: if we just talk about how we FEEL, everything will be OK. Because then we will all be self-empowered. Self-empowerment has its limitations, such as often making it difficult if not impossible to get along with other people. The self-help books make it clear you have to take charge of your own life, but they say very little about how you then deal with others. That’s because most self-help books are aimed at women who are trying to get over trying to be all things to all people and need to develop a little independence. Guys, for better and for worse, already have that independence and don’t need to learn how to do it. Imagine the scene in the Welfare office, but with Precious’s father wanting to get back together with her, and you can imagine the howls of protest from Oprah and her fans.

And so Precious does not go home with Mary, but takes off down the street with her two children. And the “take control of your own life” vibe of the last half of the movie suggests this is a good thing. Let’s recap: here is a now seventeen-year-old girl who is homeless, has two babies, one with Down’s Syndrome, no husband or other means of support, and no high school diploma or GED. I really don’t see that as a happy ending. (Tom Stempel, "Understanding Screenwriting #38" on The House Next Door)

Review: Crazy Heart

2010-01-10T12:25:00.005-05:00

Genre: Drama

Almost a perfect iterative reconstruction of last year's The Wrestler by Darren Aronofsky, Crazy Heart, a film not only directed but also written by ingenu Scott Cooper, is however seldom as drab or as seedy as it may have been as such a film, obliging its superiority above its predecessor to a beautiful coherence among its lead actor, its editor, its writer, and its composer(s). All skilled in their own rights, they together create a major 2/3 that is an exceptionally well-acted, well-paced, well-supported, and well-abstracted film, a major 2/3 that rolls along as drearily passionately bisterly as a portrait of a man such as Mr. Bridges' Bad Blake, equipped with his auburn-bister guitar and tawny-bister McClure's, could be. Fall away for those 2/3 the unextraordinariness of minor players (e. g., Ms. Gyllenhaal, who - much like Mr. Hoult in this year's bizarrely parallel film A Single Man - had only to exist without dramatic error to supply Mr. Bridges' leading character; the cinematography, which is quietly natural and earth-bound) and the insufficiencies of others (e. g.., Mr. Farrell, who - despite his previously brilliant performance, which I honored as the best of last year in the leading category - fails to slough off his Irish urbanism to truly become his character; the art-direction, which attempts to establish contemporary Texas and New Mexico by including new purchases from the likes of Ikea into what are supposed to be the seedy back-motels of those states' rural reaches), in light of the extraordinariness of the majors.

However, endurance is not a friend here; despite the film's great major 2/3, the minor 1/3 that concludes Crazy Heart only marginally surpasses itself above the tail-end of predeceasing films like The Wrestler and Half-Nelson (2006), films about struggling men who find that they can and moreover want to effectuate change in their lives. Instead of retaining the character's personal drama at the focus of the work - an admittedly difficult yet well achieved feat in the major 2/3 - the character is let slip away in the minor 1/3, slip behind the tangible and too-easy problems that previously had only superficially and minutely decorated the broader back of his personage, problems like alcoholism, want of family, and want of musical inspiration. Instead of being only the vehicles or textural touchstones through which we as the audience may recognize the internal changes that he as a character has felt, is feeling, and will continue to feel, they become the internal changes themselves; Bad Blake, though attemptedly kept in weary stride by Mr. Bridges, is roughly hewn, stripped of the depth and complexity that has made him until them almost an unbreakable object of attraction on screen, and left for a less intelligent soul's mindlessly pleasant consumption: the intransigent curmudgeon who has magically transformed into the kindly role model - hardly discernible in this way from the endlessly stock version of Carl Fredricksen who dominates the major 7/8 of Disney-Pixar's sadly thus deflating and deflated Up.

As a film-watcher, one suspects that this insubstantial reduction in the minor 1/3 of the film could likely be due to the imaginary constraints by which the film-makers mandated themselves to reign in a film longer than 2 hours in time. Rough cuts, relative to the delicate and precise transitions that preceded them in the major 2/3, that effect a much faster pacing also than that which preceded it indicate as much to me about the film-makers' later choices. While - true - Crazy Heart by the third act's opening was 'in danger of becoming too long' - whatever that may mean - concision need not mean omission, and I remain convinced that there may have been other, more delicate, and less internally destructive ways to drive the film from where it was to where it needed to be.

Still, it was good work overall, and for that work the workers should of course be commended. Specifically: Mr. Bridges' adds a sauntering perspicacity to a character that could have seemed far less colorful and deep in the hands of another player; Mr. Axelrad, the editor, creates a visual rhythm that maintains Mr. Bridges' character's gait even in those scenes in which that character fails to appear, as if the persistent 'heart' after which the film receives its name; Mr. Cooper creates dialogue that is neither overly nor underly informative and knows how to communicate ideas and sentiments less through the spoken word than through the unspoken image; and Mr. Burnett (accompanied by Mr. Bingham), the composer(s), has(ve) established the bister palette from which the entire tone of the film takes its more-than-less coherent cue. More than these commendable fellows, there is not; but that these fellows are enough to make this film perhaps one of the year's soundest is for it enough.

Grade: B+, good.

The Best of the Ones

2009-12-31T22:38:00.029-05:00

"With the close of 2009 being also the close of the first decade of the 21st century (i. e., the ones, as I like to call it - bollocks to that "aughts" nonsense and doubly such to the people who don't know the difference of that word from its near homophone "oughts"), many of the blogs that deal in spells of film - or, at least, those "many" that I've read - have been posting their lists of the 'Bests' of these past ten years in this flexible audio-visual medium in what I suspect are summative attempts at decadal closure. Though, as this blog hasn't yet existed for a full decade - not that many of those other "many" have either - I have kept my own toes from dipping into this pool of slurry "Bests;" I think now, in the final hour, I'll fold for New Year's and New Decade's Cheer and attempt my own lists in similar orders. So, here - for your very enjoyment - are my takes on the best of the best of these past ten years in film (with bold text denoting the primary of more than one significant instance of excellence created by the corresponding artist/technician):

10 Best Live-Action Films (Feature-Length)

Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Gosford Park (2001)
Låt den Rätte Komma In (Let the Right One In, 2008)
Little Children (2006)
The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)
Lost in Translation (2003)
花樣年華 (In the Mood for Love, 2000)
Moulin Rouge! (2001)
歩いても歩いても (Still Walking, 2009)

10 Best Directors

Pedro Almodóvar, Hable con Ella (Talk to Her; 2002)
Robert Altman, Gosford Park (2001)
Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation (2003)
Joel & Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men (2007)
Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)
Wong Kar Wai, 花樣年華 (In the Mood for Love, 2000)
Ang Lee; 臥虎藏龍 (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; 2000) & Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Baz Luhrman, Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Julian Schnabel, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (2007)
Martin Scorcese, The Aviator (2004)

10 Best Actors

Javier Bardem, Before Night Falls (2000)
Nicolas Cage, Adaptation (2002)
George Clooney, Up in the Air (2009)
Johnny Depp, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Aviator (2004)
Colin Farrell, In Bruges (2008)
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote (2005)
Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Bill Murray, Lost in Translation (2003)
Peter O'Toole, Venus (2006)

10 Best Actresses

Ellen Burstyn, Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose (2007)
Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married (2008)
Salma Hayek, Frida (2002)
Diane Keaton, Something's Gotta Give (2003)
Nicole Kidman, Moulin Rouge! (2001) & The Hours (2002)
Helen Mirren, The Queen (2006)
Julianne Moore, Far from Heaven (2002)
Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada (2006) & Doubt (2008)
Kate Winslet; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) & Little Children (2006)

More upon expansion:

10 Best Supporting Actors

Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men (2007)
Thomas Haden Church, Sideways (2004)
Jake Gyllenhaal, Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Jackie Earle Haley, Little Children (2006)
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight (2008)
Ian McKellen, The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)
Mark Wahlberg, The Departed (2006)
Christopher Walken, Catch Me if You Can (2002)
Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds (2009)

10 Best Supporting Actresses

Amy Adams, Junebug (2005) & Doubt and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008)
Cate Blanchett; The Aviator (2004), Notes on a Scandal (2006), & I'm Not There (2008)
Patricia Clarkson, Pieces of April (2003)
Viola Davis, Doubt (2008)
Marcia Gay Harden, Pollock (2000) & Mystic River (2003)
Julianne Moore, The Hours (2002) & A Single Man (2009)
Natalie Portman, Closer (2004)
Maggie Smith, Gosford Park (2001)
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton (2007)
Michelle Williams, Brokeback Mountain (2005)

10 Best Art Directions

William Chang Suk-ping & Mam Lim-chung, 花樣年華 (In the Mood for Love, 2000) & 2046 (2004)
Stuart Craig & Stephanie McMillan; Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), & Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
Felipe Fernández del Paso & Hania Robledo, Frida (2002)
Dante Ferretti & Francesca Lo Schiavo; Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), & Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)
Mark Friedberg & Adam Stockhausen; The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), The Darjeeling Limited (2007), & Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Grant Major, Dan Hennah, & Alan Lee; The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)
Catherine Martin & Brigitte Broch, Moulin Rouge! (2001)
John Myhre & Gretchen Rau, Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)
Ben van Os & Cecile Heiderman, Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003)
Tim Yip; 臥虎藏龍 (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; 2000)

10 Best Cinematographies

Roger Deakins, The Man Who Wasn't There (2001); Jarhead (2005); The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, No Country for Old Men, and In the Valley of Elah (2007); and Doubt (2008)
Christopher Doyle with Mark Lee Ping-bin & Rain Li; 花樣年華 (In the Mood for Love, 2000), 2046 (2004), & Paranoid Park (2007)
Robert Elswit; Good Night, and Good Luck. (2005) & There Will Be Blood (2008)
Slawomir Idziak, Black Hawk Down (2001) & Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2008)
Janusz Kaminski, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (2008)
Peter Pau; 臥虎藏龍 (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; 2000)
Robert Richardson, The Aviator (2004)
Eduardo Serra, Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003)
Hoyte van Hoytema, Låt den Rätte Komma In (2008)
Robert D. Yeoman; The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) & The Darjeeling Limited and Hotel Chevalier (2007)

10 Best Costumings

Marit Allen, La Vie en Rose (2007)
Colleen Atwood; Chicago (2002), Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), & Nine (2009)
William Chang Suk-ping, 花樣年華 (In the Mood for Love, 2000)
Milena Canonero, The Affair of the Necklace (2001), Marie Antoinette (2006), & The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
Ngila Dickson & Richard Taylor, The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)
Jacqueline Durran, Atonement (2007)
Danny Glicker, Milk (2008)
Catherine Martin & Angus Strathie, Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Sandy Powell; Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), & The Young Victoria (2009)
Julie Weiss, Frida (2002)

10 Best Make-Ups

Rick Baker & Gail Ryan, Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
John Caglione, Jr., & Conor O'Sullivan; The Dark Knight (2008)
Greg Cannom, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
John Jackson & Beatrice de Alba, Frida (2002)
Didier Lavergne & Jan Archibald, La Vie en Rose (2007)
David Martí & Montse Ribé, El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth; 2006)
Ve Neill & Martin Samuel, Pirates of the Caribbean (2003, 2006, & 2007)
Valli O'Reilly & Bill Corso, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)
Maurizio Silvi & Aldo Signoretti, Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Richard Taylor & Peter Owen and Peter King, The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)

10 Best Visual Effects

Avatar (2009)
Eric Barba, Steve Preeg, Burt Dalton, & Craig Barron; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008)
Nick Davis, Chris Corbould, Tim Webber, & Paul Franklin; The Dark Knight (2008)
District 9 (2009)
John Dykstra, Scott Stokdyk, Anthony LaMolinara, & John Frazier; Spider-Man (2002) & Spider-man 2 (2004)
Scott Farrar, Scott Benza, Russell Earl, & John Frazier; Transformers (2007)
Roger Guyett, Tim Burke, John Richardson, & Bill George; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
John Knoll, Hal Hickel, & Charles Gibson with Terry Frazee; Pirates of the Caribbean (2003, 2006, & 2007)
Joe Letteri, Brian Van't Hul, Christian Rivers, & Richard Taylor; King Kong (2005)
Jim Rygiel and Randall William Cook & Richard Taylor, Mark Stetson, Joe Letteri, and Alex Funke; The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)
Speed Racer (2008)

10 Best Original Scores

Elmer Bernstein, Far from Heaven (2002)
Jon Brion, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Alexandre Desplat; The Queen (2006), Lust, Caution (2007), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), & Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
Philip Glass, The Hours (2002) & Notes on a Scandal (2006)
Eliot Goldenthal, Frida (2002)
Abel Korzeniowski, A Single Man (2009)
Thomas Newman; Finding Nemo (2003), Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), Little Children (2006), & Revolutionary Road and Wall•E (2008)
Gustavo Santaolalla, Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Shigeru Umebayashi with Michael Galasso; 花樣年華 (In the Mood for Love, 2000), 2046 (2004), & A Single Man (2009)
John Williams; Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001), Catch Me if You Can (2002), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), & Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

10 Best Original Songs

"Little Person" by Jon Brion; Synecdoche, New York (2008)
"Al Otro Lado del Rio" by Jorge Drexler, The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)
"Things Have Changed" by Bob Dylan, Wonder Boys (2000)
"Lose Yourself" by Eminem, Jeff Bass, & Luis Resto; 8 Mile (2002)
"Falling Slowly" by Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova, Once (2007)
"Travelin' Thru" by Dolly Parton, Transamerica (2005)
"Jai Ho" by AR Rahman, Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
"You've Got Me Wrapped around Your Little Finger" by Beth Rowley & Ben Castle, An Education (2009)
"Rise" by Eddie Vedder, Into the Wild (2007)
"Into the West" by Fran Walsh, Howard Shore, & Annie Lennox; The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

10 Best Sound Editings

Christopher Boyes, Addiston Teague, & Gwendolyn Yates Whittle; Avatar (2009)
Ben Burtt & Matthew Wood, Wall•E (2008)
Mike Hopkins & Ethan Van der Ryn; The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003), King Kong (2005), & Transformers (2007)
Richard King, War of the Worlds (2005) & The Dark Knight (2008)
Karen Baker Landers & Per Hallberg, The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
Skip Lievsay, No Country for Old Men (2007)
Paul N. J. Ottoson, Spider-Man 2 (2004) & The Hurt Locker (2009)
Michael Silvers & Gary Rydstrom and Randy Thom; Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Ratatouille (2007), & Up (2009)
Wylie Statemen; Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), & Wanted (2008)
George Watters II & Christopher Boyes, Pearl Harbor (2001) & Pirates of the Caribbean (2003, 2006, & 2007)

10 Best Sound Mixings

Christopher Boyes, Michael Semanick, & Hammond Peek with Gethin Creagh & Michael Hedges; The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) & King Kong (2005)
Marc Doisne, La Vie en Rose (2007)
Tom Fleischman & Petur Hliddal, The Aviator (2004)
Lora Hirschberg, Gary Rizzo, & Ed Novick; The Dark Knight (2008)
Doc Kane & Randy Thom with Gary A. Rizzo & Michael Semanick; The Incredibles (2004) & Ratatouille (2007)
Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff, & Peter Kurland; No Country for Old Men (2007)
Scott Millan, David Parker, and Kirk Francis; The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
Michael Minkler with David Lee, Dominick Tavella, Chris Munro, Myron Nettinga, Bob Beemer, & Willie D. Burton; Black Hawk Down (2001), Chicago (2002), Dreamgirls (2006), & Into the Wild (2007)
Tom Myers, Michael Semanick, & Ben Burtt; Wall•E (2008)
Andy Nelson & Anna Behlmer with Roger Savage, Guntis Sics, Jeff Wexler, & Ronald Judkins; Moulin Rouge! (2001), The Last Samurai (2003), & War of the Worlds(2005)

10 Best Editings

William Chang, 花樣年華 (In the Mood for Love, 2000)
Dana E. Glauberman, Juno (2007) & Up in the Air (2009)
Roderick Janes (i. e., Joel & Ethan Coen), No Country for Old Men (2007)
Valdís Óskarsdóttir, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Christopher Rouse, United 93 (2006) & The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
Thelma Schoonmaker; Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), & The Departed (2006)
Jamie Selkirk, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
Tim Squyres; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Gosford Park (2001), & Rachel Getting Married (2008)
Juliette Welfling, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (2007)
Hughes Winborne, Crash (2005)

10 Best Screenplays (Original)

Pedro Almodóvar, Hable con Ella (2002)
Wes Anderson & Owen Wilson, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Noah Baumbach, The Squid and the Whale (2005)
Diablo Cody, Juno (2007)
Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation (2003)
Alfonso & Carlos Cuarón, Y Tu Mamá También (2002)
Julian Fellowes, Gosford Park (2001)
Lee Hall, Billy Elliot (2000)
Courtney Hunt, Frozen River (2008)
Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

10 Best Screenplays (Adapted)

Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
Todd Field & Tom Perrotta, Little Children (2006)
David Hare, The Hours (2002)
Ronald Harwood, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (2007)
Charlie (& Donald) Kaufman, Adaptation. (2002)
Steve Kloves, Wonder Boys (2000)
John Ajvide Lindqvist, Låt den Rätte Komma In (2008)
Larry McMurtry & Diana Ossana, Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner, Up in the Air (2009)
Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, & Peter Jackson; The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)

10 Best Animated Films (Feature-Length or Short)

For the Birds (2001)
Destino (2003)
Everything Will Be OK (2007)
Finding Nemo (2003)
Howl's Moving Castle (2005)
John & Karen (2008)
Les Triplettes de Bellevilles (The Triplets of Belleville; 2003)
Peter & the Wolf (2007)
Spirited Away (2002)
Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

10 Best Foreign-Language Films (Feature-Length or Short, Live-Action or Animated)

Amélie (2001)
臥虎藏龍 (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; 2000)
Hable con Ella (2002)
L'Heure d'Été (Summer Hours; 2009)
Låt den Rätte Komma In (2008)
Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others; 2006)
花樣年華 (In the Mood for Love, 2000)
Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (2007)
歩いても歩いても (Still Walking, 2009)
Yi Yi (2000)

Review: A Single Man

2009-12-27T01:20:00.005-05:00

Genre: Drama

Tom Ford's A Single Man, it is clear from the very start, is its director's film; pruned from the screenplay are all the traces of stodginess or disgrace that characterize the world of Mr. Isherwood's original text and planted in their steads are the bulbs of style - on the edge of a razor - that allows the story of George to breathe far more smokily than a more diligent to-film translation of the Isherwood novella ever could. As a result, that the two (the original and the adaptation) bear likenesses is almost more of a historical fashion, of shared ascendancy, rather than of a present compulsion, of direct descendency; whereas Mr. Isherwood spent much of his time focussing carefully on the complete battery of sensory nuances that flood his protagonist's fluid world, Mr. Ford spends much of his time focussing instead on the more immediate, more intimate, more concrete, and more punctuative sensory ties that anchor his protagonist amid the rush of his submerged world - a world, importantly, evoked as it is instead of as it would be, if as perversely reconstructed as the original George so frequently describes his hopes for it to be.

Those sorts of descriptive quotes (as, indeed, much of the complicating and developing ribbons of the original George's consciousness, that both inundate and reflect his world) are minimized within, if not eliminated from, Mr. Ford's new treatment of the character; environmental affectors, dispossessors, and stressors are relegated by the cinematic screenplay to being merely implied nudgers, inhibitors, and peeves that, though represented in frankness, feel exclusively peripheral to the central experience of George, in a way completely different from his experience in the novella. However, to say that Mr. Ford by treating George thus has effectively rooted out whatever lingering despondency that colored him from his audience's perception of him is to commit an overly ambitious error; for Mr. Ford's George, though he arrests himself throughout the day in order to take full inventory of the people and the events that he encounters in his quotidian and delimited life (instead of glancing over them as if over a continuous trail of variously impressed instances, as over braille), does not cheaply throw in the towel with any kind of exposed plaint like "carpe diem," as would typically punctuate such a life of loosely bound, intermittent, and otherwise heavy-handed arrests - not even, as such a plaintive message may be the inevitable masque that his perspective chooses to resemble in his 1960s' California. No, British Professor George Falconer is more tender than that bland triteness and less transient than his situation, and he manifests himself exactly in that way time and time again, as he falls hour after hour into the night of his day - falls, in a way that cinematically treats the medium of his ennui, which intervenes itself between himself and his experiencing the world, as capably as Mr. Isherwood's internal ribbons of conscious literally treat it. As a theoretical result, any minimization and/or elimination of Mr. Isherwood's original elements by Mr. Ford's new treatment exists only as a consequentially repositioned artifact of a story transferred from a subjective perspective, like that of a literary first-person narration, to an objective perspective, like that of a cinematic third-person observation; and any peripheralization, a collateral consequence thereof. Observation as by film allows these consequences inconsequentially, by requiring a vocabulary that transcends the need for any such staging in the fore, and Mr. Ford's treatment finds this vocabulary and utilizes it ulimately expressively.

Though it is clear to a viewer of the film that Mr. Ford is inexperienced as a director by witnessing his choices as the results of an obviously roughly translated (from fashion to film-making, still imagery to motive imagery) artist's toolbox, it is nevertheless also clear to any viewer of the film that an artist was at its helm: that - equally - Mr. Ford is an artist, using the tools as best as he knows how, to paint his intentions upon a canvas. Rough compositions, that stumble at first as a newborn foal stumbles, find their own internally consistent footing and from there compose scenes of elegiac beauty, wan distress, and quiet rapture to be savored. Colors, that at first appear overstressed as alternating bottle-green and pink-rose filters of the world, play a delicate and lilting, sinusoidal, emotional curvature; and fumbling focal points call to stand palpable echoes of George's own fading, as-if-trying-to-make-contact-from-behind-a-white-sheet condition. And dialogical phrasings, that jitteringly announce factors at beginning, only have positioned themselves, as satellites do, to best commit home factorial results at end.

Almost like a speeding train, with him chained to the front of it, George's day hurtles forth from the first word toward a fait accompli that comes to pass only in so many words. In the gaps, where both inevitability and Mr. Ford's artistry have not, the actors' performances, Mr. Korzeniowski's score, and Mr. Grau's cinematography fill. For the actors: Mr. Firth stands quite on point in George, in a poise and emotional register that he had been unable either by circumstance or by experience to display in films before; though it occasions that he may have used a bit more intuitive direction than he manages in some quiet instances - direction as could have been had, had there been a stronger or more knowledgeable director's guiding hand - he is otherwise as reliable a protagonist in this work as could have been imagined. Countering him, Ms. Moore is stunning, as usual - so much so that nothing else need be said for her, except that Mr. Ford's more savvy revision of her character quite suits her - and Mr. Hoult is critically sufficient, as all his rôle needed him to be. For the composers: Mr. Korzeniowski's score, bolstered by Mr. Umebayashi's undulous themes, is a strong and knowledgeable guiding hand in the utmost capacity where Mr. Ford himself for whatever reason could not be; rigorous, emotive, involved, confident, and transcendent, it is what music in film should be. For the cinematographer: Though I took issue at first with the liberality which which you allowed your director to color-bend your images, I appreciated nevertheless your overall use of color as direction, as well as your fleeting homages to the work of the likes of Philip Lorca diCorcia, greatly; though not always on its mark, Mr. Grau's final product does contain what are some of the year's best images.

All in all, by the time A Single Man does reach its end, it is utterly resplendent and aromatic even with captivating imagery, sounds, and performances. I cannot think of more that would be worthwhile to add to this review than the comments made of it by The London Times' Wendy Ide, who wrote:

It’s no surprise that the feature film directing debut of fashion designer Tom Ford is a thing of heart-stopping beauty. He celebrates the male form with a sensual reverence. He uses colour with the visual articulacy of Wong Kar Wai and frames his shots with elegance and wit. It looks like a Wallpaper magazine photo shoot styled by Douglas Sirk. But what is a little more unexpected, certainly for those who were suspicious of Ford’s background in the ephemeral world of fashion, is that this is no frothy, throwaway piece of pretty silliness. Rather it’s a work of emotional honesty and authenticity which announces the arrival of a serious filmmaking talent. There will be critics who will be unable to get past the director’s background, but rest assured: Tom Ford is the real deal.

Grade: A-, "the real deal," emotionally authentic and sensuous without ever pandering to gratuity, sublime.

Discourse: The Times' Reviewers on the Year

2009-12-25T21:09:00.013-05:00

Recently The New York Times' three official reviewers of film (i. e., A. O. Scott, Manohla Dargis, and Stephen Holden) each compiled, in addition to their own various and variable iterations of Top-10 lists, thoughtful postscriptions after their full year of filmic reviews in 2009. I link each such postscription here, here, and here, respectively; and I cite a few important, smart, and/or provocative quotes that I found in each (below):

From A. O. Scott:

A jealous-makingly concise appraisal of the A story in Jason Reitman's Up in the Air and interlacing of it and Up, Olivier Assayas' Summer Hours, and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker:

What if home is no place at all? That question surely haunts Ryan Bingham, the corporate nowhere man played by George Clooney in “Up in the Air,” whose gravity-defying life is a beguiling illusion of freedom. Ryan has given up the bonds and tethers that hold more earthbound souls (including the people it is his job to fire) in place, realizing only too late that he has sacrificed security and continuity. A similar sacrifice is imposed on old Carl Fredricksen in “Up,” who must let go of the home he has tried to take with him, and on the French family in Olivier Assayas’ “Summer Hours,” who give up cherished family property because the logic of modern life demands it. For Staff Sgt. Will James, the Army demolitions expert in Kathryn Bigelow’s “Hurt Locker,” the home front is a place where he feels alienated and adrift, divorced from his true self. He is most himself, most at home, in a far-away land, where the risk of death makes him feel alive.

From Manohla Dargis:

An apt quip about Gary Winick's Bride Wars, produced by 20th Century Fox: "female-minstrelsy show"
An apt recommendation for Nora Ephron about her Julie & Julia: "[You] did everyone right by giving us Meryl Streep as Julia Child in 'Julie & Julia.' ([But you] can keep Julie.)"
"Moment[s] to remember":
the dust that clings to Anthony Mackie’s eyelashes in “The Hurt Locker,” as he waits in the Iraqi desert, gun at the ready, for enemy fire. And Colin Firth’s face crumbling like pulverized stone as he receives the awful news of his lover’s death in “A Single Man.” Some of the greatest filmmaking of the year was represented by the story of a happy marriage, which was represented with breathtaking narrative economy and a great depth of feeling in four sublime minutes in “Up.” The rest of the movie left me fairly indifferent, but those four minutes will play on a loop in my head for years.
Other images, other memories: the bodies of two teenagers being transported by a backhoe operated by a mobster in the Italian film “Gomorrah,” a backhoe first glimpsed in a scene in which the boys exult over the crime that will lead to their demise. The phosphorescent flowers fluttering like sea creatures on the surface of the alien world in “Avatar.” A restless camera tracing lines of love among grieving family members in “Summer Hours,” a French film poignantly true to everyday life and emotions and almost impossible to imagine being made in America if only because of its insistence on ambivalence as a condition of human relations. A young camel riding in a motorcycle sidecar amid an extraordinarily choreographed whirl of human and animal motion in “Tulpan.”

From Stephen Holden:

A statement of relief for honesty in film-making, specifically regarding Oren Moverman's The Messenger: "The harrowing scenes of people crumpling [for the news of their loved ones' deaths] are only slightly softened by a sense of relief that the human cost of our overseas adventures is finally being acknowledged in movies without a veneer of sentimentality and flag waving."
A bizarrely old-world (see here for starters) statement of relief for equality in sexual liberation, specifically regarding the relationship between the protagonists male and female in Mr. Reitman's Up in the Air: "The film recognizes the emerging new rules of engagement in the age of the hook-up, in which women can be as coolly detached as men."
A nostalgic statement of harkening for indelibility in a now concluded, brilliant television-series, a statement coupled with another of praise for restraint in Mr. Moverman's The Messenger:
Mr. Foster (unrecognizable from the wimpy art student he played on “Six Feet Under”) gives an award-worthy portrayal of Staff Sgt. Will Montgomery, an Army officer wounded in Iraq who is serving the last three months of his tour in an assignment as excruciating in its way as combat. Mr. Foster’s performance is extraordinarily restrained, as his character struggles to maintain his reserve in the face of volcanic emotions hurled him by family members of the casualties of war. Against his will he develops an attachment to a new widow (Samantha Morton) that the movie wisely refrains from turning into an instant happy ending. Beautifully written and acted, “The Messenger,” the first feature directed by Oren Moverman, from his and Alessandro Camon’s screenplay, never stoops to tearjerking manipulation.
A quintessentially descriptive statement of recognition of Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker: "The movie is a pungent exploration of pressurized machismo in which demonic and heroic impulses fuse."

Interview: Richard Linklater

2009-12-22T21:04:00.004-05:00

T he Criterion Current has recently posted a terrific little interview that its writers/managers have done with Richard Linklater, director of this year's Me and Orson Welles, about his work on the film, his actors in the film, and his thoughts on Welles in general. Check it out here.

Review: Avatar

2009-12-18T22:27:00.006-05:00

Genre: Epic

It is a delicate thing, to create a film - a delicacy impinged upon all the more when the ambition compelling the film is magnitudinous in its scope. Epic, magnitudinous films by their very definitions attempt to conquer many facets of the human psyche and fan them out in clear array before our eyes, like iridescent plumes or playing cards; men are loved and betrayed, culture is ritualized and written, and learning and life in relation to others is lionized, tragedized, and recorded. At their best, therefore, such epic works grow and flourish and manage to thistle out at their extremities tiny niches of humanity that had only faintly, if at all, been touched before; at their worst, such films gurgle and gag up upon themselves consecutive clichés and clumsy metaphors that drag their knuckles over the broken glass of awkwardly executed long-range firings. Avatar - to credit Mr. Cameron - is an epic film thankfully closer in execution to the former extreme.

He (i. e., Cameron), hardly an estranged director from the epic film in general and - no doubt - so aware of its variability, its delicacy, and its necessary concern for each manner and maneuver and choice in effect, lest just one be misplaced and cause, like the slippage of an improperly rooted epiphyte, the fall of the entire tangential structure, knew that temperament in epic direction would be key, temperament for choice and choice in anticipation of result as well as in heed of precedent. Each tier, each layer that an epic film-maker adds, he knows, must extend to bear the weight and the shape of both its successor and its foregoer. Otherwise, the structure can shatter, crumble, and fold like a house of playing cards, instead of diverging - as it ought - like a fan of them. No, epic films, he knows, are not like a laser or a beam, marking its course single-mindedly from its onset and pruning away all else in streamlining idealization, as less ambitious films are and ought be; rather, the epic film ought, as if fancying itself the illuminative appreciator of the spectrum rather than the elucidative categorizer of the wave, be macroscopic and grow organically, heterodoxically, into form and refractive focus.

I discourse on, as I have, on these matters, because it is important to remember them: to remember that, when writing in review of an epic film as when creating such a film, one may not expect from it the same incisive acuity that one may expect from other, non-epic films. Its measure, much more accurately, is closer to the measure of quality for odes, songs, and lyrical sagas than to that of epithets, fables, and fairy tales. Against its appropriate measure, an epic film like Avatar does well.

Agglomerating pensive tips from the likes of Locke, Foucault, and - most clearly - Descartes as well as from computer science, pop culture, and anthropology as it rolls farther and farther into its story, Avatar takes on the organic life that it needs - albeit covets - to survive and to support its magnitudinous structure, emotions, and scenes - which can indeed be breathtaking. Lush, lush life, excerpted in inspiration from the sparkling texts of Wells perhaps and Margaret Mead maybe, are flowers festooning the screenplay - which, though an inventive retelling of the legend of Pocahontas, is sadly a rather dry bed to harvest from. But then Mr. Cameron was never much of a writer. No, his strengths lie much more in his abilities to eke out effective drama from his drying seeds, to turn his trite dialogue and simplistic phrases into quiet and unobstrusive scaffolding for his physical plays, and to show us why he bothered planting his seeds in the first place: well choreographed rushes, battles, and unions that, though lacking the grandeur, the majesty, and the objective finesse of - say - Mr. Jackson's, stir the emotions nevertheless and, for this stirring, are meritorious.

Beyond the physical action, the physical appearance(s) too are lush and meritorious. Though almost steroidally neon at first glance, the world of Avatar is actually meticulously quiet and happily not visually strident. Costumes may be typical, but they are donned by aesthetically interesting bodies, which lithe and labile the make-up complements well. And, though subjective to the hilt, the cinematography makes something notable of itself - though I am not 100% convinced that that something owes its existence entirely to its own merits and not those of the scenes that it depicts.

Acoustically, sound-editing is fine and appropriate; and Mr. Horner's score, like Mr. Cameron's screenplay, predictably raw but supplementarily completely condign with the tone and the object each of its instances. His original song, however, is unavoidably sappy.

Still, overall Avatar is a good, good work; and, I must say of it, though it was not particularly gifted in terms of its actors, it was wonderful to see Sigourney Weaver taking strides in a film of its size, type, and ambition once again.

Grade: A-, a worthy contemporary amalgamation from and to the world of folklore and mythology - I particularly cared for the non-flagrant use of 3-D.