David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet – 7.5

It’s hard to “rate” a beautifully made film on the end of the world as we know it, just as it is hard to watch it. I don’t need to be reminded what humans have done to climate, habitat and the cause of biodiversity in the last 70 years, but Attenborough’s personal testimony, measured and even understated, bears witnessing. By drawing on the films he has made in Africa, in the Arctic, in the oceans, he reminds us of the treasures we took for granted and are rapidly losing. To end on a message of hope he lists in simple terms the steps we can take to reverse disaster, but their apparent, to me, impossibility is further cause for depression. All we need do is 1. stop population growth; 2. stop all deforestation; 3. change our diet to plant-based proteins; 4. create fishing-free zones in the oceans; 5. reduce agricultural lands while increasing output (a la the Dutch); 6. change energy production from fossil fuels to renewable sources; 7. and other items I’ve forgotten. And who will do this, I ask one night. Then the next I watch Quo Vadis, Aida?

Made You Look – 7

A workmanlike talkumentary about the Knoedler Gallery’s sale of 60 forged AbEx paintings, in which all sides are presented but only one is credible. There was nothing here I hadn’t read in ArtNews, but it was interesting to see the characters in person, especially gallerist Ann Freedman, whose icy but unconvincing resolve that she wasn’t to blame left much for the viewer to ponder. Michael Hammer’s role was barely touched on–a hole in the film–but what was there was pretty bad. I could have used more about the art itself, the lack of technical scrutiny of the works, and the role of the consulting experts. In short, this was more a once-over introduction to the subject than a probing investigation.

Promising Young Woman – 6.5

This is either (1) a biting critique of sex-hungry men (i.e., all men) who take advantage of defenseless women and the women who enable them; and/or (2) a horror film about a psychopath who seeks revenge on all around her through a series of impossible actions. The climax is so implausible that you realize you’d better not think too much about what has come before.  On the plus side, the film is a showcase for Carey Mulligan and her ten-megawatt smile, which makes her unlikely character relatable in a way that Rosamund Pike’s in I Care A Lot never approaches.

Minari – 5.5

Undoubtedly a worthy film deserving its accolades, but it just didn’t connect. I thought the child actors were lame, the burning barn a melodramatic plot device, and Mr. Yi’s ability to build a working farm almost singlehandedly while holding down another full-time job too unlikely. But what most bothered me was the way every scene and situation was cut short. This was true for the film as a whole. The filmmakers gave us a series of impressions, and because they involved Koreans, perhaps the novelty was enough. It was interesting to mentally compare the Yi family saga with the scores of movies about American pioneer families in the 19th century. But interesting was not engaging. Maybe I was tired.

I Care A Lot – 4

This New York Times “Critics Pick” allegedly ” seesaws between comedy and horror,” but being neither funny nor scary, what is left? A cartoonish battle between an icy abuser of senior citizens and a Russian mafioso who exploits mules to traffic drugs. Do we care who wins or survives? Not really. There could be a bigger point of how the elderly are exploited by a corrupt, greed-driven system of nursing homes, conservatorships and oblivious courts, but that’s not the point here. In fact, the system survives, and all that stops the villainy is our lax gun control laws. We tried this movie to take a break from our TV series, but all it did was make us realize how much more we appreciated the real people of Spiral and Call My Agent.

Alphabetical List of 2021 Movies

Another Round
Being the Ricardos
Belfast
Bergman Island
Better Days
Black Bear
C’mon C’mon
CODA
Cry Macho
David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet
The Dig
Don’t Look Up
Drive My Car
The Electrical World of Louis Wain
The Forty-Year-Old Version
The French Dispatch
Hand of God
A Hero
Herself
I Care A Lot
I’m Your Man
In the Heights
In the Same Breath
Judas and the Black Messiah
Julia
King Richard
Lansky
The Last Duel
Licorice Pizza
The Lost Daughter
The Lost Leonardo
Made You Look
Minari
MLK/FBI
The Mole Agent
One Night in Miami
News of the World
Passing
The Power of the Dog
Promising Young Woman
Quo Vadis, Aida?
Red, White and Blue
The Rescue
Sound of Metal
Spencer
Summer of Soul
Tick, Tick…Boom!
The Tragedy of Macbeth
Undine
West Side Story
The White Tiger

Top Ten 2005

I feel awkward calling this a “top ten,” with the implication that these are the “best” films of 2005 when, with the exception of Crash, none of these is a “great” film or would necessarily have been considered for listing in some other year. Instead, these are the ten films I most enjoyed, for whatever peculiar, often personal, reason. A number of them I saw at 4 o’clock, so to speak, in an empty theater. Which is another way of saying that un-hyped films I “discover” for myself have an easier time satisfying me than the heavily promoted blockbuster I instinctively, reactively, try to find fault with. (I find I said the same thing last year, but this year, unlike 2004, the films I’ve chosen more clearly justify this disclaimer.) That said, the runaway winner for best picture perhaps deserves even more credit for coming to me in a full, first-run theater.

 

  1. Crash. I liked the characters, the interlocking stories, the comments on race relations (an Andover teacher showed it to his class on Martin Luther King day this year), but best of all – especially for a Hollywood movie – was the moral complexity: every character had good qualities and bad, and just when we’d made up our mind about someone, we had to think again.

 

  1. Travelers and Magicians. When I saw this movie at the Oak St. Cinema, I didn’t know where Bhutan was, let alone that I would be going there this year. The landscapes it revealed were gorgeous, but it was the story that truly captured me. The movie started slow, it contained a fable-within-the-story that gave me pause, but then my body rhythms slowed, my heart opened and I became enchanted. When the film ended I heard a sigh from the audience at the loss of the friends we had been traveling with.

 

  1. Murderball. An altogether remarkable achievement: a movie about quadriplegics in which you see them as characters in the story and don’t feel any pity for them as quadriplegics. I like movies that introduce me to a new world, and although the geography was familiar, this was a new world. It also had the moral complexity of, and a lot more crashes than, my top film.

 

  1. Junebug. This movie (shown on the plane trip to Bhutan) said more about America today than anything else I saw all year. The contrast between the Embeth Davidtz gallery-owner character and Amy Adams as a rural North Carolina self-help newlywed spoke quiet volumes about the Blue-Red divide in our country. Realistic touches abounded, and we had that moral complexity again, in people we could only feel sorry for.
  2. Pride and Prejudice. Enough of moral complexity! – how about one of the all-time great love stories, set in merrie olde England, with the regiment, country balls, a buffoonish clergyman, the vicissitudes of primogeniture, and one of the happiest-ever endings, lit up by the spectacular Keira Knightley. Knowing the story, we could just sit back and enjoy every minute as it came.

 

  1. Sahara. There was more political truth here than in the heavier-handed Syriana and Constant Gardener (well, maybe not more), but that was hardly the point. Once you accepted Penelope Cruz as a WHO doctor working to prevent a plague in West Africa, you were in for a thoroughly delightful ride, with the great Steve Zahn and William H. Macy providing the laughs, Matthew McConaughey, Cruz and Morocco the scenery, and classic rockers the sound track.

 

  1. Me and You and Everyone We Know A deliciously quirky movie, full of hilarious bits, many of which had the added weight of social relevance. Almost all the characters were fun to watch, but writer-director Miranda July was a plain-Jane heartstopper. More evidence that a wonderful movie doesn’t have to cost a lot, it just has to have real people.

 

  1. Grizzly Man. A master of psychological intensity brought us this haunting psychological study of a limited individual with a photogenic and ultimately fatal mania: living with grizzly bears. Werner Herzog expertly mixed Timothy Treadwell’s own footage with postmortem interviews. Slowly it dawned on the viewer that Treadwell was crazy. But that didn’t make the issues the film also raised – mostly about man and nature – go away.

 

  1. Separate Lies. In so many stories, it’s the romance that gets dramatized and we leave the couple on their wedding day. How they will get along thereafter, once the romance has faded, is the harder story, and that’s the genre this film by Julian Fellowes fell into. It will rarely be as uplifting as the romance, but more often it will seem real.

 

  1. Tony Takitani. Matters moved slowly on screen, and not much happened, and the ending was sort of arbitrary. The simple story – of a woman’s clothes-shopping addiction and her husband’s obsession with her – was told in an unusual manner, with the characters’ voices picking up the narrator’s thread. It was different, it was mellow, it was Japanese.

 

Honorable Mentions to Good Night and Good Luck, Saraband, The Squid and the Whale, Layer Cake, Hustle and Flow and, left over from 2004, In Good Company.

 

Biggest Disappointments: Broken Flowers, Kung Fu Hustle, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Syriana, Brokeback Mountain, Walk the Line.

Top Ten 2008

The Oscar nominations this year confirmed what a dismal year the movies had in 2008. Benjamin Button was a horrible bore. Milk and Frost/Nixon were decent films, but nothing to get overly excited about, or want to see a second time. Everybody’s favorite, Slumdog Millionaire, was overbrimming with energy, and the concept was brilliant, but my implausibility detector kept me from ever fully engaging, until the encore, which was a whole different thing. When I saw part of Juno on TV, I said to myself, Now there was a movie!, a movie you wanted to talk to your friends about, a movie with moments you recalled days and months afterward. And that was just my 4th best film of 2007! Nothing this year hit me over the head like No Country for Old Men, or I’m Not There, or Once, or even Gone Baby Gone. So, I’m tempted to skip a Top Ten for this year; but tradition being what it is, I was able to come up with ten films, and ten films only, that I felt comfortable recommending to others. I’ve put them in order, but don’t take that too seriously. None of these are “award-winners,” but all are movies I’m glad I saw.

 

1.Amal. So far as I know, this was never commercially released, but it was my favorite film from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Set in a very real India (not the heightened India of Slumdog), it recounted an O’Henry-like short story about a rickshaw driver who was happier living his simple life than those around him who were chasing a fortune. “Sweet” is a dangerous word to apply to a film, but, unlike some Amy Adams vehicle, there was so much poverty, greed, dishonesty and honest emotion surrounding the driver that his good-spiritedness was both thought-provoking and heartwarming.

 

2.Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The Screenwriters Panel at this year’s SBIFF said that creating characters was more important than plot, and there is no better proof than this Woody Allen movie. Not much happens – certainly nothing important – but the four main characters are all fascinating and beautifully acted. What happens is the evolving relationships among them, and you have to ask the moviegoers with you, Which one did you relate to, or like, or understand? I’m not much on cinematography, but when I think back to all the films on this list, the vivid colors of Barcelona jump out. Bravo Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall!

 

  1. Man on Wire. Climbing Everest or robbing Brinks seems mundane compared to walking on a wire suspended between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, especially when the whole stunt has to be done surreptitiously. Easily the best of the nine documentaries I saw this year, this film benefited from a wonderfully French supporting cast; and Philippe Petit himself, wirewalker, magician, storyteller, provocateur, made you wonder why it took someone 33 years to make this movie.
  2. The Visitor. The Oscar-nominated performance of Richard Jenkins was perhaps the smallest virtue of this sensitive study of the currently intractable issue of illegal immigration. The Arab son and mother and African girlfriend lit up the screen, captured our hearts, and then broke them in an ending that owed more to real life than the movies.

 

  1. Rachel Getting Married. Here, the Oscar-nominated performance, by Anne Hathaway, was all. Her character was infuriating, insufferable, but you couldn’t turn away, from fear of missing the next transgression. Bill Irwin and Debra Winger were perfectly mismatched parents, quite capable of producing a self-centered monster, as well as her overshadowed and resentful sister. The film was ten minutes overlong, but in all, a field day for the pop psychologist in each of us.

 

  1. The Band’s Visit. Another highlight of the SBIFF (seeing films in a modest setting before they get reviewed helps), this was another sensitive portrayal of a seldom-starring group, Arabs – in this case a Columbia-blue-uniformed group of musicians who found themselves stranded in an Israeli town that wasn’t expecting them. It wasn’t that the band members were presented as heroes, but more that they were shown as a typical cross-section of humanity, just like the rest of us, as they tried to relate for one night to the strangers who, not always willingly, took them in.

 

  1. A Christmas Tale. Quel plaisir to spend 152 minutes with a French family, even one as dysfunctional as this. It took a while to figure out who was who, let alone why, and then part of the fun was deciding whom you liked the most and why. Catherine Deneuve as the mother was a treat for the eye, as usual, but she was topped by Anne Consigny as her daughter. Although life and death were at stake, it was the personal relationships that really mattered. We could only watch from the outside, mesmerized.

 

  1. Frozen River. Who would want to watch a bedraggled single mother, losing her car and her home, helping equally desperate immigrants illegally enter upstate New York in the dead of winter, with a half-blind, lost-her-child Native American as a sidekick? Yet Oscar-worthy Melissa Leo’s performance, nuanced and achingly real, gave richness and color to the empty-of-promise, black-and-white landscape of the frozen river.

 

  1. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. It’s the oldest storyline in cinema – Average Joe thinks he loves bodacious bombshell, not noticing the ‘friend’ who secretly loves him– but when the leads (Michael Cera and Kat Dennings) are endearing, the side characters entertaining and the rock score energizing, it’s still a formula that’s hard to beat. And we always need a New York fix from time to time.

 

  1. Dark Knight. A clever balance between earthbound characters, emotions and acts of violence and the fantastical cartoon razzmatazz made this far more engaging than I expected. Minute-after-minute came a surprise, a new bit of deviltry, another wrinkle to fathom; and it was not just Heath Ledger, but also Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman who deserve credit for their supporting roles.

 

P.S. As usual, movies released in Minnesota (or Santa Barbara) during the year do not coincide with the NY/LA releases that qualify for a given year’s Oscars. The Kite Runner would have further strengthened my Top Ten list for 2007 had I seen it in time. At this point I still have not gotten around to viewing The Reader, Gran Torino, Waltz with Bashir, Wendy and Lucy, Doubt, Revolutionary Road or The Class, to name films receiving 2008 awards that are still current in Minneapolis in mid-February. Maybe they won’t affect the above discussion, but in any case I don’t want their exclusion to imply rejection.

 

Oscar Selections Limiting myself to the Academy’s nominees, I would vote as follows:

Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire

Best Actor: Sean Penn

Best Actress: Anne Hathaway

Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger

Supporting Actress: Penelope Cruz

Best Director: Danny Boyle

 

 

 

Top Ten – 2007

Never, in memory, has my list of favorite films for a year been so usurped by the critics’ choices. There was never a complete synchronicity, as each critic – and I’m talking here about The New York Times, Time Magazine, the Star Tribune, the Associated Press and (Minneapolis) City Pages – favored one or two films that I did not particularly like, namely There Will Be Blood, Ratatouille, Zodiac or even The Bourne Ultimatum. And of course every critic felt compelled to include one or two, usually Eastern European, films that didn’t open, at least not in Minneapolis or Santa Barbara, before January 31. But because my own list will seem so uncontroversial, so borrowed even, I have chosen to adopt the Oscar format and start with the lesser awards.

It has never been clear to me what qualifies a role as “supporting” rather than lead; therefore, I am not distinguishing. I will simply list my favorite performances by an actress and by an actor alphabetically, with the winner in boldface.

Best Actress

Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There

Kate Dickie, Red Road

Market Iglova, Once

Nicole Kidman, Margot at the Wedding

Keri Russell, Waitress

 

Best Actor

Casey Affleck, Gone Baby Gone

Josh Brolin, No Country for Old Men

Michael Cera, Juno/Superbad

Ethan Hawke, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson’s War

 

Best Documentary

No End in Sight

Sicko

 

Best Cinematography

No Country for Old Men

Atonement

 

Best Art Direction

Across the Universe

Sweeney Todd

There Will Be Blood

 

Best Original Screenplay

Juno

 

Best Picture

No Country for Old Men

The Lives of Others

Once

Juno

I’m Not There

Gone Baby Gone

Across the Universe

Superbad

Freedom Writers

2 Days in Paris

 

Honorable Mention: Diggers, Enchanted, Jindabyne, Paris Je T’Aime, Waitress

Biggest Disappointments: Assassination of Jesse James, Away from Her, Bourne Ultimatum, Darjeeling Limited, La Vie en Rose, There Will Be Blood

 

  1. No Country for Old Men. For what it was, this was perfection, and what it was was quite something. Each scene was a stunning set piece, and built momentum to the next. Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin gave Oscar-worthy performances, and other minor characters – e.g., Woody Harrelson – were just as good. Tableau after tableau was worth framing. And, probably because it came from Cormac McCarthy, the story had a depth, plumbing beneath the Coen Brothers’ surface gloss. The movie started in the Old West, limitless spaces and sheriffs on horseback. It ended in Texan suburbia, cramped motorcourts and boys on bicycles. Who gets the money, the driving motif, became unimportant. What was important was left to each viewer to decipher.

 

  1. The Lives of Others. A seriously engrossing film about East German Communism, but more about individual morality. Where do one’s personal responsibilities lie – to the state, a friend, your lover, to art, or to oneself? The set was so confined, this could have been performed on the stage, but the issues were so large they were inescapable, and unforgettable. One would like to hope that man’s humanity to man can trump state oppression and blind ambition, but here the movie does not quite convince.

 

  1. Once. The year’s best romance and best musical. Once Market Iglova fixes you with her soulful Eastern European eyes it’s impossible to hope for anything but the long-term happiness of her and “the guy.” That this doesn’t happen only reinforces the feeling that you’re observing a slice of life, instead of just another movie. But what sets this apart from other guy-meets-girl stories is the music, so real and so integral to the story and, by the second time you hear the songs, so good.

 

  1. I’m Not There. Taking a cue, perhaps, from Dylan’s autobiography, which is half made up, Todd Haynes invents a new biopic form, one that keeps you constantly on your toes – when they aren’t tapping along with some of the greatest music of our generation. There’s Joan Baez! There’s the Beatles! There’s the Jack of Hearts! Who?? Each Dylan avatar had a different sort of appeal, although Richard Gere left me rather cold. Charlotte Gainsbourg grounded the film in reality; Cate Blanchett, on the other hand, was surreal. When the credits rolled and we heard the man himself singing Like A Rolling Stone, I felt I had been present at an art happening, not just a movie. Thanks, Bob.

 

  1. Juno. Best of the year’s “knocked-up” movies, and best of the “funny teen” movies, but both are insufficient praise for a pitch-perfect comedy in which every scene, and every song, was worth a laugh or a tug of the heart-strings. Juno MacDuff was probably not a totally realistic character, but neither was Huck Finn. Every supporting character added to the fabric, and the story built to a surprising and satisfying climax. For a little movie, it survived massive hype.

 

  1. Gone Baby Gone. Like the great Mystic River in so many ways, mainly due to the common source of a Dennis Lehane novel and Ben Affleck’s affinity with his native Boston, Gone Baby Gone throws us into a world of real people then winds us around a plot too twisty to keep up with in one viewing. And like its predecessor, it abounds in moral ambiguity. At the end, you may think our hero made the right decision; or you may follow his girlfriend, Michelle Monaghan, who walks. This, not The Assassination of Jesse James, is Casey Affleck’s coming-out film, and Oscar-nominated Amy Ryan is so natural I didn’t even think of her as an actress.

 

  1. Across the Universe. By placing the songs in a story you cared about, with the different characters supplying their own interpretations, Julie Taymor gave the music of the Beatles a depth and emotional context it never had, for me at least, on record. Moreover, the movie encapsulated the ceaselessly fascinating sociology of my favorite period, from Princeton in the early ‘60s through Greenwich Village in the early ‘70s. Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood were my favorite lovers (cf. Once), and if you didn’t love one song, wait a minute and another goodie was on the way.

 

  1. Superbad. There are laugh-out-loud comedies, and then the rare laugh-on-the-floor ones, and this was the latter, fit to be shown in a festival with Animal House and Airplane. Every joke was high-school dirty, but the innocent, almost sweet, tone never varied. And we knew that all would work out in the end, which allowed us to totally relax and wait for the next smashing bit of puerile humor. I still smile at the vision of the cop solemnly addressing “McLovin,” a name now enshrined in our culture.

 

  1. Freedom Writers. Maybe a drop-off here, to a film that garnered no awards or attention and was released in the dead of January, and had a story that’s been told many times on screen: a naïve, do-good young teacher thrown into an inner-city classroom of dead-enders who blossom into academic success. But I liked all the kids and their individual stories, and I loved Hilary Swank (more than her husband did, in a nicely realistic touch). I felt good coming out of this film, pun intended.

 

  1. 2 Days in Paris. I’m a sucker for relationship films, and for cross-cultural studies, too, and that’s all this little film by, for and of Julie Delpy was. It’s fun to see the French mocked, and when it’s done by the French, it’s okay to laugh. Of course, Americans were treated the same; so I was chuckling, or at least twittering, the whole way through. Better than Ira & Abby, the other “Woody Allen” movie I saw this year, or Paris Je T’Aime, the other ode to Paris.

MLK/FBI – 6

There was nothing new here and the presentation got repetitive. On the other hand, it is always instructive to see archival footage of the civil rights movement and to recognize, however bad matters today may be, just how far our country has come. Another way to put it is, it’s shocking to see how bad things were for Blacks in the ’60s, during my lifetime.