→ September 16, 2011
→ By

Black Swan.

Black Swan is an extremely well-acted psychological thriller about a tightly-wound ballet dancer who may or may not be losing her mind as a result of the stress of her job (and, perhaps, malnutrition from her bulimia). It’s also thinly plotted and hard to watch because of (I assume deliberately) shaky cinematography and dim lighting.

A New York ballet company is putting on a production of Swan Lake just as its longtime star, now 35, is being forced out of her role due to age. Nina, a shy but very talented technical ballerina, wins the central part playing both the White and Black Swans in the show, but finds herself beset by doubts, hounded by impossible visions, and threatened by a new dancer just in from San Francisco who may or may not be trying to steal her role.

The movie rests heavily on the depth of its four main characters and the performances given by those actors. Natalie Portman won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her central role as Nina, a fragile, childlike ballerina who is perfect for the White Swan role but is so obsessed with perfection that she can’t provide the passionate, reckless dancing required for a convincing seductress Black Swan. Portman, like Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, has to be on pointe throughout the film to pull it off, as her character is in every scene and she must be credible as an adult whose emotional and physical growth has been stunted. I was put off by her wispy voicing of almost every line through the first hour and a half, although it did help cement her nervous, timid personality.

Mila Kunis probably earned more notoriety for her sex scene with Portman than she did for her work in the rest of the film, but whose work as a free-spirited, gregarious colleague who must create suspicion in the viewer’s mind about her ultimate motives was as essential to the film’s credibility as Portman’s work. Vincent Cassel, whom I’d only seen before in Eastern Promises, is outstanding as Thomas, the creepy-but-not-always-creepy director of the ballet company, a man who is probably abusing his position and yet gives no doubt that he is committed to coaxing a command performance from his star. Barbara Hershey, playing Nina’s mother, alternates between a vindictive Mommie Dearest and a loving if overprotective mother who is desperate to prevent ballet from ruining her daughter’s life while living vicariously through her daughter’s success.

But how much of what we see is real, and how much is filtered through the distorted lenses of Nina’s hallucinations? Much of what we see in the film is clearly faulty wiring in her head, including a scene where she peels a thick layer of skin off her finger, or another where her legs spontaneously break in absurd directions. But those obvious illusions could be tipping us off that much of what seems real isn’t, something backed up by frequent decisions to use a vantage point directly behind Nina’s head. Is her mother actually the witch we see in half of her scenes, or is that Nina’s perception of her? How much of Lily’s two-faced personality is, again, Nina’s jealousy manifesting itself in imagined or distorted conversations that are shown to us through her mind? I don’t think there’s a correct answer on this one, but after thinking about the movie for the last 36 hours, I’m inclined to believe that she is the film’s unreliable narrator, and virtually none of what we see before the final scene can be taken at face value.

The story itself contains enough small twists and turns to maintain a moderate level of tension, even though it should be clear from the start where we must finish, since Thomas explains the plot of Swan Lake and the script doesn’t hide the parallels between the film and the ballet within it. But the decision to shoot so many scenes from behind Portman on some kind of handheld camera made for very rough, shaky cinematography – again, possibly a conscious decision to reflect the turmoil inside of Nina’s head, but hell to watch at long stretches. That’s exacerbated by the fact that the lighting in just about every scene in the film is poor and everything is dank and gray, good for keeping the mood bleak but, again, tough to watch for a hundred minutes.

My wife danced for about seven years as a child at a local ballet school, so I defer to her on questions about the dancing in the film. Her gut impression was that we were seeing much more of Portman’s dancing double, Sarah Lane, than we were of Portman, saying the key was to watch the character’s feet – a non-professional dancer couldn’t point her toes or arch her foot half as well as someone who’s been dancing for a decade, because of muscle and bone development. She assumed that any time Nina’s feet were out of the shot or her face wasn’t visible – we had a lot of scenes where her face was blocked by another character or only visible in a blurry reflection in a mirror – that it was her double.

To answer two questions I’m anticipating from the regular readers among you:

* I’m torn on Best Actress between Portman and Lawrence. Both roles were difficult. Both women executed them about as well as I could expect. I think Lawrence’s was more difficult, but feel like I’m unqualified to make that judgment when it’s such a close call; it seems to me like playing a child who acts convincingly like an adult would be harder than playing an adult who acts convincingly like a child. I know Lawrence was more critical to Winter’s Bone than Portman was to Black Swan, but is that not analogous to judging an MVP candidate by the caliber of his teammates? I still lean Lawrence, but without confidence that she’s the right call over Portman.

* Best Picture: I’m through seven, and this would be at the bottom of the seven for me. Good movie, but not on par with the previous six I’ve seen. I think The Kids Are All Right is on its way to us from Netflix.

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→ September 14, 2011
→ By

Moneyball.

Moneyball, the movie, is an absolute mess of a film, the type of muddled end product you’d expect from a project that took several years and went through multiple writers and directors. Even good performances by a cast of big names and some clever makeup work couldn’t save this movie, and if I hadn’t been planning to review it, I would have walked out.

The movie failed first and foremost for me as a movie, not just as a baseball movie. (I’ll get to the baseball parts later.) The general plot here is that the A’s lose their 2001 ALDS to the Yankees and are about to lose three major players to free agency, so Billy Beane goes hunting for a new way of doing business. He runs into a stats geek working in Cleveland’s front office named Peter Brand, hires him, and Brand brings the sabermetric philosophy that we now associate with the early 2000s Oakland teams. This causes friction with Oakland’s scouts, who are all idiots, and Art Howe, who was a stubborn idiot (this is the movie, not my opinion), and Billy might even lose his job until the A’s get hot and win 20 games in a row. Meanwhile, we are to believe that this is all so Billy can purge the personal demons created by the failure of his playing career.

Billy is the only fully realized character in the entire movie, and even at that his disparate pieces don’t tie all that well together. Peter Brand, a.k.a. Paul Antipodesta, is a mousy number cruncher who looks like the lay viewer would expect a stat geek to look – unathletic, dressed in dull collared shirts and ties, intimidated by the players, with no complexity to the character. Howe is nothing but a holier than thou obstacle for Beane whose entire motivation for his stubbornness is his desire for a contract extension – a hopelessly tired plot device that makes for a one-dimensional character. Even Casey, Billy’s daughter, who is shoehorned into this weird plot strand about him possibly losing his job, is nothing more than the plot strand requires her to be.

The lack of multi-dimensional characters is exacerbated by the languid, aimless plot and stop-and-start pacing. The film mopes through Opening Day and the beginning of the A’s season, races through their midyear turnaround, then jumps through most of the winning streak until the twentieth victory, at which point we’re handed slow motion views of the A’s blowing an 11-0 lead … and of Art Howe thinking, with no sound at all. Even the paces of conversations are strange and often forced; one of the “action” scenes, if I could call it that, involves watching Billy juggle three GMs (Shapiro, Phillips, and Sabean) to try to acquire Ricardo Rincon. All three GMs come off as stooges, but more importantly, it’s boring as hell to watch anyone, even Brad Pitt, talk on the phone.

Pitt is very good with the stilted material he’s given and clearly made an effort to look and act the part, from his hair to his tone of voice to his facial expressions. He’s also frequently eating or drinking, which he seems to do in every movie in which he appears. Jonah Hill, as Peter Brand, is very good when he can use his character’s dry, monotonous delivery for comedic effect, drawing laughs from lines that aren’t inherently funny because his timing is so good. Chris Pratt has several funny moments as Scott Hatteberg, very recognizable if youve seen his work as Andy on Parks and Recreation, although he really only has two scenes of any significance in this movie. Philip Seymour Hoffman was wasted as Howe, unfortunately, playing a one-note character who would like you to know he doesn’t care what you have to say about baseball. Robin Wright Penn is also wasted as Beane’s ex-wife who is apparently married to a closeted gay man.

I could have tolerated a lot of flaws if Moneyball had just given me a good baseball movie, with some real tension to it, or perhaps a strong character study of Billy Beane. But the film provides neither, and I spent most of the movie wondering what was really on the line here. The A’s don’t win a playoff series in 2002, so the script can’t set that up as a goal or use the playoffs as a climax. Beane took a $39 million team to the playoffs the year before; he wasn’t going to be fired in May for taking a few risks that his owner more or less told him to take (and if he had been fired, he would have been hired by someone else in a heartbeat, despite the character’s later claim to the contrary). His daughter is worried about him because she doesn’t see the big picture, but neither she nor her father is in any real jeopardy at any point in the film. We’re not playing for anything here.

—

Then there’s the baseball stuff, which is not good. For starters, the lampooning of scouts, which draws from the book, isn’t any more welcome on screen (where some of the scouts are played by actual scouts) than it was on the page; they are set up as dim-witted bowling pins for Beane and Brand to knock down with their spreadsheets. It’s cheap writing, and unfair to the real people being depicted. Current Oakland scouting director Eric Kubota also gets murdered in a drive-by line that depicts him as a clueless intern given the head scouting role after Beane fires Grady Fuson in April after a clubhouse argument (that never really happened). I’ll confess to laughing at the scout referring to “this Bill James bullshit,” although the A’s bought into that bullshit years before the film claims they did – and, in fact, hired Paul Depodesta three years before the movie-A’s hired Brand. (In the film, Fuson refers to Brand as “Google boy,” a term applied to Depodesta by Luddite beat writers in LA three years later.)

The film also relies on some pretty gross misrepresentations or oversimplifications of the business. The idea of a GM getting on a plane and flying two thirds of the way across the country to meet another GM to discuss a trade for a left-handed reliever is so absurd that it should set off alarm bells in even the casual fan. Do you really think that GMs only talk trades in person? That they fly to meet each other for tete-a-tetes before consummating any deal? Similarly, teams don’t sign injured players to guaranteed contracts by flying out to their houses (on Christmas Eve, apparently) without having them go through physicals.

I wasn’t as concerned with the script having Beane trade Carlos Pena to Detroit for a reliever and some money (as opposed to the actual three-team, seven-player deal including Jeff Weaver and Jeremy Bonderman) as I was with seeing Pena, an intelligent, gregarious person, depicted as a sullen Latino player. I also find it hard to believe Beane would ever say he didn’t care about pitchers’ platoon splits. And the film’s emphasis on Beane not making it as a player seems to point to questions about his makeup, especially his confidence, which hardly ties into a film about how makeup is overrated.

If you do end up seeing the film, and I imagine most of you will, there is one scene towards the end that stood out for me as incredibly spot on, so much so that it didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the film. Beane is sitting in what was then called the .406 club at Fenway Park with John Henry, who is about to offer him a record-breaking deal to become the Red Sox’ new GM. Henry expounds on how Beane’s method of doing things is going to sweep through the industry, and how critics within the game weren’t just trying to protect the game, but were expressing their own fears about their livelihoods. That speech applies just as well to any industry undergoing the kind of creative destruction ushered in by Bill James, Sandy Alderson and Billy Beane. Remember that when you see the next written attack on “stat geeks” who are ruining the game along with a defense of RBIs or pitcher wins.

If you haven’t already done so, go read the book before thinking about seeing this movie, and maybe go watch Brad Pitt steal every scene he’s in in Snatch instead.

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→ September 10, 2011
→ By

Winter’s Bone.

Winter’s Bone was one of the eight hundred, or more accurately ten, nominees for Best Picture in this year’s Academy Awards, and of the six I’ve seen it was pretty clearly the best movie. It wasn’t the most enjoyable, and I’m not sure I’d be all that eager to watch it again, but for plot, dialogue, direction, visuals, and key performances, this one edges out The King’s Speech.

Set in a backwoods community somewhere in the Missouri Ozarks, Winter’s Bone focus on Ree (played by Jennifer Lawrence), a 17-year-old girl who is her family’s de facto parent. Her mother is catatonic, and her father, a meth addict and meth maker as well, is out of the picture, leaving Ree in charge of her much younger brother and sister. Ree is barely holding things together with a little help from neighbors when she’s told that her father put up their rickety house and property as bond for his most recent court date and has now disappeared. She has just a few days to locate him or face losing the house.

The search for Ree’s father isn’t the main narrative element in the movie; the court date passes and the narrative splinters into an effort to prove he’s dead (if he is, which Ree doesn’t know for sure) and a few desperate plot strands related to it. The central story is the reactions of Ree’s neighbors, all relatives of hers, some distant, some as close as her father’s brother Teardrop (John Hawkes), but most of whom stonewall her in her attempts to locate her father. She’s turned away, bought off, threatened, and eventually beaten to try to get her to stop looking.

You could argue Winter’s Bone is about one of two things. One interpretation a few of you offered on Twitter was that the film (based on a novel of the same name) is about finding slivers of humanity in a situation that bears neither physical nor emotional resemblance to anything most people seeing this film would recognize as modern life. Ree’s people are all broken to various degrees; even Teardrop, who shows the most kindness towards Ree over the course of the movie, is a drug addict who tells his wife “I said shut up once already, with my mouth.” No one seems truly good except Ree and her friend Gail (played by Lauren Sweetser, who appears to be one of the many locals cast in various roles in the film, which was shot entirely on location), and even Ree is pushed to the boundaries of her goodness.

I saw the movie much more as a character study of Ree, one that could only succeed if the writing was strong enough and the performance of the actress matched it. Ree’s love for her siblings pushes her forward into uncomfortable and even dangerous situations; the threat of violence doesn’t deter her, and ultimately the evident strength of her resolve forces her antagonists to change their tactics in dealing with her. Nothing shakes her; her dedication to her task on behalf of her siblings is absolute, much like the Man shows for his son in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And she’s a child who has been prematurely aged emotionally by the horrific circumstances of her home life, let down explicitly by her father and implicitly by her mother (who had a breakdown related to Ree’s father).

Had Jennifer Lawrence been anything less than perfect in her role as Ree, Winter’s Bone would not have succeeded. Her character is so central to the movie that the actress’ credibility as a child who acts in almost every way like an adult is critical, and Lawrence nailed it. She looks young, and of course is dressed to look young, yet projects adult determination and toughness in confrontation after confrontation with the irrational, unfeeling, often intimidating adults who are standing between her and a possible solution to this looming catastrophe. I found her utterly convincing in look, in tone, in timing, and in conveying this very faint hint of vulnerability, or maybe fear – not fear for herself, but fear that she’ll fail. I haven’t seen Black Swan yet, but either Natalie Portman gave a historic performance, or Oscar voters are every bit as subject to the narrative as baseball writers are.

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→ August 31, 2011
→ By

The Social Network.

The Social Network, a stylized, maybe not all that accurate rendition of Facebook’s origin story, won wide acclaim in last year’s awards season before running into The King’s Speech at the Oscars. Featuring a ferociously quick, smart screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher (apparently a favorite director of many of my readers), it takes what might otherwise be dry source material and draws you into a technical and legal morass by means of a truly well-told story, one full of flawed characters, interpersonal drama, and plenty of incredibly funny lines.

Although nearly all of the central characters in The Social Network are real, as are the major plot points, much of what fills in the rest of the plot was either exaggerated or just made up to make for a more compelling script. (Since it’s not pitched as a documentary, I don’t have a huge issue with this.) In the film, Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg is shown as a brilliant programmer, business visionary, and interpersonal doofus who is set on the path to start Facebook after he’s dumped (with cause) by a girlfriend after an insane conversation that more or less concludes when he tells her she doesn’t really have to study because “you go to BU.” After that point, the film uses two parallel lawsuits against Zuckerberg to structure the narrative through long flashbacks that follow the history of Facebook from its predecessor, facemash (a hot-or-not type of site featuring only coeds at Harvard), through his interaction with the Winklevoss twins (who may or may not have given him the idea for Facebook), to the startup phase of Facebook and eventually to the move to Silicon Valley and venture capital investments that led to a schism between Zuckerberg and his best friend, CFO, and seed-money source Eduardo Saverin.

The pace and intelligence of the dialogue in The Social Network are frenetic, reliant on actors who can deliver the lines credibly and time everything properly. It reminded me not of any drama or anything recent, but of one of my favorite classic films, the screwball comedy His Girl Friday, a Cary Grant vehicle known for so much dialogue that its script had three times the pages per minute of a typical script of the era. The Social Network isn’t quite that frenzied – characters aren’t talking over each other as Grant and costar Rosalind Russell did – but just about every character speaks quickly, and there’s no mercy with the dialogue, not in vocabulary, in subject matter, or in pauses between scenes. This isn’t merely a movie about really smart people – it’s a really smart movie about really smart people, and it expects you to follow along.

Eisenberg earned plaudits and award nominations for his performance as Mark Zuckerberg, affecting disdain for most of the people around him and perhaps for social connections in toto, yet switching to fanboy mode when Internet rock star/bad boy Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) shows up and talks his way into the company. Timberlake was just as good as Eisenberg in less screen time, playing Parker as more pretense than substance, untrustworthy but never grating. And Andrew Garfield, who’s about to become a huge star as Peter Parker in the next unnecessary Spiderman reboot, was incredibly affecting as Eduardo Saverin, who, in the movie at least, is squeezed out by Zuckerberg and Parker in the latter’s power play. (Saverin was the primary inside source for Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, which was in turn the source for Aaron Sorkin’s script for The Social Network. I haven’t tackled that book, but one of Mezrich’s earlier books, Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, was a great read.)

I did enjoy the Harvard scenery and even some campus vernacular. The final clubs’ role in campus life may have been overstated; my sense at the time I was there was that they were very much on the fringes of the social scene, although to be fair I was never “punched” and so I don’t have first person experience to back that impression up. I did notice that Zuckerberg’s dorm room was a good bit larger than any room I ever had at Harvard, and less industrial-looking.

I’ve read some criticism of The Social Network for its portrayal of “nerds” as socially awkward or simply awful people, but I didn’t see that in the film at all. No one comes off worse than the Winklevoss twins, who appear as entitled upper class twits and are, in the script, probably the least intelligent of the central characters. Zuckerberg may be socially inept, but he also ends up getting stinking rich because of his intelligence and work ethic, and I think the portrayal of him as able to outsmart would-be competitors and to work wonders with a modest amount of coding both paint him in a better light than otherwise reported. He’s not depicted as a great guy, but the film’s central debate on his character – it’s bookended by women telling him he’s an asshole (beginning) or that he’s just trying to be one (end) – only covers half of what makes him compelling as the protagonist.

In a rather scathing review of the film’s underlying message, Harvard Law professor Laurence Lessig argued that the script ignores the fact that the Winklevoss’ suit, one of two central plot points, was basically frivolous. The film never mentions an NDA or non-compete agreement, and Zuckerberg says explicitly that he took no code from the Winklevoss’ efforts. So what exactly were the grounds for their suit? You can’t copyright an idea, and you aren’t supposed to be able to patent one (although there are these bogus “business method” patents, the film never mentions that either). Zuckerberg isn’t accused of stealing a trade secret. He settled simply to make the nuisance suit go away. Lessig argues that this is a pox on our economy, and I tend to agree. He also argues that the film omitted the power of the Internet to destroy barriers to entry into new or existing market spaces, which is undoubtedly true but tangential to the human story (real, fabricated, or somewhere in between) at the heart of The Social Network.

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→ August 29, 2011
→ By

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (film).

I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo two years ago and didn’t care for it, between the awkward prose, stilted characters, and violent revenge fantasy that fueled the story, so I gave up on the trilogy rather than plowing through the two subsequent, longer books that followed. The film adaptation of the book garnered very positive reviews, however, as Larsson’s plot, too thin and angry for a 600-page novel, worked well in a 150-minute film that was ultimately powered by Noomi Rapace’s star-making turn as Lisbeth Salander.

If you haven’t read the book, the basic plot is that Mikael Blomkvist is an investigative journalist in temporary disgrace who is hired by an aging industrialist to solve the 40-year-old disappearance of the industrialist’s niece Harriet. The industrialist used a research firm to investigate Blomkvist first, and the reclusive, tortured hacker Lisbeth Salander, who did the actual research, ends up teaming up with Blomkvist to try to solve the mystery of Harriet’s disappearance and find the previously undetected serial killer whose identity Harriet seems to have deduced right before she vanished.

Salander’s character is all hard edges, from her eidetic memory to her flawless cracking skills to her extremely insular personality to her refusal to talk about the traumas of her past. Her portrayal ends up critical to the film, not just because she is the Girl of the title but because Blomkvist’s character is about as dull as an old butter knife. Rapace, a Swedish actress whose English-language debut will come in the next installment of the Sherlock Holmes reboot (which, as a fan of the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories, I have to say looks like a circus freakshow’s take on the character), inhabits the character with a brooding intensity and a barely concealed rage that keeps threatening to explode through the surface. But even when she is violently raped – more on that scene in a moment – by her legal guardian (long backstory there), she channels that rage into a violent, controlled revenge that gives her what she wants by reversing the balance of power. Conveying all of this through Larsson’s clipped, unrealistic dialogue is not simple; it puts more responsibility on the actress involved to convey it through body language, tone, and facial expressions, and Rapace does so from start to finish. It was no small shock to see her out of character in one of the DVD extras and discover she’s kind of cute. There is no cute to her portrayal of Lisbeth.

That rape scene, though … I’ll confess that my wife and I both voted to fast-forward through it. We’d both read the book and knew exactly what was coming, but the thought of watching that attack on Lisbeth in real time was repulsive, and the film does not shy away from just how violent the attack was, or just how much of a violation it was. That scene in the book is all about power and powerlessness, and there’s no question that those aspects come through in the film version. Even at double the normal speed, it went on too long to stomach, and watching Lisbeth get her revenge doesn’t erase it for the viewer any more than it would erase it for her character.

The last half of the movie is all about Blomkvist and Harriet looking for clues in old newspapers and business records for the identities of the serial killer’s victims and, eventually, his identity as well. There’s tension as they visit the sites where various bodies were recovered, but no real drama until Blomkvist blunders into the killer’s grasp and has to be rescued by Lisbeth in a scene of fake-tension – you know Blomkvist isn’t going to die with two more films in the series, but the book and film both push him to the brink of death before it happens. In other words, don’t watch this just for the plot, which is mildly interesting but also extremely sick (reflected in the book’s original Swedish title, which translates to Men Who Hate Women). Watch it for Rapace’s performance as Lisbeth, and for the tremendous prep work that had to go into creating all of the documentary evidence that she and Blomkvist eventually use to find the killer.

–

I commented on Twitter that I was unlikely to go see the English-language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, due out in theaters this winter, because these remakes tend to fall short of their originals. This isn’t strictly a language issue for me, but a cultural one. For one thing, large American studios that remake foreign films tend to Hollywoodize the films to increase their commercial appeal, often changing plot elements, dumbing down smarter dialogue, softening harsher elements that might scare away viewers or hike the film’s MPAA rating, or employing more marketable actors who might bring their own audiences. They have every right to try to make more money, of course, but these are not factors that typically increase the quality of a film. For another thing, there is a pretty clear insinuation in these remakes that the studios believe that Americans will not – or can not – tolerate a film with subtitles. I’m not exactly Mr. Art Film Snob, but I’ve seen at least 20 films with subtitles in at least eight foreign languages and have never once felt that my opinion of a movie suffered because it was subtitled. You get used to them in a matter of seconds, and then you don’t notice them for the rest of the film. Did Inglourious Basterds fare worse at the box office for its heavy use of subtitles? No. So why do we need an English-only version of a film that was made very well by native actors in their own country?

Several readers argued that the director of the English version, David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network), makes it worth watching on its own. I understand that the director of a film can have significant influence on its ultimate quality, but in this case, I’m not concerned about the directing but of the script itself, and as far as I can tell, Fincher wasn’t involved in the screenplay, which was adapted from the book (not the Swedish film) by Steven Zaillian, whose filmography since Schindler’s List skews towards big-budget and commercial efforts, including Mission: Impossible, Hannibal, and, of interest to most of us, Moneyball. I’d also consider it a negative that the filmmakers were reportedly offering too little money for the role of Lisbeth, not because I think money buys you a better actress but because it sends a signal that the studio and/or Fincher don’t see Lisbeth’s role as the crucial one. I might eventually see the English version, but the early indicators on the film’s quality are not all that favorable in my eyes.

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→ August 24, 2011
→ By

Up in the Air.

The more I thought about Up in the Air after watching it, the more I realized what a terrible movie it is. It was pleasant enough for the first two-thirds or so, mostly because the three principal actors are all excellent in their roles, but one insanely stupid plot twist just exposed how many other holes there were in the script to that point.

George Clooney – who seems to be morphing into Cary Grant as he ages – plays Ryan Bingham, a consultant who flies around the country and fires (or, really, lays off) employees whose bosses are too cowardly to do it themselves. He’s also a straight-up mileage whore who has set a life goal of becoming the seventh flier ever to reach ten million mileages in American Airlines’ AAdvantage program. (The film doubles as an extended infomercial for American, Hilton Hotels, and Hertz.) And Ryan moonlights as a hired motivational speaker, praising a life of independence from both physical possessions and interpersonal relationships. Then, of course, he meets the perfect woman and has to change his entire philosophy, all while toting around an overconfident and highly naïve 23-year-old Cornell grad (love the stereotyping of the Ivy Leaguers – remember, kids, it’s bad to be smart!) while they teach each other Big Important Lessons about life and love and psychology.

Clooney, Anna Kendrick (as the Cornell grad, Natalie), and Vera Farmiga (as Ms. Perfect) are all superb, extremely convincing even when their roles turn out to be paper-thin (Kendrick’s) or internally contradictory (the other two). There’s an effortless chemistry between Clooney and Farmiga that makes his transition from one-night-stand to budding romance not just believable but almost invisible – before you know it, he’s falling for her, even though we’re missing a bunch of steps in the story. You might watch the film just to see these three actors, all nominated for Academy Awards for their performances, do their thing, but I think you’ll want to punch the screen before it’s over.

And the reasons are many. One is that we never learn why Ryan is so afraid of commitments. He came from small-town Wisconsin, but this isn’t the budding urbanite in search of culture beyond his homogenous, provincial upbringing. His sisters are his only family, and he’s mostly abandoned them until one of them gets married, but there’s no obvious reason why – both characters, in bit parts, are sweet and care for him even though they don’t seem to have much in common. Another is that Natalie ends up something of a prop for Ryan to play off rather than a fully-developed character in her own right – she changes as the plot needs her to change.

(This movie was, on some level, ruined for me beforehand by Will Leitch. Will’s become my go-to movie reviewer for after I’ve seen a film, because I find his observations are often so spot-on that they influence my interpretation of the movie. He nailed Up in the Air, especially on the glaring inconsistencies in the script, although I think he went easy on the plot twist, which I’ll get to in a moment. But you’ll notice I’m saying a lot of the things he said, and I’m sure that’s not an accident: He set me up. So now I read him after I’ve seen a movie and want an expert’s opinion, using Roger Ebert as my go-to guy before I choose to see a film.)

That plot twist – big spoiler alert here – is a killer, though. Alex (Farmiga, who by the way looks like what I expected Claire Forlani to look like at this age) is Ryan’s female analogue, another road warrior looking for NSA sex in high-end Hiltons but not much more than that, until the two start meeting up a little more often and then spend more quality time together at a conference, where he asks her to be his date for his sister’s wedding, to which she agrees without much debate. There they have the classic Hollywood falling-in-love weekend, and you might think they’re headed for happily ever after … until he surprises her at her house in Chicago, only to discover she has a husband and two kids, after which she berates him as if it’s his fault that she hid this significant life detail. (“I’m a grown-up.” No, sister, you’re a raging narcissist, and possibly a sociopath as well.) Alex is two completely different characters that have virtually no crossover, and the idea of this independent, too-perfect paramour also being a loving mom who also is willing to abandon her kids for a romantic weekend with the guy with whom she says she only wants casual sex is such a farce that it blew up the whole movie and made me realize how badly I’d been bamboozled by everything that had come before it.

I will give Up in the Air credit for one thing, however: Someone involved in writing the story at least grasped the world of frequent flyer/guest point accumulation. Ryan is absurd in that regard, and his underlying motivation is murky, but the absurdity of the portrayal is the source of its humor. Either you’ve been a heavy traveler and understand using every trick possible to max out your points, or you know someone who has. I’ve never traveled as much as Ryan has – I’ve never been above the first level of “elite” status on any airline – but I do it enough to make me a mileage junkie, with affiliated credit cards and one eye always on promotions that might boost my miles or bump me up in status. That nod to people who fly as part of their jobs was a cute touch – but it added virtually nothing to the strange, unfinished plot about Ryan Bingham’s life choices, and when Sam Elliott makes his Coen-esque cameo as the pilot on the flight where Ryan reaches the ten million mile threshold, it’s like we’ve been airlifted into a separate film entirely. The worthwhile parts of Up in the Air could have been aired on a flight from Chicago to Milwaukee, but I like to get a little farther off the ground than that.

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→ August 23, 2011
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Inception.

Inception is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind meets Ocean’s Eleven with a few sequences directed by Michael Bay – in other words, a heist movie that involves sneaking into someone else’s dreams, but with lots of guns and blowing shit up. The first two parts are clever and pretty tightly done, but the movie’s gradual devolution as the heist progresses, combined with a hero/antihero protagonist, cut off the film’s upside for me.

Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is an expert “extractor,” a mercenary spy who can infiltrate the dreams of other people and extract critical information. Cobb and his partner in crime, Arthur (an impressive turn by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) employ a dream-within-a-dream trick as their specialty but fail to extract information from Saito, a Japanese executive who then hires them for the biggest job of their careers – an “inception,” or planting a new idea in the target’s mind rather than extracting an existing one. Cobb returns to his father-in-law, who originally trained him in the field, to hire a new dream architect, (Ellen Page, largely wasted as a prop whose “architect” skills come up once in the final heist), and then travels to Kenya to add a chemist (Dileep Rao) who prepares the powerful sedatives used to put the target to sleep, also allowing for a crazy and somewhat pointless chase scene. When the team is assembled and begins attempting to extract the information, however, they encounter two problems: The target has been trained to fight potential extraction, and Cobb himself isn’t fully capable of leading the mission.

Neither my wife nor I found the plot confusing – everything’s pretty clearly explained, but never at such length that you want to go get a cup of coffee till they finish – but the very short cuts in the final third of the movie are incredibly distracting, and a horrible choice of colors made the final battle within the target’s mind impossible to watch. For some reason, that final dream level takes place in what looks like a military facility in a tundra, and everyone – team members and the armed “defenders” who are projections of the target’s subconscous – is dressed in white, usually with hats or hoods up. Other than Ellen Page, whose long hair identified her, everyone else looked alike.

Other decisions with the visual and sound effects brought far more benefits to the finished product. When the characters are falling in the first dream level, they lose gravity in the second, meaning Arthur first must fight the defenders in zero-G conditions (I cannot imagine how much fun that was for Levitt to film) and then concoct a solution to wake his comrades up without the benefit of an in-dream “kick” (usually a fall). The team also uses music to signal an imminent kick within the multiple layers of the dream, and the use of ever slower music the deeper the dream-level helped build tension while also clarifying the varying speeds of time within each dream.

The film seems to skirt the major problem with its central character – that is, that Cobb is no hero, but actually a selfish ass. He takes his team into a high-risk venture where the main reward is primarily his and the risk to the remaining team members is terrifying. He doesn’t inform his team that he’s having a technical problem that has a significant negative impact on their chances of success. Even within the mission, his personal motivation to reach the goal causes him to stay on course even when the risk of failure is increasing. We have to root for Cobb to succeed because he has two young kids at home who have lost their mother and have no immediate hope of seeing their father, but that alone can’t whitewash the fact that he’s put four other people at great risk to achieve his own personal ends.

Of course, the main question about Inception is how to interpret the ending – once again, spoiler alert – although my wife and I both found it fairly unambiguous; her remark after the film was that she was “waiting for the big twist” that never came. The director, Christopher Nolan, has refused to clarify the ending, stating instead that the important part is not whether the final scene represents reality or a constructed dream, but that Cobb has chosen this scenario as his reality, to leave his fugitive life behind and “return” to his children. He’s also pointed out that parents who see the movie are far more likely to accept the concluding scene as reality than non-parents because of our deep desire to see Cobb and his children reunited, which is undoubtedly true. However, we both felt that the only hint of ambiguity in that final scene was the fact that the camera goes black as Cobb’s totem wobbles but before it falls – and unless you want to argue that it’s a dream where Cobb has altered physics but didn’t show it to us until that very point, I don’t see how the totem wobbles without eventually falling. (I admit it was a visually arresting shot, however.) Had Nolan wanted to make it truly ambiguous, he could have ended the film before the kids turned to see Cobb, which would have made it consistent with his other dream-states in the film. Nolan took care of some superficial stuff to try to create confusion, like keeping the kids in similar clothes (although in different shoes), but somewhere along the line, there was a decision to give the ending a little bit of Hollywoodization so the audience at least gets the cathartic moment of Cobb and his kids reunited, but for us that airbrushing pushed the ending past any question of whether it was real.

I’m shifting my standards slightly here, however, to the detriment of Inception; by the standards of mainstream Hollywood films, Inception was intelligent and thoughtful, well-acted, and sharp-looking. But if you remove the frippery of rampant gunfire and chases and the sentimental ending, there’s a smarter movie underneath that had an action film grafted on to it – a successful commercial decision that kept the film from reaching its full artistic potential.

If you like the concept of entering another’s dreams or thoughts, check out the film I mentioned in the first paragraph, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of the two or three best movies I’ve ever seen, where two ex-lovers attempt to forget each other by having their memories of their relationships professionally erased – until one changes his mind during the procedure.

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→ August 21, 2011
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two.

I’m mixed on the final installment in the Harry Potter film series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two. On the one hand, it was pretty true to the book, including a number of key sequences, plot points, and quotes, without feeling terribly rushed about it. On the other hand, it doesn’t stand well on its own – it is very clearly the second half of a film, not a complete film in its own right – and the pacing that worked fine on the printed page proved very uneven on the screen.

Harry has to jump through specific hoops to get to the final, climactic battle with Voldemort, and J.K. Rowling made sure to get several of his friends in on the action in that melee, although for some reason Ginny was barely present in this half of the movie. Some of those hoops don’t translate terribly well to the screen, or just lacked the necessary contest of the books, but the film jumps back and forth between action scenes and Harry’s more cerebral quests, creating pacing issues but also keeping the film from becoming incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the story. (That is, those are the good guys, those are the bad guys, they’re fighting. Everyone can grasp that much.) The battle sequences often seemed cut off by the need to get Harry back on screen, though, meaning it didn’t have the same intensity as part one, which remains the best of the eight films if we view these two parts separately.

The staccato cuts also mean that none of the actors beyond Daniel Radcliffe (Harry) gets to stretch out much, meaning we get more mugging and less acting from some outstanding performers. Helena Bonham-Carter looks certifiable as Bellatrix Lestrange but is largely left making faces at everyone, while Alan Rickman – as central to the success of the films as anyone outside of the three main characters – might end up hoping for a Judi Dench exemption if he wanted a Best Supporting actor nomination. I wrote in my review of part one that Rupert Grint and Emma Watson had shown substantial growth as actors, but here they’re reduced to bit players, and the development of their relationship earns little screen time and scarcely any explanation.

The movie looks amazing, both in scenery and in special effects, with the initial attack by the Death Eaters on Hogwarts the effects highlight of the series. (That scene was preceded by a necessary yet too-short return for Dame Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall.) Rowling has always been one of my favorite authors for the depth of her descriptions, and the films have lived up to the prose in sights and sounds, including some of the more difficult settings like the goblin bank Gringott’s.

But that Gringott’s scene encapsulates why I found this second half somewhat unsatisfying. It looked the part. Everyone involved in the scene did his or her job. But there was so much time spent on setup and so little on the climax of the scene that even though you saw them escape (and do quite a bit of damage along the way), the escape doesn’t stick with you as much as the setup does. I can tell you how it looked, and the tension of the scene before the betrayal, but what happened after that didn’t have the same power.

I mentioned half-jokingly the possibility of Alan Rickman getting an Oscar nomination for his role as Severus Snape, one of the meatiest roles outside of the big three across the series. The films themselves were not Oscar-worthy, but knowing the Academy’s penchant for honoring successful series as they close, I did wonder if they’d throw one nomination at someone in the film just to acknowledge the series’ existence. (That is, something beyond a technical award or an award for costumes or design.) Rickman would be my choice, since Daniel Radcliffe would have a difficult time cracking the competitive Best Actor field. Helena Bonham-Carter was convincingly crazy, but she’s barely in the movie and her part was too thin to be award material. Then again, they nominate so many films for Best Picture that perhaps the academy will shoehorn Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two into that category as they did with Toy Story 3: we hope you feel like it’s an honor to be nominated, because we have no intention of actually giving you the award.

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→ August 6, 2011
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True Grit

The 2010 version of True Grit (iTunes versionicon) earned ten Academy Award nominations – winning none, so I hope it truly is an honor just to be nominated, otherwise the Coen brothers must be really pissed off – which accurately reflects the quality of the acting, the screenplay, and the visuals. It’s also an unusually mainstream film for the Coens, who seem to specialize in cult favorites or films that garner more acclaim from critics than at the box office. I enjoyed the film more for its critical aspects than for the story, and would rank it as above-average but have a hard time pushing myself to call it plus.

Mattie Ross is a 14-year-old girl whose father was robbed and murdered by a hired hand named Tom Chaney, who subsequently fled into the Indian Territories (now constituting the bulk of Oklahoma) to escape arrest. Mattie, ostensibly in a frontier town to collect her father’s body and belongings, hires the dissolute bounty hunter Rooster Cogburn – over his objections – to catch Chaney, with the condition that she accompany him on the chase. They are joined by the arrogant Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, himself pursuing Chaney for the murder of a state senator and a dog in Texas. (It is unclear which was the greater transgression.)

The Coen brothers were, as far as I can tell having not read the novel, faithful to the original work, or at least far more so than the 1969 adaptation for which John Wayne won an Academy Award. (I haven’t seen that film either.) That decision appears double-edged to me, for while it means they stuck to Mattie’s perspective and gave her character a richness it might have otherwise lacked, it also leads down the figurative and literal slope of coincidences and sentiment in the film’s final fifteen minutes. Everything is a little too clean and perfect. You knew that a snake would come into play. You knew someone would fall into the hole in the ground. The Coen brothers didn’t have to kill off a main character to make the film a little grittier, pun intended, but it seems that their loyalty to Portis’ original work won out.

Two aspects of the film stood out over all others. One, obviously, is Hailee Steinfeld, who portrays Mattie and was just 12 years old when True Grit was filmed. Her performance was absolutely critical to the movie’s success – she needs to be tough, firm, adult-like in sensibility yet still maintaining the naïveté of a child of her age; if she’s not believable, nothing that comes after in the film would matter. She must be able to boss around the grizzled, alcoholic Cogburn (played by Jeff Bridges) and yet to be vulnerable when she’s first exposed to violence or finds herself disdained (or worse) by LaBoeuf (Matt Damon). And she owns the screen in her negotiation with the dismissive horse-trader that ends with her talking him into a corner and out of his money, a scene where you would easily forget Steinfeld’s age were you not reminded of it within the dialogue. That she accomplished this at her age in her first significant film role is remarkable and justifies the passel of awards she won for her work, as well as the nomination for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress (an award won by Melissa Leo for The Fighter).

The other aspect that stood out is the cinematography, which is not something I ordinarily notice in films unless it’s done poorly. But the Coen brothers played True Grit as a classic Western epic, filling the screen with wide-angle views of the countryside, using plot elements like having Mattie on top of a cliff while a battle rages below as an excuse for Roger Deakins to give us an expansive shot of the dusty plateau where the climactic encounter of the book occurs.

(I admit I would have loved to have seen an outtake featuring Rooster Cogburn ordering a White Russian, but maybe that’s just me.)

As for the Best Picture race of last year, I’d still give The King’s Speech the nod over True Grit; both were well-acted, but the two lead performances in The King’s Speech were better than any of the three major performances here. Both films benefited from some contrived drama – the former by altering historical circumstances, the latter through a little coincidence and some silly foreshadowing – but The King’s Speech did so more subtly.

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→ August 3, 2011
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The Secret of Kells.

The Secret of Kells is a stunning hand-drawn animated film that draws on the history of the Book of Kells and on Celtic mythology to create a mysterious and beautiful origin tale for that book, a work of religious, artistic, and cultural significance in Ireland. Nominated for Best Animated Feature in 2009, where it lost to Up (from Pixar, which has won six of the last eight such awards, including the last four), The Secret of Kells deserves a much wider audience than it’s received so far, and shows there is a place for old-fashioned animation alongside the technical marvels of CGI.

The story takes place at the Abbey of Kells, in Ireland’s County Meath, sometime between 900 and 1000 A.D., after the abbey at Iona had been sacked by Viking raiders. The Abbot of Kells, Abbot Cellach, oversees the construction of fortifications around the abbey in expectation of a similar Viking assault, yet also tries to protect his nephew, Brendan, but appears to have more than just a familial interest behind his strict treatment of the boy.

Brendan is fascinated by the work in the scriptorium and becomes fast friends with a refugee from Iona, Brother Aidan (who, like Cellach, is based on a true historical figure), an illuminator who is working on the Book of Kells, an illustrated book of the Gospels that is described in more vague terms in the movie (e.g., that it will “turn darkness into light”). Yet to help Aidan continue his work, Brendan must violate the orders of his uncle to stay within the walls of the abbey, and ends up heading twice into the forbidden forest to find materials for ink and a sacred lens*, meeting and befriending a childlike fairy named Aisling who helps him both by saving his life (several times, as she likes to remind him) and by building his confidence so that he can continue his work with Brother Aidan.

*The lens, called the Eye of Collum Cille in the movie, draws its name from the same saint for whom the church of St. Columbkille in Brighton, Massachusetts, is named – which I know primarily because I used to pass it every time I headed to a game at Boston College.

The star of the movie, despite an intriguing story and strong voicing (led by Brendan Gleeson as Abbot Cellach), is the animation, which draws heavily on ancient Celtic art while also showing more recent influences, from Miyazaki (especially our family favorite, My Neighbor Totoro) to Tim Burton to the exaggerated look of the animated humans in The Triplets of Belleville. The forest backgrounds are lush, while the winter scenes are stark and gothic – it reminded me of a classic Flash game, A Murder of Scarecrows – and Celtic images recognizable to viewers of almost any background abound in the film, including a dreamlike sequence where Brendan fights a snake in the form of an ornate Celtic knot.

Without any knowledge of the history of the Book of Kells, however, the plot is a little obtuse. What little is known of the book’s origins is incorporated into the film, but its religious and artistic significance are assumed rather than explained. (Of course, long explanations can be about as interesting as watching paint dry, so this is hardly a flaw.) The heavy of use elements of Irish mythology, from the Aislings to the pre-Christian Celtic deity Crom Cruach to the cat Pangur Bán, based on a cat in an ancient Irish poem of the same name, was less of an issue because the context of those characters filled in the blanks in our knowledge.

What The Secret of Kells is not, however, is a children’s movie. There’s plenty of implied violence in depictions of Viking raids, including the final sacking of Kells, and a flash of actual violence. Brendan’s quest for the eye of Collum Cille leads him into the battle with the snake and other dark sequences that would be scary for smaller children. It’s a wonderful movie for adults and older kids, however, replete with visual candy, outstanding Celtic-inspired music, and a story that veers from sweet to serious in just an hour and change.

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