|
|
 |
 |
American Gangster | Assassination of Jesse James | Atonement | Away From Her | Before the Devil Knows You're Dead | Beowulf | The Brave One | Charlie Wilson's War | The Darjeeling Limited | Eastern Promises | I'm Not There | Into the Wild | Margo at the Wedding | Lars and the Real Girl |
Once | Redacted | There Will Be Blood | Waitress
The problem is not that I don’t like or admire American Gangster. The problem for me is that one of the very best gangster epics of all time is sitting there, unfolding before our eyes… and suddenly we are stuck in the middle of Russell Crowe’s character’s custody fight. And really, what the hell does that have to do with this American Gangster? Not a whole hell of a lot.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Really, as mean as I am being, I feel bad for everyone involved. Pitt is working his ass off to create an elusive, but distinct character. The supporting cast is excellent. The production design by Patricia Norris is first class. And the cinematography by Roger Deakins is stunning… you will likely never see light coming from the inside of every character in a movie’s eyeballs like this again.
This is no déjà vu of Pride & Prejudice. There is a romantic subtext, but the foreground is serous and misery laden most of the way. You can tell from the images that Joe Wright has improved as a director… but he still isn’t a director who can wrangle magic from simple images.
Every film upon the face of creation could end profitably with one of two images: the flat horizon beyond the sea or the turn of a woman‘s face toward or away from the camera (as at the end of Godard’s About de soufflé or in paintings by Gerhard Richter), turning her neck to evade or engage a gaze. Polley understands both iconic gestures in her closing shot. Her potential is great and Away From Her is just so measured, so tender, so kind, so very, very good.
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
A lot of swoon-derful prose has been applied to this dark delight, a trim, fierce, modestly budgeted movie, shot on high definition video with multiple cameras, and man, it almost feels wrong to add to it. This is a wowser, a marvel and a gem. When Lumet's fortieth or so feature in a fifty-year career of terrible lows but tremendous highs, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, it was darker than a dark horse, it was a dark horse in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere.
The thing is, by the time you get to the big action beats, they may thrill, but the core of this film is simple, quality filmmaking. It is the obvious difference between Beowulf and of the films made in similar formats… Zemeckis is one of our very best filmmakers and always finds a way to tell a story in a way that connects with the audience.
Neil Jordan's best work as a writer and a director is customarily when he draws from fairytale form, ranging from In The Company Of Wolves to The Miracle, Mona Lisa and The Crying Game, allusions to Alice in Wonderland are recurrent, as in the fate that meets New York public radio host Erica Bain (Jodie Foster) when she and her boyfriend (Naveen Andrews) walk their dog in Central Park late one night.
The film has been cut, re-cut, re-shot, re-cut, etc ... but that is pretty much Mike Nichols' way of doing things on his best and worst films. But Charlie Wilson's War feels more schizophrenic than any Nichols film I can recall. There are worse films in his filmography, definitely. Like I wrote ... I like the movie. But never have I felt so much like Nichols had no idea of what exact tone he was after, from start to finish.
Any picture that opens with Bill Murray wearing a trim, too-small fedora poked atop his head while in suit and tie in a getaway taxi through the crowded, colorful streets of a city in India is showing all the right signs for pleasure to come.
Eastern Promises
Eastern Promises is a good movie, no doubt. And the Cronenberg touches are fun ... for those of us who enjoy a gaping, gurgling neck wound now and again. But the script might have made a better movie in the hands of a director with less of a vision and more interest in serving the screenplay’s ambitions first.Eastern Promises
The stuff of Eastern Promises is asserted in the most concrete ways while deeper portent, elusive and hardly specific, rises to the surface in an ultimately touching fashion. The characters' phrasings, mostly gnomic, become lyrical through repeated variations.I’m Not There is all there. Six, six, yes, six Bob Dylans in all, the latest from Todd Haynes seems to aspire to an excess of clever and a dangerous dance with pretense, but remarkably, in a 2 hour 18 minute running time, turns out to be a very demanding, but very clear-minded piece of filmmaking.
"Tactile" is one key word that suits the ambition, and achievement of this long but rewarding movie. It was more than ten years after Penn first wanted to make the movie before the McCandless family allowed production to proceed, and it seems to be for the best: this is mature work, from a middle-aged man's remove, about the hopefulness of youth. Penn's raised children, his beloved father, of whom he has often spoken movingly, has gone on, and he recently lost his brother, Chris.
It would not be shocking to see Ryan Gosling nominated for Oscar for a second year in a row for this completely unexpected turn that becomes more complex as the film continues. (There is a beat where Lars experiences a moment of clarity and you can read it on Gosling’s face in a performance moment that is both tiny and absolutely stunning. The best of what Gosling offers.)
First, we have the metaphor of the more successful sister being a rabid climber. The joke would be very easy to overdo… but without the invocation of that metaphor, what is the frickin’ point? On the more literal level, we have Kidman taking up the challenge. Why? I don’t really care what the answer is. But the must be an answer or we are nowhere. Moreover, how incredibly silly is it to have this woman climbing a tree in tight linen pants and an expensive sweater and shirt? On what planet would she do this?
Once is slightly, just a bit more than nothing at all, yet it is one of the rare movies where any recollection of the simplest gesture, smile, or catch of voice in it have made me stupid-teary since I first saw it (twice) at Sundance. The grave, tender secret of this tiny picture is, simply, its simplicity, its sketchy but efficient form filled with the grandest of longings.
While some reactionary observers who haven't seen Redacted have labeled Brian DePalma's latest film with such calumnies as "arthouse snuff-porn," there is at least the courage of his anger, which brings this rapid-fire, if indifferently written and acted, montage to a consistent boil. There are levels of staging and acting and phoniness and fear that work despite shortcomings. There are esthetic and moral qualms present in almost every frame of DePalma's fictional multimedia sketch of crimes committed in the American occupation of Iraq; his fury seethes.
I’m Not There is all there. Six, six, yes, six Bob Dylans in all, the latest from Todd Haynes seems to aspire to an excess of clever and a dangerous dance with pretense, but remarkably, in a 2 hour 18 minute running time, turns out to be a very demanding, but very clear-minded piece of filmmaking.
Her characters are so far from perfect, and do things people usually do in the real world but not on screen, but there’s something, well, delicious here. It’s the arrival of an almost fully-formed goofy comic voice, and sadly, the end as well: Shelley died before finding out her film had been taken up by Sundance and then bought by Fox Searchlight for this Mother’s Day release.
