Go Go Tales (2007)

I grew up in the ‘90s, and this movie made me feel like a kid again, but in the way a kid feels when he’s flipping through naughty movies late at night on his parents’ TV. You know, those movies with silly characterizations of “bad” people who eventually get their comeuppance, but at least they get a good sex scene or two. Kind of a loose remake of a movie that was already loose to begin with, Abel Ferrara’s undistributed 2007 film is like a comic, Altmanesque version of John Cassavetes’ Killing of a Chinese Bookie, replete with intermittently titillating striptease and a dedicated, overzealous owner (Willem Dafoe) looking to break even. Yet while that film ventures out of its crawlspace to test its protagonist’s devotion to his dream, Ferrara stays mostly indoors, providing a panoramic, sketchy, lovingly photographed view of the people who keep it running. The plot of the film, which hinges mostly on Dafoe trying to find his winning lottery ticket, is less important (or arresting) than the offbeat performances that Ferrara brings out of nearly all his actors, not to mention their asses. Asia Argento bitches out her fellow co-workers before strutting her stuff on stage and making out with a dog; Matthew Modine is a slightly effete womanizer whose villainy is undermined by his lust; and Ferrara indulges Bob Hoskins’ trademark throaty yell to hilarious effect. In one scene, a stripper’s husband discovers her true vocation, and Hoskins attempts to assuage him by replying that “it’s an art form, we do it clean here.” Maybe so, but nothing is ever too serious in this movie, and thinking about it in relation to Cassavetes’ masterpiece reminded me of Werner Herzog’s “remake” of Ferrara’s own Bad Lieutenant, which borrowed a few of that film’s basic themes and explored them more through comedy than tragedy. Dafoe’s performance in this film is similar to Nicolas Cage’s in wearing its wildly mixed emotions for all to see, culminating in a one-take monologue that alone makes the film worth seeing. Until that point he’s hard to take seriously, but is great fun to watch; he even sings an entire number, which the credits say Ferrara wrote. It’s possible Dafoe is a stand-in for Ferrara himself and his career-long dedication to the fringes of urban society. He’s made many flawed but fascinating films, at once gazing at NYC through a cheeky, empowering B-movie lens (Ms. 45), and going on to fashion his own gritty, idiosyncratic gangster saga (King of New York). The sleazy vibe that oozes through many of them is here at its most recognizable, but also its most celebratory; the fact that we hardly get to see New York isn’t an issue. These characters may not be deep, but at least they know what they want. No one else would make a movie like this today—at least not one with a big, booty-shaped heart at the center.

The Best Movies of 2009 (or rather, That I Saw In Theaters Last Year), Part 1

Note: I began writing this at the end of last year, but due to the craziness of modern life, and my own procrastination, it's taken me this long. And I'm not even finished. Still, I hate leaving written work unpublished, and this will hopefully give me the incentive to write as often as I used to on my own time. Making these year-end lists is a tradition for me, and I would hate to let a year slip by. More to come soon.

Here we are again, writing in my rarely-updated blog at the end of Oscar season, for a publication none other than my own. No more expletive-free school newspaper articles (fuck), since college has begun, quite wonderfully in fact, and so I have had less time for and access to movie theaters showing what 70 or so celluloid projections I’ve trekked out to see for the last several years. However, I’m not exactly bummed about that. Looking back over the past year, it seems like most of the really great movies came out in the first 6 months. What’s up with that? Why have movies (at least to me) kind of sucked lately?

Maybe “sucked” is a strong word; maybe “middling” is better. I remember towards the end of last year when I walked out of the mega-hyped James Cameron’s Avatar feeling underwhelmed. At first I thought that maybe I wasn’t sitting close enough to the center of the IMAX theater, so that Cameron’s imagery could really fuck with my sensory perception. Then I thought that perhaps my expectations were too high, that the movie ended up being less The New World than The Lost World. Yet finally I remembered what had struck me while watching the movie at the sold-out showing—the audience rarely, if ever, guffawed. Or tittered. Or shrieked. Or moaned. The movie, I realized, did not truly affect the emotions of the audience; rather, we merely donned our spectacles to gaze, to see these images fall in and out of depth, to watch what Cameron has been up to for 12 years. And it was pretty, and it was big. But we didn’t lose ourselves in it. This wasn’t watching the humble, heroic Frodo battle the huge freaky spider in order to reach his final destination—this was watching a bunch of blue people topple each other. What Avatar was missing is what makes great movies memorable—a thoroughly engaging story and interesting, complex characters. Without a hero we are interested in or a ring to get rid of, the freaky spider is just a freaky spider.

Now, listen: I hate it when people say, “Well, it wasn’t The Godfather or Citizen Kane...” No, it wasn’t, nor does it have to be. Film is such a versatile medium; it can be shaped by any number of personalities or methods of storytelling. It is also impossible to make a perfect movie. Personally, I think Rushmore comes close, but that’s probably because I’ve seen it 30 times and Wes Anderson’s talent for montage still profoundly, inexplicably affects me. There’s no accounting for taste. But people often ask me what kind of movies I like, and I always want to respond, “Ones with integrity.” That may sound incredibly vague and lame, but that’s almost always the first thing I look for, however abstract. There are movies I love where every scene, every note feels necessary, but there also are messy movies I love where the filmmakers and actors seem restless with life. If I can feel it, then the language doesn’t matter. French or Romanian, live-action or CGI, stop-motion or hand-drawn—it’s all the same on screen. It’s communication. It’s a conversation with a lover. You can bitch around and distract them, or you can give them what they want. Or you can do a little bit of both. Ok, I’ll shut up.

Note: These are in no particular order.

Betty Blue: The Director’s Cut

Like On The Road and Last Tango in Paris combined, Jean-Jacques Beiniex’s 1986 film, newly restored to its original 3-hour-plus running time, leisurely portrays the ups and downs of a highly destructive relationship, one marked by days of lusty rapture and nights of intoxicated kickbacks with only the best of friends. I’ve rarely seen a movie so inviting, so eager to let the viewer in on a good time, which may explain its reputation in France as a cult classic. It’s almost drunk with itself: the film features lush color schemes of blue and red, and the unforgettable score by Gabriel Yared, which transforms from haunting circus music into an elegiac piano ballad (the film’s centerpiece), reinventing itself again into a theme of lush, summery synths that could only have been written during the electro-pop craze of the 80s. This movie was made for romantics, and you will hopefully (as I did) forgive its bizarre and over-reaching third act as an act of desperate closure. A movie this beautifully transient doesn’t need a good ending.

The Secret of The Grain

I don’t know if this actually came out last year, but I don’t really care. It was supposed to come out December of ‘08, but some theater fucked up, and so I rushed out to see it in January when it played with little to no advertising for a week in LA. Needless to say, it has stayed with me since then. Like Fanny and Alexander (though not really like it at all), this is a family movie that is bursting at the seams. At the center, it is about a timid, poor man who wants to open a restaurant. Yet his extended family has a lot to say, and a lot to cook. This film is a journey; at two and a half hours, it begins as one thing and ends as something else. Scenes go on longer than you would expect. It all builds to a final act that is one of the most perfect endings I have seen in a movie. I think Criterion is releasing this eventually, so give this sprawling triumph a chance.

Two Lovers

James Gray is one of the few working directors who attempts to combine an economic sense of storytelling with a sensual, tone-conscious camera, and does it successfully. After 2007’s underrated, under-seen cop drama We Own The Night, Gray returned with his latest effort, which happens to be Joaquin Phoenix’s final screen role. And what a role it is, perhaps the most unsettling and ambiguous performance he’s ever done. Recalling the gritty, psychologically front-and-center New York films of the 70s, Two Lovers tells the story of a man-child forced to choose between the Jew and the shiksa. Of course, it isn’t that simple: the film mines the few extraordinary elements remaining in the familiar love-triangle setup, finding unpredictable ways of heightening tension between the characters. And still, half the fun of the movie is gauging exactly how these seemingly bizarre relationships are formed, making the viewer understand just how strong an ability human beings have, that of being able to endlessly rationalize fantasies within this disturbingly complex framework we call reality. Thematically and visually intact, but also completely accessible, this is the kind of movie you thought they didn’t make anymore. If not a modern classic, certainly a word to those privileged enough to make one.

Full review here: http://mgottlieb.blogspot.com/2009/08/two-lovers-2009.html

Humpday

The idea of a good friendship, and perhaps any relationship in general, is that you have someone who consistently challenges you in some way. This dialectic can come in many forms, such as through sex, a difference of opinion or habitude. The characters in Humpday all express this conflict in different ways, mostly out of their need to ensure the stability of their relationships, and perhaps prove it to themselves that they still have a bit of life in them. And you know what else? The movie is about two straight guys who, meeting each other after ten years, dare each other to make gay porn together. They do it because they can, and also because, deep inside, they need this challenge, which the movie ever so subtly reveals. Yes, it’s a comedy. Yes, it’s very funny. But it’s also the most emotionally true movie I saw this year. Shot mostly in close-up with unprofessional actors and an improvised script, the characters talk and emote like people you know, bringing out the human comedy of everyday in natural, infectious conversations. I felt so light after watching this movie because it felt like it was made for me. Director Lynn Shelton (a woman!) made a movie about guys being guys, that was also one of the year’s brilliant surprises.

Tetro

John Cassavetes, the grandfather of independent film, funded and distributed his own projects, simply because he knew he could make the movies he wanted to make. Francis Ford Coppola, maybe the most consistently brilliant director of the 1970s, has recently taken the same route after a comparatively lacking (yet prolific) run of studio films in the following decades. Now, after a 7-year hiatus of making movies, he has written, produced, directed and self-distributed his first original script in 30 years, resulting in what is probably the most glorified film yet made in digital video. Toned in black-and-white with occasional brilliant flashes of color, Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, blatantly auteurist as this opening title tells us, is an ode to the art of making movies, shamelessly artificial and acutely melodramatic. The most attractive virginal teenage boy you’ve ever seen (Alden Ehrenreich) comes to Buenos Aires to find his brother (Vincent Gallo, always the perfect asshole), and attempts to learn more about his family’s dark past. A play is discovered, numerous other plays are staged (including, memorably, a transvestite production of Faust) as the scenes reinvent themselves in flourishes of color and music. Coppola’s wide cinematography and loud, crackling sound design makes the film glisten. Whether the story is or isn’t autobiographical is up to you, but the time, money and love Coppola invested in this project is evident in every frame. If digital can look this good, then maybe we aren’t losing as much in the shift as we think.

In The Loop

It's often said that comedies are a tough sell because there’s nothing that everybody will find funny, but I think that the reason why most comedies are unmemorable is that there’s a lack of context. Judd Apatow’s films, as much as I love them, are filled with jokes so extraneous to their stories that they end up feeling like filmed improvisations, as if a joke in one movie could so easily have been thrown into the other with no difference. I think that Armando Iannucci realizes this, and his film In The Loop is ready to show you otherwise. Hilarious and tightly plotted from start to finish, the film plays like a mixture of The Office and Dr. Strangelove, a handheld-camera satire of the modern political spectrum in which egos run wild and insults are the weapon of choice. A war may or may not be on the horizon, and we see every hilarious detail of the process it takes for something “unforeseeable” to become...forseeable. Another great thing about the movie is that it assumes little knowledge of the real-world politics on part of the viewer, as long as they’re paying attention to the film’s chain of command, though I couldn’t see why you wouldn’t be: the film is perfectly cast, particularly Peter Capaldi as Malcolm Tucker, a lost Oscar nomination if ever there was one. You’ll want to quote him as soon as the movie’s over: “Don’t get too detached, or else that’s what I’ll do to your retinas.”

District 9 (2009)

Just as you've heard, Neill Blomkamp's "District 9" is something new, something possibly brilliant. For about 45 minutes. And then it reveals itself to be something like a lengthier retread of "28 Months Later" (has anyone seen that?), first utilizing a strong, chilling sci-fi concept to suck you in, then losing its character arcs somewhere along the line, and finally devolving into action that means absolutely nothing to people asking the bigger questions. Like me. I walked out of it more than a little exhausted. Probably because I saw the 10:55 showing, which included waiting in line for just under an hour beforehand, and literally 25 minutes of previews for every single zombie/vampire movie coming out until 2017. But also probably because for the last 45 minutes of the movie I found myself trying a little too hard to give a shit.

(Spoilers ahead.) I was a little frustrated with this movie mainly because it sets up this really interesting antihero, Wikus (Sharlto Copley), someone clearly very weak at his core, who has more than enough opportunities to shield that (a job with the government, a pretty wife whose father happens to his boss, a promotion from that same boss) but is suddenly thrown way out of his comfort zone into a situation almost impossible to solve peacefully. And on top of that, he's a complete asshole. The first 30 minutes or so of the movie consist of highly compelling documentary footage (strangely and sadly all but done away with in its second half), in which we see Wikus force aliens (known derogatorily as "prawns") out of their homes without a standard 24-hour eviction notice, insult their seemingly able intelligence to their faces, and literally stage the biggest abortion you've ever seen on screen. "Hear those pops? That's what's left of 'em burning up," he says to the camera. How can you NOT hate this guy? So I was waiting for him to get his comeuppance in some fashion, either grotesquely, or in a way that falls in line with the disorienting, mysterious, well-designed plot machinations of the film's first half. And for a while, the latter seems to be true, as disturbing scenes depicting Wikus' subjection to government experimentation makes "District 9" look something like a Nazi-themed remake of "Men In Black."

Soon enough, however, the movie becomes a quest for this asshole (who remains an asshole, or at least does nothing obvious to change that persona) to save his own ass, in ways that push past narrative plausibility and allow for a strange string of scenes that you've seen in many other movies but don't quite make sense for this particular character. For example, do we want to see him cry to his wife over the phone about wishing that things were different? How are we supposed to have sympathy for him after he tells an alien child that "we're not the fucking same"? By the time the movie kicked into "Iron Man"-esque action mode, with countless exploding bodies and reversals of fortune, I was a little confused. In not fully developing Wikus as a three-dimensional character, one with clear motives that we can understand and somewhat sympathize with despite his unshakable prejudices, director Blomkamp sacrifices what could have been a finale as chilling as his first act.

Which is not to say that "District 9" lacks qualities. In fact, this movie shows why spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a movie is unnecessary, given a lot of hard work. For a comparably small $30 million, Blomkamp, whose previous career was primarily as a special effects artist, creates a unique race of roach-like aliens with ambiguously sad faces that speak a crisp, eerily pleasant dialect of clicks and pops. Nothing in this movie is an eye- (or ear-) sore, even the hand-held camerawork, which fits with the documentary feel. An interesting aspect of the movie was the seeming lack of a language barrier between the human and alien species, which, if explored in a sequel, could lead to establishing some sort of new hybrid civilization. Though the last third of the movie doesn't really hint at progress in that regard.

Earlier this weekend I saw Hayao Miyazaki's wonderful new film, "Ponyo," which, as all his films do, reminded me just how important it is to find the human aspects of things we can't understand. More often than not, the things and people we define as "evil" are rooted in ignorance or misunderstanding. "District 9" very clearly sets up a situation that is chilling for its injustice, and gives us more than enough glimpses of global and psychological repercussions. Yet it loses itself in neglecting to bring its subversive protagonist down to earth.

Two Lovers (2009)

During the 1970s, there existed an era of American film unseen since the film noir movement of the 1940s. Gritty, introspective urban dramas like Taxi Driver and The Conversation explored deeply flawed male protagonists in degrading environments—which primarily existed in their minds more often than not—and we still look to those films today, whether to revel in the grainy, brooding imagery and rigorous camera work, or to hold a mirror up to ourselves and find out more than we thought we needed to know. In a way, these films depict what Holden Caulfield would have become had he remained in the city and never been put in an institution.

Which brings me to Two Lovers, arguably the first great film of 2009, and one that owes as much to those ‘70s films as it does to the talent and willingness of actor Joaquin Phoenix (in what is supposedly his last performance) to embody fragility, giving the most unsettling and ambiguous performance he’s ever done. Portraying Leonard, a Jewish man-child living in Brighton Beach with his positively French-Israeli parents, Phoenix brings his rugged handsomeness to a spontaneous, mumbling, fidgety demeanor, so weirdly endearing to every other character in the film that someone in the theater where I saw it cried out, “How the heck does he get so many women?”

Indeed, Two Lovers mines the few extraordinary elements remaining in the familiar love-triangle setup, finding unpredictable ways of heightening tension between the characters; yet half the fun of the movie is gauging exactly how these seemingly bizarre relationships are formed. It might not make sense at first that a guy like Leonard gets a pretty, old-fashioned Jewish girl (Vinessa Shaw) to fall head over heels for him (“I want to take care of you,” she says); or that he’s able to enter nearly every loophole possible when it comes to spending time with the adventurous neighboring shiksa (Gwyneth Paltrow)—indeed, superficially, the movie can be seen as what happens when a good Jewish boy goes too far. But this is a film that bends reality even as it lets it falls into place, making the viewer question the plausibility of these relationships just as Leonard is constantly and increasingly in danger of completely screwing them both up. To give away other subtleties would ruin the experience, but rest assured, the dichotomy promised by the title is raised to such high stakes that you will either be hissing in disapproval or purring from a rush of blood to the head.

Indeed, unlike most romantic dramas, Two Lovers isn’t afraid to be funny in all the wrong places, nor does it ever allow you to pick apart all of its secrets. We don’t know why Leonard suddenly breaks out into a painful hip-hop verse to impress some ladies (and why they love it), but clearly these characters have needs, and director James Gray uses incredible restraint in conveying this, as in his previous films (including the severely underrated We Own The Night).

Gray is the rare American director that makes lovely and subtle use of interiors to tell a deceptively simple story, which I believe is about the ability of human beings to endlessly rationalize fantasies within the disturbingly complex framework we call reality. He is clearly fascinated by the depths some men are willing to plumb in pursuit of an impossible dream, so much that the first scene of his movie even depicts the protagonist attempting to drown himself in the ocean. Indeed, the film is rife with provocative imagery, from an infectiously rapturous dance club sequence to close-ups of Leonard’s childhood photos during a heated sexual encounter. These scenes are what give the film a certain mystique, which carries it to the very end: without spoiling it, I can say that the last image of the film is something I won’t forget for quite some time.

If you want a film with a strangely compelling protagonist, where every frame is taken seriously, and consistently invites interpretation, you can rent Taxi Driver, or you can see Two Lovers. Hell, why not do both?

Top Ten Movies of 2008

In 2008, the quality of film as an art form dropped as steeply as America’s economy. For me, nearly all of the numerous “prestige pictures” that studios squeezed into theaters from October to December proved underwhelming, having failed to live up to their impeccably edited trailers and tremendous talent involved.

Pretensions to greatness are a common trap, as you can see every day in the lavish art gallery that is the Calendar section of the LA Times. Oscar-nominated Slumdog Millionaire is as photographically lavish, yet as cut-and-paste, as its poster, with characters so devoid of personality that you wonder why the protagonists’ names weren’t Lower Class #1 and #2. Indeed, many of the films this year disappointed in their lack of genuine human interest, a quality exploited through singular detachment in Steven Soderbergh’s compelling, flawed epic, Che. Films like Revolutionary Road misunderstood their layered source material, and felt like dated, archetypal exercises when they could have been nuanced and relevant.

Fortunately, a handful of excellent features dropped early in the year. As you probably know by now (or, at least, you should—go rent it), The Dark Knight was the rare blockbuster event that audiences could enjoy on multiple levels, a thrilling crime drama wonderfully invested in its themes, sustaining its momentum all the way through its positively overwhelming convoluted finish. Oddly enough, the movie wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, which shows how the Oscars are increasingly becoming a skewed and irrelevant celebration of cinematic zeitgeist. I’d rather see three more of those than a minute of another endless death knell like Benjamin Button.

However, at this time of year, I tend to ask myself, which movies did I see recently that I found truly fulfilling on a humanistic scale? Which films gave me a sense of discovery or meaning that stuck with me after I woke up the next morning? Which of the approximately 73 movies released in 2008 that I took the time to see reminded me why I love movies in the first place?

Here are 10 of them, most of which came and went in the first half of the year. And while I don’t think that any of these movies are perfect (what is?), I found each of them either deeply moving or resonant. Film, like all art forms, is subjective, but hopefully I can shed light on some lesser-known films that deserve your attention. I have chosen not to rank them, though I do have a particular favorite.

Dear Zachary

A raging torrent of a documentary, Kurt Kuenne’s aggressively edited testament to the murder of his childhood friend is a film best seen with little prior knowledge of its incendiary and heartbreaking story. Serving as a depiction of the universal facets of human injustice and beautiful goodness, Kuenne has crafted a feature that is clearly manipulative in structure, yet the footage culled from hundreds of hours of home movies is pieced together in consistently compelling and surprising ways.

Encounters at the End of the World

Werner Herzog, in his endless quest to document the most esoteric of human passions (see Grizzly Man), offers yet another endlessly thought-provoking documentary, an existential study of scientists and other workers in Antarctica, and the strange creatures they’ve studied for years. Herzog’s films always serve as both studies of quirky characters and juggernauts of unforgettably gorgeous imagery, and this film has its share of bizarrely introspective interviewees, as well as lengthy, transporting underwater sequences set to rousing choral music.

Happy-Go-Lucky

Mike Leigh (Secrets & Lies), one of the best directors of actors alive, has made yet another film with an utterly unique yet fully realized protagonist who whether you love or hate her, is impossible to forget. Sally Hawkins gives a full-bodied performance as Poppy, a relentless optimist who bounces from one situation to another with the same cheerful, infectious attitude; she shamefully wasn’t nominated for an Oscar. Interestingly, an irritable driving instructor serves as Poppy’s necessary pessimistic counterpoint, one of multiple introspective tests to her seemingly boundless ability to love. Leigh’s fascinating and poignant film truly shows the fruits of taking time to develop characters.

Let The Right One In

Without having seen Twilight, I’d say that this is the teenage vampire love story of the year. Yet even if that doesn’t interest you, this wondrous Swedish coming-of-age tale explores budding sexuality, childhood discovery and the importance of friendship in ways that transcend its sparse genre trappings. A sort of romantic Pan’s Labyrinth in snow, the film portrays a 12-year old boy living in chilly Stockholm who meets and befriends his new neighbor, Eli (the revelatory Lina Leandersson), an androgynous bloodsucker in hiding. Steeped in a meditative mysteriousness, this is one of the most unique and subtle films of its kind.

My Father, My Lord

An impassioned cry from first-time Israeli director David Volach (a former Haredi Jew), this excellent movie depicts a rabbi and his wife dealing with their young son’s insatiable curiosity, which threatens their fundamentally religious lifestyle. Using a low budget and non-professional actors, the film is quietly moving, with a subtle synth score, evocative cinematography and organic, internal performances. At 80 minutes, this is a short, swift indictment of religious nationalism, and a truly independent film.

Paranoid Park

My favorite film of the year, Gus Van Sant’s masterpiece views teenage life as an ongoing, epic morality play, a world where detachment and indifference seem to create the easiest path to indulge in our passions. And what passions they are, as Van Sant shoots what are surely the most phantasmagorical skateboarding sequences ever committed to film. The protagonist’s involvement in the accidental death of a security guard, which exposes the triviality of his various emotional investments, gives way to the most cinematic portrayal of teenage existentialism I’ve seen yet.

Rachel Getting Married

Jonathan Demme’s latest is an alternately rapturous and devastating depiction of a family’s attempts to make amends with the past, in anticipation of the titular act. Indeed, such humane gestures are reflected in Demme’s choice to represent a variety of ethnic backgrounds in the guests at the wedding, which not only culminates in a ravishing extended wedding sequence, but also serves as a subtle background to the acceptance that rehabilitated Kym (Anne Hathaway, in a breakthrough performance the Oscars managed not to ignore) yearns for. This camaraderie comes through in many inspired moments in the film, such as a spontaneous dishwasher-packing contest.

WALL-E

Pixar is the most successful movie studio in the world because of the sense of wonder and discovery that permeates their best films. WALL-E is a glorious return to the creativity I felt was lacking from their last few efforts, both in terms of character design and atmospheric resonance, and was one of the most joyous experiences I had in a theater this year. The film manages to be both a touching love story and a thrilling action movie, simply because of the way the story and characters are presented. Who knew that an animated female, machine-gun-wielding, egg-shaped robot could be sexy?

The Witnesses

Novel-like in structure, French filmmaker André Téchiné’s incredible story of illicit homosexual relationships before and after the strike of AIDS is filled with fascinating moral conflicts and brilliantly three-dimensional characters. Most movies don’t have this amount of intrigue and focus in telling a multi-faceted story. The subject matter itself is not explicit, but is essential to conveying the fear of death and the tumultuous consequences that the epidemic had on the lives of ordinary citizens.

The Wrestler

It’s rare that an exhausted story can be done in an original way, yet from beginning to end, Darren Aronofsky’s restrained The Wrestler, a Rocky-esque story of redemption, is impeccable in style, effort and presentation. It is a film that addresses the nature of performance art, while the actors themselves give impeccable performances. There are so many scenes that would feel contrived in lesser hands, yet are poignant because of Aronofsky’s camera, capturing evocative details and facial expressions, and, moreso, Mickey Rourke’s much-talked-about (and thankfully Oscar-nominated) performance.

Burn After Reading (2008)

“I guess that's the way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin' itself,” says a character at the end of Joel and Ethan Coen’s cult classic The Big Lebowski; in a way, one could argue that that is the idea the Coen brothers have been milking throughout their celebrated 24-year career. In films like Fargo, Raising Arizona, and, yes, even No Country For Old Men, the seminal auteurs depict characters that get trapped in horribly mucky situations, often due to a bad moral choice, or just plain stupidity.

Their newest film, Burn After Reading, explores those same themes, with especially stupid characters. However, it never really comes together, simply because, while every character—whether it’s Frances McDormand’s man-hungry, liposuction-eager gym employee, or John Malkovich’s profanity-spewing alcoholic ex-CIA agent—has its own quirky motives (“I’m writing my memoirs,” purrs Malkovich), they really do feel like hyphenated screenplay throwaways, somehow existing in the same movie and crossing paths at some point, for no reason other than to make the audience laugh. Unfortunately, the movie isn’t especially funny, though it does have its moments; but generally, the viewer never really fully understands, or cares, about what is going on.

The Coens love playing with genre conventions, and while Burn After Reading is their take on an espionage thriller, it has none of the moral conflicts that go with the best entries in the genre. The characters just do and say until the proverbial wheel (if it can be traced) comes full circle. The story goes something like this: Malkovich’s character gets fired, a disc with classified information on it is somehow left at the gym where McDormand and Brad Pitt (in an intermittently amusing, expectedly bright performance) work. Malkovich’s wife is sleeping with George Clooney, a paranoid ex-cop who somehow starts sleeping with McDormand, who by that point has already caused trouble by attempting to blackmail Malkovich. Violence occurs, nothing occurs. There is no tension or feeling for any of the characters. And rather than having a Lebowski-esque profound statement at the end, to explain what it all means, we get shrugged shoulders: “Whatever it was, let’s make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Joel and Ethan, please, follow your own advice.

Though it does have its moments of inspired dialogue and the wonderfully bizarre, Burn After Reading is a scattershot effort, an empty prototype of a movie the Coen brothers have done so well before, and probably don’t need to do again. Perhaps they’re letting off some steam after the dank nihilism of No Country for Old Men. There are two similarities, however, between this and last year’s Oscar winner: neither film gives us a clear exit; and while the earlier film leaves us pondering the meaning of its title, this film is as easy to forget as its title demands. I guess the true human comedy is that nobody—even the great artists—is perfect.

The Wackness (2008)

Writer-director Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness, the story of a Jewish 18-year-old drug dealer finding summer love on the streets of New York City in 1994, is not nearly as interesting as it sounds. Rather, it is the latest in a string of half-baked Sundance favorites, having nabbed the Audience Award at the festival, but playing like a mishmash of original and unfinished ideas.

The protagonist, Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), has just graduated from high school, and is on his way to gaining thousands of dollars selling marijuana. His swagger and his vernacular—which includes words like “dope” and “fly”—reflect his love of hip-hop culture, yet he is far from a stereotypical gangsta. Rather than being swarmed by the opposite sex or any sort of posse, Luke sits at home playing his NES and not much else. This is somewhat unrealistic, considering how much money Luke ostensibly has, and the number of characters to whom he deals drugs, but still he comes off as naive and weirdly inexperienced. Does he really not have any friends? How did he get into drug dealing in the first place? Do his parents care? The film never answers these questions, and unfortunately for Peck’s fine performance, it’s hard to fully sympathize with his character.

We might suspect that he’d be somewhat unsatisfied, which he is, in that he can’t seem to nab the object of his affections, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby). She happens to be the stepdaughter of one of Luke’s clients, who is also his psychiatrist, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley in an inexplicably weird performance). With his awkward New York accent and haphazard behavior, it’s hard to know what to make of him, and it seems that Levine didn’t know exactly what he wanted to direct.

But Luke’s relationship with Dr. Squires gives the movie what humor and message it has. To paraphrase one of the more memorable lines of the film, Squires tells Luke: “A man has to do whatever he has to in order to become the man he has to be.” This simple, powerful mantra drives Luke through the rest of the film, which goes mostly the way you’d expect, save for a warm, open-ended conclusion that evokes just how important it is to have new experiences.

As solid indies go, Juno this isn’t, even though it has several wonderful things in common with the Oscar-nominated film. The aforementioned vernacular of the characters, though it isn’t used by all of them, provides for an endearing urban aesthetic and quotable dialogue. The soundtrack is a sampling of East Coast hip-hop in its prime, with classics by Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Notorious B.I.G. making the cut. Music is an integral part of teenage life, and the film emphasizes this in the best of ways.

At best, The Wackness is a time capsule for 1994 -- a time where Rudy Giuliani’s influence on New York City hadn’t fully made itself known, kids were cooling off on rooftop couches and Illmatic was an album that everyone had to own. But I have a message for up-and-coming indie filmmakers: nostalgia is a wonderful thing, indeed, but try to give us something new to remember.