
A semi-free-associational, six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon, reliance-on-patchy-memory look at every movie I saw in a theater this year
I'm probably going to give a lot of worthy films short-shrift, because I'm busier than hell and I want to finish this crazy project before May.
... Another superhero blockbuster part deux, Guillermo Del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army was a lot more fun than The Dark Knight, but not without its problems. Del Toro is such an innovative creator of monsters that I wish I could take my own 5-year-old self along to his movies with me. The monsters in this film are a joy to behold. The story, aah, not-a so much-a, as we say in Fake Italy. Aesthetically speaking, Del Toro creates some beautiful images here, and I love the drunken singalong, but I wish he hadn't swapped the first film's nastily charismatic villains and urban action setting for a bunch of fucking elves and fantasy quests.


Gus Van Sant's last dalliance with Hollywood arguably produced his three worst movies: the competent Good Will Hunting aka Rocky VI: Equations, the puzzling remake of Hitchcock's Psycho, and the anonymous and shitty Finding Forrester aka You're the Man Now, Dogg. Fortunately, his return to mainstream, expensive, movie-star movies, Milk, is a solidly enjoyable, if slightly well-worn, formally interesting entertainment. Though I detest bio-pics more than any other genre of film (I may write a post explaining why someday), and I had grown weary of Sean Penn as an actor thanks to a long string of ponderous, overbearing, speechifying roles, I liked Milk a lot (save for the cringe-inducing scene of boy-in-wheelchair uplift). As so many pundits, hacks, and talented critics have already pointed out, it's nice to see Sean Penn play a joyful character with a sense of humor again. Penn gets to make some speeches and tackle some heavy drama, but his inhabiting of Harvey Milk is actually nuanced and full of space. He listens and reacts to the other actors instead of thespian-sploding all over the place. Josh Brolin and James Franco are also worth seeing here. (I'm not one to pontificate on the possible political impact of a film, and I don't find that approach very interesting anyway, but I do hope Milk can do at least a little bit to make our culture less homophobic.) Van Sant shows a keen interest and sensitivity toward the film's setting and moment in time, and I liked all the attention spent on the details of city government.

Van Sant's films, even his bad ones, are full of such luscious colors and compositions (again, except for the jobbing Forrester), and Milk is no exception. I love the way Van Sant's films look, first and foremost, and that's part of why I fell in love with Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho in high school, watching both films dozens and dozens of times. His movies, at their best, have an almost narcotic effect on me. His more low-key 2008 release, Paranoid Park, provided this pure movie hypnosis better than Milk's Academy Award sheen and reliable three-act structure. An extremely loose narrative about a teenage skater who accidentally causes a death, Paranoid Park repeatedly loses itself in images, inarticulate teenage speech, the camera's movements, and the varied soundtrack. A closeup on droplets from a boy's shower-wet hair dripping onto the bottom of the tub becomes an abstract loop of shapes and patterns, as do the scenes of skaters skating at a local park. Comparing apples to oranges, which is all I really do here, Milk is like a Vanity Fair article while Paranoid Park is like a piece of music.

Still more to come, for Christ's sake. I haven't even written about my two favorites of the year yet.
3 comments:
Please write about your favorites. I keep coming back here to see films you liked the best. Please, for the love of god, put my curiosity at rest.
School keeps getting in the way. I'm going to try to post here again in about a week, but if that doesn't work, I'll be able to post in mid-March.
Thanks for writing about "Snow Angels," which I just saw and really liked, otherwise I wouldn't have known about it. Thought it was a beautiful film.
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