by ·Comments Off on The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012, Stephen Chbosky)

Stephen Chbosky adapted a novel by Stephen Chbosky (based partly on the life of Stephen Chbosky) for director (and executive producer) Stephen Chbosky. Sounds like a recipe for a bland, safe movie made by someone too close to the material, but it turned out very well, and features the best cinematic use of David Bowie’s Heroes to date (plus a fair amount of Morrissey).

Charlie (Lightning Thief star Logan Lerman), a high school freshman in the early 90’s had only one friend, who just died, so Charlie spent the summer in an institution having dark thoughts. He’s a nerdy loner at school, only ever talking to English teacher Paul Rudd, but greatly improves when he starts hanging out with Patrick (Ezra Miller, title murderer in We Need to Talk About Kevin) and Mary Elizabeth (Mae Whitman, Ann from Arrested Development, also in Scott Pilgrim) and hottie Emma Watson (of those Harry Potter movies).

Much high-school drama ensues. Charlie joins the older kids’ Rocky Horror show and defends Patrick from homophobes, but doesn’t go after Emma because he is too shy. Belated plot thread when the other kids graduate and Charlie reveals to cast latecomer Joan Cusack that his dead aunt touched him inappropriately. We get a good feeling at the end, like Charlie (an aspiring writer) will be alright, possibly write a memoir-novel of these experiences, adapt it to a screenplay, maybe executive-produce and direct a film version full of Bowie and Morrissey songs.

by ·Comments Off on The Master (2012, P.T. Anderson)

Long-awaited follow-up to There Will Be Blood has a similar episodic construction – power-hungry man meets someone equally strong-willed but very different, feels he needs to conquer the other man in order to progress. This one doesn’t come together as well, possibly because Philip Seymour Hoffman’s emerging religion is supposed to be similar to Scientology but with hardly any concrete details – the movie dances around its own (and its characters’) intentions.

Joaquin Phoenix is a burn-out ex-navy drifter singularly talented at making harsh alcoholic concoctions from whatever chemicals are around. He and Hoffman are the stars here – the Sunday and Plainview of this movie – and the other actors are almost incidental. Hoffman has a devoted wife (The Muppets star Amy Adams) and a frighteningly lookalike son (Jesse Plemons). Laura Dern has a small role as the family’s host, and later, the only believer to question Hoffman’s shifting rules (drawing rage instead of a reasoned explanation).

The movie is long and sprawling, and has plenty of uniquely wonderful shots. It seems disappointing compared to its predecessor – a movie less explicitly about religion which comes across as more spiritual and insightful.

Slant:

The Master drifts for long expanses, like the wanderer at the heart of the film, running on only the fumes of drama and action… [Phoenix] seems perpetually out of synch with dynamics of the group to which he belongs, and his apparent disinterest in the details of the religion he embraces is probably the best case for the film’s own detachment from the same—a line of reasoning one can accept abstractly without deeming it a virtue.

by ·Comments Off on Kinyarwanda (2011, Alrick Brown)

Oh no, I shouldn’t have waited so long to write about this… let’s see what I can remember. Rwandan genocide movie, shown from different character perspectives and overlapping timelines. That’s not clear at first, when small stories are set up then abruptly abandoned, but as they start to cross and join towards the end (including at least one Run Lola Run alternate-story), the movie gets much richer and more interesting.

Since there is a movie about a struggle, a young couple from opposite sides of the struggle must fall in love, so that happens. The girl’s parents are murdered, her boyfriend has to decide whether to support her or not, and the killer eventually confesses at one of those forgiveness committees. Also a priest on the run hides with an imam and regains his faith. And an outmanned military group tries to protect the courtyard where the girl and the priest are hiding.

Writer/director Brown’s first feature after a string of shorts, won an audience award at Sundance.

by ·Comments Off on Looper (2012, Rian Johnson)

I laughed at the trailer for this, because Bruce Willis going back in time and confronting his former self, a hitman hired to kill him, recalls 12 Monkeys. Appropriately, this is the best time-travel movie since 12 Monkeys. Dystopia with a grimy Hobo with a Shotgun vibe, saving money on future-stuff by setting the second half in a farmhouse.

Joe Gordon-Levitt and his buddy Paul Dano work for evil Jeff Daniels, executing masked mob enemies sent back in time twenty years. But a new boss is taking over in the 20-year future (which we never see), someone who is “closing the loops” by sending the killers’ own future selves back to be self-executed. Paul Dano lets his guy escape, then is caught with gruesome results. Joe is slightly smarter, so when his older Bruce Willis self escapes, both of them manage to avoid capture, ending up at Emily Blunt’s farm. While Bruce (on a revenge mission for his murdered future-wife) wipes out the entire crime organization single-handed, losing sympathy by killing a shortlist of children, Joe G-L discovers that Emily’s son is the supernaturally gifted future mob boss – or he could be, if he loses his mother to a maniacal Bruce Willis. So Joe kills himself, causing Bruce to disappear and giving the kid a chance.

Joe and Bruce know each other from the G.I. Joe movies. Piper Perabo (Carriers, The Prestige) must’ve played Joe’s prostitute friend. Good to see Jeff Daniels again – last time was The Squid and the Whale.

by ·Comments Off on Cosmopolis (2012, David Cronenberg)

Already showed up in someone’s top-ten-ever list in Sight & Sound. Completely odd and exceptional movie, everyone acting like they’re in another dimension, standing outside the film. Sleek and cool, starring a blank Robert Pattinson as self-destructive billionaire Packer, Sarah Gadon (Mrs. Jung in A Dangerous Method) as his new wife, Paul Giamatti as his stalker, and a bunch of people who get a single scene each.

Starts with business partners talking shop, health (he gets a prolonged rectal exam while talking with an employee), paintings (he has sex with art dealer Juliette Binoche) and relationships in his silent limousine, but things start to go downhill. It becomes clear that Packer has sunk his fortune into a dying currency, rat-wielding economic protesters fill the streets and attack the car, Packer’s wife is breaking up with him, and his favorite hip-hop musician has died – this is in decreasing order of how much these things seem to matter to him.

Packer’s quest to get a haircut in his old neighborhood is nearly complete when a celebrity-pranker (Mathieu Amalric) hits him with a pie – then, probably unrelated to that, he asks to see his bodyguard Torval’s gun, and shoots Torval to death with it. Down to just Packer and his driver, they have dinner with the barber, who cuts half of Packer’s hair before he wanders off again to confront violent stalker Paul Giamatti, trying to talk reason to him.

The movie is wall-to-wall talk, so to summarize all the conversations, as if I remember them, would take pages and pages. Best to just watch it again. Cinema Scope 51 has a good few pages, with input from Cronenberg and Pattinson, and discussion of what makes this faithful adaptation of a Don DeLillo novel uniquely Cronenbergian.

by ·Comments Off on Red Hook Summer (2012, Spike Lee)

Not a Do The Right Thing sequel at all, except for some embarrassingly distracting cameos by Spike as Mookie, still delivering pizzas. Except for Clarke “Lester Freamon” Peters’s performance and one crazy shot when his church’s holy-cross-shaped fluorescent lights reflect in his eyes as he goes on a defensive preaching rant, almost the whole movie is embarrassing.

Frohawked Atlantan kid named Flik Royale (okay, the names are good) is dumped on his grandfather Enoch in New York for the summer. They don’t get along, grandpa forbidding junk food and yelling about Jesus all the time, and Flik hiding behind his iPad and hanging out with asthma-having girl Chazz. What do we know will happen when someone in a movie has asthma? Yeah, that happens. Flik almost bonds with his grandpa after Enoch’s friend gives him some good advice, but suddenly a dude named Blessing crashes into the church accusing Enoch of child abuse years ago in Georgia. This takes over the movie – the preacher gets beat down by some gangster kid who’d stolen Flik’s iPad earlier, and Isiah “Sheeeeeeee” Whitlock “eeeeit” Jr. appears as Detective Flood in his third Spike joint. Then Flik, having learned nothing but at least made a friend in the asthma girl, goes home.

Thomas Jefferson Byrd of Girl 6 and He Got Game plays a drunk deacon. A character named Mother Darling is played by Tracy Johns, star of She’s Gotta Have It. Movie has a couple of blatant Michael Jackson references (note Spike’s other movie this year is an MJ documentary) and some amusing DTRT references: the phrases “do the right thing” and “that’s the truth, ruth” show up in the dialogue. Seems harmless until “do the right thing” comes back as a terrible song towards the end. Overall the music is innocuous, picture is unexceptional (with digi noise) and dialogue is groany.

by ·Comments Off on We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011, Lynne Ramsay)

“There is no point. That’s the point.”

I always enjoy a good Tilda Swinton performance, and was willing to put up with a grim school-shooting drama to get one. I wasn’t expecting the movie to be such a cartoon, though. Her son is portrayed as so single-mindedly hateful that I’m disappointed the movie didn’t turn into straight supernatural horror by the end. Stylized movie with blatantly unrealistic portrayals of human behaviour (there’s definitely, definitely no logic) are usually okay, but the movie acts like Tilda’s world, feelings, situation are to be taken seriously. I couldn’t put all the parts into a whole that made sense.

Tilda has a devil child who has hated her since birth. Movie flips back and forth in time, culminating in the shooting (with a bow and arrow!), before which Kevin (sadly not Devon Bostick of Rodrick Rules) also shoots his little sister (whom he partially blinded in an earlier scene) and dad John C. Reilly. It seems like the whole rest of the movie was his build-up, that everything Kevin has ever done was to make Tilda’s life miserable, which it finally is as the town’s parents sue for all she’s got, and she ends up working a shitty job at a travel agency, living in a shack, drinking herself to sleep, with no family, visiting her mute homicidal son every week. Then the movie sabotages its demon-spawn horror by almost making Kev seem human in the final scene – what for?

Based on a novel. Intriguing Jonny Greenwood score featuring old-timey songs, well-shot by Seamus McGarvey (Atonement).

F. Croce:

The symbiosis between anxious mother and psychotic son—is she absorbing his growing malevolence out of guilt or responsibility, or is she projecting her own bad vibes onto him?—is what gives the film its shape, the sense of a deforming bulge resulting from turmoil swept under the maternal rug. But Ramsay doesn’t let the horror arise from the material; instead, she pulverizes it with a cacophony of clashing sound bridges, crudely symbolic colors and overwrought edits. Like Steve McQueen’s Manhattan in Shame, Ramsay’s Connecticut is a netherworld of vacant signifiers (Home, Office, Hell) where blunt abstraction and blunt literalism wrestle for control.

by ·Comments Off on Margaret (2011, Kenneth Lonergan)

A traumatic year in the life of Lisa (not Margaret – long story) and her mother in New York. Straightforward character drama with some unique filmic touches (lots of half-heard side conversations, two 360-degree pans within a few minutes of each other in opposite directions). I would possibly have watched this based on the back-story (Lonergan made the beloved You Can Count On Me then spent six years in editing and legal limbo trying to get this one released), then probably not watched it based on the trailer (looked like a bland L.A. Crash-style character-intersection drama), but I finally watched it based on the few vocal critics who insist it’s the best, most criminally neglected film of 2011. They were right!

Mom and Jean Reno at the opera:

Mom and Lisa on the way to a different opera:

Great acting, and a truly impressive, screenplay. Character behaviors seem untidy and human, self-centered and confused. Lisa is a shrill teen, alterately excited and upset by everything, trying to deal with personal responsibility, growing up, family, too much all at once, leading to a beautiful ending. I watched the three-hour version. Not sure which sixth of the film was chopped for its brief theatrical and blu-ray releases – it’s hard to imagine, since there’s no repetition. For instance, whenever the story calls for one person to tell another some things we’ve already seen or heard, the camera pulls back, we see the beginning of the conversation but hear something else, just long enough to get the point then it cuts to the next scene. So, some of the story would have to be removed – maybe her classmate love-triangle, or a Broderick class session.

Lisa’s after-school job as a theater lighting technician:

The central event in Lisa’s life this year is her witnessing/causing a bus crash that kills Allison Janney. Lisa (Anna Paquin) lies to the cops, saying bus driver Mark Ruffalo had the right of way, but she keeps obsessing over the accident, wanting to talk about it with teachers (Matts Damon & Broderick) and friends and others – so she seeks out the victim’s best friend Jeannie Berlin (Charles Grodin’s new bride in The Heartbreak Kid) and Ruffalo, who is understandably defensive when a high schooler comes to his house wanting to talk about the truth behind the accident, which had already been ruled accidental.

Lisa, Jeannie and Jeannie’s lawyer friend:

Meanwhile Lisa’s stage actress mom (J. Smith-Cameron) is dating wealthy fan Jean Reno, but can’t quite deal with their cultural/social differences, and Lisa is planning a vacation with her estranged father (played by the director). Lisa ditches longtime best friend John Gallagher Jr. (Pieces of April) to have sex with bad Kieran Culkin, then she manages to seduce Matt Damon and ponders ruining his life by making a scene about it (shades of 25th Hour). And the bus-crash intrigue continues, with involvement by lawyers and detectives and the victim’s greedy next-of-kin. After mom breaks up with Jean Reno, he dies unexpectedly, and mother and daughter go to the opera together with the tickets he’d bought.

Lisa’s film-director dad:

The cast is great, but most importantly, nobody acts like a movie character acting out a plot with foregone conclusion. Lisa is inconsistent, eventually loses the threads of her attention-grabbing schemes, because she’s surrounded by people with their own ideas and feelings, not stock characters in a hack script designed to help or hinder her – which is how, as a self-centered teenager, she sees the world.

by ·Comments Off on Grey Matter (2011, Kivu Ruhorahoza)

A weird art movie in three parts.

An arty filmmaker with a screenplay called “The Cycle of the Cockroach” can’t seem to get his resources together to shoot: the equipment guy failed to get lights, the actors are restless and the government won’t fund anything that doesn’t carry straightforward public-service messages.

A madman locked in a cell listens to radio broadcasts warning about cockroaches, traps one in a glass, is offered his freedom (by a white hand holding a key).

Postwar siblings, the boy traumatized by images from the war and his murdered parents (invented, since he was studying abroad at the time), refusing to speak or paint, throwing buckets of water on the TV and hiding in the attic from imagined invaders. Older sister is paying for his treatment by sleeping with the psychiatrist. He seems to snap out of it when they attend a mass-grave excavation. But all this has taken a toll on the sister. In the end, she’s in a cell. A roach runs under the door into the cell of the madman next door.

Said to be the first-ever film by a native Rwandan. The director: “It’s a film about the brain and the tricks it can play on people when they go through really traumatizing experiences. . . We are a nation of traumatized people who never got any professional help, because how are you going to get professional help to millions of people?”

C. Bell: “Finally, we have a contemplative film on the disgusting tragedy that took place in the East African country, one that recognizes it as a severely traumatic, complicated, and long-lasting event and not something ripe for Oscar bait.”