Barney’s Version – 3

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“Unpleasant,” “absurd,” “pointless” are the descriptors that come to mind when reacting to this purported comedy, with “insufferable” not far behind. A little Paul Giamatti can be interesting, although I’m tiring of even that, but a whole movie of him smoking cigars, drinking and behaving badly is hard to take. Then there is the question, why would three women – two with looks, one with money – marry him? He supposedly turns into a heartwarming figure at the end, thanks to Alzheimer’s Disease, but by then it is way too late.
While I am on the subject of smoking, have I noted in these pages that every movie I have seen in the last two years, not counting children’s films and a few rare exceptions, has shown a character smoking. In more than a few, such as Barney’s Version, it is hardly a plot point; it is instead a major character crutch. I wonder if some actors could convey “troubled” without a cigarette in their hand? Of course, some will offer the excuse that they are “setting the scene” in the 1950s or before, when smoking was much more prevalent. But even then, many people did not smoke, and more often than not the exact same movie could be made without anyone lighting up. Were the protestors from 20 years ago, like Andy Tobias, rebuffed in their efforts to get Hollywood to go smokeless, or did they just get tired and give up?

Another Year – 7.5

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Sometimes, it seems, not much happens in a year: we grow tomatoes, have a barbecue party, lose a friend from work – oh, and our son gets engaged. Not much there for a movie, it would seem, but Mike Leigh’s ensemble actors make the mundane sufficiently dramatic without, for the most part, histrionics. The exception here was the manic performance of Leslie Manville as their divorced friend, looking for love in all the wrong places. She was hard to take, but she propelled the story, from the hopefulness of spring to the desolation of winter. Another year.

Biutiful – 7

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Most of the movie was Javier Bardem’s face, which expressed a range of emotions, almost all melancholy. The backdrop was the Europe of 2009’s Gomorrah, this time in Spain instead of Italy, with sweatshops of Chinese illegals, Senegali street merchants, and cops on the take or on the make. A fair amount of explanation was left out, whether from insufficient translation or excessive editing I don’t know, which may have contributed to the ambivalence I felt about Bardem’s character: intense as it was, I was not sorry to see him pass away.

Just Go With It – 8

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Depth aside, everything you could want in a night at the movies: humor, romance, cleverness, cute kids, gorgeous women, Jennifer Aniston. This was only my second Adam Sandler movie, but both featured a gentle kindspiritedness, if such a word exists, that let me relax and enjoy the gags, many of which were quite original. Most memorable was my favorite sheep joke of all time. But the great pleasure was watching Jennifer Aniston – funny, beautiful and made to seem accessible: America’s sweetheart, indeed. Nary a moment passed without producing a smile, if not an outright laugh; and when Jennifer and Adam lay down in their separate beds and realized they were in love, it was truly touching.

Oscar Preview

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Having already given my pronouncements on the Best Picture race – for me, it should be Winter’s Bone over Black Swan, by a neck – it is time to look at the individual awards. The pundits are almost unanimous in predicting the actual winners, so I will instead give an analysis of whom I would vote for, and why, if I had a ballot.
Best Actor Jesse Eisenberg is Oscar-worthy for his compelling and quite tricky portrayal of a real live contemporary as a socially destructive inventor, someone who operates outside the social norms we require yet remains sympathetic. The performance also impresses as a stretch from the goofy, lovestruck nerd Eisenberg played so well last year in Adventureland. This is not a normal year, however, and he will be blown away by Colin Firth, who is even more dominant in his movie and carries off the acting magic of convincingly stammering the entire film. Furthermore, Firth’s performance last year, in A Single Man, far outshone Eisenberg’s, and you feel that, as the more mature actor, this is his turn to win. Finally, Colin Firth is so good-looking and articulate that you just want to see him on stage giving the acceptance speech.
[Caveat: I have not seen Javier Bardem’s movie.]
Best Actress Natalie Portman gets points for playing a tragic role, points for her physical sacrifice (losing 20 pounds to get in character), and points for performing her own “stunts,” the dance scenes. Moreover, she’s a wonderful actress, with a long string of varying roles at her early age. Black Swan is her vehicle, and she rides it to perfection. Her only challenger, according to press accounts, is Annette Bening, but her performance left me indifferent, if not cold. Jennifer Lawrence did a wonderful job, but with no body of prior work and in a film that no one saw she is not in the competition. If she had been nominated, I would be tempted to cast my vote for Anne Hathaway in Love & Other Drugs, a baring performance in every sense; but I will be content to watch her MC the broadcast.
[Caveat: I have not seen Rabbit Hole, but Nicole Kidman, however talented, is not a favorite of mine.]
Supporting Actor This is a two-man race, and it is not the two that people are talking about. First off, Geoffrey Rush has no business appearing in the “supporting” category. King’s Speech is a two-person drama, and it is, in fact, Lionel Logue’s equality with King George VI that is the crux of the movie. Rush and Firth both belong in the Best Actor category, just as Bening and Julianne Moore shared best actress nominations at the Golden Globes. Christian Bale, the odds-on favorite, gives a remarkable performance, in the style of Brando or DeNiro. But for me, his performance was distracting, not supporting. “Look at me act!,” he seemed to shout every time he was onscreen. The truly supporting performances that mesmerized me were turned in by Jeremy Renner and John Hawkes. Each added a hard, sinister edge to his movie and, rather than acting, came across as totally authentic. Neither took the spotlight away from the star – Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lawrence, respectively – but both added heft, and a touch of terror, to the screen worlds they inhabited. If I had to choose? I couldn’t.
Supporting Actress Here again I will go with the consensus: Melissa Leo performed a similar service to The Fighter that Renner and Hawkes did to their films. As touching as Leo was in Frozen River, she was that tough here. Amy Adams, one of my favorites, held her own in arguably a more nuanced role, but it was Leo who set the appropriate tone; if Mark Wahlberg was too bland and Bale too showy, Leo was the anchor, the perfect bridge between the Hollywood actors and the common folk of Lowell. As for Hailee Steinfeld, she has apparently been nominated in the Supporting category because of her age and inexperience. By any measure – dialogue, screentime, narrative pivot – she is the lead performer in True Grit, far more essential than Jeff Bridges, who was somehow nominated in the Leading Actor group.
[Caveat: I have not seen Jacki Weaver. I should also add props to Leslie Manville, although again if she is a “supporting” actor, one wonders who the lead is. That is the dilemma of a true ensemble piece like Another Year.]
I know nothing about the non-acting awards, but it seems neither do other voters, who tend to cast ballots for whichever film they liked the most. So, among my choices would be:
Adapted Screenplay – The Social Network
Original Screenplay – The King’s Speech
Documentary Feature – Exit Through the Gift Shop
Film Editing – The Fighter
Sound Editing – Inception

Top Ten – 2010

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This year for the first time I am offering three Top Ten movie lists, and the first, for reasons of pre-Oscar urgency, will merely be my capitulation of the ten nominees for best film. For detailed explanation of why I prefer one to another, go to the Alphabetical Listings for 2010 and click on the relevant movie title. In order, my choices are:
1. Winter’s Bone. The most authentic, least Hollywood of the bunch, with acting that didn’t seem like acting (compare Jennifer Lawrence to Hailee Steinfeld) and a gripping, unpredictable story.
2. Black Swan. Even more intense than Winter’s Bone, the sheen of Hollywood and melodrama is all that made its horror bearable (if not always watchable). Wonderfully psychological and ambiguous.
3. The King’s Speech. Wonderful acting but small story.
4. The Fighter. Wonderful acting but cliched story.
5. Social Network. Fascinating character study, but for a “true story” a lot rang false.
6. True Grit. (Dropoff starts here) Formulaic story enlivened by precociously formal young heroine, but that was not enough to carry the film.
7. 127 Hours. Not much suspense or point, a how-to for something you don’t want to do, or see.
8. The Kids Are All Right. The relationship between Annette and Julianne left me cold.
9. Inception. Bold moviemaking, but it could have been just as groundbreaking with a more comprehensible plot and better casting.
10. Toy Story 3. Good pre-adult animated film, but it remained a pre-adult animated film.

Being critical of so many of the Academy’s choice, I must next offer my own list of 2010 movies, which I admit to being more idiosyncratic, if not offbeat.
1. Cell 211. A good, suspenseful and original story, which was rare, and powerful acting by some scary Romanians.
2. Winter’s Bone. See above.
3. Black Swan. Ditto.
4. Women Without Men. An artwork by Shirin Neshat that grabbed the emotions as well as the eyes.
5. Bluebeard. A feminist fable that brought a myth to life.
6. Get Him to the Greek. Raunchy good fun, a smile-a-minute, with music to boot.
7. Buried. One person in a coffin but oh-so-connected to the world.
8. Love and Other Drugs. My favorite romance of the year.
9. Fair Game. Politics, Sean Penn and a story I cared about.
10. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. An adaptation that did justice to the book.
Runners-Up: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps; The King’s Speech; The Fighter; The Social Network.
Finally, for reasons of completeness, I add a third Top Ten, based on movies I saw in 2010. Several were released in 2009 but didn’t make that list because I had not yet viewed them when the list was published. There are, obviously, overlaps.
1. Cell 211.
2. The White Ribbon. So much for German culture.
3. Black Swan.
4. The Secret in Their Eyes. Spanish passion, good storytelling.
5. Winter’s Bone.
6. Women Without Men.
7. A Serious Man. Coen Brothers at their best.
8. Bluebeard.
9. Still Walking. Japanese family saga.
10. Buried.
If I can add one comment that perhaps makes some sense of my choices. What I rewarded this year was edgy or unusual film, works that used the cinema form in a novel way: Bluebeard, Buried, Women Without Men, even Black Swan. Cell 211 and Winter’s Bone, coincidentally my top two picks, are the only films that tell a straightforward story building to a suspenseful climax. Maybe next year there will be more, but for 2010 it was a more experimental cinema that caught my attention.

Zambezi – 1

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Two second-rate TV ‘specials’ covering the upper and lower halves of the river, but nothing distinguished one part of the river from another, or this river from any other. Shots of animals often had no connection to the river, in any case, and were nothing we didn’t see in better films 20 years ago. A pointless, repetitive, uninformative nature documentary.

Troubadours – 1

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This was such an annoying film I’d give it a negative score if I could. Different rock eras were conflated and confused, and no legitimate story line emerged. The filmmaker took his access to the James Taylor/Carole King Reunion Tour and purported to base the story of the Troubadour nightclub in L.A. on it, but he wound up making a movie about Taylor and King. Greater talents like Elton John, Jackson Browne and the Eagles were reduced to subservient cameos, and telling a story of “singer-songwriters” without Bob Dylan is as misguided as basing a movie about the L.A. scene on a mildly boring singer from Massachusetts.

Nostalgia for Light – 3

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If there was a connection between Chilean astronomers searching out celestial bodies and Chilean widows digging nearby in the Atacama Desert for bones of the “disappeared,” I slept through it, one story being told as slowly and undramatically as the other. The widows’ quest struck me as particularly pointless, but that may just be me.

The Still Moment – 5.5

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This is the kiond of film a film festival is for: totally uncommercial, produced on a used shoestring, aimed at a mini-market – but made with such singleness of purpose that its message comes through pure and clear (unlike Nostalgia, Zambezi and Troubadours, below). The message: surfing is about oneness with nature, with commitment and abandonment producing, if lucky, “the still moment.” The medium: scratchy, backlit interviews with surf pioneers, filmed in washout that matched the vintage ’60s clips of the surf world. Someone in the audience called it “Zen,” and it was.