Behind Every Door, Another B+

As you'll have noticed, if you keep track of the sidebar, I've been racing to catch up with 2008 releases that I missed in theaters but are now available on DVD, and just like every year, they reinforce what a falsehood it is that the fall is the best season for seeing movies. The best season for Oscarbait, maybe. And sure, there is fabulous stuff knocking around the multiplexes and the arthouses these days: The Wrestler, Milk, The Class, A Christmas Tale, Rachel Getting Married...

Still, in the last week or two, and adding to the early '08 marvels that I already absorbed in the theaters, I've seen a rash of really great springtime releases: the exciting and partially animated documentary Chicago 10, the plush and perverse costumer The Duchess of Langeais, the vividly filmed and acted criss-crossy drama The Edge of Heaven, and the serenely observant and occasionally cheeky Still Life. (Boy has the Venice Film Festival been on a terrific run these last few years!) Assuming that my six A-range movies from the year are all safe for my Top Ten List (and I'm basically only awaiting In Bruges and Benjamin Button before I sally forth with that thing...), this means that the competition in my mind for those last four slots is suddenly quite tight among the seventeen movies I've tagged with a B+ in the last year of commercial releases.

So, while I'm only fitfully on the web for the next few week, and while I'm cogitating about my list and second-guessing my allegiances, can you do me a favor? Make a short, punchy FYC statement about why any one of these movies does or doesn't deserve to qualify for the Top Ten ahead of one or more of the others. Does A Christmas Tale or Rachel Getting Married do better by its lively family dysfunction? Does Milk or The Class strike a more interesting balance between its documentary and imaginative impulses? Has Yella's elliptical sense of dread lingered better in your mind than WALL•E's measured sense of wonder? How about the afterlife of Burn After Reading's acrid comedy, or the muted, observational styles of Ballast and Flight of the Red Balloon? The dusty dreamworld of Alexandra, the nightmare chamber of Taxi to the Dark Side, the florid pop-up book of The Fall, or the rambunctious historical embellishments of Man on Wire or Chicago 10?

If you haven't seen one of these titles, rent it or buy a ticket, and file your impressions. I'm all ears, and nothing is a sure thing! I thought The Dark Knight was, but a second viewing bumped it down a notch. Alternatively, I've been known to decide that a "B" movie from earlier in the year has made a more potent impression on me than a whole flock of "B+"s, which is how Iraq in Fragments leapfrogged its way up at the last minute in 2006. So—sway me!

Gran Torino: The Seven-Word Review™

Again, this idea belongs to Nathaniel, but Clint Eastwood is nothing if not famously efficient, right? I can hardly avoid this format. So, here goes:

The nightmare child of Kolya and Crash.

Milk: The Seven-Word Review™

™ed because this is completely Nathaniel's idea, and I'm completely stealing it out of equal parts time pressure, admiration, and covetousness. (I know, I know, thou shalt not...) So, here goes:

Liked tremendously. Didn't love. Improves. Brolin! Sean!

I just wrote a P.S. to about Sean but I deleted it because of dignity, professional reputation, etc.

I Tried to Love Them...

...but, reader, I couldn't. Remember nine months ago, during a particularly fantastic Best Actress race, when it seemed certain that this year's derby would be even starrier and more marvelous? Winter and spring and then summer failed to add much to the mix, especially since Savage Grace was just as Oscar-unfriendly as everyone had said, and I found Melissa Leo a little hemmed in by the incomplete imagination of Frozen River, though I still think she's got a bright shot at a nomination. Anyway, none of it mattered: we'd have Julianne again! But then Blindness opened. Nicole back with Baz! But have you seen that trailer? Meryl Streep in Doubt! But have you seen that trailer? Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road! But have you seen that trailer? Maybe they'll all pull it off, but I'm putting on my Tim Gunn face and voice to say, "I'm worried." And when it comes to what's already bowed: Angelina in a Clint Eastwood movie and Kristin Scott Thomas in a well-buzzed chamber drama. As you'll hopefully read, I didn't think much of either movie, but more disappointing than that, I didn't think much of either performance, partly because both of their directors seem 105% confident that these actors in these roles couldn't possibly put a foot wrong. But isn't it a director's job to help the actor put her feet right? And, in Claudel's case, shouldn't he be making sure that his world-class star has something actually to do? I'm sure I'll be in the tiny minority on this one, but give me the nervy floridity of La Vie en rose and Marion Cotillard's precise gradations of hysteria and terror any day over the wan, watch-her-exist complacency of I've Loved You So Long and the astringent but finally defeated efforts of Kristin Scott Thomas to find a character inside of this tepid stunt.

A Glorious Part for Every Whole

I was hoping I'd happen upon something great for my 400th full review, and I did. Though lots of people will be puzzled or put off by Synecdoche, New York, and I feel sure I understand why people who don't like it don't like it, I am equally sure that I am completely besotted with it. I can't wait to see it again, to reconsider some possible "solutions" to this enormous puzzle, to enjoy all the local details that happily deter you from finding "solutions," and to thank the movie afresh for giving a much-needed jolt to the autumn multiplex. There's so little else that I'm truly anticipating before the year is out (Milk, The Wrestler, and a handful of overseas imports) that I was worried all my best '08 experiences would be found on DVD. Thanks, Charlie. Thanks, Philip. Thanks to everyone who ever made anything crazy and huge and eccentric, and admitted that it was all very hard on the people around them, and hardest (maybe) on themselves.

London Film Festival: Waltz with Bashir

First, a note on obvious messages from God. Taking a break from the festival rotation but not straying too far from my movie-junkie habit, I decided to take advantage of London release dates and swing in for a late matinée of the festival phenom. Gomorrah. 45 minutes in, I was liking the movie but decidedly not loving it—given this material, I want some formal and visual finesse—but I had bigger problems. For the first time in at least five years, I had to go to the bathroom during a movie. I will do anything, I will twist in my seat or silently kick my feet or whatever to get out of doing this, even if the movie is long or boring, and even if it means sprinting out the door after the credits finish rolling. But it couldn't be helped. So up and out I go, feeling immensely guilty for this 60 seconds or whatever, and then, immediately as I walk back into the theater, Gomorrah burns up in the projector. In fact, the city of London experiences its first October snowstorm in over 70 years, which knocks out the cinema's power, which kicks on the emergency generator, which surges so powerfully that all three prints burn in their separate theaters at exactly the same time.

Clearly, I will never pee during a film again. Please let me know if there is any other possible way to interpret this paranormal sequence of events.

Happily, I was able to use the extra hour and 20 minutes that suddenly stretched before me to wrestle with Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir, which has emerged from the last eight days of festival-hopping as the least vivid film in my imagination, even though I liked it better than most, and even though the whole point of the film is to resist amnesia and score a big point for personal and cultural memory. I have tried in my review to explain what I like about the film but also what I question about it and why I think it's not lasting well with me. Nick Schager's reservations about the film are stronger than mine are, at least at the moment, but it's not impossible that I'll wind up close to where he is, and I think he makes some very smart points.

London Film Festival: Quantum of Solace

Because not every festival movie is full of lowering skies and Arvo Part and Hobbesian behavior, and because Quantum of Solace ranks handily above a lot of the "serious" fare that I've seen so far in London. Review here, with somewhere between a Code Yellow and a Code Orange spoiler advisory. I don't give up any big ghosts, but you might want to be hanging on every precipice of micro-revelation, as I was.

That's a Lot of B's...

...but in case you're wondering, at least at this moment, I'd say Waltz with Bashir > Quantum of Solace > Wendy and Lucy > Che: The Argentine. But I'll have more to say about all of that.

London Film Festival: Genova, The Possibility of an Island, and Let's Talk About the Rain

The festival experience is starting out beautifully, with oodles on offer and efficient organization and careful projection and big, appreciative crowds. I've never seen so many people in a theater for a James Gray or a Michael Winterbottom film. There were more paying customers at a weekday afternoon screening of The Possibility of an Island, Michel Houellebecq's fantastical, philosophical, theoretical smorgasbord of hogwash, than there were at my evening showing of Tropic Thunder last month in Chicago. I wish the actual movies had been better so far: in addition to Island, which I lay into here, I had a disappointing experience with what I hoped was a sure thing, Michael Winterbottom's grieving-family drama Genova. Winterbottom and regular producer even popped up like gophers after the screening to answer the questions of an almost all-student audience, which would have been a transporting experience for a fan like me if Genova had anything to say or if Winterbottom even now seemed sincerely invested in what he'd created.

Ah, well. The beginnings of festivals are the easiest parts, because the general excitement level is still so high that you can stomach your share of mediocrities. And truth be told, lesser works by Gray or Winterbottom are still illuminating about the medium and dotted with memorable grace notes. And blazing, idioglossic trash like The Possibility of an Island is impossible to conceive under almost any other circumstances, unless Ursula K. Le Guin and Slavoj Žižek dropped a little acid and made a filmed homage to an Iron Maiden album cover. Who would want to miss that?

P.S. Another esteemed director, another subpar product. Is it turning into a curse? Agnès Jaoui puts a foot wrong, for me, by putting her feet so safely and modestly right for a lot of other people. This screening of Let's Talk About the Rain at least drummed up some laughter and warm applause of a kind I hadn't heard in the last 36 hours, but it's the definition of a movie that you wouldn't want to write home about. Next up at bat: Oliver Stone.

Chicago Festing, London Calling

In my dream life, I would have posted about a week ago to herald the approach of this year's Chicago Film Festival, easily one of the highlights of my moviegoing year. The festival opened on the 16th of this month and extends its enormous, diverse, and exciting programming all the way through the end of the month.

After trumpeting this occasion, I would have fluffed my own feathers a bit and shouted with joy about my biggest news of the fall, which is my first-ever trip to England to attend and cover the 2008 London Film Festival, which also comprises a bevy of new work by artists from around the world, some names more familiar than others, some titles already big buzz-hits and awards magnets from Cannes and Toronto and Venice. I used all my best soothsaying abilities to convince the BFI to accredit me as an official journalist for the fest and to persuade Northwestern to subsidize my trip, in the service of my research and of future classes I can teach with an expanded global sweep.

So, let's pretend that October had been less frenetic and that I actually did inform you of these two thrilling events in a more timely fashion—since, as it happens, I'm already in London, where I'm spending my two-week trip with the heroic and debonair Tim R. of MainlyMovies (and, by day, of the Daily Telegraph). I've never been to England before, so the last 24 hours have been a delicious comination of party, blur, and dream come true.

Truant though I was in providing advance word about these trips, I have been uncharacteristically diligent in chronicling my adventures. Because the festivals are virtually simultaneous, I had to leave Chicago only a few days into the CFF, but the two screenings I caught more than made up for the truncated stay: Erick Zonca's transfixing and ambitious Julia (reviewed here), starring Tilda Swinton in one of her best and certainly least typical performances, and Lance Hammer's Ballast (reviewed here), a poetically affecting drama in the vein of David Gordon Green, though a bit more intimate with its characters.

My first London screening was less auspicious, I'm sad to report, though a subprime James Gray film is still a solid way to spend an evening. Here is my shorter write-up of his latest, Two Lovers, with Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow.

And now, stay tuned for reports on new work from Kelly Reichardt, Oliver Stone, Danny Boyle, and Steven Soderbergh, a rare old jewel with Gloria Swanson, and whatever else is fit to print from London!

Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

Well, things have already gotten more interesting since I published The Fifties a few weeks ago. Conceding some grotesque misfires, the broadly inept Hamlet 2 unquestionably the worst of them, I was extraordinarily moved by Trouble the Water, then richly entertained by Tyler Perry's The Family that Preys, and then coaxed out of my early skepticism toward Rachel Getting Married. All three movies will furnish fond memories at year's end... and that would be true even if the "competition" weren't shaping up so grimly. Sitting through preview trailers is becoming an endurance trial lately, given how bad they are for some of the ersatz big-ticket items. Frankly, I'm more excited to track down some winter and spring releases I missed in theaters, like Snow Angels and In Bruges and The Band's Visit, than I am to spend time with a lot of the Turkey Day and Yuletide menu items. But I've been wrong before, oh so many times: just last year, I couldn't wait for the turgid Youth Without Youth and expected Stephen King's The Mist to be a lump of coal. If Tyler Perry didn't already prove it, I really don't know what I'm going to like till it comes around. But I know what I expect to like, or at least what I'm excited about...

I'M DROOLING NOW
Che, Hunger, Milk, The Wrestler

I'LL DROOL WHEN THE TIME COMES
A Christmas Tale, Wendy and Lucy, Ballast, The Secret of the Grain, Happy-Go-Lucky

I'LL SHOW UP HUNGRY
Waltz with Bashir, Synecdoche, New York, The Class, I've Loved You So Long, Quantum of Solace

I'M EAGER TO TRY IT
Changeling, Let the Right One In, Nothing But the Truth, Slumdog Millionaire

TASTY INGREDIENTS, IFFY ON THE WHOLE
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Appaloosa

I'LL TAKE TWO BITES
W., Defiance, The Reader

I DON'T KNOW, THIS SMELLS FUNNY
Doubt, Australia, Frost/Nixon, Last Chance Harvey, Revolutionary Road, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Brothers Bloom, Gran Torino, The Duchess, Valkyrie

LOST MY HANKERING
Ashes of Time Redux, Body of Lies, Good, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, Passengers, The Secret Life of Bees, Seven Pounds, Soul Men, The Tale of Despereaux, Yes Man

STRIKE IT FROM THE MENU
Twilight, Transporter 3, Pride and Glory, Four Christmases, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, RocknRolla, Marley & Me

BURN THE KITCHEN
The Spirit, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Max Payne, Bolt, Bedtime Stories, What Just Happened?

Dumb and Dumber

Mamma Mia! and Tropic Thunder. I'll let you decide which is which. What was I just saying about how much I like reviewing truly good movies?

Nick Woody Mediocrity

Woody Allen, for my money, has failed once again to "come back" in any meaningful way, but that doesn't mean that I can't take a stab at my own career resurgence. Remember when I used to write full reviews? Taste this and tell me if I'm ready.

A Gotham in Trouble

Briefly: The Dark Knight upset and unnerved me more thoroughly than any movie since INLAND EMPIRE—not least because I wasn't really expecting such a brutal sideswipe into dementia and misery and the impossibility of justice, and not least because both films force you into such determined, relentless intimacy with these horrible grimacing masks of high-voltage terrorism and despair. Also, not least because, as a Chicago filmgoer, I had to walk out of this spectacle of Gotham eating itself alive and right into the city on the screen: creepy in the extreme. The Dark Knight's glories (ambition, scope, seriousness, sheen) and its lapses (protraction, editing coherence, subplot management) have been and will be well-rehearsed elsewhere. But let me go on record as saying what I haven't heard anyone else say: this movie scared the shit out of me.

And boy does Heath Ledger deserve whatever posthumous awards and nominations are coming his way, but let me again go on record as saying what I haven't heard anyone else say: he's not a supporting actor in this movie. The movie would be as hobbled without him as without Bale/Batman. He is a LEAD, and a brilliant one. Please consider him as such when you discuss him amongst yourselves.

Let Me Be Frank

No, seriously—just for one day, let me be Frank Rich. Or at least let him hear my loud huzzah about this. He liked the movie more than I did, but our hearts and our angers are in the same places.

In the City of Smart People

That's what we tell ourselves in Chicago, anyway, especially where I hang out. But I can't well give into self-indulgence when I'm decrying it in the movies—and there's more than enough to go around in José Luis Guerín's In the City of Sylvia, an unbearably light divertissement from Spain with pretty retro gender politics mixed in with its buttery spectacle. I saw Sylvia as part of the Indianapolis International Film Festival that I keep advertising to you; though I've had to return to my hometown and its seedy Greyhound terminal and its shady "livery cabs" to pick up the reins of my day job, that shouldn't stop you from visiting the Circle City and catching some more flicks. If all the festival screenings are sold out when you get there (dream big!), you can still catch Noam Murro's Smart People at an adjoining auditorium in the same Landmark Theatre. That's three full reviews in two days. Who knows what May will bring? (Answer: hopefully a movie that deserves higher than a B. But, a hint: I already saw one in the Hoosier State. Keep reading!)

'River' Queen

When it rains it pours, even if that's not quite the right aquatic idiom for Chris Eigeman's Turn the River. What I mean is, almost a month with no posting, and then two in one day! Granted, that's often the way with me, but why not keep up some momentum while I'm still here at the festival and post a full review for my favorite film I've seen so far outside of my own assigned competition bracket ...which, again, I'm not yet at liberty to discuss. Stay tuned, but for now, tune into Famke Janssen's impressive, film-carrying performance in Turn the River, reviewed here, and opening in New York and LA, we gather, on May 9. Be there for Famke, though there's even more in this film to admire.

It Takes A Village Nathaniel...

...to get me blogging again, but seriously, how could I share a hotel room for a whole weekend with His High Holy Hyper-Productiveness and not get my act together? It's so late now that I don't have time to say much about the movies we've been seeing at the 2008 Indianapolis Film Festival, where we are both serving as jurors—he in the World Cinema bracket, and I in the American Spectrum competition for homegrown independent dramas. Suffice it to say that none of the first four features I've seen has quite blown my socks off, but they all have significant virtues, particularly the committed performance by Famke Janssen in Turn the River and some juicy pop arcana in the documentary Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story. But more on those soon—and, later on, a little more on the features and the short films that I'm overseeing as part of my jury duties (with Sean Penn as my spiritual if not my practical leader). I'm not at liberty to say anything about these before awards are announced next weekend, but I'll allow myself these: you're missing a lot of good work if you live in the Hoosier State and you aren't catching these movies. Indiana may never again produce anything quite as great as recent birthday girl Dr. S, but this film festival would be a splendid achievement in any "small" city (and at 850,000, not that small), and the all-volunteer staff and supervisors have done a beautiful, generous job of hosting and coordinating. Come out and represent, Indiana!

Nick's Flick Picks watchers will also want to know that, with the fifth month of the year about to roll around, I finally have a Movies of 2008 page up and running, with pages and the usual screening log, though no reviews yet. I don't know where Ryan Phillippe came up with that sterling Stop-Loss performance or what so many other critics saw in the Oscar-nominated Beaufort (that 4 Months omission is officially a travesty), or quite what to say yet about the maddening half-successes of Teeth and Paranoid Park, but I'll (try to) get there. And yes, I still plan to finish that Best of 2007 countdown.