35 Rhums

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The more I turn things over in my head, the more flaws and imperfections get to the surface. I sat down to write a brief praise of 35 Rhums as a great, possibly overlooked film of 2009 but it's going all Monet on me. I mean are you still allowed to wait patiently and drop the title of your film into the dialogue? Is this just another plodding French film with a barely discernible plot line? The answer is yes.

That's what's great about it. The story is told with broad, controlled, and perhaps elegant strokes. The drone of the train and the monotony of the passing skyline, the angst of politicized youth, and the solace of home and it's routines are just a few images captured. The absences are even more telling, a mother, a budding relationship, and latent Freudian sexuality are all just shy of the lens.

I'm American. I'm usually waiting for a storyline to jump out and bash me in the fucking head. It's nice to just watch and wonder sometimes.

The White Ribbon

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J Hoberman's thoughts | AO Scott's thoughts

This is a film to see and to discuss. Michael Haneke, the brilliant director behind The Piano Teacher, Caché, Funny Games, The Seventh Continent and more, is a master of filmic craft. His ideas are always provocative, if not easily digestible and agreeable. In this one, he says it's an exploration of the mindset and childhood of Nazism. I've linked to terrific reviews from two of my favorite critics, who offer countering perspectives on this powerful film.

Best Films Of 2009

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Top Ten (12) List.

Inglourious Basterds
A Tarantino masterpiece and an ode to film and filmmaking. Hilarious, tragic, and beautifully violent. Great acting, brilliant score, superbly written. Tarantino alters history. Great King Kong conversation. This film should easily win all awards in my opinion. Hands down.

Where The Wild Things Are
A Spike Jonze Masterpiece about the complexities of being a child. Visceral. Haunting. Amazing. I saw this with my mom. We both cried. Beautiful music. Karen, I love you.

Hunger (Technically 2008, but US release 2009)
True story of IRA hunger strike in the 1981. Michael Fassbinder starves himself to death for this role. The real Bobby Sands refused to eat for 66 days and died at age 27. Brutal. Powerful. I also had the privilege to see Steve McQueen's video art installation at the Venice Biannale which was amazing too.

Avatar

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A lot has been said for Avatar. People go on and on about its technical achievements, its budget, the 3D extravaganza, etc. I can’t say I’m convinced at all that it’s a good film. In fact, I found it boring and offensive, despite my predilections for visual beauty, peace, environmentalism and a new age consciousness of energy, all of which this movie supposedly espouses. This will be a downer of a review:

Bright Star

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Shy poem of artistic poverty

Everything of such delicate quality
Soft kisses, windblown curtains, moments of everlasting luxury

Thimblefuls of piety
Wings fluttered like your splendid modesty
Carefully sewn cloth, simple snacks in the grass, the safe joy of mutual vanity

Victoria, crisp grass and sun-soaked land
Hands in hair, feet deep in sand
Music floats and hearts broke and a wooden wedding band

District 9

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District 6 was the home to many South African people in the 1970s who were demanded to vacate by the conditions of apartheid. District 9 is an allegorical reference to it, where aliens, who have stranded themselves via spacecraft over the city of Johannesburg, are segregated by the humans in a shanty town and again relocated further away.

The political and historical issues are interesting and handled with thought. Director Neil Blomkamp grew up through these very times. It shows in the film, which is genuine and entertaining. I really liked the way "documentary" and "news" footage was worked into the film language at the beginning of the movie. This was the strongest part of the 90 minutes, and drew me in. Structurally, it fades into general summertime fare with fighting and explosions, and also includes a worthless love subplot, which is either lazy writing or evidence of compromised vision. A more soulful, inward hero's quest would have worked better thematically, since it loosely parallels Kafka's Metamorphosis.

Alien movies are not about aliens. They are always about us. Extra-terrestrials probably exist. There is too much out there to suppose it improbable. But human thinkers and creators cannot tell a story about extra-terrestrials because it is simply not in the realm of our reality. We have only our imaginations, which run wonderfully wild! In Alien, a gruesome, curious creature erupts from the abdomen of a man. It is man's own subconscious demons, manifested in a stomach ache, a birth, a grotesque death. Later in that film, Sigourney Weaver discovers a fully grown alien beast inside her own chamber. It feels a lot like a Lynchian moment, because Alien and Twin Peaks, for example, both come from a similar imaginative space, wherein our own demons and fears and curiosities haunt us, and their appearance in our actual reality is delightfully frightening.

Taking Woodstock

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There isn't much to say about the 2009 movie Taking Woodstock, because it is quite boring. It moves along without much ado, chronicling these historic events modestly and with kindness. It succeeds in touching the fringes of an overblown event. It feels like a tale told by a close friend who happens to be boring himself, instead of an attempt at objective, grand journalism. It is indeed refreshing to see a perspective of Woodstock that ignores actual concert footage. It is also nice to see (though slightly, despite the film's slow wind-up) the gritty details of how such a phenomenon could happen. I'm still left with a lot of questions about logistics...

What else can I say? The characters are barely worth discussing. They're all rather likable in a bland way, save for the mother, who is wretched, but not enough to discuss any further. The pacing of the film is soft and careful, but not in the touchingly intimate way that other Ang Lee films are. Brokeback Mountain, as well as The Ice Storm, was so infused with interesting drama and passion that every slow scene was charged with intrigue and satisfaction. Not so here.

The title is interesting, I suppose, though forgettable. It sounds as though Woodstock itself is drug, like taking acid. Characters in the movie do take acid, and the portrayal of their little trip (about five minutes of screen time) is honest and good. It was at this point in the movie that I most connected: life is groovy.

Inglourious Basterds

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Quentin Tarantino is a filmmaker. I stress this obvious point because I appreciate very much how evident his films - this one in particular - are made. The first thing that the audience of Inglourious Basterds sees is the company logo for Universal Pictures, all grainy and retro and lush. We are looking at film; we are looking specifically at an older version of the now-glossy, shiny logo that precedes so many Universal releases. Tarantino wants us to know that we are at the movies. He follows this with a release date, in roman numerals, I believe, on the title card, and then procedes to indulge in a very extended list of credits, switching fonts no less than three times, and to the cue of a comedically dramatic score. Bear in mind, it is and has been the trend in movies to minimize the introduction of a film. Most blockbusters (think Lord of the Rings and Batman) have but one title card, and move along very quickly. This film basks in its filmness, and for this, I praise it highly. If you are not one to appreciate such things, much of this movie might be lost on you, but probably not :)

After this very tongue-in-cheek introduction, it is time for the storytelling, which is excellent. The movie occurs in five chapters. The first is so gripping that I found myself wondering how I could already care so much about characters I’ve barely met. The scene functions like a classical painting in this respect. Every technical aspect is commendable here: the photography is brilliantly shot, the camera movement is precise and nimble, the script is gripping, and the acting is extraordinary. The tension created could be cut with a knife, but instead it's cut with rounds and rounds of loud bullets. The knife comes in later.

There are viewers who will be turned off by the prospect of graphic violence. I myself am not unilaterally opposed to violence. I side with pacifism as a political principle, but as a lover of art and film, I recognize that, since violence is a part of life, it belongs in movies. The biggest, most mind-numbing blockbusters, like Transformers or Die Hard or so many others, have egregiously glorified senseless, gratuitous violence. In effect, our culture has become desensitized to it, which is unfortunate. We turn to violence for catharsis, personally and socially: a huge explosion might release our individual frustrations and fears, while a broadly sketched vigilante with a gun might exemplify our egos in fantasy. Like anything, we need more to fulfill what was once fulfilled with less. Those tropes are being pushed to pornographic proportions, and we continue to consume them like an obese over-eater, not asking the right questions, like, for instance, what is this fulfilling?

(500) Days of Summer

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Let’s start with the title. It’s cute. It has parentheses for some reason. This makes it interesting in some ambiguously edgy way. The denotative reading suggests a happy summer romp that goes on ridiculously long, like the surfing movie Endless Summer, or Comedy Central’s SPF 100 from ten years ago. That the word Summer is actually a girl’s name is a nice little pun…

First we see an Annie-Hall-esque note to the audience that this movie isn’t about anyone specific, and then names a girl. “…especially you, Heather Lane” or something like that. Okay, it’s a movie written about a girl. Cool.

The movie starts with a disembodied narration. It sounds exactly like the narrator from a remarkable and under-watched film from three years ago called Little Children. It is, in fact, the same narrator. Points to the producers for cashing in on his terrific talent, though his tone doesn’t quite match this cute, quirky movie the way it did so perfectly for the ominous, eerie beauty of Little Children.

We are warned immediately that this is not a love story. Fair enough…

The title sequence is fantastic… too good, really. The characters are shown as children, growing up in parallel lives. The director employs a split screen to emphasize this point. I am a fan. He also employs super-8 film, also of which I am a fan. I use the same medium for art videos. But I use it with complete awareness of its nostalgic value, and my dishonest relationship to it: I was born in January of 1981 – my childhood videos are firmly shot on terrible-looking VHS tape. Joseph Gordon Levitt was born less than a month later than me. Zooey Deschanel was born one year earlier. These people, to whom the movie is designed for me to relate, were not shot on super-8mm film as kids. They saw it on the Wonder Years like I did. Why do we create false nostalgia? Is it purely about aesthetics? The rest of the movie suggests that, yes, it is.

Reflections on the Curious Case(s) of Benjamin Button

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***Warning: Potential spoiler for both the film and short story***

First, I want to go over what I did like from the film, then the differences and similarities between the short story and cinematic versions of Ben Button, and then critique the relationship between Daisy and Benjamin.

If the film was called anything but the Curious Case..., it would be a rather fine Hollywood film. (I would call it Titanic meets Forrest Gump, except much better written than both.) It was consistent and beautiful. It tried to tell a complex story that spanned through what might be the United State's lifespan as the source of influence, innovation, and ideals that make us all, to some extent, patriotic. Beginning on November 11, 1919, the final day of WWI, and ending just as Hurricane Katrina hits NOLA, it evoked thoughts of innocence and reflection that made the United States such a strong country. Coming into its own after WWI and clearly having lost it's way in the wake of Katrina, Ben's life (and the backwards clock, a great image) could simply be a statement that the United States became and remained great for its wisdom of an elder nation, yet maintaining the innovative spirit of youth. This is reinforced by the final image of the backwards-moving clock being submerged in flood water.