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 Still, I hate leaving written work unpublished, and this will hopefully give me the incentive to write as often as I used to on my own time.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.”
