Gorgeous Degradation

It’s hard to like a film about a broken-down, narcissistic head-banger with a special gift for sentimentalism and self-destruction. Having the character played by Mickey Rourke doesn’t make it any easier. I’ve always thought of Rourke as something of an oddball, and Darren Aronofsky has provided him the perfect character to both rehabilitate and reify his superfreaky aura. The first forty minutes of The Wrestler burn past with a searing, nearly anthropological furor. I have to admit I was initially enthralled by this portrait of a sub-culture that would ordinarily leave me more than cold. The writing is lean, raw and intense, the acting honest and risky, and Aronofsky utilizes hand held cameras to give the film a DIY, Def Leppard-worthy, visual punch. Shortly thereafter the film settles into something more recognizable and less surprising, but that’s to be expected I guess. Rourke is good, maybe even great. Marisa Tomei is also really good.

Curious Indeed

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a stunning technical achievement in filmmaking. In some ways it is a valentine to the grand pleasures of movie making, but director David Fincher has put his computers to use on a haunting, emotionally resonant, and deeply satisfying story full of heart and soul and loss and love. It’s a movie star movie—a sweeping, epic, Hollywood romance—and one of my favorite films of the year. Continue reading Curious Indeed

Best Music of 2008

With the caveats that I have not yet seen The Wrestler, and that some of these movies were released on DVD in 2008, but in theaters in 2007, here (in alphabetical order) are the movies I most enjoyed in 2008:

The Dark Knight
Hellboy 2
I’m not there
Into the wild
Iron Man
Milk
Paranoid Park

Quantum of Solace
Sukiyaki Western Django
War, Inc.

Gran Torino

In Gran Torino Clint Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean war veteran and retired Detroit autoworker who, as the movie opens, is mourning the death of his wife. There are three acts. In the first, Eastwood plays a crotchety, deeply racist and unhappy man whose ire is raised by everything, but especially the Hmong family next door. Act II sees his character mellow, become friendly and attached to this family, or at least the teenage son and daughter, and try to help the son gain skills, a job and some sort of confidence in himself. The Hmong family substitutes for his own family and children, from whom he has become estranged, and he becomes the de facto protector of the largely Hmong neighborhood. In Act III Eastwood contemplates vengeance in response to the brutality of a local Hmong gang. Continue reading Gran Torino

Un film de Arnaud Desplechin: Un conte de Noël

Full of heart and bile, whiskey drenched and reeking of cigarettes, A Christmas Tale hurls the viewer headfirst into a sprawling, gloriously messy, bourgeois comedy populated by a likeable, charming though often irascible, family full of sad-sacks, philosophers and self-obsessed neurotics. There’s the matriarch, Junon (Catherine Deneuve), a dragon lady who exudes maternal warmth when necessary; her husband Abel, who works diligently to keep the peace; their oldest daughter, Elizabeth, a successful playwright who banished her irredeemable younger brother, Henri (Mathieu Amalric), six years earlier; and the baby of the family, Ivan, whose puppyish contentment belies his own fading youth. Hovering above all is the ghost of young Joseph, the first-born son who died from leukemia at age six (Henri was conceived in hopes that his placenta would heal his dying, older brother). These folks, their spouses and children, gather together for a Christmas celebration tinged with dry-eyed melancholy. Junon has recently been diagnosed with leukemia and needs a donor match for a bone-marrow transplant. Thus, much to Elizabeth’s chagrin, Henri returns to the fold. Continue reading Un film de Arnaud Desplechin: Un conte de Noël

Short Takes: Three Films

After voting for Obama, I drove over to Minneapolis to see Happy-Go-Lucky (so as to avoid the internet and CNN). Mike Leigh’s latest functions as a kind of yin to Naked’s yang, centering on a truly happy woman who carefully and successfully negotiates the angry, xenophobic, violent, unfair world that streams around her. Sally Hawkins delivers a lovely, quirky yet believable performance. Her Poppy may be happy but she’s no flake. An elementary school teacher who has traveled the world with her best friend and flatmate Zoe (fine, grounded work by newcomer Alexis Zegerman), Poppy likes to party about as much as she enjoys taking the piss out of life’s rude awakenings. The film opens on one such event when her bike is stolen and Poppy is forced, for the first time, to learn how to drive. It is her driving lessons with Scott (Eddie Marsan channeling David Thewlis) that provides the main thrust of the dramatic action. Continue reading Short Takes: Three Films

Soccer and the visual arts

I mostly started this thread in the hope of goading Arnab and Gio into discussions of Italian soccer. But a couple of movie-related soccer topics have recently come to mind.

First, I just re-watched the central scene of the original Fever Pitch (the re-make was beyond horrible) with Colin Firth as a fanatical, obsessed Arsenal fan. It is a fine portrait of how sports obsession can make you miserable. I loathe Arsenal, and I’m concerned about the decency of the short shorts being worn by soccer players in 1989, but it is still worth seeing: here.

Continue reading Soccer and the visual arts

Synecdoche, New York

I just got a copy of 2666 from the library, and should be starting in on it, but I wanted to at least throw a few words down about Charlie Kaufman’s latest.

First off, the cast. Philip Seymour Hoffman has to have the best homerun average in the game right now. Though I wish he’d get roles a little closer to Talented Mr. Ripley than the usual depressed shlub, this shlub is every bit as great as this guy or the guy from Happiness. Hoffman’s the center, but there’s a huge number of first-rate female performances here: Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis – and then showing up late and re-igniting the whole movie again – Dianne Wiest and Emily Watson. This can be a frustrating movie I guess. Time is screwy, sores ooze, injuries mental, physical, psychological and self-inflicted are heaped on to a man who is so predestined for failure that his award of a MacArthur Genius Grant is almost summarily ignored by everyone.

But I’ll let Manohla and Roger say a little:
NY Times’ first line:

To say that Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well pack it in right now.

Ebert’s Sun-Times opener:

I think you have to see Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to. It will open to confused audiences and live indefinitely.

Having only seen it once, I can’t claim to get it all (I’ve actually learned quite a bit I missed by reading some of the better reviews after seeing it), but I can at least tell you some of the reasons I loved it.
Continue reading Synecdoche, New York

Cinema 16

Has anyone heard of these discs? 2 discs, 16 short films from a pretty impressive range of European directors–not new stuff, but culled from bignames’ prior efforts. Just finished disc 1, which had a bleak and funny bit of corrosive stoic fury very much like the the director’s longer Songs from the Second Floor (Sweden’s Roy Andersson), the excellent Wasp by Andrea Arnold and equally fantastic Gasman by Lynne Ramsay, a very entertaining New-Wave parody by Toby Macdonald (who?), an old Svankmajer short, and then some stuff veering from forgettable whimsy to utter crap (Christopher Nolan’s ridiculous little Doodlebug). Disc 2 has films by Ridley Scott and Anders Thomas Jensen that I want to see, as well as the previously-discussed and excellent Six Shooter.