Review: Hanna

Hanna is a brilliant, unrelenting action thriller in the mold of the Bourne trilogy that will grab you by the front of the shirt and never let go.  It visually extraordinary for an action flick, features stunning performances and an amazing score, and it is undoubtedly the finest mainstream movie released so far this year.

Now that I’ve gotten the hyperbolic, poster-ready quotes out of the way, I should probably admit that this isn’t exactly the majority opinion.  Reviews are a good deal more mixed than that.  Oh, it’s got a 70% positive score on RottenTomatoes, but the majority opinion seems to be that it’s just a decent little thriller, nothing very special.  It’s only got a 57% among the “Top Critics” listed there, and even positive reviews from the likes of Roger Ebert and Glenn Kenny don’t rise above the level of “solid movie, worth watching.”  No one else probably cares about this, but I seriously loved this movie, and I’m rather disconcerted that no one else seems to share that love.  It’s not so much that big-time critics are divided on the movie, but virtually every blogger I read who has reviewed the movie has had a “meh” reaction or worse.  This guy is literally the only person I could find who feels the same way I do, and when you read as many movie sites as I do, that’s rather surprising.

So anyway, your mileage may vary, but I think the movie’s brilliant, and I’m standing by that opinion.  The story finds the titular Hanna as a teenage girl living alone with her father in the arctic forest, hunting caribou with bow and arrow and constantly training in the arts of war.  It turns out that her father, an ex-CIA agent/assassin, has been preparing her for the moment when she will return to civilization and take revenge on agency higher-up Marissa Wiegler for the death of her mother.  When Hanna feels she is ready, her father (Eric Bana) has her flip a switch, notifying the agency where they are, and setting off a non-stop chase thriller filled with intense, brutal action scenes that jumps from Finland to Morocco to Spain to Germany.

The performances here are all excellent--not necessarily nuanced, but tough and bold and exactly what they need to be.  Cate Blanchett plays the villain role as Marissa Wiegler, and while her Southern accent cuts in and out and sounds a bit awkward, she exudes cruel professionalism from every pore and manages to toss in several little character details that suggest a more complex motivation than the script really gives her.  Her oily henchman is played by Tom Hollander of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, and he is about as creepy and evil as it is possible to be given his limited lines and screen time.  Eric Bana also has few lines, but he nevertheless manages to convey a small bit of the complexity of a man so driven by revenge he turns his daughter into a weapon.  Does he really love her?  Does he have her best interests at heart?  The movie is ambiguous on this score, but while some might count it a weakness I call it economy in storytelling.  This is a thriller, not a morality drama, and I find the ambiguity intriguing.

The star, of course, is Saoirse Ronan, and what a star she is.  She is a force of nature in this movie.  I have not seen any of her other movies yet, but based on the acclaim she garnered for those entirely different roles (including an Oscar nomination) and her incredible work here I feel I have to call her the most gifted actress of her generation.  With her bleached-blonde hair, too-white skin, and pale eyes she is every inch the teenage killer, expert in every weapon as well as hand-to-hand combat.  Nevertheless, she somehow manages to convey the feelings of a real girl out on her own for the first time, experiencing the wonders of the world with awe and occasionally confusion.  

This comes through in a sequence in the middle of the film when she meets up with a British family on holiday and makes friends with the motor-mouthed, celebrity-obsessed daughter (a hilarious Jessica Barden).  This interlude provides the biggest laughs of what is a surprisingly humorous film, as well as the only moments of tenderness.  Hanna is a killer, but she begins to want more. The British is family is comically liberal and lenient--the parents are hippies who talk of getting back to nature as they tour Third World countries in their giant trailer, letting their daughter run off with boys for a night on the town in Morocco--a sharp contrast to Hanna’s Spartan upbringing.  Nevertheless, this family, mildly dysfunctional as it is, is still suffused with love and real human connection that Hanna has never known.  Unfortunately, her upbringing proves entirely necessary for her future, while the modern family is unprepared.

The direction of the film is splendid, rather a surprise from Joe Wright.  I have only seen his adaptation of Pride and Prejudice before this, and it struck me as half of quite a good movie.  The first half of the film was beautifully done, centering on a wonderful ball scene filled with intricate tracking shots in and around the dancing and social maneuvering, clearly influenced by Welles, Renoir, and Altman.  Over the course of the film, though, the beauty of the cinematography began to overwhelm, as scene-necessitated tracking shots gave way to picturesque vistas that wallowed in sentimentality and heaving bosoms instead of taking advantage of the humor of the situation.  I have not seen Atonement, though it looks quite good despite mixed reviews, or The Soloist, which looks quite bland and uninteresting.  In Hanna, though, Wright steps up to the plate and succeeds enormously.  He has admitted that the action scenes terrified him, that he wasn’t sure if he could do it, and he looked to several other films and filmmakers for influence.  He pulls it off in grand style, filling every frame with beautiful sets, evocative lighting, and sharply blocked fights that he shoots clearly, not with the shaky cam of Michael Bay or Paul Greengrass, nor in slow motion like Zack Snyder, but with clean, well-defined shots that let us see the action.  Except, it should be noted, in a few of Hanna’s fights, when he cuts it up in quick, elliptical editing that shows the results of her violence without trying to show how she did it.  This fits well with the style of the film, but it also avoids putting too much pressure on Ronan’s ability to fight convincingly.  After all, she is tiny compared to many of her assailants, and in real life she could never take them out.  His techniques work, though, and I never once doubted her lethal abilities, though I can see how others might.

Pulsing along with the gorgeous imagery is one of the most unique and exciting soundtracks in recent memory, written and performed by The Chemical Brothers.  The music is alternately loud and menacing and light and bouncy, adding immeasurably to the overall effect of the film.  Wright has known the Brothers for years, and he brought them into the process to quite an extensive degree.  Apparently “the sound effects editor took some of their music and turned it into the sound effects and they took some of the sound effects and turned it into music,” creating an exciting electronic score that nevertheless feels very organic to the film.

I found Hanna to be a stylish blast of adrenaline, a purely kinetic thriller akin to The Bourne Ultimatum, Aliens, or The Road Warrior; a movie whose one purpose is to give as intense and exciting a ride as possible.  I loved it, and I would not hesitate to rank it with those films I just listed as one of the finest action thrillers of its generation.  I can't imagine a situation where it won't be among my favorite films of the year.

Two Recent Movies: Source Code and Paul

Source Code is director Duncan Jones’ folow-up to 2009’s acclaimed Moon, unseen by me.  He acquits himself well here, though not spectacularly, directing a script he did not write where the flaws are mostly in the script.  The film is a clever, fairly satisfying little thriller, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a soldier in a special program tasked with uncovering the terrorist responsible for bombing a commuter train in Chicago.  The plot is full of twists and turns the whole way through, with information meted out miserly to keep up suspense, so any further plot details are spoilers.  Everything is appropriately taut and engaging the whole way through, but I had a few problems with the ending.

[SPOILERS] The politically correct nature of the villain is to be expected at this point, I suppose, though that really only makes it more predictable because we know it could never be a Muslim or vaguely Middle Eastern-looking person.  What’s a little more galling is the cracks at the military-industrial complex, for they are also boring, as well as being clumsy and dumb.  Jeffrey Wright’s character is a genius and a hero, considering what he has created and helped prevent, so the film’s insistence on demonizing him is puzzling and smacks of ideology triumphing over narrative logic.  These are minor gripes, though.  What’s more off-putting is the nature of the film’s denouement.  After a satisfying climax where the killer is found and Gyllenhaal has completed his mission and found peace in death, the film insists on giving him a happy ending in love with Michelle Monghan.  But if this is real, as the film clearly states, an actual reality in another dimension, then what happened to the man whose body Gyllenhaal was inhabiting?  Did he just die?  Have his existence snuffed out by Gyllenhaal, who has the right to do that because he’s the main character?  Because that’s pretty disquieting and odd.  Plus, it suggests that Monaghan will eventually realize that Gyllenhaal is not who she thinks he is, as he has no experience teaching social studies and is now an entirely different person.  And is he just going to remain in this new body for the rest of his life?  And if Wright’s invention really does create different dimensions, doesn’t that change everything?  Like, not just every other iteration that we’ve already seen, but also the whole future?  That just seems like a weird plot thread to leave hanging--not really an intriguing implication, more a fig leaf thrown out to try and cover up plot holes.

I did like all the footage of Chicago, though, where I’ve spent a lot of time.  And the Metra commuter trains, while renamed were easily recognizable, which I found rather exciting, considering how many times I’ve ridden trains like that into the city.  I’ve never seen a Dunkin Donuts on one of those trains, though.  Maybe I just wasn’t riding the right ones, but that suggests a lot more room in the cars than there really is.

Rating: 6/10 stars.  I was going to go with 7, but then I looked at my review and realized how flawed it really was.  It was fun though.

Paul is another collaboration between comic actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, who have previously appeared together in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, both directed by Edgar Wright.  This film, co-written by the duo, is unfortunately not directed by Wright but by Greg Mottola, previously of Superbad and Adventureland.  That is only one of the film’s problems, but it is perhaps a central one.  Wright could have made this film a good deal more exciting and entertaining than it is, simply by his editing, if nothing else.  Other problems include the casting of Seth Rogen as the titular Paul, a diminutive green alien who speaks perfect English and likes to party.  Rogen makes the character somewhat funny, but never really interesting, and he mugs so much that when he tries to show the character’s softer side--of which there is a surprising amount--he usually botches it, and we don’t care emotionally for anyone at all.

Also problematic is the movie’s surprisingly virulent attack on Christianity.  Krisitn Wiig plays a woman raised by an emotionally abusive fundamentalist father whose faith is first shaken, then completely destroyed by the appearance of Paul.  This is depicted as a liberating experience, as Wiig decides she’s now capable of cursing and fornication, and proceeds to engage gleefully in the former and pursue awkwardly the latter in mildly humorous ways.  Paul claims that his existence “only disproves every Abrahamic religion in their entirety,” which is nonsense, but the film supports this wholeheartedly.  I can respect an honest, intelligently atheist film, but this is neither.  It’s arguments are little more than a couple of jokes, and it sets up a straw man depiction of Christianity (including a Creationist argument for a 4000-year-old Earth, which no one actually believes--even Archbishop Ussher’s infamous dating of Creation to Sunday, Oct. 23, 40004 B.C., would yield 6,000 years) before taking it down in a quick, mocking manner.  Of course, the whole argument is moot because Paul doesn’t really exist in the first place, so he can’t prove or disprove anything.  So it amounts to a mere mocking portrayal of religion, with nothing else to say.

Fortunately, Pegg and Frost can make anything funny, and they give their characters a real sweetness and likability that the movie as a whole doesn't quite achieve.  The rest of the cast is filled with funny people, but most of them are only mildly funny here, and a major cameo at the end falls flat.  The movie’s still pretty fun, and its low-key attitude is in some ways a welcome reprise from the insistent, bombastic comedies so common at the moment.  It’s attempt to be character-driven and humane doesn’t really work, though, and it comes off a little bland instead.  Pegg and Frost are still the best comedy duo in movies at the moment, and I’m looking forward to their next collaboration in Tintin as Thomson and Thompson.  This one just gets a “meh” from me, though.

Rating: 5/10 stars.

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2 (2004)

This post is for the Raimifest blogathon over at Things That Don't Suck.  It's my first-ever blogathon post, so I'm pretty excited.




If the superhero movie were the western, Superman: The Movie would be Stagecoach--the masterpiece that kicked the genre off in earnest--and The Dark Knight would be The Searchers--the one that revealed the dark heart of the genre, which all others will be measured against afterwards.  But Spider-Man 2 would be Shane, the quintessential evocation of all the genre represents, the clearest version of the basic superhero myth yet produced.

The triumphant sequel to 2002's Spider-Man, which is arguably the quintessential superhero secret origin story (though not the best), Spider-Man 2 provides a blueprint for other superhero sequels to follow.  With the origin story out of the way, the movie can focus on what it does best: the eternal conflicts between hero and villain, hero and love interest, and the call of duty against the wish to have a normal life.  These conflicts are at the heart of any traditional superhero tale, and Spider-Man 2 embodies them more fully than any other superhero movie I know of.

What makes this unique is that it manages to be a full and fully satisfying film while focusing entirely on its central character and his central conflicts.  Like Shane, this is a movie content to tell an old tale in the most simple and iconic way possible and succeed on that basis alone.  It doesn't try to do too much.  Unlike Superman, it doesn't engage in Fordian romanticization, high concept science fiction, or grand epic storytelling.  Unlike The Dark Knight, it doesn't attempt a complex dialectic on the nature of good and evil, law and order, chaos and civilization.  Unlike X-Men, it's not a metaphor for major political issues, and it doesn't involve multiple super-powered characters, each with their own underdeveloped character arc.  It's about Peter Parker, an everyday guy that anyone can relate to, who happens to have superpowers and has to figure out to use them while simultaneously dealing with his own love life and trying to hold down a job.  It's centered in New York City, and it stays there the whole way through--no need to travel the globe or fight battles that threaten the entire planet.  There's plenty of crime to deal with right here, on the smaller, more believable scale.

I confess that I have seen few of Sam Raimi's other films.  My familiarity with him is limited to the Spider-Man trilogy and The Quick and the Dead, a film I found godawful and difficult to sit through.  I have heard from many sources how great his Evil Dead trilogy is, and Darkman and A Simple Plan both look intriguing.  All are on my list to see.  But on the basis of the films I have seen alone, I would still say he is a remarkable director.  Not one of the all-time greats, but one who is capable of working with large budgets on pre-existing properties and making things that give the fans what they want while staying true to his own vision and sensibilities.

The most extraordinary thing I find about Spider-Man 2, is Raimi's ability to juggle great divergences in tone and mood so effortlessly.  It starts with the look and attitude of the film.  Unlike Christopher Nolan's  Batman films, which seem to be attempting to escape their comic book origins by becoming ever more dark and realistic, Raimi's Spider-Man is unapologetically bright and sunny, full of bold colors and fights in broad daylight.  The movie feels like a comic book, and it gets the simple sincerity and enthusiasm that made the original comics so popular and timeless--unlike so many other superhero movies which just come off cheesy, Spider-Man 2's sincerity and decency redeem it.  It doesn't mind offering idealistic speeches once in a while--"I believe there's a hero in all of us,"  "With great power comes great responsibility"--and it is capable of presenting these as simple, heartfelt truths without letting them come as corny, putting an ironic, cynical twist on them, or treating them with such intense seriousness that they become pretentious.  This is an increasingly rare quality in movies these days.  It is something that old masters like Frank Capra and John Ford made their careers on, but no one outside of perhaps Spielberg, and now Raimi, seems able to do today.

The film dances from scene to scene with effortless grace, moving from slapstick hilarity to deadpan subtlety in an instant, then on to intense action with a clear sense of danger, and desperately sad scenes that pack an emotional wallop, then instantly back to humor again without ever tripping over itself or not giving its emotional high points their due.  He even manages to fit in a scene of real terror that feels like something out of a horror movie, when Octavius's tentacles come alive and slaughter the roomful of doctors and nurses.  A big part of the credit for this ought to go to Tobey Maguire, who is perfect as the mild-mannered Peter Parker, a kid who can't catch a break.  He can play the deadpan stuff as straight as Buster Keaton--check him out in the elevator scene, where he complains about the suit chafing a bit too much--but he can also display such infectious enthusiasm we can't help but laugh with delight--see the "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" scene, a reference to another famous western.  He is cute and lovable and innocent, his tears are heartfelt and pathetic, yet he can shift in an instant to righteous anger and heroic action.  This is not an easy combination to pull off, but Maguire never falters, and Raimi shapes his film around that performance.

Hearkening back to '80s style Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, Raimi manages to ladle on the humor and fun and action without neglecting the weighty, iconic image.  He has a terrific sense of pacing which allows scenes to build at their own speed without ever feeling slow or boring, and lets the images tell the story.  Think of the shots of Spidey unconscious on the train, being carried along by the passengers--a shot that could easily have come off as pretentious or too much, by the way, but just avoids it--or the Doc Ock standing tall on the side of a building, daring Spider-Man to come after him, or the super-low angle shot of Peter's fist tightening as his anger builds and he determines to go after the Doc to rescue Mary Jane.  This is not a film that neglects the crowd-pleasing "epic" moments, its a film that knows how to balance the epic with the small to create something truly special.

So I'm finished, and I haven't even talked about what a great villain Alfred Molina makes, or how other supporting actors like J.K. Simmons, Kirsten Dunst, and James Franco are so important to the films success.  I haven't mentioned the film's terrific fight sequences, or the highly creative and intense way they are staged, despite being mostly in CG.  I suppose the best way to sum up my feelings about the is film is this:  This movie is the best example of why I love the superhero genre.  When done right, like here, it can be profoundly simple, yet heartfelt and honest, an all-American ideal of heroism and democracy.  This movie embodies more clearly than any other why the superhero is an American icon as enduring as the cowboy, and why the superhero film is the most dominant genre of this new century.

Two Recent Movies: Rango and The Adjustment Bureau

Rango is a delightful psychedelic comic western that plays with genre tropes creatively and successfully.  Johnny Depp somehow comes to embody his digital alter ego completely, creating one of the most distinctive vocal performances from identifiable star since Robin Williams in Aladdin.  The movie manages to reference dozens of other film classics--from Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy to High Noon to The Searchers to Star Wars to Apocalypse Now to Chinatown--yet it remains its own distinct beast.  Its references and parodies are more classic and creative than the pop culture jokes of the average Dreamworks movie, so it feels less bound to one time and place and more timeless--like Blazing Saddles rather than Scary Movie.  (A scene involving gophers flying on bats through a desert canyon to the heric strains of Ride of the Valkyries played on banjos is a highlight.)  The colors and textures and details are all beautifully done, and the action scenes are absurdly complicated and exciting, reminiscent of director Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  In fact, the whole film clearly displays the same sensibility that made that trilogy so off-the-wall hilarious and exhilarating, but without the overly long and convoluted plots that started to make those go stale.  Rango may lack a little bit itself in the pacing/structure departments--it could use a bit more logic and character development in order to increase our emotional connection with it all--but it makes up for it by doing so many things we haven't seen before.  An excellent film for the whole family.

Rating: 8/10 stars

The Adjustment Bureau is a light, clever, exciting thriller that satisfies in both the entertainment and the emotion departments.  The plot follows Matt Damon, a rising star politician, as he meets and falls in love with a beautiful young woman, but is then pulled apart from her by mysterious forces who claim to control every aspect of the world, keeping everything on plan behind the scenes.  This premise may seem similar to The Matrix, 12 Monkeys, and Dark City, and it is, but the way it plays out is original enough that these similarities cease to matter.  This conceptual hook has many potential philosophical implications, but the movie doesn't really want to get into these.  It throws a couple ideas out there, but mostly it just wants to define its world well enough for the plot to work, and if we judge them only by this, the ideas work quite well.  Based on a story by Philip K. Dick, The Adjustment Bureau doesn't try to engage with murky ambiguities in the way of other Dick adaptations such as Blade Runner, and because of this is always seems a bit too pat and easy, but it's probably a good thing first-time director George Nolfi didn't try to make the film do too much.  Spielberg attempted both thrills and philosophy with another Dick adaptation, Minority Report, and ended up with an uneven film which couldn't really deliver either.  There is only one point when The Adjustment Bureau really seems to insult our intelligence:  When one of the higher-ups at the Bureau describes their interventions in history, and reveals the screenwriter's utter ignorance of anything outside Western history and willingness to impose general morals onto entire historical eras in completely silly ways that made me roll my eyes and grumble.  Fortunately his lecture was over soon.


The rest of the film works surprisingly well, and proves to have quite a script (also by Nolfi, who previously wrote The Bourne Ultimatum).  It moves quickly, but is also willing to take surprising risks in its narrative, leaping ahead periods of months and years more than once.  The film has a pleasing retro style, filled with fedoras and trench coats, but playing out mostly in the day in downtown Manhattan, with plenty of shiny surfaces and good-looking people.  Nolfi also knows how to construct a chase scene, and there are several here which are just darned fun, especially with the clever ways Damon has to go about dodging the supernaturally gifted Bureau members.  Indeed, much of the film's fun is watching as Damon sets out to outsmart them, figuring out their rules and exploiting loopholes ot get back to his girl.  Ultimately, though, it all comes down to the fact that I liked both Damon and Emily Blunt, and wanted them to end up together.  There cause was worthwhile in my mind, and because of that I was willing to go along for the ride and be satisfied with the ending.


Rating: 7/10 stars

Ten Favorite Films of 2010

1. The Social Network
The most fast-paced, exciting, witty, flat-out brilliant film of the year.  This is not some stuffy drama or pseudo-documentary, but a great work of entertainment that also happens to dissect a generational moment.  I saw this film more times and spent more time thinking about it than any other film this year.  Will it stand up 15 years from now?  Only time will tell, but my gut says yes.


Read my fuller thoughts here.

2. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
If The Social Network was a dissection from above, Scott Pilgrim is the embodiment of the chemical experience of living within the millennial generation.  Directed by Edgar Wright, who I believe is fast approaching greatness (but without a trace of smugness about it), this is unlike anything made before, a film where humor can come from every possible direction involving every technique in a director's arsenal.  While I admit the possibility of The Social Network's fade from consciousness, no such thing will happen here.  Underrated and under-seen on first release, Scott Pilgrim will go on to be a comedy classic, beloved decades from now by audiences and critics alike.


See Review here.

3. Toy Story 3
I did not know how to properly describe this film when I first saw it.  Mostly this was just laziness, but it was also a feeling that there was nothing more to say and an inability to articulate what I loved so much. I now realize that the film's deceptive simplicity can obscure how much there really is to say about it.  Toy Story 3 completes one of the great cinematic trilogies, a hilarious, heartbreaking ending that completely lives up to its illustrious predecessors.  I will admit that the first half hour of the film is rather familiar, hitting the same notes as the earlier films but at a higher velocity.  Sometime around the moment the toys discover how bad Sunnyside Preschool really is, though, the film comes into its own, taking on greater depth and intensity until the shattering climax and denouement.  Some may accuse the end of being manipulative, but for those of us who grew up playing toys Andy and are now in college ourselves, these movies will be treasured forever.


My original review is pitiful, but you can read a wonderful write-up of the ending here (scroll to the bottom).  I also love this review, which I think sums up my opinion of the trilogy very nicely.

4. Inception
I may as well state it now: I have come to the conclusion that Inception is not a masterpiece.  It lacks the richness and the emotional/philosophical complexity that we should expect from a true masterpiece.  Yet I reject the argument it is a failure or an offense to good taste.  It is still one of the most ambitious blockbusters in decades, a thrilling and engrossing work that I have watched several times and will continue to watch in the future.  Remember the awe at the layers of dreams; the beauty of a hundred falling water droplets; the exhilaration of the spinning hallway fight.  Recall the incredible images:  Paris folding back on itself, a marketplace exploding all around you, a train hurtling through traffic, Marion Cotillard's face.  Remember what it felt like when Christopher Nolan performed an inception on you in the end, making you wonder what was real and what was not.  This is a singular film, and it is worth remembering.


Fuller thoughts here.

5. Winter's Bone
One of the most powerful pieces of cinema to come out of Sundance in years, this movie is engrossing and horrifying in equal measures.  It is engrossing because of the subtle, accomplished direction and the incredible performances from Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, and the rest of the cast.  It is horrifying because in many ways it is true.  I know people who live like this, I've encountered them at work and school; they would not look much out of place in southern Indiana.  Of course, the story here is full of gory details that shouldn't be taken as typical, so it shouldn't be taken as a documentary.  But it can and should be taken as a powerful, involving narrative that holds the fascination of the best gangster movies: it lets us see into another world, one we wouldn't want to live in, but a place we can't look away from no matter what happens.

6. Mother
I see this film as similar to Winter's Bone in its dark, violent quest narrative, and it is arguably the better piece of cinema.  Its direction is certainly more creative and accomplished, its cinematography more carefully composed and starkly beautiful.  I think Winter's Bone just strikes closer to home, so I put it higher.  But part of the fascination that this film has is its foreignness and strangeness.  So strange, in fact, that I suspect it feels very odd to most Koreans as well, though there are no doubt a couple points which make more sense to them than to me.  The story is a twist on the Hitchockian wrong man thriller, and it involves tension, red herrings, and carefully constructed set pieces that would make the master of suspense proud.  Hye-ja Kim, as a woman trying to prove her condemned son innocent, is obsessive, righteous, motherly, and disturbed in equal measures.  The violence, when it comes, is brutal and unexpected, and the strangeness of it all holds a dread fascination.  Again like Hitchcock, Bong does not shy away from Freudian psychological implications, and his character are more tragic for it.  This beautifully shot and constructed movie deserves to find an audience outside of the arthouse.

7. True Grit
A triumph of old-fashioned moviemaking.  The Coen Brothers leave behind most--but not all--of their weirdest tics to craft a film that is completely satisfying on the most basic of movie-movie levels.  The characters are warm and sympathetic, the emotions are genuine, and the action is exciting.  The most pleasurable part of the film, though, is the dialogue.  Transcribed almost verbatim from Charles Portis's source novel, the characters' everyday lines sound as if they were 19th century orators, expressing everything in long, eloquent, un-contractioned sentences.  The cadence of their speech is pleasurable in itself, and hilarity flows far and wide.  The film surpasses the original in every way, except for one:  It doesn't have John Wayne.  Jeff Bridges plays Rooster Cogburn as a delightful, entertaining character, but he ust doesn't have the same presence or persona that Wayne had which made his performance legendary. This doesn't matter, though, because the focus of the films is different--where the original was a John Wayne star vehicle, this is a character-driven drama focusing on Mattie Ross, here played by Hailee Steinfeld.  Steinfeld, to put it bluntly, is a revelationgiving my favorite female performance of the year, and blessedly banishing memories of Kim Darby's obnoxious performance forever.  The cinematography and musical score by regular Coen collaborators Roger Deakins and Carter Burwell, respectively, are both beautiful, as usual.  It is the film's coda, however, which endows it with its power.  After the raucous, entertaining story ends, the characters are left to continue on with their lives.  And their lives are not necessarily happy or fulfilling.  Happily ever after is a myth--life doesn't just go on without incident.  "Time just gets away from us."

8. A Prophet
The story of a boy who becomes a man, a petty thief who becomes a master criminal, a sympathetic youth who becomes a monster.  Masterfully directed by Jacques Audiard, this film follows 19-year-old Malik, a young French Arab, as he serves his 6 year term in a French maximum security prison.  Within days of his first arrival, he is recruited by the Corsican mob who rule the prison and charged with killing a fellow inmate.  If he refuses, he will die himself. The resulting murder attempt is one of the most tense and suspenseful scenes I have ever seen.  The story is filmed naturalistically, observationally, with characters who all seem like real people, and a rhythm which allows tension to build and recede at a realistic speed. There are tensions within the prison between Muslims and Corsicans, blacks and whites, and these are explored in detail.  One thing that struck me was the strange leniency of the French prison system--whoever heard of giving prisoners their own televisions where they can watch porn, or letting them out for a day to visit friends and family?  And yet, inside the prison, the inmates are at risk of rape, violence, and death almost constantly.  When it was over, I felt as if I had come through a prison sentence along with Malik.

9. Four Lions
A comedy about a group of British Muslim buddies who decide to follow their dreams and blow themselves up.  The film is shot on handheld, digital cameras, and is obviously low budget, but its brilliance is evident nonetheless.  This is a movie that deceives with its silly humor, focusing on the complete idiocy of almost every one of its characters.  It mocks the simplistic, "believe in your dreams" rhetoric of so many movies today, along with bro-mance and other genre tropes.  The most competent of the would-be terrorists has a loving wife and son who fully support his efforts to achieve his goals.  It comes off as a cross between The Office and Cool Runnings, except that this is a comedy which isn't afraid to punctuate laughs with exploding bodies.  It's hard to get more subversive than this, and its commercial appeal is no doubt limited by the uncomfortableness of its premise.  In fact, the movie was probably a dangerous one to get made, considering the willingness of Muslim extremists to kill anyone they consider to have insulted their religion.  Which is exactly why this is an important film that needed to be made--what better way to combat terrorism, or any evil, than to mock it and laugh at it, and show that we are not afraid?  This movie belongs to a long tradition including the great anti-Nazi films The Great Dictator, To Be or Not to Be, and Der Fuehrer's Face, and it fully deserves to be in their company.  We should never let it be said that Donald Duck had more bravery than the filmmakers of today. 

10. The Secret of Kells
Technically, this film premiered in 2009, but it only made it to a couple of theaters in California for an Oscar-qualifying run.  It really came out around the country in 2010, and that's when I saw it, so that's when I'm going to include it.  This film is beautiful and unique in a time when so few hand-drawn animations are, a stylistic masterpiece full of swirls and tiny details, with a flat-but-exciting look that shows the influence of The Princess and the Cobbler and perhaps Samurai Jack.  The greatest influence on the film's look, though, is the Book of Kells, one of the greatest illuminated manuscripts of the early Middle Ages, and the subject of the film.  The Book of Kells contains the four Gospels, beautifully illustrated in incredible microscopic detail, and hand-written by monks over a period of decades.  Few books from that era survive, for the monasteries where they were created and preserved were the constant target of Viking and barbarian attack.  The movie is a fictionalized tale of the creation of the book, made for children but filled with complex adult themes.  In fact, the film is a meditation on the nature of tradition culture in times of barbarism, holding up the artist and the scholar as the bastions of civilization.  It is also an exploration of early Irish culture, dramatizing the conflict between traditional pagan religions and the new Christianity.  The plot is perhaps rushed, and the characters are not as fully fleshed out as we often call for, but this is a genuine work of art that is like nothing else out there today.  Don't let your children miss it.


You can find another good appreciation of it here.

Trailers for Most Anticipated Movies of 2011

There are many great movies coming out this year, none of which I have actually seen, obviously. There are several, however, that I am especially excited about, so I thought I'd feature them here. Of course, many movies coming this year have yet to put out trailers or even production stills yet, so I can't say much about them.

Among those I'm most looking forward to are:  The Invention of Hugo Cabret, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Ben Kingsley, Jude Law, and Chloe Moretz;  The Adventures of Tintin, a collaboration between Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson starring Jamie Bell, Daniel Craig, Andy Serkis, and Simon Pegg and Nick Forst, though they will all be covered up by motion-capture CGI to represent the classic characters from the comics;   A Dangerous Method, directed by David Cronenberg and starring Viggo Mortenson and Michael Fassbender as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, respectively; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, directed by Daivd Fincher and starring the beautiful Rooney Mara as the piercing- and tattoo-covered Goth-hacker, Lisbeth Salander;  and finally, the return of Whit Stillman, writer/director of Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco, with new film Damsels in Distress, starring Greta Gerwig and Adam Brody.  All of these films look fantastic, and I encourage everyone to check them out.

My top trailers are after the jump.  I didn't want to slow down the load time too much with so many more videos on the front page.