Tradition dictates a 10 Best list at this time of year, but rather than annointing what I think were the 10 best films of the year, I'm going to list the 10 movies that very pleasantly surprised me in a year of generally quite good output. The list tends toward the art house and the foreign, but that is where you're more likely to be surprised, isn't it? Heaven knows, the major studios are going to make good and sure that you know about the big titles. So here they are, in no particular order.
The Lookout. Joseph Gordon-Levitt portrays a brain-damaged young man working toward rehabilitation who becomes the dupe of villains planning to rob the bank where he's the janitor. The fascination here is Gordon-Levitt's outstanding performance and the unvarnished feeling for the small town and hard-scrabble rural life.
Waitress. Writer-director Andrienne Shelly creates a witty, poignant, tasty dish of a movie set in a diner famous for the pies its main character creates. It's a delicious slice of life and love served warmly with the knowledge that life is not as easy as whatever, and that we must live with the choices we make.
Knocked Up. Judd Apatow captures our times, our speech, our habits, our attitudes, our sexual and moral confusion, in this laugh-so-hard-you-miss-the-next-line comedy that you've undoubtedly already seen. But whatever you heard about it, wasn't it unexpected fun?
The Host. Beautiful, scary, original Korean monster movie (and what a monster!) that speaks to us about family, loyalty, and sacrifice.
Paprika. Mind-blowing Japanese animated feature that lives half in the "real" world and half in a dream world where the main character becomes the heroine Paprika. The story and images are breathtaking and original.
Once. An Irish street singer boy meets a girl (we never learn their names in the movie) and together they make some beautiful music in an effortless musical that for one, brief, shining moment holds you breathless.
Day Watch. It was the top-grossing Russian movie ever in Russia, a sci-fi fantasy set in Moscow's gritty underworld where the forces of Light and Dark continue their battle begun in "Night Watch" in this second installment of a trilogy. I loved the inventive special effects and imaginative direction that proves that talent and art can more than compensate for budget.
Ratatouille. This cooking rat had me from his first fresh ingredients. I couldn't believe I was rooting for a rat in a kitchen. The animation was superb, and the story delightful.
La vie en rose. Marion Cotillard channels French cabaret singer Edith Piaf in this detailed, thrilling and engrossing bio, which does suffer from a little too much jumping back and forth in time. I was shocked to learn later that many of the songs are lip-synched. If you're too young to remember Piaf, you'll understand what the fuss was all about.
Into the Wild. A great road movie with a remarkable cast of memorable characters that does not preach an easy answer to the questions it raises about the nature of freedom and materialism.
Honorable mention: The Namesake, Starter for 10, Lives of Others, Away From Her, Gone Baby Gone, Talk to Me, Juno.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Lars and the Real Girl ****
In the Ryan Gosling vs. James McEvoy debate, I am squarely in the camp of Gosling. Of course, I haven't yet seen "Atonement," which goes wide next week, so look for a future post assessing the star of "Starter for 10," "Becoming Jane" and "The Last King of Scotland." But for now, and especially in the holiday season, I am convinced and moved by Ryan Gosling in "Lars and the Real Girl." Although it opened in October, "Lars" is still playing in 65 indie-type theaters around the U.S., including two in Denver: the Starz Tivoli and the new Neighborhood Flix Cinema & Café. Hopefully it will stick around a few more weeks following Gosling's Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical.
Written by "Six Feet Under" scribe and co-producer Nancy Oliver, "Lars" tells the story of a painfully withdrawn but nice young man in some unnamed Upper Midwest town. Living a cubicle work life and in a garage apartment behind his brother's house, Lars breaks out of his shell when the exotic girlfriend he met on the Internet comes to visit. But Bianca is not a real girl, she's a life-size sex doll, complete with clothes and a wheelchair furnished by Lars. His brother and sister-in law (excellently played by Paul Schneider and Emily Mortimer) don't know what to do or how to react. So they take Lars to the family doctor, Dagmar (a suberb Patricia Clarkson), who is also a psychologist ("You have to be both this far north," one character says). Dagmar counsels playing along with the delusion until she can figure out how to treat Lars. What follows is a funny, heart-tugging fable about what friends and community can do to help one of their own.
Throughout the movie Gosling plays Lars with such conviction, is so true to this shut-in character, that you cheer any small triumph in his journey. And can we believe that people will play along with make-believe? Well, isn't that what we're doing any time we sit in a darkened theater and give ourselves over to the make-believe on screen?
Gosling is fascinating to watch, and not just here. At his best, his work has focused on troubled young men. After much television work in the '90s, including "The New Micky Mouse Club" culminating as the star in 50 episodes of the television series "Young Hercules" in 1998 and 1999, he has played in a string of often-lauded, usually small box office movies interspersed with some interesting big-budget movies.
Ryan Gosling's indie credentials were established with "The Believer" (2002, $417K box office), based on the true story of a KKK leader who was revealed to be Jewish, for which the Chicago Film Critic's Association nominated him as Most Promising Performer. Then he appeared as the tortured title character in "The United States of Leland" (2004, $344K) opposite Don Cheadle as the teacher and aspiring writer in the juvenile detention center where Leland is sent. Then women discovered Gosling as the young Noah Calhoun in "The Notebook" (2004, $81M), and he was finally in a blockbuster hit, and the recipient of several "Best On-Screen Kiss" awards. "Stay" (2005, $3.6M) was a big-budget flop, where he played opposite Ewan McGregor as the psychiatrist who strives to keep Gosling's character from killing himself.
That brings us to last year's "Half Nelson" (2006, $2.7M) which brought him a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his portrayal of an addicted inner-city school teacher trying to do the right thing and finding help in an unlikely friendship with one of his students. Earlier this year, in "Fracture" (2007, $39M), he held his own with heavyweights Anthony Hopkins and David Strathairm. And now we have "Lars," generating $5.6M so far, in a performance of another tortured soul, told without irony and played so delicately, it could earn him another Academy nomination. I hope so, and I hope that this recent pattern of one for the money, one for the art that we're seeing in his role choices, as with several other of our greatest actors, will continue.
Rated PG-13. 106 minutes. Produced by Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. Distributed by MGM.
Written by "Six Feet Under" scribe and co-producer Nancy Oliver, "Lars" tells the story of a painfully withdrawn but nice young man in some unnamed Upper Midwest town. Living a cubicle work life and in a garage apartment behind his brother's house, Lars breaks out of his shell when the exotic girlfriend he met on the Internet comes to visit. But Bianca is not a real girl, she's a life-size sex doll, complete with clothes and a wheelchair furnished by Lars. His brother and sister-in law (excellently played by Paul Schneider and Emily Mortimer) don't know what to do or how to react. So they take Lars to the family doctor, Dagmar (a suberb Patricia Clarkson), who is also a psychologist ("You have to be both this far north," one character says). Dagmar counsels playing along with the delusion until she can figure out how to treat Lars. What follows is a funny, heart-tugging fable about what friends and community can do to help one of their own.
Throughout the movie Gosling plays Lars with such conviction, is so true to this shut-in character, that you cheer any small triumph in his journey. And can we believe that people will play along with make-believe? Well, isn't that what we're doing any time we sit in a darkened theater and give ourselves over to the make-believe on screen?
Gosling is fascinating to watch, and not just here. At his best, his work has focused on troubled young men. After much television work in the '90s, including "The New Micky Mouse Club" culminating as the star in 50 episodes of the television series "Young Hercules" in 1998 and 1999, he has played in a string of often-lauded, usually small box office movies interspersed with some interesting big-budget movies.
Ryan Gosling's indie credentials were established with "The Believer" (2002, $417K box office), based on the true story of a KKK leader who was revealed to be Jewish, for which the Chicago Film Critic's Association nominated him as Most Promising Performer. Then he appeared as the tortured title character in "The United States of Leland" (2004, $344K) opposite Don Cheadle as the teacher and aspiring writer in the juvenile detention center where Leland is sent. Then women discovered Gosling as the young Noah Calhoun in "The Notebook" (2004, $81M), and he was finally in a blockbuster hit, and the recipient of several "Best On-Screen Kiss" awards. "Stay" (2005, $3.6M) was a big-budget flop, where he played opposite Ewan McGregor as the psychiatrist who strives to keep Gosling's character from killing himself.
That brings us to last year's "Half Nelson" (2006, $2.7M) which brought him a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his portrayal of an addicted inner-city school teacher trying to do the right thing and finding help in an unlikely friendship with one of his students. Earlier this year, in "Fracture" (2007, $39M), he held his own with heavyweights Anthony Hopkins and David Strathairm. And now we have "Lars," generating $5.6M so far, in a performance of another tortured soul, told without irony and played so delicately, it could earn him another Academy nomination. I hope so, and I hope that this recent pattern of one for the money, one for the art that we're seeing in his role choices, as with several other of our greatest actors, will continue.
Rated PG-13. 106 minutes. Produced by Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. Distributed by MGM.
National Treasure: Book of Secrets **
Like the intricate wooden machinery of an old trick desk made by a master of Chinese boxes, which just happens to appear in the movie, "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" slides its moving parts just so to produce the calculated effect. Three turns of the iconic city dial: Washington, D.C. White House, click, Paris and the other statue of Liberty, click, London and Buckingham palace, click, click, click. Lets dial in some older and younger marital bickering (Jon Voigt vs. Helen Mirren; Nicolas Cage vs.Diane Kruger), some snippets of real history, lots of phony balony history, some inside views of national monuments, and a preposterous hunt for a lost city of gold apparently built by one of the lost tribes of the Maya who decided that the tropics were not for them, CLICK!
The trouble is, all these moving parts just don't satisfy like the first "National Treasure." It is perhaps the work of the fabled Curse of the Sequel, which dooms filmmakers to try to reproduce the effects of a first hit by slavishly duplicating its structure, conceits, and tricks in the second. This curse in its classic form produces a sequel that doesn't stack up to its golden progenitor, but still makes money, so there's yet a third edition of the franchise, where it becomes so mired in its own history and ossified in its thinking, that everyone loses interest and it finally manages to lose money, and puts an end to further editions. That is what we're seeing here.
The first "National Treasure" (2004) was enjoyable Hollywood Trash, a romp through history and monuments with some real suspense and surprises. Universally trashed by critics, it nevertheless played for four months and racked up $168 million in domestic box office. But "Book of Secrets" is deja vu all over again. There's a good car chase, a scary time on a tipsy platform, more Jon Voigt, which is good, some Helen Mirren, which is very good, and a better role and performance by the tech whiz sidekick (Justin Bartha as Riley Poole). But the rest is just too creaky. There's a curious absense of suspense even in the most harrowing of circumstances, a murky plot with a murky bad guy (Ed Harris), and a sense that you've seen it all before and know how it will turn out. There is even, God help us, a set-up for "National Treasure 3." According to ancient texts the only remedy for the Curse of the Sequel is to hack into the Los Angeles area traffic control system, and turn off all the green lights in Hollywood. Sounds like a job for Riley Poole.
The trouble is, all these moving parts just don't satisfy like the first "National Treasure." It is perhaps the work of the fabled Curse of the Sequel, which dooms filmmakers to try to reproduce the effects of a first hit by slavishly duplicating its structure, conceits, and tricks in the second. This curse in its classic form produces a sequel that doesn't stack up to its golden progenitor, but still makes money, so there's yet a third edition of the franchise, where it becomes so mired in its own history and ossified in its thinking, that everyone loses interest and it finally manages to lose money, and puts an end to further editions. That is what we're seeing here.
The first "National Treasure" (2004) was enjoyable Hollywood Trash, a romp through history and monuments with some real suspense and surprises. Universally trashed by critics, it nevertheless played for four months and racked up $168 million in domestic box office. But "Book of Secrets" is deja vu all over again. There's a good car chase, a scary time on a tipsy platform, more Jon Voigt, which is good, some Helen Mirren, which is very good, and a better role and performance by the tech whiz sidekick (Justin Bartha as Riley Poole). But the rest is just too creaky. There's a curious absense of suspense even in the most harrowing of circumstances, a murky plot with a murky bad guy (Ed Harris), and a sense that you've seen it all before and know how it will turn out. There is even, God help us, a set-up for "National Treasure 3." According to ancient texts the only remedy for the Curse of the Sequel is to hack into the Los Angeles area traffic control system, and turn off all the green lights in Hollywood. Sounds like a job for Riley Poole.
Rated PG. 124 minutes. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer Films. Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pcitures.
Charlie Wilson's War ***
First of all, it's a comedy. Yes, it's a true story about how one congressman from Texas had a great deal to do with enabling the Afghan rebels to defeat the Soviets in the '80s. But's it's not a war movie. Yes, there are some heart-tugging refugee camp scenes, and some realistic air attack scenes, both in newsreel style and in helicopter point of view mayhem. But it's not a war movie like you think. It's not like the war movies you've been staying away from in droves. It's not "In the Valley of Elah," it's not "Lions for Lambs," "Rendition," "Redacted," or the documentary "No End in Sight," all of which have had disappointing or downright minuscule box office receipts. It's a serious story told in a funny way with larger-than-life characters.
There's Charlie himself (Tom Hanks), his rich Houston friend who has taken up the Afghan cause (Julia Roberts), and an effective but too rough around the edges for Helsinki CIA agent who gets demoted to the Afghanistan desk (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). And maybe you're right to stay away from those other movies. After all, why do we go to the movies? Most of all we want to be entertained. We can even be entertained by war movies. But we do require a little distance. A CBS News poll in September found that 61% of Americans think it's too soon to be making movies about the Iraq war. These same people are voting with their feet as they head to escapist Hollywood trash like "National Treasure: Book of Secrets," (reviewed above) which has racked up $65 million in five days against the paltry $16 million that "Charlie" has made.
But seriously, this is a funny movie, and yes it has a lesson or two, but that's not the big, serious point. I mean, come on people, it has Tom Hanks in great form, Julia Roberts playing the kind of free spirit only big Texas money can buy, Phillip Seymour Hoffman in another great character turn, and all directed by Mike Nichols. Did I mention all the women, and drinking, and drugs, and parties that Charlie Wilson occupied a great deal of his time with? This is not a preachy collection of speeches, but a real movie, and with real twists and turns of office politics, national politics, and international clandestine politics. Doesn't that sound like more fun than another mish-mash of phony-baloney history "National Treasure" hunt?
Rated R. 97 minutes. Produced by Good Time Charlie Productions. Distributed by Universal Pictures.
There's Charlie himself (Tom Hanks), his rich Houston friend who has taken up the Afghan cause (Julia Roberts), and an effective but too rough around the edges for Helsinki CIA agent who gets demoted to the Afghanistan desk (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). And maybe you're right to stay away from those other movies. After all, why do we go to the movies? Most of all we want to be entertained. We can even be entertained by war movies. But we do require a little distance. A CBS News poll in September found that 61% of Americans think it's too soon to be making movies about the Iraq war. These same people are voting with their feet as they head to escapist Hollywood trash like "National Treasure: Book of Secrets," (reviewed above) which has racked up $65 million in five days against the paltry $16 million that "Charlie" has made.
But seriously, this is a funny movie, and yes it has a lesson or two, but that's not the big, serious point. I mean, come on people, it has Tom Hanks in great form, Julia Roberts playing the kind of free spirit only big Texas money can buy, Phillip Seymour Hoffman in another great character turn, and all directed by Mike Nichols. Did I mention all the women, and drinking, and drugs, and parties that Charlie Wilson occupied a great deal of his time with? This is not a preachy collection of speeches, but a real movie, and with real twists and turns of office politics, national politics, and international clandestine politics. Doesn't that sound like more fun than another mish-mash of phony-baloney history "National Treasure" hunt?
Rated R. 97 minutes. Produced by Good Time Charlie Productions. Distributed by Universal Pictures.
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Juno *****
Ellen Page as Juno finds she must deal with many things that are, as she says, "beyond my maturity level" when, at 16, she becomes pregnant and decides to have the baby and find the perfect couple to adopt it. Juno is way smarter than her age would suggest, and her observations and reactions to her predicament are quick, cutting, and often hysterically funny. Kudos to writer Diablo Cody (whose account of her life as a stripper marks her as the same kind of free and quirky spirit as Juno) and to director Jason Reitman ("Thank You for Smoking") for this well-observed gem, just the antidote we need for too much Christmas treacle. The movie is, finally, heart-warming, but in its own way, as more than one character grows up a little.
But the highest marks go to Page, who is in turn, and sometimes at once, a kid, a teenager, and a mature young woman. Page is no stranger to acting beyond her maturity level. She was the harrowing star of "Hard Candy," (2006), where she passed for 14 to trap, expose, and punish a suspected child molester played by Patrick Wilson. This movie made less than a million dollars, but is worth renting if you enjoy edgy psychological thrillers. (Guys, be warned, there's a scene of torment that will have you crossing your legs.)
"Juno" seems poised to do well as Fox Searchlight expands the theaters this week to over 900, riding on the wave of its Golden Globe nominations (best comedy or musical, actress, and screenplay). I predict the Oscars will take notice as well, assuming, of course , that there will be Oscars this year. I also predict multiple viewings by groups of girls and young women, who will go back to catch the lines they were laughing too hard to hear the first time.
The rest of the cast is, in a word, superb. Michael Cera ("Superbad") is the sperm-donor boyfriend who gets a chance to realize his maturity level. Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman are the "perfect" suburban couple (but we all know what kinds of things can lurk in the suburbs). And as Juno's parents, J.K. Simmons (the gruff editor in the "Spiderman" trilogy) and Allison Janney ("Hairspray," "The West Wing" and countless appearances on "Ellen") play the kind of supportive parents a kid like Juno needs.
There is also a stand-out score of independent songs, assembled, I suppose, by Matteo Messina, who was also the composer on "Thank You for Smoking."
Rated PG-13. 92 minutes. Produced and distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures.
But the highest marks go to Page, who is in turn, and sometimes at once, a kid, a teenager, and a mature young woman. Page is no stranger to acting beyond her maturity level. She was the harrowing star of "Hard Candy," (2006), where she passed for 14 to trap, expose, and punish a suspected child molester played by Patrick Wilson. This movie made less than a million dollars, but is worth renting if you enjoy edgy psychological thrillers. (Guys, be warned, there's a scene of torment that will have you crossing your legs.)
"Juno" seems poised to do well as Fox Searchlight expands the theaters this week to over 900, riding on the wave of its Golden Globe nominations (best comedy or musical, actress, and screenplay). I predict the Oscars will take notice as well, assuming, of course , that there will be Oscars this year. I also predict multiple viewings by groups of girls and young women, who will go back to catch the lines they were laughing too hard to hear the first time.
The rest of the cast is, in a word, superb. Michael Cera ("Superbad") is the sperm-donor boyfriend who gets a chance to realize his maturity level. Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman are the "perfect" suburban couple (but we all know what kinds of things can lurk in the suburbs). And as Juno's parents, J.K. Simmons (the gruff editor in the "Spiderman" trilogy) and Allison Janney ("Hairspray," "The West Wing" and countless appearances on "Ellen") play the kind of supportive parents a kid like Juno needs.
There is also a stand-out score of independent songs, assembled, I suppose, by Matteo Messina, who was also the composer on "Thank You for Smoking."
Rated PG-13. 92 minutes. Produced and distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures.
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