The First Time (2012)

A movie about puppy-dog high school love starring ex-Nickelodeon/Disney Channel stars playing wealthy white L.A.-dwellers?  No thanks.  And yet--I had heard a couple recommendations and my curiosity got the better of me.  And it turns out I actually liked it.  Far from being the dumb rom-com of high school clichés I was expecting, the model to think of here is Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset.  Of course, it’s not nearly as good as that seminal film, but the mechanics are similar:  A boy and a girl meet each other unexpectedly and begin talking, and their conversation continues through arguments, interests, statements of purpose, and philosophies of life as they gradually fall in love.  The film starts on a Friday night and ends on Monday morning, so the action never has a chance to get wild or drawn-out.  Instead the focus is entirely on the two leads (Dylan O’Brien and Britt Robertson), on their little ticks and quirks, the way they stumble over words and struggle with embarrassment while opening themselves to genuine romantic intimacy for the first time. Of course, it’s still shot with flat lighting, bright colors, and smooth-faced well-dressed characters that remind strongly of tween-aimed television.  But somehow the fact that it pushes past that, that we come to know these characters and recognize their emotions, makes the final result sweeter and more impressive than it would have seemed otherwise.  Among recent teen romances, it isn’t quite up there with The Spectacular Now, but it’s far, far ahead of something like Easy A.

Rating: 7/10 stars.

(actually posted Jan 2015)

If I Gave the Oscars: 2013 Edition

The premise is simple: these are how I would give out awards to the movies of 2013, if that was a power that I had.  I'm not going to go through all the exact same categories as the Academy Awards, because some of them are just tiresome and others require inside knowledge that I do not possess.  This post is obviously meant to be complementary to my Best of 2013 post, where I listed all my favorites, so I have left out Best Picture nominees here; they would be the same as the top 10 from that post, so no need to list them twice.  

Each category is listed in order of preference, with the first director/actor/etc. being my choice for the winner.  Things should be fairly self-explanatory from there.

Best Director

1. Hayao Miyazaki (The Wind Rises)

2. Martin Scorsese (The Wolf of Wall Street)

3. Abbas Kiarostami (Like Someone in Love)

4. Terrence Malick (To the Wonder)

5. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen (Inside Llewyn Davis)

HM: Richard Linklater (Before Midnight), Shane Carruth (Upstream Color)


Best Screenplay (Adapted or Original, doesn't matter)

1. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen (Inside Llewyn Davis)

2. Terence Winter (The Wolf of Wall Street)

3. Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy (Before Midnight)

4. Shane Carruth (Upstream Color)

5. Spike Jonze (Her)

Best Actor

1. Leonardo DiCarprio (The Wolf of Wall Street)

2. Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis)

3. Simon Pegg (The World's End)

4. Chiwetel Ejiofer (12 Years a Slave)

5. Joaquin Phoenix (Her)

Best Actress

1. Olga Kurylenko (To the Wonder)

2. Greta Gerwig (Frances Ha)

3. Julie Delpy (Before Midnight)

4. Brie Larsen (Short Term 12)

5. Amy Seimetz (Upstream Color)

Best Supporting Actor

1. Matthew McConaughey (The Wolf of Wall Street)

2. Michael Fassbender (12 Years a Slave)

3. Jiang Wu (A Touch of Sin)

4. Tadashi Okuno (Like Someone in Love)

5. Nick Frost (The World's End)

HM: Barkhad Abdi (Captain Phillips)



Best Supporting Actress

1. Zhang Ziyi (The Grandmaster)

2. Margot Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street)

3. Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years a Slave)

4. Zhao Tao (A Touch of Sin)

5. Shailene Woodley (The Spectacular Now)

Best Cinematography

1. Emmanuel Lubezki (To the Wonder)

2. Philippe Le Sourd (The Grandmaster)

3. Hoyte van Hoytema (Her)

4. Nelson Yu Lik Wai (A Touch of Sin)

5. Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity)

HM: Sean Bobbitt (12 Years a Slave)


Best Editing

1. Keith Fraase (To the Wonder)

2. Shane Carruth, David Lowery (Upstream Color)

3. Bahman Kiarostami (Like Someone in Love)

4. Eric Zumbrunnen, Jeff Buchanan (Her)

5. Shigeru Nishiyama (Wolf Children)

HM: Takeshi Seyama (The Wind Rises), Paul Machliss (The World's End), Ethan Coen, Joel Coen (Inside Llewyn Davis)


Best Musical Score

1.  Joe Hisaishi (The Wind Rises)

2.  Arcade Fire (Her)

3.  Steven Price (Gravity)

4. Hanan Townshend (To the Wonder)

5.  Shane Carruth (Upstream Color)

HM: T. Bone Burnett (Inside Llewyn Davis) for an expert collection of beautiful folk songs


Best Scene

1. The Opening Dream (The Wind Rises)

2. Quaaludes (The Wolf of Wall Street) 

3. From 1st Grade to 4th Grade (Wolf Children)

4. "My head is made of the same substance as the sun" (Upstream Color)

5. Final Homily (To the Wonder)

6. Earthquake (The Wind Rises)
7. Please Mr. Kennedy (Inside Llewyn Davis)
8. Sky-Diving Rescue (Iron Man 3)
9. First Impact (Gravity)
10. Roll Jordan Roll (12 Years a Slave)


(actually published Feb 28, 2016)

Best of 2013

1. The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki)

1. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese)

2. Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen Bros.)

3. Before Midnight (Richard Linklater)

4. Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami)

5. To the Wonder (Terrence Malick)

6. A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke)

7. Gravity (Alfonso Cuaron)

8. Upstream Color (Shane Carruth)

9. The Grandmaster (Chinese Cut) (Wong Kar-Wai)

10. Wolf Children: Ame and Yuki (Mamoru Hosoda)

11. 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen)

12. Short Term 12 (Destin Daniel Cretton)

Honorable Mentions:  The World's End (Edgar Wright), Mud (Jeff Nichols), Ernest & Celestine (Stephane Aubier, Vincent Patar, Benjamin Renner), Iron Man 3 (Shane Black), Pacific Rim (Guillermo Del Toro), Monsters University (Dan Scanlon)


Most Overrated:  American Hustle (David O. Russell)

Most Underrated/Underseen:  The Lone Ranger (Gore Verbinski)

Favorite Guilty Pleasure:  The Wolverine (James Mangold), I guess?

Worst Movie I Saw This Year:  Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)


(actually posted Feb 2015)

Best of 2012

1. Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)

2. Lincoln (Steven Spielberg)

3. Holy Motors (Leo Carax)

4. The Master (Paul Thomas Anderson)

5. The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies)

6. Django Unchained (Quentin Tarantino)

7. Skyfall (Sam Mendes)

8. Looper (Rian Johnson)

9. Bernie (Richard Linklater)

10. Zero Dark Thirty (Kathryn Bigelow)

11. The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan)

12. The Grey (Joe Carnahan)

Honorable Mentions: Damsels in Distress (Whit Stillman), Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard), The Avengers (Joss Whedon), The Raid (Gareth Edwards), Blue Like Jazz (Steve Taylor), Life of Pi (Ang Lee), Les Miserables (Tom Hooper)


Big Imposing Art Movies Which I'm Too Chicken to Try Ranking Against These Others, But They're Certainly Something Else, Lemme Tell You:  The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

Most Underrated/Underseen:  Arbitrage (Nicholas Jarecki)

Most Overrated:  Argo (Ben Affleck)

Favorite Guilty Pleasure:  Lockout (James Mather, Stephen Saint Leger)

Worst Movie I Saw This Year:  On the Road (Walter Salles)


(actually posted Feb 2015)

Recent Movies: Argo and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

A daring idea for a comedy produces a rather quiet film, and one not nearly as funny as you might expect.  Indeed, it’s one of the saddest American comedies to be seen in years.  The jokes are mostly knowing, wistful ones about human behavior in the face of coming doom--some people go crazy, some throw out all boundaries, some commit suicide, and some go looking for love.  It’s all a but mopey and mushy, and lacking in memorable scenes, but Steve Carell and Keira Knightley anchor the film with heartfelt roles and surprisingly believable chemistry.  Somehow the thing does end up developing momentum and building emotion.  And in the end, it seems to me, this little movie reveals a far more compelling, truthful, and finally, beautiful, view of the human response to The End than Von Trier’s Melancholia and all it’s half-baked philosophizing.

Rating: 7/10 stars.

Argo

When a film presents itself as a docudrama about events of international importance occurring within living memory, it helps if the film is accurate in what it portrays.  Argo is not the worst offender in this regard, but when one reads afterward about the various fudged details and learns most of the tension-building elements of the second half of the film were added or falsified, it can leave a viewer dissatisfied.  When the film offers little in terms of depth or theme otherwise (none of the characters are more than two-dimensional, and while there’s a mishmash of comments about Iranian history and the American response that one suspects are just there so the filmmakers can defend themselves from charges of jingoism, there are no larger comments on America and/or the Middle East), the viewer might come to feel the whole thing was a bit empty and forgettable, at worst misleading and reprehensible.  

I won’t go quite that far, because the truth is Argo is pretty gripping stuff, and it effectively dramatizes the mood of the nation and the administration during one of the major crises of recent decades.  It is always a fascinating thing, for this viewer anyway, to see the inner workings of important institutions and the machinations behind major events, and I found the little details to be the most interesting (everything from the mechanical devices used by air traffic controllers before computers to the fact that the revolutionaries employed women and children to piece shredded diplomatic documents back together for propaganda purposes).  There’s also some good stuff in here about Hollywood, both its hypocrisies and its perennial appeal, and plenty of snappy dialogue to give the illusion of more depth.  The clever skewering of the movie business early on, though, just makes it more disappointing that Affleck had to “Hollywood-up” the climax with fictional ticking-clock delays.  In the end, we’re left with a pretty good movie that probably makes most viewers want to read the book or watch a documentary on the subject to learn more about the real story.

[As a P.S., I found Jimmy Carter’s voiceover at the end terribly self-serving with its boast of getting all the hostages back “peacefully”--despite the fact his violent option crashed in the desert and cost 8 American servicemen their lives, not to mention the fact the Iranians released the hostages on the day he left office as a final humiliation, not a victory.]

Rating: 6/10 stars.

(actually posted Jan 2015)

My (Imaginary) Sight & Sound Ballot

The big story in the cinephile world is obviously Sight & Sound magazine's once-a-decade poll on the greatest films of all time.  Since everybody's critiquing it and making their own suggestions, I figured I'd share my own list, if I was ever so lucky as to be asked for it.

I am an inveterate list-maker, so what follows does reflect some serious thought and many changes and revisions.  (I actually have a big list of greatest movies that I'm constantly updating--which is probably a weird thing to have, but if blogging has taught me anything, it's that I'm not alone in this practice.)  However, I freely admit that the extent of my knowledge and experience in the world of cinema is limited, probably (hopefully!) more limited than anyone who actually participated in the poll, so I make no claim that my list is better than the poll's results, nor anyone else's personal list.  There is, of course, no such thing as the "Greatest Movie Ever Made," so all lists such as this are merely games which help us discover/decide what aesthetic ideals we value.  

My list has no overarching ideals to it except my own response to the movies themselves.  I wouldn't describe the list as my "favorite" movies, because that word suggests to me those movies which I most enjoy watching again and again, but I have not tried to list those movies which are most "historically important" either.  These films are those which have impressed me most strongly with their aesthetic brilliance and emotional power; they have left me in awe and altered the way I see the world.  I present them here with no further detail or explanation; each film deserves volumes devoted to it, and I would need to write at least a post for every one or nothing at all, so I have opted for nothing at all.

So, as of September 2012, this is my list of the 10 Greatest Films of All Time:

1. Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)
2. Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
3. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)
4. M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
5. The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939)
6. It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)
7. On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)
8. The Godfather: Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)
9. The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)
10. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

OK, just two lines of explanation:  If I had to justify with one film the ability of cinema to present beauty and humanity in the face of the vast wasteland of vulgar, obscene, and commercial junk that we are so often swamped with, I would choose Sunrise.  If I had to justify film as an art form which can express the beauties and terrors of human existence on a level comparable to the other great arts--a film to mention in the same breath with Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Hamlet, or the Sistine Chapel--I would choose Andrei Rublev.

And just because ten is too small a number, here are ten more films, in alphabetical order, which could on another day have made it into my Top 10:

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
The General (Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton, 1926)
High Noon (Fred Zinneman, 1952)
Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
The Red Shoes (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952)
The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949)



(actually posted April 2015)