Good pictures?

Not making any “Best of 2012” lists, here are some other recent films I’ve watched lately, again ranked in rough order of my enthusiasm, from a couple of sleeper recommendations down to a shrug of the shoulders.

Never on a bicycle -- certainly not a fixed-gear, steel-frame, no-brakes bike – but I have in my time enjoyed the rush of battling taxis, trucks, and pop-up pedestrians, to get from here to there on the streets of Manhattan, so I was primed for Premium Rush (2012, MC-66, NFX), a velocipede comedy-thriller of sorts, directed by David Koepp and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  He’s a champion bike messenger, who is assigned a package labeled as in the title, and has to get it from Upper West Side to Lower East Side, while competing with a Black rival and for a Chica girlfriend who is also an expert rider.  Meanwhile he is being chased by a drug-crazed bad cop (Michael Shannon, in full bug-eye mode) in a patrol car, leading to a chase under the El that pays homage to The French Connection, with the ironic twist of the bike managing to outrace and outmaneuver the car.  JGL does an amazing amount of his own riding down Manhattan canyons in real traffic, but there are four different stunt riders who astonish with all the things they can do on a bike.  I particularly liked the visualization of on-the-fly calculations of routes, from aerial maps to frozen moments at intersections that diagram the possible outcomes of different routes through the melée.  Fast and furious fun, as far as I’m concerned, this movie (in the most kinetic sense) is a premium rush indeed.

Despite some over-obvious plot twists that verged on soap opera, Yaron Zilberman’s first feature film, A Late Quartet (2012, MC-67, NFX) certainly snowed me with its inside view of the Lincoln Center-Julliard-Central Park lives of a group of musicians.  Touching all the high cultural bases, the title alludes to late chamber pieces by Beethoven and T.S. Eliot, but refers specifically to the four string players who’ve been performing together worldwide for 25 years.  Are they entering a late phase, or are they already late, in the sense of defunct?  Christopher Walken plays the eldest (and wisest!?!) of the four, a cellist whose medical difficulties set off the collective crises of the group.  Second violinist Phillip Seymour Hoffman is married to viola player Catherine Keener.  First violinist Mark Ivanir was long ago in love with Keener, but his ultimate, fanatical devotion was always to his own instrument.  Throw in the couple’s ripe young daughter, a violinist who studies with the other members of the quartet, and you have the makings of bedroom farce played with a straight face.  None of that mattered to me because the four players seemed so real, inhabiting a world I’ve been in proximity to but never part of, both the realms of music and musicianship, and of uptown Manhattan.  Walken is superb in an uncharacteristically gentle and sane role, while Hoffman and Keener are reliably fine, and the other players are plausible enough to paper over the script’s flaws.

Yet another Jarecki, this time Nicholas rather than brothers Andrew and Eugene, makes his feature film debut with Arbitrage (2012, MC-73, NFX), a glossy glimpse inside the world of high finance.  Richard Gere certainly looks the part of a big money guy, sleak as a shark, comfortable on TV or the cover of Forbes, really comfortable on his private jet, even more comfortable at his sixtieth birthday party with extended family and wife Susan Sarandon.  Not quite so comfortable with the young mistress he leaves the party for.  His Madoff-maneuvering to salvage a big bet gone bad is soon overshadowed by greater crimes, but our anti-hero barely breaks a sweat or creases his suit.  The feel is right, the look of this particular world, but the twists of the story don’t necessarily carry us along.  Handsome all right, but is it handsomely done?  My reaction was positive, but not enthusiastic enough to urge upon viewers not naturally attracted.  Simply put, it’s not something you gotta see, but something you might want to see.

Turning up on my Netflix queue on some forgotten recommendation, I wondered at first whether The Wise Kids (2012, MC-74, NFX) was just a mistake, some sort of amateurish evangelical production, but soon twigged to the personal authenticity of the story, about growing up gay in a Southern culture where that made you a child of the devil.  The film’s look may suggest a decades-old tv show, but the sentiments are raw and real, and the acting is fine.  Writer-director Stephen Cone plays a youth director at a church in Charleston, whose companionable marriage is tested by his attraction to one of the boys in his Easter pageant.  The boy, played with spirit and appeal by Tyler Ross, seems to be based loosely on Cone’s own experiences.  He’s in the last semester of high school, headed for NYU, and best friends with two girls, a pastor’s daughter who is beginning to have doubts, and another who remains an eager-beaver believer (“Jesus is just awesome!”) shocked by revelations from her friends.  Molly Kunz and Allison Torem are young actresses I would definitely like to see more of.  And the youth director’s yearning wife is well-played by Sadieh Rifai.  It’s a world that may seem backward in time to us blue-state sophisticates, but its authenticity is vouched for by its low budget.  The cast stayed in the director’s parents’ house, and shot scenes there.  It’s a perspective not often seen in the movies, and presented with humor, conviction, and breadth of sympathy.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead is definitely the best reason to watch James Ponsoldt’s slight but honest Alcoholics Anonymous drama, Smashed (2012, MC-71, NFX).  She’s a lively young second-grade teacher, whose nighttime carousing with husband Aaron Paul intrudes in the classroom when she drunkenly barfs in (or near) a wastepaper basket.  Nick Offerman (Ron of Parks & Recreation) is a sympathetic vice principal who introduces her to AA meetings.  Winstead’s character is from a hardscrabble background, with bad habits acquired from her mother, whom we see in only one scene, but Mary Kay Place makes it count.  Her husband comes from money, which allows him to get by as a music reviewer, attending concerts and partying nonstop, so he’s not inclined to follow her into sobriety.  Olivia Spencer becomes her AA sponsor, and after a relapse when her past behavior catches up with her, she winds up staying sober one day at a time.  It’s really the plain (though pretty) freshness of Winstead that takes this film out of the realm of the familiar and ordinary. 

Michael Winterbottom turns out at least one film a year, and moves on to the next, always looking for a different subject or approach.  Sometimes the result is superlative, and sometimes it’s merely interesting.  Trishna (2012, MC-57, NFX) interests on several levels.  It’s his third adaptation of a Thomas Hardy novel, this time Tess of the D’Urbervilles (previously Jude and The Claim, a McCabe-like Western based on The Mayor of Casterbridge).  Always exploring exotic locales, he sets the story in contemporary India, and one acute pleasure of the film comes from the location shots in Rajasthan, Jaipur, and Mumbai.  Ever the avid absorber of divergent cultures, Winterbottom works in a lot of Bollywood scenes.  It’s not entirely clear that Freida Pinto can act, but ye gods, she’s so beautiful one is happy to watch her just stand or walk.  Maybe the same holds with Nastassi Kinski in Polanski’s Tess, a film I’m always happy to re-watch, and another interesting point of comparison to this adaptation.  (The book I don’t remember well, since I read it as a teenager, well before I could understand it.)  The story’s two principal male characters are combined in one, which makes for a bit of muddle and some arbitrary shifts in personality, and the final third of the film lacks tragic conviction.  Less the hand of fate than the forced hand of the screenwriter.  So the film feels longer than it is, petering out instead of rising to climax, but well worth watching along the way.

More exotica is on view in Chicken with Plums (2012, MC-70, NFX), Marjane Satrapi’s follow-up, both as graphic novel and film, to her wonderful Persepolis (also co-drected with Vincent Paronnaud).  This one is more live-action than animated, but does retain much of the visual magic of graphic panels.  It’s the story of a melancholy violinist in 1958 Tehran, played with silent comedy wit by Mathieu Amalric.  His violin is broken as well as his heart, so he decides to die and takes to bed to wait out the end.  There are flashbacks and flashforwards, fantasies and visual fillips, some of which soar and some of which fall flat, in this fractured fairy tale.  It doesn’t hang together or finally satisfy, but it does have marvelous moments of visual amazement.

Of an inter-related group of three recent offbeat rom-coms, I liked best Your Sister’s Sister (2012, MC-72, NFX), largely because the sisters in question are Rosemary DeWitt and Emily Blunt.  The guy who comes between them is Mark Duplass, as his standard would-be-lovable lunkhead.  Lynn Shelton puts these three together in a picturesque Puget Sound vacation cabin, and puts them through their paces, frequently improvised.  The results sometimes feel fresh and true, sometimes funny, and sometimes forced and evasive, like the ending.

Duplass is crackpot as well as lunkhead in Safety Not Guaranteed (2012, MC-72, NFX).  He places a classified ad in a Seattle paper, seeking a partner in time-travel (with the proviso of the title), and three journalists at a hip magazine go in search of a satirical story behind the ad.  One of them is Aubrey Plaza (April of P&R), who in the way of such things, falls for the subject of their investigation, and gets drawn into his fantasies(?).  Colin Trevorrow’s film is cute enough, but not believable enough to make me care.

The involvement of Rashida Jones (Ann Perkins of P&R) was sufficient to get me to watch Celeste & Jesse Forever (2012, MC-59, NFX), but not enough to make me enjoy it.  She co-wrote the script as well, but the proceedings strike me as too fey (and not in the Tina way).  I still like Rashida Jones too much to bash her earnest and well-meaning efforts here.