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.
24 January 2011
Note: On the SpyGlasses Full (2010)
Review: Another Year
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+
17 January 2011
Review: Blue Valentine
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
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-.
30 December 2010
Review: The King's Speech
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.
24 December 2010
Review: 127 Hours
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
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....
15 December 2010
Announcement: The Criterion March Releases!
05 December 2010
Review: Black Swan
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+.
16 November 2010
Announcement: The Criterion February Releases!
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