My
aim is to make this round-up useful and fun, both for me and for you, but I’ve
got forty or more new films to comment on, so let’s get right to it. I’ll start with the prestige pictures of the
year, notable for award nominations or high critical ranking, continue with my
own particular recommendations, and then work my way through various groupings
by category or theme. (Included for
each film -- links to Metacritic and Netflix, plus rankings in Film Comment and
IndieWire critical polls for 2013.)
I
already covered five of the year’s top films here, but the most
acclaimed of all was Best Picture Oscar winner 12 Years a Slave (MC-97,
FC #2, IW #1, NFX), and I am no nay-sayer about that. It was an honest piece of work, and I found it an appropriate
successor to Lincoln and antidote to Django Unchained, in historical films from the previous year. Well-directed by Steve McQueen and
well-acted by Chiwetel Ejiofor and others, with a decent respect for historical
accuracy, unflinching but not sensational, my only quibbles with this film were
the almost-too-pretty cinematography and cameos by actors whose recognizability
threw me out of the veristic sense of period.
I’m
a dedicated follower of Paul Greengrass and his immersive documentary-like
style, but going in, I put Captain Phillips (MC-83, FC #50, IW
#41, NFX) more in a crowd-pleasing category with the Bourne films than with Bloody Sunday, so I was pleasantly
surprised to find it effective in the vein of United 93, making the reality of a recent news story come alive
with vivid immediacy and broad sympathy.
Tom Hanks dials back the charm to play the matter-of-fact ship captain,
and real Somalis play the pirates who hijack his container ship and take him
hostage. The film elicited an
intriguing disparity of opinion among reviewers I typically trust, with one
finding it a “disturbing celebration of
American power,” another suggesting that Greengrass “wants this victory to
shatter you,” while a third wonders, “how does a left-wing
conscience find room to maneuver in a right-wing form?” I side with those who find this film an
exceptional success.
A different perspective on Somali piracy comes
across in the Danish feature A Hijacking (MC-82, NFX). In Tobias
Lindholm’s film, American military might is not involved, and the
incident goes on for 134 days of tense negotiations by phone, with the pirate
mastermind on one end, and a Danish shipping CEO on the other. The boss is all business. but not without a
conscience, and can’t always accept the advice of his professional piracy
consultant. This is “Getting to Yes”
with a vengeance. Instead of slam-bam
action, we get excruciating tedium with an ominous hum of potential violence,
for an involving experience nonetheless.
Another approach to maritime adventure is applied in All is Lost (MC-87, FC #26, IW #19,
NFX). J.C. Chandor’s film, quite a
departure from the financial thriller Margin
Call, follows a solitary sailor from the moment his yacht’s hull is
breached by an errant flotsam shipping container to the time when, despite his
inventive and arduous efforts, it sinks and abandons him at sea in the Indian
Ocean. Unlike Captain Phillips, which was actually shot on a ship that was a
corporate twin to the original, this was mostly filmed in a tank with a green
screen background, but special effects and sound design convey a genuine sense
of being at sea. Robert Redford, doing
a lot of stunts for a 77-year-old, also does a lot of characterization with
virtually no dialogue. We watch because
the character is making an inventive and fascinating series of stabs at
survival, but we really pay attention because it’s that familiar face, however
weathered by the storm.
Going
back to Best Picture nominees, there are three I haven’t seen yet, but one I
sadly decline to recommend. There’s lot
to appreciate in The Wolf of Wall Street (MC-75, FC #37, IW #21, NFX), but I
found its extended length fundamentally unrewarding. You can see why Leonardo DiCaprio would want to play the
financial sleazeball Jordan Belfort, a person who is all over-the-top performance
anyway. And Martin Scorsese brings a
good deal of filmmaking genius to the bad-boy spectacle, but no discernible
soul, despite his typical autobiographical subtext. Much of it is funny, but in a disgusting way, Hangover-style. None of it is very enlightening.
As
“Best Foreign Film,” The Great Beauty (MC-86, FC #24, IW
#14, NFX) was a more reputable Oscar choice than many. I went into it with a certain skepticism,
but came out reasonably enchanted. I’d
even venture the heresy that it’s as good as the film it updates after fifty
years -- La Dolce Vita -- not that I
rank that benchmark among my favorite Fellini films, I much prefer the view of
Rome in The White Sheik. And I have to say Paolo Sorrentino does a
better job than Scorsese in satirizing decadence and debauchery without exemplifying
it. Toni Servillo excels as the central
character who holds the pulsing, scattershot energies of the film
together. He’s a jet-set writer, just
turned 65, who long ago swapped his commitments from literature to the high
life, to become the party master of the Roman rich. He’s understandably weary of his world, but not yet dead to the
beauties of his city.
As
usual, the most esteemed foreign release was not even nominated for an Oscar,
though it did not lack for notoriety. Blue
is the Warmest Color (MC-88, FC #12, IW #8, NFX) is best known for its
explicit lesbian sex scenes, and would probably be better with them cut, given
the three-hour running time, but Abdellatif Kechiche has plenty of other stuff
to offer in his follow-up to The Secret
of the Grain. This film has an
intimacy that goes well beyond sex, as we follow Adèle
Exarchopoulos as a character named Adèle in tight, constant close-up,
registering every change of color or expression on her face, from a schoolgirl
who develops a tortured passion for an older art student, into a teacher of
young children trying to put her life back together after their break-up. It’s a rich emotional experience, and your
heart goes out to Adèle as hers breaks.
Turning
to films rated among the top fifty of 2013 in critical polls, I’ll start with
two I personally would rank higher, and then go on to five I’d rank lower.
I expect to like any film by Nicole Holofcener, but
Enough Said (MC-79, IW #47, NFX)
surprised me with delight. It’s honest
and funny about romantic relationships in a way rarely seen this side of Eric
Rohmer. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a
divorced LA masseuse who meets a possible mate (James Gandolfini, in one of his
last roles) and a new best friend (Catherine Keener) at the same party, but later
finds out they know each other, and keeps the secret from both. Meanwhile each of them has a daughter about
to go to college. The slight but
significant story follows each character with wit and empathy, and offers a
steady stream of sparkling dialogue.
Short Term 12 (MC-82, FC #47, IW #16, NFX)
is set in a foster care facility, and clearly bears the fruit of direct
observation from writer/director Destin Cretton. Based on his previous short film, which had a male protagonist, this
film revolves around Brie Larson, who may prove a star with real gravitational
pull. She certainly holds this group of
kids, and this film, together. The
character’s name is Grace and she displays plenty of it, in a modest,
understated way, as she supervises the facility. Clearly subject to some neglect and abuse in her own childhood,
she is adept at caring for her charges and dealing with her fellow staff
members, with one of whom she’s romantically involved. Potentially grim, with sad stories of
damaged children, this film celebrates small steps and glimmers of hope, with
humor and heart.
As
for films that worked better for some other people than they did for me, I’ll
start with Upstream Color (MC-81, FC #10, IW #9, NFX), a freaky sci-fi-ish
thriller/romance/something by one-man-band Shane Carruth. I was content to let some of the spectacle
wash over me, but I didn’t care enough to try to figure out the enigma.
In Frances
Ha (MC-82, FC #9, IW #10, NFX), Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig get to
play out their mutual attraction through a scrim of early French New Wave
visuals and music. Like the
20-something title character, footloose and at loose ends in NYC, this film is
endearing up to a point, and then it’s a little much, or not enough.
Large
claims are made for another small film, which had its moments, but made no
strong impact on me – Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours (MC-83, FC #11, IW #20,
NFX)
tracks the passing connection between two lonely middle-aged people, a
Canadian woman in Vienna to watch over a cousin in a coma, and a guard at the
Kunsthistorisches Museum, where she idles away the waiting hours. The pair are appealing enough, but the
proceedings are so low-key that the most exciting thing in the film is a
gallery lecture on Bruegel.
Nonetheless, I would definitely consider showing this at the Clark, if I
ever wind up showing anything at all.
Wong
Kar Wai’s The Grandmaster (MC-72, FC#20, IW #33, NFX) is a splendid
visual spectacle, with Oscar-nominated cinematography by Philippe Le Sourd, and
serious about the philosophy of martial arts, while delivering all the
outlandish kicks and jabs that the genre demands. But it’s an insider’s film that leaves me on the outside.
Some
people keep announcing Woody Allen has made his best film in years, and I keep
feeling that I don’t care whether I ever see another Woody Allen film. Blue Jasmine (MC-78, FC #25, IW #27,
NFX) is worth viewing for Cate Blanchett in full-diva mode, as someone like
Mrs. Madoff after the fall, but not much else held my attention or earned my
appreciation.
Of
other highly ranked films, I’ve already expressed my love for Polley’s Stories We Tell (FC #16, IW #12), my
admiration for Bujalski’s Computer Chess (FC
#8, IW #18), and my ambivalence about Malick’s To the Wonder (FC #31, IW #23).
After the jump, I will comment on two good indies about run-ins between
the police and African-Americans, three films from the Middle East, four teen
comedies, two made for viewers mad about Mads, two about intellectuals and two
about artists, and three foreign films titled with a woman’s first name.
We
knew and loved him as Wallace in The Wire
and QB1 Vince Howard on Friday Night
Lights, but Michael B. Jordan emerges as a full-blown movie star in Fruitvale
Station (MC-85, FC #30, IW #34, NFX).
Ryan Coogler begins his debut film with real cellphone footage of the
actual event toward which his story leads, the murder of a young black man by a
cop in an Oakland subway in the early morning of New Year’s Day 2009. We go back and follow the threads of Oscar
Grant’s life on its last day -- his devotion to his mother, girl friend, and
young daughter, his sketchy work history, time in jail, efforts to reform --
and of the community in which he lives and dies, dramatizing an inflammatory
incident in a non-inflammatory way.
Blue Caprice (MC-76, NFX) is a searching dramatic treatment of the perpetrators of
the 2002 Beltway sniper shootings, by first-time director Alexander Moors. Isaiah Washington stars as the volatile
older man who brings an abandoned Antiguan boy to the States and then grooms
him to carry out his schemes of scattershot vengeance. This is a crime procedural told completely
from the perspective of the criminals, the police side glimpsed only in actual
television news coverage of the aftermath of the random shootings that left ten
dead and three wounded, terrorizing the region still reeling from 9/11. The film does not try to explicate
inexplicable psychological derangement, but portrays it with quiet, ominous intensity.
Wadjda (MC-81, IW #46, NFX) would
be notable as the first feature film made in Saudi Arabia -- and by a female
director yet! – but Haifaa Al-Mansour’s debut effort is made utterly winning by
the performance of Waad Mohammed as the title character, a Saudi tomboy who
will go to any length, even studying the Koran to win a cash prize, all to
obtain her dream bicycle, and the freedom it betokens. She lives in reasonable comfort with her
mother, but her father is elsewhere, in search of another wife who can bear him
a son. At school, she is told to start
wearing a headscarf and stop wearing black sneakers. A neighborhood boy longs for the day when she will go from
playmate to mate, but Wadjda is in no such hurry. She has places to go on that bike. With an obvious debt to Iranian neorealism, this film is both
penetrating and endearing.
The Attack (MC-74,
NFX) is the story of a suicide bombing that seems so even-handed about
Israeli-Palestinian relations that it was hard to figure out the nationality of
the director, who turned out to be Ziad Doueiri, Lebanese but a former
cinematographer for Tarantino. A
Palestinian doctor is thoroughly assimilated into Israeli society, but finds
his very identity in question, when his beloved wife does something
inexplicable, and he goes in search of meaning and understanding.
There’s
also an even-handedness built into the story of The Other Son (MC-63,
NFX), with its fable-like premise of two infants switched at birth, one
Palestinian, one Israeli. Lorraine
Levy’s film does not dig as deep into that tragic divide, but is effective in
its depiction of two young men trying to come to terms with a radical new
identity, and two mothers each trying to find a way to love both the son they
know and the lost son they’ve discovered, while fathers and brothers cling to
tribal imperatives. Emmanuelle Devos
and Areen Omari, as the respective mothers, carry the film.
High
school romance never grows old. The
best of the past year’s class was The Spectacular Now (MC-82, IW #42,
NFX). Miles Teller, as the good-time
guy whom everyone likes but no one respects, and especially Shailene Woodley,
as the mousey girl who is stubbornly her own person, make this well worth
watching. Director James Ponsoldt
follows up Smashed with another
understanding look at alcoholism. Intimate and realistic in its portrayal of young love, and of
lives in the process of formation, this film bears comparison with Say Anything, charming and original
enough to survive an ending that’s a little too familiar.
Another
well-received adaptation of a YA novel did not go down quite so well with
me. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (MC-63,
NFX) is directed by its author, Stephen Chbosky, with perhaps too much respect
for the original, as a demonstration of the consoling high school principle of
“It gets better.” A dorky freshman is
taken under the wing of wacky pair of senior step-siblings, wild girl Emma
Watson and gay aesthete Ezra Miller.
Hijinks ensue, and teenage wisdom is acquired.
One
teenage comedy looks at sex from a girl’s perspective. Maggie Carey’s The To Do List (MC-61,
NFX) follows the Bridesmaids template
of trying to out-gross the boys. I
watched it out of a certain affection for Aubrey Plaza. She plays a super-student who decides not to
go off to college as a virgin -- a dedicated overachiever, she sets out not
just to have sex but to sample every flavor from her comprehensive list. Sometimes you’ll laugh, sometimes you’ll
wince, and you won’t remember a thing.
The Kings of
Summer
(MC-61, NFX) was another teen film that struck me as almost pretty good, with a
goofball premise, and some funny moments, but ultimately unsatisfying. The suburban Ohio location struck a chord
for me, and the Thoreauvian fantasy of fleeing society to live in a cabin in
the woods also resonated, but the whole interaction of three boys out in the
“wild,” and the girl who comes between them, did not rise about sitcom level.
Typecast
by Hollywood as Bond villain or Hannibal the cannibal, Mads Mikkelson has quite
a range despite his chiseled visage and imposing frame. He softens his aspect sufficiently to play a
kindergarten teacher in The Hunt (MC-76, IW #37, NFX). Thomas Vinterburg’s film, the Danish Oscar
nominee for Best Foreign Film, details the spreading hysteria of a small town
riven by false claims of child sexual abuse.
The looming sense of injustice and menace grows as the knot tangles,
becoming a witch hunt to go with all the literal hunting in the film, but a
surprise ending does not really satisfy.
In A
Royal Affair (MC-73, NFX), Mikkelson is a country doctor and follower
of Voltaire, who happens to become physician and advisor to mad king Christian
VII of Denmark, and solidifies power by becoming the lover of the queen and
effectively a reforming regent, who brings the ideas of the Enlightenment into
practical politics, with mixed results.
Combining an interesting history lesson with all the charms of a
well-made bodice-ripper, this film by Nicolaj Arsel suited me royally, but may
strike some as a royal pain in the ass.
I’m
happy not to consider myself an intellectual, but once upon a time that life
held some appeal for me, so the thing I liked best about Hannah Arendt (MC-69,
NFX, this review is particularly discerning) was the opportunity to sit
in on cocktail parties with New York intellectuals. Barbara Sukowa plays Arendt under Margarethe von Trotta’s
direction, after teaming up most recently on Vision: From the Life of Hildgegard von Bingen, which is not as
wide a reach as one might think, both stories of intellectual women standing up
for their vision in the face of male vilification and domination. I particularly liked Janet McTeer as Mary
McCarthy. Arendt’s struggles with the
reception of her Eichmann book make for a telling incident, but a thin thread
for a whole film. There’s an awful lot
of just our solitary author smoking and staring off into space.
Looking,
perhaps, at Something in the Air (MC-76, FC#28, IW #43, NFX). I expected a lot more from Olivier Assayas’s
retrospect on his own youth as a would-be revolutionary intellectual in the
wake of May ’68 (Après Mai is the
original French title), but he brings little of the insight and perspective
that characterized Carlos and Summer Hours, just a haze of
affectionate nostalgia, which I didn’t begin to share. Many reviewers I respect felt differently,
so your results may vary.
Next
come two films I felt obliged to watch, in case I’m ever again programming
films at the Clark. Renoir
(MC-64, NFX), by Gilles Bourdos and starring Michel Bouquet in the
title role, is appropriately languid and sensuous, full of summery
nostalgia. It’s 1915, and the painter
in his old age is virtually crippled by arthritis and no long able to do more
than paint the women who disrobe for him, and relies on former models to take
care of him and his household. A fresh
young model upsets everyone when she arrives, and most especially the painter’s
son Jean, on leave from the front. His
father’s last muse will become his in turn, as the two will marry and go on to
make many films together. But that’s all
in the future, and this film is very much in its present moment, one hundred
years ago.
Remarkably
similar in subject, but as different as black & white in approach, The
Artist and the Model (MC-53, NFX) is about an old sculptor (Jean
Rochefort) in France during World War II, and the model his wife (Claudia
Cardnale) recruits to revive his interest in sculpting nudes. Fernando Trueba’s film introduces some
melodrama when the model turns out to be aiding partisans crossing over the
border from Spain, but remains languid and sensuous. Like La Belle Noiseuse,
it’s mostly about the laborious process of an artist turning lust into art, but
it lacks the length or depth of Rivette’s film.
I
finish this round-up with three recent foreign films coincidentally first-named
for the woman around which each revolves.
Barbara (MC-86, FC #16, IW #22 on 2012 lists, NFX) is about an
East German doctor who is sent into internal exile in 1980, from Berlin to the
provinces, and kept under Stasi surveillance, for trying to secure an exit
visa. Nina Hoss plays the lead
character, as she does in several of Christian Petzold’s films. At first she seems prickly and remote, but
we are drawn in by the difficulties of her situation and her obvious concern
for her patients. The picture fills in
slowly and meticulously, and in doing so, develops several layers of meaning,
from the personal to the political to the moral.
Elena (MC-87, FC #34, IW #32 on
2012 lists, NFX) is a proletarian former nurse, second wife, and current caretaker
to a retired and ailing business tycoon in Andrei Zvyagintsev’s
noirish film about class conflict in a grim and decaying contemporary
Russia. Much of the film takes place in
wintry silence, through long and seemingly uneventful takes, but a level of
tension and illumination is maintained that sustains attention.
Viola (MC-82, FC #29, IW #38, NFX)
is an enchanting oddity that does not overstay its welcome at 65 minutes. Matías Piñeiro is a
young filmmaker making a film about young (would-be) creatives in Buenos
Aries. You could call it Argentinian
mumblecore, except that it’s frightfully articulate, and reminiscent of Rivette
and Rohmer, with much of the dialogue in Spanish translation from Shakespeare,
particularly Twelfth Night, which a
female theater troupe is rehearsing and performing, mostly in tight roving
close-up. Viola is a character in the
play, masquerading as a manservant, and also another character in the movie,
who bikes around delivering bootleg disks.
Everyone’s playing a role, and nothing is spelled out, but the film
still seems to make a lot of sense, if you work at it. If not, the attractive female faces may
still hold your interest.
No comments:
Post a Comment