Moonrise Kingdom (Sunday, June 3, 2012) (53)

Wes Anderson is basically the most accomplished director working today at making really symmetrical shots in movies. I can't think of another director who puts as much effort into creating each and every shot and filling the screen with "a look"that evokes some sort of phantom nostalgia -- that is, nostalgia for something that has never really existed and only comes through in a simulacral least common cultural denominator. He makes beautiful movies that are technically perfect. Seriously. The problem is that his movies are frequently so denatured, so dehumanized that it's hard to connect to tehm. All the doors seem to be sealed from the inside with a rich, battery goo that we'd like to lick, but can't break through.

Moonrise Kingdom is probably his most form-forward film to date. The story is particularly banal, but the art direction, colors, lighting and sounds are overwhelming. The film opens in 1965 with a gorgeous title sequence (Wes loves titles) that makes the Bishop family house (located on some New England island that doesn't really exist, but seems like it really could) seem like a doll's house. We casually meet Suzy (Kara Hayward), 12, the oldest child and the only daughter. She has a precocious mind and is always reading and doing non-kid things.

We then meet Sam (Jared Gilman), 12, a boy at the local boy scout-like camp across the island, who is an orphan being passed from one foster family to another when he's not alienating himself from his peers who see him as a nerd, and overachiever and a freak. Both Sam and Suzy are outsiders in any nuclear family and connect (during a community theater pageant) over their mutual weirdness. The agree to run away together and explore the island together. They claim to deeply be in love with one another and seem to see the world more clearly than the gray adults who surround and dominate them.

There is what seems to be a superficial examination of "authority" and "childlike wonder" and how the two ideals do not relate. Clearly the scout camp has some connections to the Vietnam war that is lurking over the shoulders of each boy (although the fact that they all seem to be white and upper-middle class could possibly suggest a bitter attack on the "rich man's war, poor man's fight" reality of the conflict), or even related to the present wars the US military is in. But then I have to ask, so what? How does this banal attack on war bare any relevance on the twee love story we see between Sam and Suzy?

Formally, Anderson is very interesting, though I'm not sure why he chooses to do what he does. Almost every set-up in the film is a short interior or an exterior with a short depth of focus. (The two long shots of the film seem to be accidents, or the exceptions that prove the rule.) These mostly normal to short-lens shots give us an uncanny feeling of unease, making this whole world a doll's house (like in the titles). This is an interesting effect, but I'm not sure what to do with the information.

Is Anderson making an anti-Jean Renoir film, where humans are stage-settings for some bigger kabuki story? (Are we merely playthings of the gods?) Why? This doesn't really seem like a political movie - and it seems to be politically moderate or middle, if anything - but this could be an interesting window to see the world (somewhat reminiscent of the implied Marxist polemic in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman). I love taking theory and critical thought (like that of French film thinker André Bazin) and turning it on its head, but I don't really understand why Anderson is doing that -- and I'm not sure if he knows either. At least there's not evidence in the text that these questions lead anywhere but into a deep chasm of uncertainty.

Is he intentionally trying to make it difficult for us to connect to the characters and the story or is he just looking to make a movie that alienates on a superficial level, not knowing it is incredibly hard for us to make any visceral connection? Are the impossibly symmetrical shots a critique of a world that is in fact incredibly lopsided? Is Anderson a formal polemicist who is sneakily assaulting our political traditions through overindulgent stylistics? I don't know if the answers to these questions are really present in the film. This isn't really ambiguity or obliqueness; it's just under-developed.

Taking away all the theory, this is a great looking and sweet, if unfulfilling love story between two presexual kids. That's nice. But so what? Why should I love this movie? What is its point? I really don't get it.

Stars: 2 of 4

Footnote (Friday, March 9, 2012) (25)

Joseph Cedar's Footnote was Israel's entry into the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race this year - and it is a very good film, well worth watching. It has a very dark and cerebral tone that generally has the comic feeling of Jonze's Being John Malkovich -- a bit of a latter-day screw-ball with lots of bleakness.

Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) and Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-Aba) Shkolnik, are two leading Talmudic professors in Jerusalem. Father, Eliezer, a broken man filled with almost no love left inside, has spent his entire life researching variations in versions of the Talmud, only to blocked by his main academic rival. His greatest accomplishment is being referenced in a footnote by his mentor. Uriel, his son, a joyful husband and father himself, has become a leading expert on Talmudic traditions, softer subject matter that the father resents. He seems to be a pushover in life and in his family, but a very good man.

One day Eliezer is surprised to get a phone call that he won the most prestigious national prize for scientific research, after he tried for dozens of years, but always came up blank. He seems like a changed man all of a sudden, finding some joy in his accomplishment. The next day, however, Uriel is called to the prize committee's office where they tell him that he was supposed to win rather than his father and that his father got the phone call by mistake (they're both Professor Shkolnik, after all). He now has to figure out a way of convincing the committee to give his father the prize despite internal academic political issues.

The film explores the intersections of truth and fiction, hard scientific research and fluffy social scientific observation. Both men would argue their work is hard research, but Cedar certainly suggests that there's some chest puffing involved in all academic work. There is also a very glib idea that all academic work really doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the real world -- that internal politics of any organization have as much to do with what gets out and its impact as the significance of the work has.

Cedar uses a very sarcastic style throughout, both in his script and in the formal presentation. When Uriel visits the committee in their offices to discuss the problem, there are seven people (he makes eight) in a tiny closet of a room. Whenever anyone wants to get in or leave, they have to rearrange the chairs in a funny bit of physical comedy. Cedar cleverly mixes wonderfully rich long takes (the first shot lasts for about 8 minutes) with elegant dutch angles and interesting lenses. At times there's a jokey score, at other times there is pure silence, as different characters struggle with internal hopes and fears.

There are also, sadly a handful of untied up elements that seem to lead nowhere, but also don't really act as MacGuffins (the big prize itself is a true MacGuffin). There's a bizarre suggestion that Eliezer has a former girlfriend who comes back (actually it's really not clear who this woman is... I'm just guessing that she's an ex) and Uriel struggles with his ne'er-do-well son who is happy to sit and watch TV rather than studying. These things really should have been cleaned up and cut out -- the film would have been a lot tighter without them.

This is a very funny and smart movie and a lot of fun to watch, with great acting throughout (because everyone really plays it straight and not over-the-top, which it really is). I'm happy it doesn't dwell on the rather tired trope of father-son relationships and deals more with the means of academia and the reality of "Truth" and acknowledgment as these are much more interesting ideas with more room for fresh comedy.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Forgiveness of Blood (Saturday, February 25, 2012) (19)

American filmmaker Joshua Marston really likes making movies not set in America. His last and most major film to this point was Maria Full of Grace from 2004, about a girl who becomes a drug mule to get cocaine from Columbia into the U.S. In his new film, The Forgiveness of Blood, Marston looks East at Albania and the curious tradition of family blood feuds there.

Nik and Rudina are two teenagers living in a rural part of Albania. When their father and uncle get in a fight with a neighbor and accidentally kill him, their lives change dramatically. In Albania, there are hard and fast rules concerning blood feuds. All men of age (or near it) are legitimate targets for retribution attacks, which means they must not leave their houses in order to stay safe. The problem is that the family who is feuding with them bends the rules of the tradition, so they intimidate and threaten Rudina, who should be off-limits as a girl, and Nik's younger brother, who should be too young to be involved.

With their father goes into hiding in the countryside to avoid getting hurt or put in jail, Rudina has to pick up the slack he leaves, stepping away from school to run his daily bread cart route. Nik, also not able to be in school, is a typical 17-year-old, interested in video games, his friends and girls, although those things become less interesting when he's trapped in his house for weeks on end.

This is a very interesting film about a subject that I didn't know much about going in. I particularly like the frankness of the situations and how the tradition of the feud is not judged, despite our Western ideas of it's madness. There is something particularly compelling and upsetting about the film being set in such a remote and seemingly poor location, where the family has a horse and cart as their main transportation, but where the kids play video games, record videos on their phones and post stuff on Facebook. It's an unexpected and beautiful clash of cultures that is happening in Albania, where shedding "less civilized" traditions of blood feuds is necessary and difficult as the digital world races in the door.

As with Maria Full of Grace, Marston has an elegant, straightforward style, very sympathetic to the young people who are caught in situations outside of their control. There is an unsentimental view of the impossible dilemma that Nik and Rudina find themselves in, a mere microcosm of the greater problem such blood feuds could cause the country going forward.

I should note also that despite the fact that Marston has no particular connection to Albania, he spent time there before co-writing the script and shooting the film. The Albanian Academy of Film actually submitted this film to the Oscars for consideration for a Best Foreign Language Film nomination, but there were some political objections raised about Marston's Americanness and it was rejected. This is still a very good film and it's a shame the Oscars couldn't have kept it in the running.

Stars: 3 of 4

A Better Life (2011) (Wednesday, February 1, 2012) (150)

A Better Life is a precious film about how hard life is for Mexican immigrants in East L.A. It's not at all a bad film, just one that wears its sentiments on its sleeve and makes sure that you know how important a story it is.

Carlos (Demian Bichir, who was nominated for an Oscar for this role) is a Mexican immigrant working as a day laborer landscaper in fancy parts of Los Angeles. His son, Luis (Jose Julian), is a Chicano kid, born and raised in East L.A. who is struggling in high school and considering joining a gang rather than continuing his studies.

The father and son don't really connect well, which is sad for Carlos as he's doing all this hard and illegal work for his son who seems oblivious to his father's work and efforts. When Carlos gets into financial and work trouble and might be sent back to Mexico, both he and Luis have to face the fact that the world is a tough place and there might not be a happy ending for them.

There is nothing in this movie I haven't seen before and I worry that the filmmakers, director Paul Weitz and screenwriter Eric Eason, are a bit proud of themselves for making such an important film. It feels in every scene like they're patting themselves on the back - or at least that's how I feel as an ultra-liberal viewer who is very glad I'm watching such a film.

Bichir is actually very good in his role and I can't really say he doesn't deserve a Best Actor nomination (though it does feel a bit random that he has such an honor). I guess I feel like the film is such a narrative and emotional paint-by-numbers that it's hard to give him all that much credit. Still, it's a good job. The film is good - it's not bad at all - I just wish it was a bit more inventive than it is. This is a hard criticism as I'm mostly annoyed that my experience watching the film was different, which isn't really the worry of the director or writer. Still I felt like it wasn't as emotionally complex as it could have been.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Warrior (2011) (Thursday, January 26, 2012) (148)

I had no interest in seeing Warrior when it came out. It looked like any average boxing movie that have been made over the years (there have been a lot of them recently). But then it got an Oscar nomination for supporting actor for Nick Nolte, so I decided I'd give it a change. Well, it's really nothing more than your average boxing movie - though this time it's not boxing, per se, but mixed marshal arts (MMA).

The film follows two brothers, Brendan Conlon (Joe Edgerton) and Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy), who live in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh respectively. They were both raised partly by their drunk dad, Paddy (Nolte), who was an ex-Marine and a high school wrestling coach. It seems at some point their mother took them to the West Coast, from where they split up. Later, Brendan became an amateur MMA fighter and Tommy went to the Marines and served in Iraq.

Back to the present day, they are both having a hard time in life, both underemployed and looking for a shot of cash to make everything better. They both begin training for some big super MMA tournament that apparently people care a lot about (because that's just like it would be if this happened outside of a movie!). Against big odds they both make their way to the final match where they have to face one another. Oh - and there's something about both of them dealing with their drunk dad, who is soberish but still a jerk.

There's really nothing special about this movie, aside from the fact that it runs about 130 minutes, which is way too long. All the traditional tropes of fight movies are present here, the pretty but powerless wife/girlfriend, the underdog gaining respect by brawling, the fighter who is also a physics teacher (no, he doesn't also play the violin).

Nolte is fine here, though there's really no reason for him to have gotten the Oscar nom. He's basically playing himself again, drunk who can sober up here and there, but is generally a psychologically underdeveloped man. He's not a leader and hero the way Mickey from Rocky is, nor is he an outright scoundrel. This is much more of a boxing movie for kids who prefer MMA to boxing than any sort of interesting or compelling narrative.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

I'm Glad My Mother is Alive (2011) (Thursday, January 12, 2012) (137)

I'm Glad My Mother is Alive is the story of Thomas (Vincent Rottiers), a French boy who was put up for adoption when he was five because his young mother wasn't able to deal with him and his half-brother. The story begins when he's a teenager and having difficulty relating to his adoptive parents (who seem like wonderful people). In a fit of rage he goes to find his birth mother and reconnect with her.

We see him again, when he's 20, struggling to keep his life together. He's an auto mechanic and seems to have come to some sort of understanding with his adoptive parents. He goes out looking for his birth mother again, this time as a grown up. When he finds her, he feels some sort of connection to her (and her young son, his half-brother). They become friends, though he never tells his adoptive family about her.

This is generally a good film with an interesting story. There is a constant tension with Thomas as we see him lashing out at people for almost no reason and being on the verge of violence several times. When he meets his birth mother there is an almost immediate sexual tension between them (he's 20, she's in her late 30s), reminiscent of the views we see of her from when he was a child (sensually looking at her breasts and her legs). We don't really know what he's going to do to her or around her. He's a very guarded person, probably due to his need for self-preservation, and it's hard to totally guess what is next from him.

Vincent Rottiers is really great in this role and plays Thomas as a likable, normal-seeming guy with a darkness below the surface. He loves his birth mother, but doesn't know how to interact with her (particularly considering his feelings for her) and is easily wounded. This is a small film, but is generally interesting and well done.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Lebanon, Pa. (2011) (Wednesday, January 11, 2012) (136)

Lebanon, Pa. is about Will (Josh Hopkins), a guy in his mid-30s who lives in Philadelphia who has to go to Lebanon, PA to deal with his estranged father's estate once after his death. Once he gets there he becomes friendly with his dad's neighbors, a guy about his age who is raising two teenage kids. The daughter, CJ (Rachel Kitson), is in a Juno-like dilemma about whether or not to keep an unplanned baby and the son is just discovering sex with girls. Will also falls in love with Vicki (Samantha Mathis), a teacher at the high school (yes, of course she is one of CJ's teachers. Of course.) who is married buy upset with her average life.

Easily the best thing about the film is Rachel Kitson who doesn't appear to have ever acted on screen before, but is totally wonderful as a precocious, self-determined teen. She's particularly great because she looks like a teen, a girl who a geeky guy could fall in love with, who would want to go to college rather than becoming a housewife at age 18. She's totally genuine and wonderful. I hope she acts in other stuff again.

This has an overall light tone and is a bit of a real-feeling twist on the "going back home" genre with the abortion talk and all. It's a very small movie and nothing more than one would expect from such a movie... though it does have some good pro-choice, anti-counseling center stuff in it and that's wonderful.

Stars: 2 of 4

A Separation (Friday, December 30, 2011) (129)

Asghar Farhadi's A Separation begins with Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) in a courtroom speaking to a judge about getting a divorce. Simin wants her her husband Nader and daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, Asghar's own daughter) to go with her but he refuses, claiming he has to take care of his elderly father in Tehran. As a result they get a separation and she stays in Tehran just the same, with the Termeh living mostly with Nader.

He is a good father, very understanding and honest and she's a very good mother. They are an upper-middle class family with a nice apartment in a nice building. To help him take care of Termeh and his father, Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat) a woman who can help him keep the house and manage things. One day, when he gets very frustrated, Nader after she leaves his father in the middle of the day, he fires her and shoves her out the door rather violently.

This brings about a lawsuit about how much she was really hurt and if Nader caused her to lose the baby she was pregnant with, or if she was hurt by other means. It seems Razieh is working with a handful of lies that might protect her from her husband. Nader is a bit of a scapegoat here for other things that are happening.

The story deals a lot with issues of class and money, reminiscent of themes in films by fellow Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. It is clear that Nader and Simin are rich and more European in their tastes. Simin wears a colorful chador (either burgundy, green, lavender or blue), that seems much more liberal and design-forward than the more conservative and traditional one worn by Razieh. Simin also looks a lot more European (and gorgeous) with red hair and less Persian (I am not aware of Iranian minority groups enough to know if Razieh and her husband are from a minority group, such as the Kurds, but the possibility is certainly there). There is also the idea that the rich can do what they want to the poor, even though Nader is being accused of harm that we're almost certain he didn't cause.

Putting this all in context, it is important to be aware of the extreme attention and deference that is paid to the Iranian jurisprudential system, not only in the case of the separation proceedings at the beginning (and end), but later during the trial, when Razieh and her husband sue Nader. The judges seem to be reasonable non-idealists who are looking to do right regardless of politics. There is no criticism of the post-Revolutionary government or the rights of women or poor people. This is presented as a sober tale of lies and hidden facts. Albeit one that involves a good amount of interaction with the courts.

The writing in Farhadi's script is wonderful and all the acting is tremendous, particularly Peyman Moadi, Leila Hatami and Sarina Farhadi. They all deal with their various legal troubles differently, but totally naturally. It is wonderful to see such interesting and powerful acting, when it's not overdone or forced.

At one point near the end of the film, as Termeh talks to Nader about the legal issues they're involved in, she says, "I thought you said this wouldn't be serious," to which he snaps, "Well, it got serious." This is a beautiful and uncomfortable commentary on life and an efficient explanation of a neorealist view of this world. This is a beautiful, dispassionate film and one that explains things simply and effectively.

This is really a film about a man who is a wimp and almost totally emasculated -- not by his wife, but by his own doing. As a quick-fix for his inability to deal with issues, he is constantly scrappily doing small things to changes situations -- mostly for the worse. His wife, on the other hand is clinical and calm and efficient. This is about the choice of who we wish to believe and "life with" -- much like how Termeh has to make a similar decision. Nader is kind and loving, but makes small issues more problematic due to his tinkering; Simin is a bit cold, but calculated and correct. Both approaches can deal with and fix problems in different ways. In the end there is some truth that we're trying to excavate, and each side hopes to be seen as correct.

Stars: 4 of 4

London River (Tuesday, December 6, 2011) (112)

Rachid Bouchareb's London River is a very nice and very small movie about the loss of children in both a spiritual and physical sense. Elizabeth (Brenda Blethyn) is a humble and unworldly woman who lives on the island of Guernsey and Ousmane (Sotigui Koutaté) is an African man living in France working for the forestry department. After the bombings of July 7, 2005, they both get worried that their children (her daughter and his son) were killed in the attacks. They both go to see if they can find them.

In London they meet as they find that their children knew one another and were probably dating. This comes as a shock to both parents who realize they actually don't know much about their kids. He left Africa for France when his son was a child and she only had a telephone relationship with her daughter. Each one loses their kid twice, essentially.

There is a lovely parallel structure here as both parents have complimentary backgrounds, even though they're from very different places. As she lives on Guernsey, she's something between English and French. She raised her daughter mostly alone after her husband was killed in the Falklands. He is clearly African, but has lived in France for a few decades and is not totally either one. He didn't raise his son at all and has no idea what kind of man he became. There's also a lovely visual pairing of the two, where she is short and chubby and he's extremely tall, skinny and has fantastic dreadlocks. They couldn't be a more unusual pair.

Sadly, as nice and sweet as the film is, it's very simple and straightforward, with the only real excitement coming from a moment when they've lost all hope of finding their kids alive and then they regain hope suddenly. This is a very manipulative film that toys with emotions in a rather banal way. Blethyn is actually very good, but plays a pretty terrible woman who's shrill and annoying. The worst kind of loving mother possible. Koutaté is fantastic. Quite and contemplative, knowing full well the whole time that he's sorta out of place everywhere.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Hugo 3D (Friday, December 2, 2011) (111)

Martin Scorsese's Hugo is supposed to be a family movie, but I don't think it really is at all. In fact, I think it's pretty freaking boring for adults and kids alike. Based on the book by Brian Slznick, it tells the story of Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a preteen boy who lives in secret in a Paris train station in the 1930s. He's effectively an orphan and spends his days winding the dozens of clocks in the station. His main passion, though, is the nonfunctional automaton his father stole (!!) from a museum that he was trying to get running again before he was killed in a fire.

Between his winding duties in the station, he runs around the stores in the station, which seems a bit odd considering he's always being chased by the station master (Sacha Baron Cohen). One place he loves to go is the toy maker (Ben Kingsley), where he can steal mechanical parts and wheels that will help him rebuild the automaton. One day he meets the toy maker's young ward, Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz), and the two find that she wears a heart-shaped key (oh - how magical!) that will turn on the automaton. When they get it working they find that it draws a picture of the Man in the Moon being hit in the eye by a rocket... a still from Georges Méliès' 1902 film A Trip to the Moon. They then spend days researching early movies - because kids love reading books and doing research in libraries, of course.

I think I like what the film is getting at in general - that a fascination with mechanical stuff in the hopes of connecting with dead daddy leads a boy to discover the wonder of cinema, but it feels cold and stale. The case isn't helped by the fact that the plot plods along with no particular direction for most of the way. At first it's a film about an orphan boy, then it's about a broken automaton, then it's about the life of an old man, then it's about the history of cinema. It's slow and boring, and, although I love movies about movies, I would rather just watch a documentary about Méliès rather than seeing this inelegant tribute to him.

The whole thing feels much more like the sort of history lesson you'd get from someone who reads a lot of books and has a lot of facts available to them, but presents it in a showy rather than a structured way. I get that Marty loves old movies (he talks about them all the time), but why waste time with the kid and his father, who is almost totally forgotten by the end of the film? (And this is to say nothing of the automaton, which is just a silly MacGuffin... but a fake-magical one. Pardon me while I throw up in my mouth.)

The connection between clocks and mechanical stuff (a toy mouse, the station master's mechanical leg) and early movies is thin at best. Yes, early cameras shared a lot of moving parts with clocks, but that's sorta missing the point. Why not connect internal combustion engines to early cameras and movies too? (OK, fine, Méliès was some sort of clockmaker... but still, the connection seems forced.)

I'm sure screenwriter John Logan and Marty wanted to stick close to the book, but I think cutting a lot of the boy's journey, as well as some totally flaccid romantic material involving secondary and tertiary characters, would have greatly improved the story. The only reason the station master is in the film is to create chase scenes - because kid audiences need chases. But these chases are not very exciting and ridiculous when Hugo keeps going back to the same station where he'll inevitably get chased out again.

I paid extra to see this in 3D and I will say that it's totally not worth it with this film. There's an elegant meta explanation for why this would be Marty's first foray into 3D - that the movie is about technology and mechanical stuff, so he's flexing his technological muscles here - but he didn't do enough with it to make it worthwhile. I don't know why he, a lover of cinema, wouldn't have done some grand allusions to de Toth's House of Wax or Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder. Instead we get a movie that would totally work in 2D, but just wants to fool people into paying more.

The film generally looks good (though very storybooky and a bit like the early Harry Potter movies) and the acting is good, but the story is dull and meandering. I think there's material here for a good movie written and cut differently, but the way it all rolls out is totally banal.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Muppets (Thursday, December 1, 2011) (109)

I was very worried that The Muppets would be just another Muppets movie with not much going for it (can you say Muppets from Space?). Happily I was totally wrong about it. It's fantastic. It's funny and fresh and has all the warmth a joy of the gold-age Muppets with a very clever contemporary flair. It feels much more geared toward Muppets fans who grew up with them in the '70s and '80s than for kids today. Happily that's not my problem.

In the world of the film, puppets of all shapes and colors live among people and that is totally normal for everyone. Walter, a boyish puppet, lives in the mid-American town of Smalltown and is the biggest fan of the Muppets, a group of puppet performers he knows from the Muppet Show and several movies from his childhood. His brother and best friend Gary (Jason Segal) and Gary's girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) want to go on a vacation to Hollywood and agree to bring Walter along so he can visit Muppet Theater, where the Muppet Show was produced a long time ago.

When they get there, they find that it is closed to the public and in terrible shape. Walter overhears oilman Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) buying the theater and talking about how plans tear it down and drill for oil there. Walter, Gary and Mary have to find Kermit the Frog to get the Muppets back together to perform a telethon and raise the money to buy back the theater back from Richman. In grand Muppets style, they all go around the country picking up the old gang (Fozzie is working in Reno with his band, the Moopets; Gonzo is a plumbing and toilet bowl magnate; Animal is in anger management rehab; Piggy is in Paris working for a fashion magazine).

I love that the story is silly but generally simple enough to hold together. It's very, very funny and filled with some of the wonderful double jokes that work for kids and adults on different levels. There's lots of Muppet-centric humor and lots of very clever and timely jokes. There are great songs, including some of the old favs like The Rainbow Connection, Moving Right Along and the Muppet Show theme song. The tone is very fun and silly and it's constantly winking at us as ridiculous stuff happens. The film was co-written by Segal and Nicholas Stoller and the script is great.

There's really nothing to criticize about the story or the production. There are a few fantastic moments that I still laugh about now when I think about them. This is a warm, wonderful movie that I hope to watch again and again and fits in perfectly with early Muppet films like The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper and Muppets Take Manhattan. This is an instant classic in my book and totally wonderful.

Stars: 4 of 4

The Descendants (Friday, November 18, 2011) (100)

Alexander Payne's newest film, The Descendants, has a lot going on in a pretty modest little movie. George Clooney plays the father of young girls, one is 10 and the other is 17, and his wife is in a coma in the hospital after a massive head injury. They live in Honolulu and seem like pretty normal, nice people. As Clooney is reeling from his wife's situation, he finds out that she had been cheating on him for a few months. Meanwhile, his family owns a significant amount of land in a trust that they're being forced to sell and he is the final decision-maker about whom to sell the land to. At some point Clooney and his daughters, along with the older daughter's stoner boyfriend, go to find the man his wife was cheating with, only to discover there might be some ramifications of that affair in the land deal.

The central motif of the film is family, and that makes me really sleepy because that's a dumb thing to make a movie about.There are a bunch of tangents to the story and it's much too complicated for what it needs to be. I think there is probably a pretty decent movie that could be reformed from the skeleton of this one just about the wife being in a coma, having had an affair; there is no need for the land deal part or the daughter's dumb boyfriend part.

If the script for the film, by Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, based on a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, were cleaner and better, this could ultimately be a good movie. It's very small and really doesn't have the materials to be more than just good. Probably the most remarkable thing about it is that Clooney really looks like a normal middle-aged dad in this, not the gorgeous movie star that he has become over the past decade or so. I give lots of credit to Clooney, Payne and the costume designer, Wendy Chuck, who really transform him and make him seem totally normal, desexualized and not at all hot.

Stars: 2.5 of 3

Our Idiot Brother (Saturday, August 27, 2011) (74)

Our Idiot Brother (co-written by Evgenia Peretz and David Schisgall and directed by her brother Jesse Peretz) is a feel-good indie comedy about a zany family and their aloof, sweetheart brother. In the future I will use the term "a feel-good indie comedy about a zany family and their aloof, sweetheart brother" as a euphemism for boring and stupid. This movie is so proud of its small weirdness that it covers all liberal bases (that is, it's a movie that liberals... well, white people, would love): pot smoking/dealing, lesbians, documentary filmmaking, dogs and being nice. All of these things, of course, when listed like this, are treacly and flaccid. There is really nothing different between this film and a list of things.



Ned (oh, isn't that a wonderful name for a doofus!) (Paul Rudd) is a hippie who sells organic vegetables at farmers' markets in suburbia. He has a naïve sense of the world, one where he doesn't understand how people lie to move along and how those lies should be met with some level of skepticism on his part. One day he's arrested for selling pot to a uniformed policeman and goes to jail. When he gets out he moves in with each of his tree sisters in succession (all of whom live in New York City) for a spell.



He ends up changing their lives (at first for the worse, but ultimately for the better) by being wide-eyed and having no ability to keep his mouth shut. He doesn't understand that when his brother-in-law says he is shooting his documentary of a dancer in the nude to get closer to his subject, that he's actually is lying to cover up the affair he's having. He reports this tidbit ("Did you know he shoots the documentary in the nude?") but doesn't realize that it's effectively going to end his sister's marriage (probably for the best, of course). He changes everyone's life, but not on purpose. He stumbles into being a good person, but is really just a loser all along.



Rudd is good, but the character he plays is really annoying. There's only so much stupidity I can tolerate as "he's just a well-meaning guy" before I want to take him by the shoulders and shake him to get him to realize he's being dumb. Are we really supposed to think he's just this aloof because he smokes a lot of drugs? Is there something here that "some people are just free-spirits and don't understand subtlety"? (One: there are not people like that, and; two: if there are, I hate them and don't want to watch a movie about them because they're annoying.)



I can't tell if the inclusion of a (magical negro) black parole officer is a cynical commentary here about how white people have it really easy in our world and how when they screw up (dumbly) they can get back on their feet. I don't think the film is that deep or that that criticism is really here, but that point is suggested. There is basically nothing different between Ned and, say, Gator from Spike Lee's Jungle Fever (a druggie who constantly gets into trouble with family and the law) other than their race, the state's treatment of that race and the drug of choice. Of course, Gator is a tragic figure (in a classical sense) and Ned is a lovable everyman (because he's white and the people who will see this movie are white).



The supporting cast of the film is actually solid, with Zooey Deschanel, Rashida Jones, Adam Scott and Steve Coogan (I don't really like Elizabeth Banks, who's doing her best impersonation of Parker Posey here, or Emily Mortimer, who's doing her best impersonation of an American here), though the script and dialogue are so terrible they might as well be doing bad college improv.



This movie is sweet, nice, happy and written to be funny (though I never laughed). It's just totally dull and frustrating. I think there's a nice germ of a film here. A loser brother helps his family by showing them how to be less callous. It's just the execution is so tedious, I can't even say I enjoyed it.



Stars: 1.5 of 4

Beginners (Thursday, August 4, 2011) (63)

Beginners is a very intimate, funny, personal and sad movie by writer/director Mike Mills. It does sometimes boil over with sentimentality and cuteness (he is married to Queen of Cute Miranda July), but his enthusiasm is infectious and he communicates the difficulties of discourse brilliantly through montage, score and clever dialogue (sometimes from a dog).

As the film opens, Oliver (Ewan McGregor) tells us that his mother died five years ago and that his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer) has just passed away from cancer. Hal had just came out as gay after living as a straight married man since the 1950s; in his final years, he had a lover, Andy (Goran Visnjic) and began to open up to his son in ways that he had never done in the past.

The story is told simultaneously in the present and flashbacks at the past, sometimes at Oliver's childhood interacting with his off-beat mother and sometimes looking at the last years of his father'a life, but always from Oliver's point of view. He's a sad guy; now in his 40s, he is an artist living and working in LA and never totally connecting to anyone (including his friends). There is a suggestion from them that he used to be more "into it all," but he's gotten sadder and more quiet, either because of his father's death or exacerbated by that.

At any rate, he goes to a party with them where he meets Anna (Melanie Laurent) a French actress living in an LA hotel for some short period of time. The two immediately connect, probably they each see a similar dourness in the other, and they try to make it work together despite their individual distrust of humanity and Oliver's specific pain from losing his father, who had become a close friend in recent years.

I think that a well-crafted montage is one of the best and most interesting devices a director can use, and Mills employs them here wonderfully and rather unlike anything else I've ever seen. There is a refrain and a structure they all come back to. In a monotone voice-over we hear Oliver say, for instance "I was born in 1963. This is the President in 1963; this is what nature looked like; this is the sun; the stars." As we hear these things, we see advertising or publicity stills of the things being described. Yes, it's certainly a bit precious, but it's effective. This is how Oliver sees the world and this gets us into his literal frame of reference. He is not a very elaborate emotional person, rather he sees things in a binary way: happy/sad, pain/pleasure, good/bad, comfort/discomfort. These montages lead us into this understanding.

To say they are reminiscent of Hollis Frampton's seminal art film, (nostalgia), is an understatement, and perhaps strikingly naive. The disembodied voice feels close and uncomfortably clinical at the same time; the idea of images summing up emotions and acting as stand-ins for whole stories. Really what the connection comes down to is exactly the title, nostalgia - and more specifically sadness over things long ago (even things you didn't experience yourself).

As the film goes along, Oliver seems to be working on an art project about sadness, hand-drawn pictures that have some political message and some personal connection (they're about his father's suppression of his sexuality). Clearly Mills isn't subtle with his themes.

Back with Anna, they both have issues with their parents (she has an ongoing discussion with her father he wants to kill himself for reasons we never find out). They connect because they're both moving at the same slow pace experiencing everything, stopping to smell the roses, as it were. Oliver is clearly afraid of commitment, and ambivalent about "taking the next step" with her, for fear their relationship will evaporate (because things move toward nothingness, of course).

The connection they mutually feel is frightening to Oliver, who has connected to several people over the years. First we see his unconventional mother (who is a riot, played by Mary Page Keller), who seems to interact with the 10-year-old Oliver as if she is a 10-year-old. She does a silly dance in an art gallery, she has a game where she shoots him with her fingers as a gun and critiques his death-fall. It's clear that as a kid, he connected more to his mother. After she died, he clearly connected to his father and appreciated his joie de vivre and recognized his life-long struggles. After his father's death, he connects to his father's dog, Arthur, who doesn't speak, though we do see his glances subtitled several times (this is wonderful and very reminiscent of Miranda July's joyful eccentricity).

Oliver is worried that he might not be in an emotional position, at this moment, to properly give himself to Anna, and he wants to cut off the relationship before they get in too deep. Clearly this is a self-fulfilling action, as pushing her away for no good reason...well, it pushes her away. We feel bad for her, but also bad for him. He knows not what he does.

All four lead actors here are non-Americans (and then the fifth is a dog) and only Laurent is playing a foreigner. I found McGregor's American accent difficult throughout, as much as I tried to ignore and just chalk it off to a silly LA affectation. Really, Plummer, Visnjic and McGregor all struggle with their accents, though they all give very nice heart-felt performances. I guess Laurent's performance feels the most honest (possibly because she's playing a French woman who speaks with a French accent), because she doesn't seem to be reaching as far for the emotional connections to Anna's actions. (I'm very upset that I'm not dating Melanie. She's beautiful and talented... and Jewish... .)

Perhaps Mills relies too much on his montages. I think they would have been even more effective than they are if there had only been three or four of them rather than the six or seven we see. He's certainly a bit too blunt about the theme of sadness. Clearly the actors' accents are distracting too, but Mills gets great performances out of them all. He also uses technical stuff, like a wonderful, sad piano score by Roger Neil, Dave Palmer and Brian Reitzell to convey the darkness of the film, despite it's very funny writing. This is a movie that I expected to hate for being too sweet and too on-the-nose about child-parent emotions. It's much better than that and is a very nice work.

Stars: 3 of 4

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 - 3D (a.k.a. HP7P2-3D) (Sunday, July 17, 2011) (56)

So here we are. We've reached the end of the Harry Potter movies. The seven books, having been stretched out to eight films and nearly 20 hours of screen time and are now totally over forever (until J.K. Rowling writes a new book that is turned into a new movie). It's one of biggest, longest, most profitable film franchises ever. It's also a lot of fun. (If you haven't seen any of these movies, or none since the first, ignore the rest of this post as you will be bored miserably, I'm sure.)

HP7P2-3D is basically the second half, or really the last third, of the seventh and last Harry Potter book. It begins with a running start with the Harry, Ron and Hermione trio on the hunt for more of Voldemort's horcruxes (small things into which he injected parts of his soul to make it harder for him to be killed). They go to Gringott's to get one of them, and then realize one of the last ones is back in Hogwart's, from which they have been truants for the whole school year (no comment on how in a book about seven years at a school, they only spend about six there, with the last one a year of non-lesson-based Evil Lord-fighting. But J.K.R. wants kids to stay in school, or something).

When they get to Hogwart's they find the school in dark lock-down, now run by Snape, where the professors teach the kids all sorts of terrible magic to inflict pain on others. There are Death Eaters all about and all sorts of people in black leather (hot, if you're into that sorta thing). Harry gets a little help from his friends (students and teachers) in Dumbledore's Army and what's left of the Order of the Phoenix. They fight a massive knock down, drag-out fight with the bad guys before Harry's final one-on-one with Voldemort.

I think the movie smooths over some rough patches that I never liked in the book, particularly with Snape. I always felt like the 'Snape is a good guy' thing that we're told near the end was a bit too hard to swallow in the book. Here, however, director David Yates and writer Steve Kloves do a wonderful job of showing how Snape was always massively conflicted about Harry, about his eternal love for Harry's mom, Lilly, and his deep hatred for Harry's dad, who was probably a total douchebag who deserved to be killed by dark magic. The last 20 minutes of the film are particularly wonderful. The epilogue especially always felt forced and precious, but here feels totally natural and necessary. It's a lovely ending to a great epic story.

What I particularly like about this last film is how it brings in traditional themes from human existence and classical art: the idea of one person doing something alone versus someone working with their friends and allies to get a job done. It is very reminiscent to me of the classic story from Hollywood lore that after seeing Fred Zinnemann's High Noon (a story about a marshal who can't get help and is forced to defeat a bad guy singlehandedly), Howard Hawks decided to make Rio Bravo (a story about a sheriff who gets all the help he needs from his friends to defeat the bad guys) in response.

Voldemort is Marshal Will Kane and Harry Potter is Sheriff John T. Chance. We are constantly reminded here about how Voldemort (né Tom Riddle) is one of the greatest wizards ever, for better or worse, and how Harry is really only an average wizard who excels at making friends and having them help him. (There is even an suggestion, posited by Snape, that Harry is a proud prima dona and somewhat of a talentless jerk.) When Harry goes searching for the missing horcruxes, he does find a few on his own, but also needs help from his associates to find the others. Meanwhile, Harry is told that Voldemort found all of them on his own. I guess the idea that this Lincolnian leadership style is more effective, at least less demagogic and less evil.

I'm also very interested in the revisionist look at Snape as a reluctant collaborator. In this film, he's Maréchal Pétain, a stooge put in a position of power and told to stay quiet while terrible things happen inside his domain (the school). Unlike the general understanding of Pétain, however, Snape is hiding the fact that he's really on the side of good and not evil. Was Pétain trying to work against the Nazis and destroy the Reich from the inside? It's a very hard sell.

(Of course, we shouldn't forget that Snape did witness lots of evil things happen at Hogwarts and his Death-Eater days and it's hard to forgive him for those things. I don't care that Colin Powell didn't believe in the testimony he gave at the UN Security Council in 2003, he said it and it sent us to war and thousands of people to their death. He should have resigned if he was so morally torn. I won't forgive him now.)

The 3D worked really well in this film, probably better than I can remember in any Hollywood picture where I've seen it used. Some of the scenes play very well with the depth of focus and the disorienting quality of the enhanced image, like Gringott's sequence at the beginning. In other scenes, where there is little action, the 3D is used gently to simply show us how basic things recede into space. I would hope in years to come, directors use 3D more in this way than they do with some movies where it seems that dumb tricks are inserted into every shot to make sure we know we're seeing it in 3D and make sure we feel like we're getting our money's worth (we never get our money's worth as it's still way too expensive).

As with the last film, there is no need to see this movie if you haven't seen all the other ones, and particularly if you haven't seen the first part of this one. It is, however, very solid, much more interesting than I would have expected and a lot of fun from a sheer entertainment point of view.

Stars: 3 of 4

Tuesday, After Christmas (Tuesday, June 7, 2011) (40)

Radu Muntean's Tuesday, After Christmas opens with a man and a woman in bed talking after sex. They chat about mundane stuff like the length of his toes and the towns where they're from for about 10 minutes and it is all shown in one-take. This, of course, is a typical scene from the so-called Romanian New Wave. There is very little cutting and a minimal amount of camera movements or changes of focus; there is no score, there are no special effects, almost everything is shot in interiors with unchanging lighting.

Unlike previous RomWave films (4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days; 12:08 East of Bucharest; The Death of Mr Lasarescu) the world of this film it totally contemporary and filled with the same new and expensive stuff that we would see in North America or Western Europe - elegant cars, Apple laptops, iPhones, clean dentist offices. This world looks much more like Paris than the Bucharest of Police, Adjective (I don't know if this is a thematic decision saying that contemporary Romania is not what you've seen in recent movies. I don't know enough about contemporary Romania or how accurate those other films are.)

Unlike those other films, however, this one doesn't really have much of a plot. Paul (Mimi Branescu), the man in the opening scene, is a married father in his late-30s who is having an affair with Raluca (Maria Popistasu), the woman in that scene. She's actually his daughter's dentist, and is more than a decade younger than he is. She enjoys the time the two of them spend together and never asks him to leave his wife Adriana (Mirela Oprisor) to date her officially. Paul has other ideas, and decides to spring the news of the affair on Adriana just before Christmas, making the holiday, which they spend with his parents, incredibly difficult.

What is really wonderful about this film is that it doesn't have any of the political/social commentary that you find in a lot of the RomWave films, this is just a slice of life drama, a story about regular people doing what people do. There is as much content in what we don't see onscreen as what we do see. The title refers to the day after the holiday when Raluca is supposed to return to Bucharest from her parents house out of town - the day when Paul and Raluca's life together will begin. But we never actually get to this day as the film ends on Christmas Eve. The suggestion is that we never ultimately know what happens on that day. Paul has rashly forced his will on his wife, daughter and mistress, without considering the effects it will cause.

One of the most emotionally searing scenes in RomWave for me was in 4 Months during the dinner party where we see Otilia sitting at a table with people talking nonsense while she is thinking about her friend, Gabita, getting an abortion from a monster of a doctor. The long, long take with a static camera and wide-angle lens makes us fidgety in our seats wanting to move on to the next break. In Tuesday, we get this discomfort at almost equal level during a sequence when Paul and Adriana take their daughter to Raluca for a dentist appointment. It's clear that Raluca is in terrible emotional pain, but can't show it, for fear of tipping Adriana to the relationship. Again here we see it with a static shot from across the exam room, nervous at the unblinking, voyeristic quality of the shot.

But I think Muntean actually goes a bit farther than his RomWave colleagues by using lenses in a magnificent way. The first part of the film is shot mostly in tight shots with normal or wide-angle lenses, giving a naturalistic quality to the action. There's actually a beautiful rack focus in the first scene that switches from Paul to Adriana and back as they talk. At the point Paul tells Adriana about his affair, there is a switch to longer lenses, making certain action in the foreground seem intimate and close and separating us (and the actors) from the out-of-focus background. This wonderfully mirrors the isolation they feel respectively and is a visual reminder that Paul changed his life and the lives of his loved ones (including Raluca) irreversibly.

There's a wonderful motif that runs through the film of gifts and gift giving. Considering it's Christmas, the adults are all excited to be buying gifts for the daughter (there's a funny sequence where Paul and Adriana have to buy themselves gifts that will be given to themselves by his parents). In many ways, Paul sees his confession to his wife as a gift to Raluca - but it's a gift she might not want. One could see the lush life of these Bucharesters and the lavish gifts they exchange (the daughter gets a snowboard from her parents) as a commentary on the way Romanians have embraced capitalism after years of communist misery, though I think the film works well without such political dialectics.

This is possibly the most small-scale, intimate and subtle RomWave film I've seen, but I think it ranks in the top tier of the class. The acting, particularly by Branescu and Popistasu is wonderful, and the direction by Muntean and script by Muntean, Alexandru Baciu and Razvan Radulescu is nuanced and elegant. It has a beautiful look overall and a very interesting storyline.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Puzzle (Wednesday, May 11, 2011) (30)

Maria del Carmen (Maria Onetto) is a soft-spoken, middle-aged, middle-class, Argentine housewife with a very loving auto-mechanic husband, Juan (Gabriel Goity) and two high school sons. She leads a common, uncomplicated life where she cleans the house, goes shopping, cooks and keeps everyone in line. On her birthday she's given a jigsaw puzzle by a friend and discovers that she can complete it herself in a very short time. She goes to a puzzle store to buy more and sees a sign for a man who needs a partner for a puzzle competition.

Her husband doesn't approve of her wasting time on puzzles, and in an act of defiance, she seeks out this man, Roberto (Arturo Goetz). Together the two practice to improve her puzzle-solving system (organize by colors and shapes, spread out the pieces, one partner works on the boarder while the other works on the interior) and speed. As she's doing this, she's discovering her sense of self and letting some of her daily jobs fall by the wayside. She has to figure out how to do what she now loves and is good at while keeping a steady ship at home.

Like many Argentine films from the so-called Argentine New Wave, this is a very simple story with a limited context. Sure, there is a Feminist and Marxist subtext to the narrative (Maria is upset that she doesn't really have agency in her own life and she struggles with her job as a worker in the household), but at the end of the day, it's a small kitchen-sink drama without many branches. I like the smallness of it a lot - reminiscent of the house-wife parts of Charlene Ackerman's film Jeanne Dielman. The story only alludes to greater battles in the world, but is just a small story with a beginning, middle and end.

Also similar to other Argintine New Wave films I've seen, there is an examination of social class that is suggested, but not really fought over. Clearly Maria is uncomfortable in Roberto's fancy Palermo townhouse, her life doesn't have things like spare puzzle-solving rooms or a maid to cook and clean. There is no anger in this realization from Maria (or Smirnoff), but just a constant idea that the two teammates come from very different places.

Not only does writer-director Natalia Smirnoff do a nice job with the script, but she is talented in a technical sense as well. Much of the film is shot with handheld cameras, most of it either in close-ups or 2-shots (there are very few establishing shots to speak of). Much of what we see is out of focus or somewhat limited in focus. This all leads to a very intimate, cozy environment. It also ties in the "puzzle" theme well, as we frequently see small parts of bigger things and can't tell exactly what we're looking at - a metaphor for how Maria sees the pieces of the puzzles.

One shot is particularly elegant where you see Maria on the phone in her kitchen in focus. She walks to the back of the room and out a door there and out of focus before coming back in the room and back into focus. The effect with this long-lens shot is the same as a rack focus, but there's no movement in the camera or the lens, it's all with the actress.

Smirnoff does a very similar "puzzle" thing with the score, which is not one piece of music, but several pieces from different musical traditions. In one moment we hear African percussion, in another a Jew's harp, in another a Japanese flute. Again, the idea is that she's thinking of these different styles as she works on the puzzles and that they make up a texture and a tapestry of sound, like how pieces make up a puzzle. It's entirely possible that this is the soundtrack going through Maria's head as she is inspired by one puzzle picture or another.

This is not an incredibly deep film. It really only glances at big issues of "a woman's work" and "self-determination in the household". It knows how big it is and doesn't try to be too preachy. This is a very nice, well-made movie. It's a bit precious, but more for its subject (about middle-aged people doing puzzles) than it's style or technique.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Beaver (Friday, May 6, 2011) (28)

I first heard about The Beaver, when it won first place on the 2008 Black List, an annual industry round-up of the best unproduced scripts (it's important to note that the script for Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds is #11 on that list... and was one of the best scripts of 2009). It came up again when Jodie Foster became the director of it and cast Mel Gibson as the lead. Then, after production had wrapped in the summer of 2010, the audio tapes of Mel calling his wife terrible names (and other things) came out and the film's release (scheduled for the fall of 2010) was held indefinitely. So finally it's out in theaters (well, sorta... I think it was on 22 screens across the country).

The Beaver is a terrible movie, having nothing to do with Mel Gibson being an anti-Semitic bigot. It has what is actually one of the worst scripts I've seen in a long time that takes shocking, gonzo steps as a way of avoiding banality. It has no structure and the premise, based on a quick read of the psychology Wikipedia entry, is bizarrely naive about what it's getting at. That this movie was ever produced is a testament to how stupid and navel-gazing the movie industry is.

Walter (Gibson) is a massively depressed businessman who also seems to suffer with with mania and schizophrenia. One day, while on a drinking and suicide bender, he finds a stuffed beaver puppet in a dumpster, puts it in his hand and begins to talk to himself in a cockney accent. This externalized superego then gets Walter to go back home, after his wife (Jodie Foster) has kicked him out, and make amends with her and his two sons. His older son, Porter (Anton Yelchin), is a high school outcast who writes papers for his classmates for cash. He hates his father and is trying to do anything in his power to not be like him.

At some point, Porter is contacted by the school valedictorian, Norah (Jennifer Lawrence), to write her valedictory address. He agrees and comes back to her with an offensive piece about how sad she is that her brother overdosed on drugs. Oh - and she likes to paint graffiti, but isn't allowed to do that because her mother doesn't want her to. Are you bored yet? Remember how this was a about a guy who talks with a puppet? Right.

It's a real surprise to me how much of this story is not about Walter and the eponymous puppet. Almost half of the film is about Porter, a secondary character, and about half of that story (a quarter of the film) is about Norah, a tertiary character. I think the idea is that the beaver is for Walter what Norah and Porter are for one another, that is some sort of external force that guides their struggles. The problem is that this simple nugget of an idea is so convoluted that it's almost totally lost. For most of the third act, there is no Walter and there is no beaver. This is stupid.

One amazing thing about the script, by Kyle Killen, is that it seems to be about psychology on the surface (it's about a crazy guy and it's pretty clear that the writer has some idea of what an id, and ego and a superego are), but it's not a very deep examination of anything psychological at all. We see that Walter goes to shrinks in the opening montage (and apparently lays in the couch at one), but he then comes up with the beaver "cure" on his own without any medical guidance (as if the treatment of depression was somehow easy and good for a punchline). After not fundamentally improving with the help of the puppet, he hurts himself in a pretty grizzly way, and then is checked into a psych hospital, medicated, treated off-screen and healed (well, it's a happy ending, so the idea is that he's on his way to recovery). The film isn't really critical of psychology, but it deals with it so lightly that it becomes either a joke or a proxy for "all that's wrong in our world". This is stupid too.

Gibson's performance is much more subdued than he is normally. It's certainly showy - he's really playing a blank cypher for a cockney beaver - but it's not as loud and crazy as he is frequently and he doesn't chew up too much of the set. Foster's direction is fine, if unnoticeable, but I give her as much blame for the terrible structure and script as Killen gets. How on earth could she have let this movie be made with this script?

Hollywood loves movies about shrinks - because everyone in Hollywood is in therapy. Hollywood is not filled with smart people, however. This is the perfect storm of those two things. Somehow people read this script, saw it was a gonzo take on psychotherapy/psychiatry and decided that it was a winner. Nobody ever had the depth of interest or knowledge to pick out the interesting nut of an idea and re-write it. This could have been an interesting and hard-hitting film. Instead it's a joke and is terrible.

Stars: 1 of 4

Win Win (Saturday, April 2, 2011) (22)

Writer/director Thomas McCarthy has a very straight-forward, frank style to his comedies. He makes movies that are totally set in our world, inhabited by characters who we could easily know as our neighbors (or ourselves) who get into difficult situations partly because of their own doing and partly because they have bad luck. His latest film, Win Win, explores how when stuck inside a world of deep malaise, people do dumb things for good reasons, and that, as with life, stuff generally works out in the end.

Mike (Paul Giamatti) is a suburban lawyer in New Jersey who has a small practice that he is struggling to keep afloat. He's married to a wonderful, loving woman, Jackie (Amy Ryan), who takes care of their two kids and has a very sensible head on her shoulders. Mike is also the wrestling coach of the local high school, where his team is one of the worst in the area. He loves wrestling and working with the kids, but the team's mediocrity and the floundering of his work is getting to him.

As part of an elaborate and unethical scheme, Mike becomes the guardian for one of his elderly clients, Leo (Burt Young... Paulie from the Rocky movies) for which he gets a few thousand dollars a month. One day Leo's estranged grandson, Kyle (Alex Shaffer), shows up unannounced and Mike feels obligated to take him in until his mother (who is in jail and rehab) can come collect him from Ohio. Kyle, a champion high school wrestler, joins Mike's team and starts to make an impact on their record and the structure of Mike and Jackie's house beings to help him. The problem, of course, is that this could all fall apart if Mike's scheme is exposed.

This is a particularly well written script. I really like the structure of this story, going from order to chaos to order, but in a very natural, understandable way. After it ties up in the end it is clear how we got to that point. It does not feel overly-manipulated by the writer, which happens much more often in movies than I'd like. It seems like more often than not, writers have an idea for a story and an ending and put a bunch of filler in the middle for no reason that moves along clumsily to that end point. The plot here winds along very organically, which fits in well with the matter-of-fact style of the film.

McCarthy loves the mediocrity and sadness of Northern New Jersey (those words are my judgement, not his). Unlike directors like Todd Solondz or Kevin Smith who delight in the weirdness of the place and paint caricatures of it, McCarthy's New Jersey is very direct: a suburban area that has a life apart from the big city it is next to, but is somehow a place of lost dreams. Life is what it is, in this place. It's not romantic, it's not silly, it's just a bit grimy but mostly good.

My biggest problem with the film comes down to this issues of naturalness, or lack thereof, where the script gets a bit jumbled. Mike's friend and business associate is Vigman (Jeffrey Tambor) a CPA who he shares the office with. Vigman is his assistant wrestling coach and good for a funny line here and there (Tambor is typically dorky, bitter and hilarious here). Unfortunately McCarthy also includes another character, Terry (Bobby Cannavale), Mike's best friend who is going through a mid-life crisis and sees helping Kyle and the wrestling team as some sort of mid-life mission. The problem is that there is simply not enough material here for there to be two friend/coach/confidant characters. It would have been better if these two characters had been merged into one. Cannavale's tone is also too jerky, too frat-boy for the film, which is otherwise sorta subtle and dark and clever.

Amy Ryan has become one of my favorite actresses in recent years with her work in The Wire, Gone Baby Gone, a comedic role on The Office and the HBO series In Treatment. She's always fantastic and never overdone. Here she continues this great streak as a woman who you almost feel bad for (she's very average) until you realize she's probably the strongest and most sensible characters in the film. She also does the most impeccable life-long-New Jerseyite accent I've heard in awhile.

Perhaps the best thing McCarthy does in this movie is to make Paul Giamatti somewhat likable. I think this is his most natural, normal, calm character since he played Pig-Vomit in Private Parts (he was brilliant as Harvey Pekar, but Pekar was a weird guy very much up the Giamatti explosive alley). Giamatti has become almost unwatchable for me as each one of his characters reaches a new depth of sadness and misanthropy. Here he's just a normal schlub with normal life problems on his back. He tries to figure out a way out of his situation, but digs himself deeper into a hole. This normal, every-manness of the character is totally the core of this film. It's a lot of fun.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

How to Train Your Dragon (2010) (Monday, February 21, 2011) (183)

It's a sad thing for How to Train Your Dragon that no matter how good a movie it is (it's a good movie) it will never be as beloved as Toy Story 3. I guess that's the luck of the draw for any animated film these days - that the year you are released there's always a chance there's a bigger and glitzier Pixar movie that takes all the attention. Still, Dragon does a wonderful job and is still a very fun and delightful film and deserving of lots of praise and attention.

In the film Hiccup is a weak, dorky boy living in a small island town of vikings (who speak with Scottish accents). His father is the chief of the town and because he's not very strong, Hiccup works as an assistant for the town blacksmith making weapons and swords that the warriors use to fight the dragons that pester the village. He seems totally inept at doing anything physical aside from grinding blades and is a shame to his loving father.

One day, after designing a catapult that shoots dragon traps (he's very clever and is good at engineering), Hiccup catches what turns out to be the notorious Night Fury dragon, the most dangerous beast in the world. When he goes to find the thing, he realizes that it's a very loving creature. He works with it, calling him Toothless, and learns all about dragon ways, figuring out the dragons are not nasty beings but just unhappy with their horrible reptile master and very misunderstood. He then has to prove to his village what he knows - and prove to his father that he is a strong man worthy of respect.

I watched this film on DVD and not in the theater in 3D format. I'm sure this affected my overall experience, but I still think it was a visual masterpiece. One scene in particular, where Hiccup finally has a breakthrough in training with Toothless and they go for an elaborate flight, is absolutely magnificent even in standard 2D - and I imagine it would be even more spectacular in 3D! This is one of the first times I've found animators use the 3D format to truly bring you inside the picture rather than just showing off with elaborate gimmicks.

The story is nice for kids and for adults and very funny and well written. I like that the vikings are all Scots and that details like the score are done with rather celtic-inspired themes. There's a rather poignant bit at the end of the film where Hiccup is injured in the ultimate battle and comes away missing a foot, as if he was an injured war veteran. This is done very well, not fetishized and could easily be understood by kids that war has real consequences, even for the victors. At the same time we are not beaten over the head with the emotional ramifications of this (Hiccup gets back on his dragon and flies away).

This might not be as fancy and elite a film as Toy Story 3, but it is a very good film and well worth watching - even in 2D!

Stars: 3 of 4