Malick, Gondry, Nichols

To the Wonder (Terrence Malick)
Though To the Wonder is very much a companion piece to Malick's previous film, The Tree of Life, in style, structure, and subject matter, it marks a couple unique firsts for the director. Excepting a few scenes of Sean Penn gazing pensively out of a Houston high-rise window in The Tree of Life, this is Malick's first film set in the present. Even more shockingly, To the Wonder arrived in theaters less than two years after The Tree of Life. This is unprecedented for a guy who took twenty years to follow up his second film and whose shortest previous gap between releases was five years. Malick, who is currently making two (possibly three) films simultaneously, is entering a prolific phase, though I'm not sure that's a good thing. I greatly admired The Tree of Life, and I like To the Wonder more than I dislike it, but I have some major reservations. If Malick continues in this vein, I'm worried the formal techniques he's grown fond of in his last three films will become crutches. He's coming dangerously close to self-parody, and though I admire anyone honest enough to get that close to ridiculousness, I can feel my tolerance for self-consciously poetic voice-over, Christian mysticism, ethereally floating camera movement, sunlight peeking through trees, and childlike women twirling their skirts stretching to the breaking point. Every Malick film has used poetic, impressionistic voice-over and placed even the strongest characters in a natural, beautiful landscape that puts the smallness of their individual egos and existences into perspective, and has used major Hollywood stars deeply against type as figures in a landscape instead of as bright, shining, charisma machines who are more special than their audiences. However, Malick's style changed beginning with 2005's The New World, though there were some hints of this direction in 1998's The Thin Red Line. His camera started floating above and below his actors and around the frame like a hovering spirit, the narrative became far more abstract, impressionistic, and plotless (shapeless and formless, if you're a detractor), and the voice-over became much more self-consciously poetic, philosophical, and overtly Christian (or pretentious and sometimes silly if this approach is not in your wheelhouse). Gone was the humor, strange improvisatory non-sequiturs, and matter-of-fact observation of mundane details in the voice-over work of Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in Badlands and Linda Manz in Days of Heaven. I miss that Malick.
To the Wonder is Malick's most minimal and abstract narrative. Ben Affleck is billed as the lead, but he barely speaks and is almost always shown in side profile. I admire this unconventional use of a Hollywood star, though it drove the middle-aged women seated behind me crazy. (Their loud take on the film after it ended: "To the Wonder, huh? Well, I wonder what that was about." They then spent a few minutes loudly trying to piece together a plot like it was a generic Hollywood film.) Instead, the film is really about two women who try to maintain relationships with him (Olga Kurylenko and Rachel McAdams) and a depressed priest (Javier Bardem) trying to work through a crisis of faith. Bardem loves God but feels God is inaccessible and unavailable to his suffering followers, while Kurylenko and McAdams try to maintain their love for the emotionally distant Affleck. There are beautiful images throughout, and lots to chew over afterwards, but Kurylenko is frustratingly childish, constantly twirling, twirling, twirling her skirt, dancing, jumping on the bed, lying on the ground, rubbing her face on flowers, leaves, and rocks. No grown woman acts like this. Still, there's too much of value here to dismiss it for its substantial flaws. A frustrating, rewarding film.

The We and the I (Michel Gondry)
Far better, though far harder to see, is Michel Gondry's latest, which screened only one time in Austin. Gondry, inspired by a Paris bus ride that saw a group of teenagers board after the school day ended, wrote a brief scenario and approached several New York City schools about making a film with their students. The schools passed for insurance reasons, but an after-school program in the Bronx said yes. Gondry taught a workshop for the teenagers to create the characters and give them some acting experience, and enlisted two screenwriters, Jeffrey Grimshaw and Paul Proch, to help him turn the workshop and story idea into a feature. The film takes place on the last day of school, almost entirely on a city bus (though Gondry punctuates the narrative with comedic fantasy sequences and a documentary-style flashback to a traumatic event in one student's life). The students board, and we follow their shifting relationships, conversations, cruelties, kindnesses, and alliances as the number grows smaller at each stop. The kids are amazing, gifted, natural actors, the emotions are earned, not forced, and Gondry's camera catches it all. It's a funny, sad, sweet, tough, honest movie, and the fact that the film is not playing widely in every theater in the country is just one more sad indictment of our bullshit mainstream culture.

Mud (Jeff Nichols)
Mud is very good and is actually playing to wide audiences, but it stars Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon, so the odds are in its favor for adequate distribution. With Mud, Nichols continues the hot streak he began with his first two films, Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter. He builds unusual films from classic situations, is excellent with actors and landscapes, and creates movies that have the feel of a great Southern novel. Mud is more accessible and conventional than Nichols' first two films without sacrificing any of his strengths and could set him up for a long, successful career. A Huck Finn boys' adventure story married to a Southern noir crime thriller, Mud is primarily about the difficulties and joys of love and friendship. Nichols is a skilled storyteller with an innate understanding of character and pacing, and he pulls great performances out of the two child leads, The Tree of Life's Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland, the big movie stars, and the sharp assemblage of character actors rounding out the cast, including his go-to guy Michael Shannon, Sam Shepard, Sarah Paulson, Ray McKinnon, Paul Sparks, and Joe Don Baker. The McConaughey redemption continues! At this point, I'm just going to pretend he made Dazed and Confused and Lone Star and then retired for twenty years before coming back to movies last year. Fair enough?
P.S. Mud has my favorite line of dialogue of the year. Sheridan goes to the trailer of Lofland and his uncle (Michael Shannon). Lofland is sitting on the steps outside while the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda" blares from within. Lofland: "Hold on. We can't go inside yet. He's doin' it. That's his doin' it song."

R.I.P. Bigas Luna and Les Blank

This is a bad month for film. Directors Bigas Luna and Les Blank both died of cancer this past weekend. I have only seen two films each from Luna and Blank, but they were enough to make me a fan, and I'm looking forward to exploring the rest of what they had to offer.

Bigas Luna was sometimes called the Spanish Russ Meyer, which is unfairly reductive, but both men shared a lunatic visual invention, a great sense of humor, and an obsession with breasts. Luna was very much his own man, however, and I strongly recommend the two Luna films I've seen, Anguish and Jamon Jamon. Anguish, an English-language postmodern horror film from 1987, renders foolish anyone who holds up Wes Craven's Scream as an exemplar of meta-horror. Luna's film is a structurally ambitious commentary about how we watch horror films while never forgetting to be a great horror film (maybe even two great horror films), and it does it with more intelligence, humor, respect, excitement, visual invention, beauty, and affection than Craven's obvious, irritating smugfest. Jamon Jamon is an almost indescribable mix of dark comedy, light comedy, live-action cartoon, doomed romance, advertising satire, soap opera, tragedy, critique of Spanish machismo culture, and T&A sex comedy, with early roles for Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem. Luna films an epic fight scene in which both parties batter each other with generous cuts of pig meat, and another scene prominently features a parrot contributing to something I've definitely never seen in any other film. I'd also like to mention that both movies are massively entertaining and fun in addition to their artistic merits.
The two Les Blank films I've seen have Werner Herzog as their subject. The feature-length Burden of Dreams documents the tortuous making of Fitzcarraldo while the short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe shows Herzog making good on the bet he made with Errol Morris that Morris would never finish Gates of Heaven. It's a testament to Blank's skills that the films are admired by both Herzog fans and detractors. Burden of Dreams is a particularly strong look at the folly, hubris, passion, insanity, and drive needed to create art in difficult conditions and a critique of some negative consequences of that drive on the indigenous population and environment. Besides his work about Herzog, Blank made documentaries about garlic, buck-toothed women, Southern music, beer, Creole cooking, and Huey Lewis & The News, among many other subjects.

Roger Ebert 1942-2013

I don't know how a guy like me from a town of 1,500 people in small-town Nebraska, four hours' drive from the nearest major city (Denver), became obsessed with music, movies, and literature when most of my peers were into sports, shopping, guns, sitcoms, blockbusters, racism, sexism, chewing tobacco, church, and top 40 radio (I'm being unfairly reductive here, but just a little unfairly reductive). I just don't know. I loved the arts from the second I could walk and talk, and this love was stronger than the pressure of a local environment that was either openly hostile or completely indifferent to anything diverting from my laundry list above.
I was fortunate growing up to have a mother and grandmother that actively encouraged my love of reading and curiosity about experiences outside myself. My father has never read anything voluntarily in his life, but he also never discouraged anything his kids loved. In one of Roger Ebert's best pieces of writing, an essay about his father called "My Old Man," he wrote beautifully about receiving that same encouragement from his father. I felt a kinship to Roger Ebert, besides our shared loves of books and movies. We both grew up in small Midwestern towns to working-class parents of German and Irish heritage. We were both raised Catholic, served as altar boys, and became agnostics. Ebert loved science fiction as a child, while I was obsessed with horror. We both received English and journalism degrees and wrote for our college newspapers. Ebert, of course, was professionally successful from a young age, while I have consistently failed in every professional endeavor I've tried, thwarted by unemployment, a bad economy, blown opportunities, my own depression and inertia, bitterness, inability to schmooze and network, and just plain bad luck (also maybe a lack of talent), but I've still got some living in me, and Ebert is a great role model for how to live well.
As a child in the 1980s, I became a regular viewer of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert's television program. Pre-Internet, I had no idea they were newspaper reviewers. I just loved seeing two regular-looking guys debate movies on television. "These guys love movies the way I love music," I remember thinking. When I worked for my college newspaper as an Arts & Entertainment reporter and reviewer and copy desk chief, I would often hang out after my shift was done to surf the web and work on papers for my classes. It was there I started reading Ebert's reviews regularly. I never stopped. I enjoyed his unaffected, conversational style and his deep love of film. So many TV and newspaper film critics in this country approach film criticism with condescension, like the movies are a goof, a diversion, something to inspire pithy, dismissive one-liners or cliched superlatives. Siskel and Ebert were the only mainstream TV critics to regularly feature foreign films, lower profile independents, and classic Hollywood movies alongside the blockbusters, Oscar bait, and high-profile independents, and Ebert was one of the only mainstream newspaper critics to do the same.
Ebert was a gateway to wonderful things. His taste was populist enough to earn a large mainstream following, but open and curious enough to champion the likes of Werner Herzog, John Cassavetes, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Terrence Malick, Yasujiro Ozu, Eric Rohmer, Bela Tarr, Dusan Makevejev, and Carl Dreyer. Ebert was also the first American critic to review Martin Scorsese and Mike Leigh, and he became a lifelong supporter of both filmmakers. History has vindicated his loud support of Bonnie and Clyde and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia at a time when most critics were trashing these films. And he got Do the Right Thing in a way most white critics didn't. Also, he co-wrote three Russ Meyer films, four if you count the aborted Sex Pistols movie that didn't happen because Meyer and Malcolm McLaren didn't get along. (The film eventually morphed into Julien Temple's The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, which is pretty great in its own right.) He's probably the only guy who wrote a book about rice cookers and collaborated with Russ Meyer.
He wasn't infallible. I can only shake my head sadly at his negative reviews of Raising Arizona, To Sleep with Anger, Dead Man, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Romero's Day of the Dead, Husbands, The Chelsea Girls (the only non-narrative/experimental film he reviewed), Cosmopolis, Full Metal Jacket, Blue Velvet, Rushmore, The Passenger, and Abbas Kiarostami's entire filmography. (To his credit, he changed his mind about The Passenger upon its rerelease. He also came around on Tarkovsky and Blade Runner.) He praised Christopher Nolan, Oliver Stone, and "serious" Steven Spielberg too highly, and I don't know what he saw in Paul Haggis' Crash, his favorite film of the year and one of my least favorite viewing experiences ever. But that was part of the fun of reading him. He made you see what he saw for a few minutes.
He went into every film hoping to like it, without prejudice. I loved that. He praised The Straight Story and Mulholland Drive after disliking every other David Lynch film when most other critics would have given up on a director who consistently disappointed them. He was criticized for giving too many three-star reviews and liking too many movies. (My favorite moment of Siskel and Ebert: After Ebert gave the Burt Reynolds/cute kid buddy cop fiasco Cop and a Half a thumbs up, a stunned Siskel replied, barely able to contain his laughter: "Where's your hat and beard, Santa? You just gave these filmmakers a gift.") Maybe he was too soft on too many movies, but that was part of his kindness and openness. I've been accused by several friends of liking everything when it comes to music, as if that's a negative. Maybe I am a little soft critically when it comes to music, but it's the only thing in life I can't be cynical about. I love every genre of music and I'm loyal to every band I love even when they put out a less than stellar album, and I refuse to feel bad about that. Ebert went into every screening with an open mind, not a superior one.
Ebert was also a consistent supporter of his fellow film critics, even those critics who consistently criticized his own work. He led me to great film writers like Jonathan Rosenbaum, Dave Kehr, J. Hoberman, Andrew Sarris, Manny Farber, Robert Warshow, James Agee, and his website editor, Jim Emerson. In many ways, these critics are closer to my aesthetic taste than Ebert, especially in the last years of his life, but Ebert was the one who led me to them, and I'm forever grateful. In the last few years, Ebert gave essay space on his site to many of his regular blog commenters from around the world. He was that rare breed of strongly opinionated man who was deeply interested in the differing opinions of others.
His series of essays about his personal canon of the best films ever made, "Great Movies," is a wonderful place to get the fundamentals of a film education. I made it a point to see every one I hadn't already seen. There's a real poignancy about his final Great Movie, posted two weeks ago. The 1958 Japanese film The Ballad of Narayama is a Kabuki-style color film about a small village that forces its elderly residents to go to a mountain on the occasion of their 70th birthdays and starve to death.
Ebert lost most of his lower jaw and his ability to speak and eat due to complications of reconstructive surgery after his third bout with cancer in 2006. For a man who loved conversation and food, this could have been a death sentence. Instead, Ebert threw himself even deeper into writing. The number of movie reviews increased, but he also joined Twitter and started a blog, where he wrote the best work of his life. The essay about his father I linked to above is such a wonderfully detailed piece of writing, but so many other essays were just as inspiring, including several about his struggles with poor health and the strength he drew from his wife Chaz.
I don't know when Ebert slept. He found time to personally respond to many emails and blog comments. Several friends and acquaintances of mine have received a message from Ebert. He emailed me once about a comment I left on his site and responded to another one on his blog. When he trashed Dogville and claimed that most critics and audiences hated it, I wrote him with a defense of it, mentioning that two of his favorite critics, Kehr and Sarris, had praised the film and also relaying that my mother loved it. He wrote me back to tell me that I should be glad I have such an unusual mother. I loved that. I can't be sure, but I think he may have read this very site once. When I left the Dogville comment, I linked to this blog. My most recent post was a rave for Luis Bunuel's final film, That Obscure Object of Desire. Shortly after he responded to my comment, he made That Obscure Object of Desire his Overlooked DVD of the Week pick. Coincidence? Maybe. For my own vanity, I'd like to think it wasn't.
Checking Ebert's site has been a daily habit for me. I'm glad Jim Emerson and Chaz Ebert have both mentioned maintaining the site. I'm sad about all the movies Ebert is going to miss, and I'm going to miss reading him. I'm only being partially hyperbolic when I say it feels like I lost a friend.

The return of the son of recent business

Like Someone In Love (Abbas Kiarostami)
Kiarostami, one of the greatest filmmakers of the last half-century, left his native country of Iran shortly before his good friend and fellow filmmaker, Jafar Panahi, was arrested, imprisoned, and banned from filmmaking for 20 years on a fabricated charge. Formerly content to ban or censor its best artists' work at home while allowing distribution and exhibition abroad, the Iranian government's suppression of its artists has become far more sinister in recent years. Having never made a bad film, Kiarostami was hardly in need of an artistic rejuvenation. Nevertheless, his two fiction features made outside of Iran have been career high points, despite the sad circumstances leading to their existence. Kiarostami filmed 2010's Certified Copy in Italy with French and British leads (Juliette Binoche and opera singer William Shimell) and dialogue in Italian, French, and English. His new film, shot in and around Tokyo with an all-Japanese cast, is objectively distanced from its characters yet empathetic, and both seductive and unsettling. Taking place over the course of one night and part of the following day, the film follows a college student moonlighting as an upscale call girl, her unstable ex-boyfriend, and an elderly retired sociology professor, most likely widowed, and the strange yet strangely ordinary set of circumstances that bring them into each other's orbit. Despite a landscape and culture, and exterior and interior spaces, quite different from the Iran of Kiarostami's earlier films, most of his trademarks are here. Kiarostami remains the best director of scenes shot inside cars we have, but he's also great at showing how people look (and look past) each other and how they organize, understand, and move through physical space. Kiarostami's endings are always open doors, never closed ones, but even by his standards, Like Someone in Love concludes with a sharp apathy-killing jolt that has kept the film turning in my mind since the second it ended. This is the film of a free man, and I don't mean his geographical location or the political constrictions or lack thereof of its government.

Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)
Spring Breakers opens in a neon hell of interchangeable tanned bodies chugging beers, flashing body parts, and grinding and groping each other in a predetermined robotic debauch to Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" and ends in a hail of bullets. Korine, though his detractors will never admit it, is a skilled visual artist with a talent for creating images never before seen on a screen. Though Spring Break is well-trod territory, Korine manages to make it look as strange and ugly-beautiful as anything else in his filmography. With a color palette channeling Skittles and Starburst, Spring Breakers is a candy-neon incantatory art film with a beach party titties'n'guns exploitation veneer. Korine makes excellent use of repetition, as scenes are shown multiple times from different perspectives and dialogue is repeated and layered, chopped up and rearranged in different contexts. One particularly impressive piece of filmmaking captures a diner robbery in a single take from the perspective of the getaway car as the driver circles the building, but there are lots of other highlights. The ex-Disney girls in bikinis hook has already made Korine more money in one week than his four previous films combined, and he deserves it.

Stoker (Park Chan-Wook)
Park Chan-Wook ties everything in this post together. Harmony Korine has a cameo as a high school art teacher, and like Korine in Spring Breakers, Park in Stoker uses repetition of images and dialogue and the same events from different visual perspectives to create an incantatory effect. Like Kiarostami, Park is working in a country and a language he's never worked in before. The South Korean Park has made his first English-language, American film, and though he's working with a bit of an overheated screenplay by Prison Break actor Wentworth Miller, Park's stunning visual prowess elevates this one above its flaws. Besides the sheer virtuosity of many of its shots, Stoker contains several striking closeups of its actors' faces, with a particular emphasis on their sharp eyes. A Gothic thriller with nods to Hitchcock, Stoker takes place in an indeterminate time period that seems to exist in several decades at once, much like the otherwise very different films of Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino. Park has made the adjustment to American cinema without sacrificing too many of his strengths.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (Dmitry Vasyukov & Werner Herzog)

Like his earlier Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog's latest documentary is carved from another filmmaker's work. Even placed in this context, however, Happy People stands apart from the rest of Herzog's filmography. Though the bulk of Grizzly Man consisted of Timothy Treadwell's footage, Herzog visited the same locations as Treadwell and filmed new interviews with the people who knew him. Happy People does not contain a single frame shot by Herzog, and the globetrotting director never visited the location. Instead, all footage comes from Russian documentarian Dmitry Vasyukov's four-part Russian television miniseries. Herzog watched the miniseries at a friend's home in Los Angeles, fell in love with it, and contacted Vasyukov with an idea. Herzog wanted to edit the 8-hour miniseries into a 90-minute feature, with his own new voiceover narration. Vasyukov gave Herzog his blessing, and this film is the result, with both men credited as directors, though Herzog is more of a remixer than director here.
The film spends a year in the remote Siberian Taiga, focusing on a handful of men carving out a mostly self-sufficient existence in some intensely rugged conditions. We see men building canoes and skis, hunting, fishing, trapping animals, training their dogs, making temporary but sturdy shacks to spend the isolated hunting pilgrimages during the winter months, creating mosquito repellent from the bark of a tree during the summer months. These are some of Herzog's pet subjects, these driven, determined men doing difficult things in hostile, strange, and beautiful landscapes. The cameras required to shoot in this inhospitable terrain produce images that are flatter and muddier than we are used to seeing in a film with Herzog's name on it, but they capture scenes that fit right in to his body of work. Some of the most beautiful images approach Herzog's talent for making natural landscapes and the people in them look mythic, mystical, and alien. I particularly loved the underwater camera following fish below the ice, a snowmobile gliding through a forest of white, and fishermen in canoes at night, lit torches attached to the front of their crafts to attract fish. And a moment when a campaigning politician pulls up to shore in a giant boat, women dressed in white behind him singing a schmaltzy ode to positivity while an indifferent, bemused crowd of Siberians goes about its business finds a place in Herzog's gallery of eccentric futility.
Herzog's narration and need to constantly mythologize can occasionally grate, as when he gives a speech a Tea Party member might love about the men needing no taxes or government. "No women, either," my wife turned to me to say near the conclusion of this speech. The film is surprisingly uninterested in the women and children who occasionally wander into frame. Maybe this was Vasyukov's failing, but another interesting film about them is buried here.
Still, this is a lovable little film well worth seeing.

Recent business

I've had the urge to get back into doing a little more writing on this blog, so I'm going to start posting about movies I watch in the theater. This is what I've seen so far this year.

Not Fade Away (David Chase)
The first film from the creator of The Sopranos, David Chase, has quickly come and gone without much media hubbub, hoopla, hyperbole, or ham giveaways (I ran out of alliterative descriptors before that last one, but I was on a roll. Forgive me.) This is a damn shame. The Sopranos is my favorite television drama, and though Chase's film doesn't come close to the formal beauty or emotional impact of that amazing show (how could it?), it does have a hell of a lot more ideas, earned emotion, and entertainment value than most recent American films. Like The Sopranos, Not Fade Away energizes and transforms a familiar story by telling it in a personal, unusual way. Chase's semi-autobiographical period piece is about a young rock band in suburban New Jersey in the early-to-mid 1960s, particularly drummer-turned-singer Douglas (John Magaro) and his family and friends. Despite a few embarrassing scenes and lines of dialogue, Chase largely succeeds in creating a world that feels almost as lived-in as his TV show. Chase's subject matter is familiar territory in terms of setting, period, and chain of events (suburban white America, the '60s, youth culture, coming of age, a rock band trying to make it, the generation gap), but he structures the film as a series of ellipses that skip events and chunks of time that have been belabored by earlier works. Cliches are avoided by simply skipping over any scene that would provide it. For example, Douglas and his girlfriend have a horrible fight and break up. The next scene takes place several months later, and they are once again together, but Chase doesn't bother showing how or why the two patched things up. And the band never makes it big, so we avoid the whole spectacular rise and fall and rise again nonsense American film is so damn obsessed with retelling. Instead, like most bands, they don't have what it takes and simply fizzle out. They're an above average suburban New Jersey bar band with a couple good originals, and that's it. Not Fade Away's final moments are as gorgeous and daring as the final Sopranos episode, and probably just as likely to piss off any viewer who needs every conclusion tidy and final so it can be safely tucked into bed in time for the next diversion.

Promised Land (Gus Van Sant)
Gus Van Sant alternates between highly personal independent projects he adapts, writes, or co-writes himself and director-for-hire projects offered to him by producers, studios, or actors. When he does his own thing, he's one of my favorite directors. When he's a hired gun, the results are often disappointing. There are exceptions (his remake of Psycho was a personal project he'd wanted to do years before, but is baffling to me; To Die For and Milk were for-hire films he was able to make his own), but I'm generally wary of Van Sant the hired gun. I had low expectations for this film. Written by Matt Damon and John Krasinski from a story idea by Dave Eggers, anti-frakking drama Promised Land was meant to be Damon's directorial debut. When Damon's acting schedule prevented him from doing the necessary prep work as director, he made a last-minute offer to Van Sant. So, Promised Land is basically Good Will Frakking with John Krasinski as Ben Affleck, right? Yes and no. It's far from Van Sant's best work, Krasinski's smug mug still drives me insane, and the surprise twist at the end is pretty abominably stupid, but the overall feel of this one is far less forced and hollow than Good Will Hunting, the performances are relaxed and natural, the small town is portrayed in a far more accurate light than Hollywood normally attempts, and Van Sant makes it look awful purty. The film also spends more time on the characters than on being a soapbox lecture about the perils of frakking (Frakaganda? Again, I apologize.) I really liked Frances McDormand's interactions with Damon and the way Van Sant shot the landscape. Still, it's nothing particularly special and is too often a reminder of what Van Sant can do with better material. This is the kind of movie made for forced family holiday viewing. It won't matter if you miss some of the dialogue when your loudest relative starts braying nonsense about his/her day or health woes or how much Obama sucks or what Charlie Sheen is up to, but it will be better than most Hollywood swill.

Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow)
First, the right wing nuts bashed this movie for being pro-Obama propaganda. Than the lefties bashed it for being pro-CIA, pro-torture propaganda. These two groups should get together and cuddle because most of them made these accusations without bothering to see the film. After seeing it for myself, I can't side with either group. Bigelow has made a dark, ambiguous film about the absence of humanity and the cold, single-minded devotion to duty in both Al-Qaeda's terrorism and the CIA's counterterrorism. She gives the audience enough room to make up their own minds about the ethical justifications or lack thereof in our country's response to the hunt for Bin Laden. Was it worth it? What did we gain from it? The questions are implied. Not answered. The film depicts torture, and even shows a sliver of usable information coming from the use of torture, but is hardly a flag-waving love letter to the CIA or an apology for "enhanced interrogation techniques," in language-molesting bullshitspeak. The film depressed me, but not because it was pro-torture or because it was bad. I admired it. Bigelow again proved herself to be one of the most talented directors of visceral action and kinetic movement. The final sequence, in which the SEALs storm Bin Laden's compound, is top-notch filmmaking. The film depressed me because the world is a pro-death, pro-revenge nuthouse. As the credits rolled, I sat still for a second thinking about how everything is fucked and the world is a dark, sad place. At the same time, the man behind me yelled, "Wooo! USA!" That the film could inspire both these immediate responses is a testament to its power and skill and its potential negative impact as a big-budget mainstream prestige picture. If the jingoistic war hawk fistpumpers are going to ignore the film's ambiguity and find their own fantasy America in it, maybe it will do more harm than good. Here's hoping Bigelow has another Near Dark or Point Break in her somewhere.
Interestingly, leftist political journalists tend to think this film is pro-torture propaganda, while leftist filmmakers and film critics have been largely supportive of the film. As my viewing experience shows, there are many ways to watch a movie. Filmmakers and serious film critics tend to focus on form, style, and structure and find their meanings there, while journalists more often focus on the film's screenplay, content, and statements made about the film by its makers. We could benefit from exchanging more ideas about this, but I'd just like to say that most journalists are missing a lot of what Bigelow is saying in terms of facial expressions, juxtaposition of scenes, and where she puts her camera at crucial moments in the film. Also, I'd like to say that artists are notoriously unreliable interview subjects about their own work, and journalists too often take artists' statements about the work as gospel when they should be looking for their answers in the work itself.

Amour (Michael Haneke)
I'm pretty shocked that this movie received several Oscar nominations. It's French. Strike one. Hollywood is completely uninterested in any other country, with the occasional exception of the UK and any movie it can remake shittily. It stars two actors in their eighties. Strike two. Hollywood pretends old people don't exist, and it also pretends any woman older than 34 doesn't exist unless she's a rapping granny. It's a film that doesn't try to tell you how to feel from a filmmaker who specializes in exceedingly dark films with open-ended conclusions. Strikes three through a million. Oh wait, the film is about physical disability. The Oscars eat disabilities with a spoon. Still, it's an odd choice, but I hope it makes more people seek it out. Haneke's film about aging, decline, and death is as formally beautiful as the rest of his work and contains a trio of incredible performances from three of my favorite actors: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Huppert.

The World's Greatest Sinner (Timothy Carey)
God and Satan bless the Alamo Drafthouse for presenting this super-rare 35mm screening of oddball genius actor Timothy Carey's beautifully strange 1962 labor of love. Carey wrote, edited, directed, and starred in this one-of-a-kind story of an insurance agent, Clarence Hilliard, who changes his name to God, quits the insurance game, gets into street preaching, becomes a rock star, and makes a deal with Satan to achieve political success until Satan comes back to collect. Sometimes infuriating, sometimes repetitive, sometimes transcendent, sometimes hilarious, always unique, this movie made me feel a little more alive. I can't imagine most people sitting through it, but those who do are my brothers and sisters.

Timothy Carey bonus track
Here's Carey with Seymour Cassel in one of my favorite scenes from John Cassavetes' Minnie & Moskowitz

My moviegoing: 2004

Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997)
Austin Film Society's Iranian film series

Nagisa Oshima, 1932-2013