Category: likey

…yet lest I seem less than enthusiastic, let me be clear: Mike Judge’s Extract may be a little too this or a little too little of that, but I enjoyed the film as much as any comedy this year. Judge has a masterly sense of structure–the film is a well-oiled (if a little over-determined) farce machine, but played with the kind of subtle dialogue-driven character focus for which he doesn’t often get enough credit. Jason Bateman plays the newly-middle-aged owner of a chemical-flavoring company, finding himself at a loss in his relationship with wife Kristen Wiig and unexcited by his job. Mila Kunis’ temp (who we know to be a con artist) catches his eye, but he feels too guilty to do more than dream, until his bartender friend Dean (a shaggy, invested Ben Affleck) gives him a horse tranquilizer and a plan: get a gigolo to seduce your wife, then you can cheat with guiltfree abandon.

That summary seems so busy, so hyperbolic, and the film does get stuck in some obvious bits, almost a necessary by-product of what is at base a reliably conventional comic plot. There’s hints of other stories bubbling up: a read on the workspace that complements his cult hit but doesn’t develop too substantively here; some space opened up but never explored for the two very interesting women (and two strong actors). A shame–the film could have been perhaps great. Instead, it’s just really, really, really enjoyable. What makes it work is how Judge’s style–a kind of deadpan minimalism–so perfectly fuels that silly plot; instead of getting lost in leers and exaggerated tics (his side characters are usually at base cartoonish buffoons), the film takes its sweet time listening to these people talk, even the loonies, gives the actors room to evoke and emote. And if he wraps up with a lot of sentiment, he’s earned it–as well as mocking it, by a late-film plot development that is so blithely derisive that it underscores the empathy Judge creates for (most of) these characters.

Lucrecia Martel’s oblique thriller (or “thriller”?) has made many critics swoon–not just end-of-year lists but leaping into decade round-ups, too. I kinda agree…. ‘though it is the kind of knotty, imagistic film that pushes against the viewers’ (or this one’s) desire for narrative even as Maria Onetto’s brilliant performance as the bourgeois Vero Lala suggests deep wells of story that keep sucking us back in. Continue reading La Mujer Sin Cabeza/The Headless Woman

This popped up as a new release yesterday but I don’t recall hearing much about it before–and the couple stray reviews kept comparing it to City of God or talking (often dismissively) about its ostensible status as a film deploying crime to get at some sociological vision of Colombia. Nah, it’s just a crime film. And I say that with real appreciation, a snap in my step, a gat in my britches — this was a fine surprise. Continue reading Perro Come Perro/Dog Eat Dog

Judd Apatow’s Funny People is half of a great film and all of a good one; it’s consistently funny yet displays more room for its cast to breathe, bump about and into one another, with fewer inspired improvisatory riffs and giggles but a lot more nuance than came out of his previous films.

The excellent half starts with bigtimestar waking up alone and lonely in his manse; George, almost too-perfect a superimposition onto a certain image of Sandler himself, makes low-brow high-concept films and is much, much loved by the public for it. He breezes through his life–shaking hands, posing for photos, then scurrying home to wander the halls–but is caught short by an unexpected terminal diagnosis. And the film digs deep, illustrating that this impending doom does less to change George’s approach to life than to most fully reveal it. He starts doing stand-up, and it is bitter, biting, self-loathing stuff. (First time back onstage, he bombs, too miserable to sell the punchlines, including one really brutal one about the Holocaust. I laughed, but no one on screen does.) There are all these amazing bits intertwined with some more conventional stuff (meeting a young mentee, sidestories about reconnecting with family and an old flame) where Sandler is just bilious. He plays a little “joke” tune on the piano to one audience, singing slightly off-key how he hates them, they’re all cocksuckers, and when he dies they won’t even come to his grave. As a study of the rage and fear and anxiety underlying comic performance, it’s up there with some of Shandling’s stuff . . .

It then, alas, becomes quite a bit more familiar when he decides to reignite that old flame. Oh, it doesn’t just get all sweet redemptive pap, and maintains a corrosive edge–and resists neat happy ends. But the rigor of some of that earlier rage is diffused and–for this viewer–is missed. Still, I wasn’t surprised to enjoy it, but I was surprised at how good Apatow is with a much broader range of tough emotions–it recalls and returns to some of the stuff he did on tv, with Shandling and Freaks and Geeks.

So my judgment will be suspect, as he seems to pitch films directly at this sweet spot where my open crazed appreciation of the sublimely silly and the elaborately constructed coincides exactly with my usually-repressed sentimental streak. The Fantastic Mr. Fox has more going for it than the old Andersonian shtick, but there’s no real way to get around the fact that it is entirely besottedly invested in that shtick: the protagonist with the outsized ego determined to see & reshape the world around him (always him), carrying along an extended family for various forms of collateral damage; the glorious wonderbox compositions, the zesty deep-track pop soundtrack, the arch snappy dialogue running perpendicular to deep veins of sadness and loss; assorted and sundry Anderson familiars, from Bill Murray to a Wilson to Wally Wolodarsky.

But even the non-fan might be taken with the fussy florid detail of the stop-motion sets and figures — it is a pure aesthetic delight just to see the film unfold: the head-on shots of opossum Kylie’s spiral-eyed stare; the shadowed skeletal frame and outsized dome of villainous Bean backlit in a doorway, face momentarily glowing orange as he lights a cigarette; Ash’s towel cape; the frenzied wild-animal rubble-rubble-rubble as the animals tear into their meals throughout the film. And there’s something apt about ye olde WA plot dynamics spun through a children’s tale, where the thin yet sturdy little moral of every Anderson film (it is hard to grow up, yet we must) seems more exactly in touch with the generic concerns.

Funny, sweet, always gorgeous, fun. It even has a good bit of Latin. I loved it, but I am almost genetically-predetermined to love it. Still–I think you might, too.

The new documentary (Almost the Truth) is a wonder — I’ve seen a ton of Python doc material, read the oral history, read various histories of other sorts…. but this is bliss, full of anecdotes and footage that concisely reiterates yet also breaks new ground. Even with a bit too much Russell Brand, I fell in love.

There are moments where you watch a sequence in a film and it’s utterly clear the joy behind the camera: the sense of invention (so this is what the camera can do here!), the delight in gaming the audience (playing familiar cards and then shuffling the deck, then cheating), the willingness to push past any sense of limits into a pure sugar rush of genre filmmaking. I smile every time I think of the Thunderdome, of Cary Grant faceplanting in the dust as the plane roars right overhead, of Jackie Chan grabbing any item in the vicinity for balletic battle, of Indiana Jones holding his hat as he first ran from varied and sundry and crazy dangers with the idol in his hand, of Chow Yun-Fat with toothpick dangling and a calm expression on his face gently wiping the blood spatter from an infant’s brow. It isn’t just that these are action sequences, done well; they’re invigorating exaltations of composition and sequence and outsized wondrous plotting.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird has at least 3 such whizbang setpieces, and it’s a dizzy blast of a film. Continue reading Kim Ji-Woon’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker opens with a quote from Chris Hedges on the way we become addicted to war, an addiction intensely–almost lovingly–scrutinized in both her tightly-wound action film and Armando Iannucci’s tightly-wound satire In the Loop. Both films work pretty well on their own merits, as exemplars of their respective genres, but I was struck by the way each seemed to strive toward something more, toward an indictment of that addiction. Their methods, however tonally distinct, I think lead to the same impasse: both films are caught–and catch us–inside the addiction. Continue reading Going to have to face it

Greg Whiteley’s 2007 documentary on debate as she is practiced in the high schools today is entertaining and smart, and maybe that’s all you need to know. Following the exploits of two schools/teams, one from well-off suburban Texas and the other from an underfunded public h.s. in Long Beach, the film engages all our narrative expectations about the role of the underdog–even refers to such expectations early on–and then goes in other directions. These two teams never meet, and that failure to meet is illustrative of both a central thesis (about the systemic relations of class and privilege to this activity) and the film’s own sly wit. We get a film about underdogs winning and one about underdogs losing. And in both cases the film is clearly valuing these showcased participants while also clearly more interested in the subculture and its relation to the broader culture.

Continue reading Resolved