confessions of an amateur cineaste

Now that no one cares, let’s react a bit to the Oscar Nominated Short Films.

Animated:

French Roast (France): The coolest thing about this short is that about half of the action takes place in the mirror behind a customer in a café. The second coolest thing is what it has to tell us about nuns, namely, that they cannot be trusted.

Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty (Ireland): Great use of two different animation styles, one for the grandmother telling the story and the other for the story being told. I liked it a lot.

The Lady and the Reaper (Spain): Probably my favorite, if only because I enjoy rooting for death.

Logorama (Argentina): Which took home the Oscar, and which I rather hated. It’s a fantastic concept, and I get that it was supposed to be satirical, but that is no excuse for a totally crap script. I am not amused,

A Matter of Loaf and Death (UK): Latest Wallace & Gromit installment, which I was totally on board with until you discover that the murderer’s motive? Is that they have gained weight.

They also showed three bonus shorts: Partly Cloudy (which everyone had seen before Up), The Kinematograph (I wasn’t that into the story, but the texture of the animation was very cool) and Runaway (a fun Canadian short about a train and a cow and ensuing hijinks).

Live Action:

The Door (Ireland): Which would have made a lot more sense if we’d had the Chernobyl context at the beginning rather than the end.

Instead of Abracadabra (Sweden): Screwy, very Swedish short about a wannabe magician.

Kavi (India/USA): Frustratingly, only half of a good short on modern-day slavery. It ends a bit abruptly, and I would have really liked it to go on a bit longer.

Miracle Fish (Australia): Fantastic. Probably the best of the bunch, with true narrative tension and a great performance by the child star.

The New Tenants (Denmark/USA): The winner, dark, which reminded me a lot of Six Shooter.

I snagged a pass to Youth In Revolt after hearing a rumor that Michael Cera actually bothers to act in it. I am more than a little appalled that it was my first movie of 2010.

Cera basically blew all the affection I had for him from “Arrested Development” and Superbad by hitting me with the one-two suckerpunch that was the god-awful adaptation of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist & the dull, self-indulgent mockumentary Paper Heart.

I haven’t read Youth in Revolt, so I can’t speak to it as an adaptation, but the film certainly felt like a YA novel, hormonal and hyper-real. If I were still in a position to do reader’s advisory, I’d hand it to someone who liked Rats Saw God.

Does it work? Sure. I particularly liked the animated sequences (very Better Off Dead). Does Cera act? Yes. Nick Twisp is definitely in the Cera mold, but his alter-ego, Francois, is great smarmy fun. (Though not as much fun as Justin Long as The Love Interest’s older brother, who was probably the best part of the movie.) And you gotta respect a film that has the guts to be an R rated teen movie.

All that said… eh. It took me this long to bother to post about it, holding up four many other films. Clearly I’m not excited.

The last in SIFF’s audaciously named “Festival Buzz Series”, The Young Victoria is a beautiful historical love story which touched me in a way I had expected Bright Star to do. Bright Star is the greater technical achievement, but Victoria has the heart I was looking for.

Emily Blunt is Victoria, soon to ascend the throne and beset on all sides by people seeking to control her & thus the empire, including the difficult-to-resist Paul Bettany as Lord Melbourne. She’s introduced to Albert (Rupert Friend) as yet another step in her carefully-vetted world, but against all odds they turn out to be true partners and an epic romance.

It’s wonderfully directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y), who doesn’t get bogged down in dresses & stately homes and instead puts us right at the center of the politics, and it’s from the script by Julian Fellowes (ofGosford Park, of course, but almost better known to me as Kilwillie on “Monarch of the Glen”). A peek at his IMDb shows a film titled Emma & Nelson in development. Lord Nelson! How exciting! (If you are a big Age of Sail nerd, which I am.)

Charming, full of intrigue, and definitely one of my favorites of the year.

I had not been in a hurry to see The Men Who Stare at Goats, because I had heard such mixed buzz, but after a pretty difficult day at work we decided that Ewan MacGregor and George Clooney being goofy was just what we needed. And we were right.

They have great chemistry, the story is bizarre enough (and convoluted a bit with flashback) that I didn’t know where it was going, and it was exactly what we needed: a ridiculous movie about the New Earth Army, claiming that more of it is true than we’d think.

::

The last movie I saw in the 69 Series, True Grit, was also pretty darn entertaining. Kim Darby is a 14 year old girl who hires (a drunken, eye-patched) John Wayne to hunt down the killer of her father. One of the original reviews described Darby’s performance thus: “the supposedly 14-year old heroine delivers her campy archaic lines with all the aplomb of an elephant playing hopscotch”. How great an image is that? All the more so because it’s true.

Also tagging along is Glen Campbell, who wants to bring the killer back to Texas. Robert Duvall is the killer in question. Great fun, though the ending was a bit overlong.

I am astonished that it was rated G, though. You can kill heaps of people and it’s appropriate for general audiences? Film ratings are total crap, with pretty much zero consistency.

Okay, kids. I am five movies behind*, but I know the only one anyone actually cares about is Sherlock Holmes. I am okay with this! For you, I will discuss Holmes!

Oh, Guy Ritchie. The night before I saw Holmes I rewatched Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and between the two I discovered that, like so many other people, Ritchie is better when he has less money to work with. One of my favorite things about it is that, even though many many people die (”They’re all dead, Dave”), it’s creatively presented, with a distinct lack of gore. Why? The gore would have been too expensive.

I famously first saw Lock Stock at a press screening shortly after it was starting to accrue some festival buzz, could not convince anyone to go with me, but went anyway of course and wound up meeting Ritchie and both of the Jasons: Statham and Flemyng**. Clearly there was some fail happening back in… whenever it came out.

But anyway, point being, Lock Stock is awesome, and Holmes, though fun, is not awesome. It is also not even pretending to be literary, which is totally fine! What it is, really, is a steampunk action movie. I, however, am not really an action movie person, the Bourne movies & Hong Kong films starring Tony Leung and/or Andy Lau excepted, so I am maybe a little harder to impress.

The way the workings of Holmes’ mind are presented is okay, but frequently just slows down the pacing. In spite of one of them having a visible fiancee, Holmes & Watson are totally in love, for those of you who are concerned about that sort of thing. (You know who you are.) Robert Downey Jr & Jude Law are clearly having a blast, which is nice for them.

However, I soured a little on the whole project at about a third of the way in, when we learn that Rachel McAdams’ character is working for (dun dun dun) a professor. Oh, what is that smell? Just eau de sequel, which we will pour over your head by the end, in case you were dumb enough to miss it the first time.

Also, the whole thing could have been about twenty minutes shorter. But the end credits are beautiful. All in all, it’s okay. But I find it depressing when a lot of money is spent on an okay movie that could have been an awesome movie. And as usual, I can’t help wonder if the fact that it had three writers had something to do with it. Two writers are fantastic, but at three I start to get concerned.

* The other four are The Men Who Stare At Goats, True Grit, The Young Victoria, and The Wizard of Oz; thanks for asking.

**Flemyng who later appeared in of one of the most memorable sex scenes of all time, featured in The Red Violin.

I can’t seem to get excited about writing up Invictus. On the way out, one of the fellows in front of me called it “brilliant”. “Best movie of the year”, another fellow concurred. Me, I think they should see more films. (Though perhaps not the two we got trailers for — The Book of Eli, where even in two minutes the slow motion shots of Denzel Washington got hilariously repetitive, and Edge of Darkness, where Mel Gibson’s daughter is killed in order to provide him with a motive.)

Anyway. Invictus is a solid but simplistic telling of a slice of history: the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa and Nelson Mandela’s efforts to use the sport to unite the country post apartheid. It’s basically another movie by white people to make them feel good about themselves. Mandela takes office, white people are suspicious, the rugby team does well, everyone is all hugs and smiles. And look, I am American, which means I barely know United States history, let alone history outside our borders, but I am pretty sure the situation in South Africa was and is a bit more complicated than that.

Sports-wise, I still don’t get rugby. Of course, I once saw a four hour movie about cricket & I don’t understand it either. You never even get really excited about the matches because you basically know how it’s going to go, and at the end of a slightly overlong movie, repeated slow motion takes are just not a good idea.

I read that Eastwood arrived in South Africa for the first time about two days before he started shooting, and finished the film ahead of schedule. It shows. If you want to see a film about South Africa, rent Tsotsi. It’s directed by a white guy too, but a South African one, not an American blowing into town for a few weeks and back out again. I respect that Eastwood understands he doesn’t have a lot of time left. I wish he’d spend it telling his own stories.

Things it does well: Morgan Freeman’s performance (as if there were any question), avoiding drawing parallels to Barack Obama, Damon fitting in on the pitch as another rough-and-tumble bulky rugby guy, the all-cgi stadium crowds, some of the security guys (Tony Kgoroge is great). But overall, it’s just too tame a telling.

I saw Where the Wild Things Are for the second time this weekend, and it seemed like a good excuse to throw some Rolling Stone links at y’all: Dave Eggers’ Monster Project: Behind “The Wild Things” (now I really want to read that, because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I am a sucker for that sort of multiple retelling thing) & Maurice Sendak, King of All Wild Things (a profile from 1976).

I still loved the movie, by the way. It’s beautiful & frightening, just as it should be. Of course, I was an angry & lonely kid too; I just directed it all inside instead.

(It’s only the second film I have seen twice this year. The first was Let the Right One In. If it had played for a full week at NWFF, though, I would have made it to Wings of Desire again, because that movie is *amazing*.)

Tonight, Invictus. Stay tuned.

Up in the Air was my one hundredth film in the cinema this year, and as such already had an outsized degree of importance attached to it, and as I sit here trying to figure out what to tell you all about it (whoever you are, if you’re even there) I mostly just want to go see it again. And then possibly have a good cry. It felt very personal in a way I hadn’t expected.

Here’s what you want to know. It stars George Clooney. His character fires people for a living, and in doing so, he spends over 300 days a year traveling. Airports are home. His family are all strangers to him. His life goal is membership in an exclusive frequent flier club. But then a few things happen. His firm decides to go high tech & threatens take him off the road. He meets someone (the always-fabulous Vera Farmiga). His sister’s getting married. His airport cocoon is challenged, basically, and all against a background of things that are happening now in America.

It put me in mind of a line from “Wonderfalls”: “You have really managed to create a stressless, expectation-free zone for yourself.” There are expectations, but only professional, and nothing he can’t handle. People are okay and everything, but best not to let anyone get too close.

For about the first half of the movie, I was pretty irked by Anna Kendrick’s character (looks like she’s currently being wasted in the Twilight franchise), not through any fault of her own, but because I wasn’t really excited about seeing another young professional woman get schooled. And I was the only person in the theater to laugh out loud when she precluded remarks to Farmiga’s character with “I don’t want to sound anti-feminist, but”. And that she couldn’t grasp why someone wouldn’t want kids? Ridiculous. But she redeemed herself by the end, so okay.

It’s the third feature from Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking, Juno) & probably accessible to folks who didn’t like either of those. He manages a perfectly even tone, a challenge, considering the themes, and all the more artful for the apparent ease with which he carries it off. Clooney’s the unlikeable guy that you like, and if you’re me, the guy you identify with a little bit more than is comfortable.

Okay, before I even get started here, can anyone tell me if there is anywhere an actual case of someone recording a feature film on their cell phone and uploading it to the internet? Because seriously, people.

On one hand, at least at this screening they didn’t flat-out confiscate phones, but on the other they nearly took your head off if you checked the time on it in the half hour we waited for the movie to begin (not that I’m complaining about having that much time to kill — better inside than out). And for the first time ever (that I have witnessed) a theater staff member had to read off a legal document from the distributer letting us know exactly what the consequences would be if we were the first people in the history of the world to pirate a movie with a cell phone.

For the love. And it’s not like this was, I don’t know, Avatar or some blockbuster shit. It was a remake of a Danish film. What is the market for *that*?

Whatever. So, Brothers stars Tobey Maguire & Jake Gyllenhaal as (obvious from the title though not from looking at them) as brothers. Natalie Portman is Maguire’s wife, he gets shipped back to Afghanistan, and fresh-from-prison Jake grows a bit into the man of the house after they get the news (incorrect, as it turns out) of Tobey’s death.

Jim Sheridan has a way with directing children, and the kids here are as marvelous as the ones in In America. Carey Mulligan & Clifton Collins Jr are underused, and Maguire, back from the front, is scary as hell, but overall? I think I would rather have seen the original. Which may or may not have dealt better with the many issues of family, war, and the way we fail our soldiers when they return that this version skimmed over.

Guys, this is such a good year for allegedly children’s movies. We had Up, we had Wild Things, and now? The Fantastic Mr Fox, Wes Anderson’s stop motion adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel, which was so much better than I had even hoped. I am a little grumpy, to be honest, that it didn’t get the viral marketing blitz that Coraline did. Who, for example, knit the wee fox sweaters? Inquiring knitters want to know.

I have to say right out that I am a huge Wes Anderson fan, even though I did not enjoy The Life Aquatic & own The Darjeeling Limited mostly for the nearly-fetishized shots of Adrian Brody & his v long limbs. The Fantastic Mr Fox is visually unmistakable as Anderson, from the open-book opening to the cross-section dollhouse-esque shots to the neurotic perils of family life. I wanted to own the DVD immediately, to freeze-frame and admire the detail. With all the visual richness, though, it’s somehow less fussy than Anderson tends to be. It’s clever, but not irritatingly so, full of fox-sized adventure in a dangerous world, more true for being handmade. It’s fantastic.