Antagony & Ecstasy

TYLER PERRY: DADDY'S LITTLE GIRLS (2007)

2012-01-26T23:26:00.000-06:00

It's a bit silly to talk about a director's sophomore feature as representing all sorts of breaks from his customary style; but hindsight permits us to observe that3007's Daddy's Little Girls, the second film directed by Tyler Perry and the third he wrote, is something of an outlier. It is the first of his features that he did not act in, which makes it necessarily the first not to feature his Madea character; it is the first one not based upon one of his stage plays; it is the first to hinge on a male protagonist; it is the first that is strictly a drama, without any trace of the sometimes desperate comic relief of his earlier films; and perhaps as a direct result of the rest of these firsts, it was his first film to underperform at the box office, and remains the lowest-grossing work of his cinema career.

I'm not sure if this feels altogether fair or not, but this much is certain: Daddy's Little Girl is confounding in a way that Madea's Family Reunion is not. Family Reunion is weird as hell, sure, but in a way that's mostly straightforward: you get where it's going and why, only it takes some might strange paths to get there. Daddy's Little Girls, on the other hand, is a mass of conflicting impulses and half-formed ideas, though it also has individual elements far more successful than Perry's earlier work; it is at once a huge step forward and a huge collapse backwards. My suspicion is that this was partially because Perry had absorbed enough of the criticism of his two earlier film productions to want to prove his maturity as an artist, only when the rubber hit the road, it turned out that he wasn't a mature artist, at least not in the way his harshest critics might have wanted.

More to the point, I think that with this film, Perry was lashing out against the charges that he was perpetuating crude racial stereotypes by responding, and not without a hint of snottiness, "I am too black!", and so he fills up the script - which I hasten to remind you, was newly-conceived at this time - with authorial tracts that sometimes even manage to feel like something that the characters might actually be inclined to say at that moment, all of them designed not so much to answer the specific charge that he was running a latter-day minstrel show, as to establish that he was, at any rate, sensitive to issues of African-American identity, and sensitive to the damage caused by racist caricature. And thus having inoculated himself against any criticisms ever again, he makes his antagonist a shrill harpy of an ex-wife so single-mindedly driven by the desire to acquire wealthy and live in tacky surroundings that she attempts to force her teenage daughter into whoredom.

The whole thing is such a frazzled combination of overt messaging on the one hand, and garish pandering on the other, that the film ends up fighting against itself almost constantly. If, somehow, a white filmmaker had been responsible for directing this, he would never, ever have been able to escape the charge of racism, nor should he. It has an unmistakable tang of "Well of course minorities are worthy of respect and consideration, but, seriously, look at how these people act!" It doesn't help matters that, while nearly everything in the film is as sober as sober can be, with hushed lighting and somber line deliveries all over the place, whenever the characters identified, frequently in dialogue, as the "disreputable" sort of black people - the golddiggers, the drug dealers, the gangsta wannabes, the perpetual adolescents - they are played 100% for broad comedy of the Madea school, and just to make sure we get it, Perry has the mature, upstanding characters respond to their cartoon adversaries with exaggerated eye-rolling and grimaces.

And on the other side of the coin, Daddy's Little Girls is unquestionably a more accomplished piece of filmmaking than Madea's Family Reunion: the transitions are smoother, the scenes are assembled with much less fumbling around with camera angles that refuse to work, the acting doesn't swing from pole to pole so broadly; though this last may have less to do with Perry's newfound skill with directing actors, and more with the quality of the actors he was able to afford this time around: the two lead roles are played by Idris Elba, who had by this point already completed his extrarordinary run on HBO's The Wire, and Gabrielle Union, one of the many talented black actresses given a rare chance to actually show off how could she could be, even hamstrung by Perry's overwritten, underdeveloped scenarios (if there is nothing else we can thank the filmmaker for, there is always this; but I'll have much more to say about that when I get around to For Colored Girls). So it does, in a sense, represent Perry's new maturity, just not in the direction it needed to if he was going to rise above the perception that he was a self-exploiting black clown, a perception that frankly, he has earned several times over.

As for the actual plot of this film, it is once again pretty much hokum: Elba plays Monty, a mechanic living in Atlanta and just barely able to keep his three beloved daughters safe and fed in the heart of the ghetto. Union is Julia, the state's only black female legal partner, who one day takes the advice of her assistant Maya (Melinda Williams), Monty's neighbor, to hire the mechanic as her driver. This ends poorly when Monty takes a lengthy detour to the emergency room, where his daughters have been rushed following an ultimately harmless accident, and he is promptly fired; but this has already planted the seeds of doubt in Julia's mind, that the mythical Decent Black Man that she has been hunting for might actually exist, deep within the ghetto that she has for so long written off as the home exclusively of cartoon gangbangers with funny speech patterns. Do both Julia and Monty get to use this situation as a chance to spout off about how they feel about their skin color, and the sense of community they long to feel with all black people, if only that community could recover its dignity? Absolutely. Do they, and by extension the film, unconsciously delegitimise ghetto culture, with all its trappings and forms of communication? Pretty much, yeah. Does Julia discover that her adherence to class structure is blocking her from finding true love with this smart, articulate, spiritual mechanic? Duh. Does she come riding in to help when Monty's Gorgon of an ex-wife, Jennifer (Tasha Smith), attempts to spirit them away? Obviously, though you wouldn't know that since I haven't mentioned the custody subplot yet. But it's that kind of movie.

Of course, church figures in there - this is a Tyler Perry movie - but not as organically as it does in his previous films, nor with the same functionality. In essence, the church exists as a place for Monty to hear sermons that comment on his situation and form something of an echo chamber for his conscience; there isn't the same "trust in Christ and all is well" moralising that rounded out both Madea's Family Reunion and Diary of a Mad Black Woman, which is probably for the best, given how dramatically unsound it left both of those scripts. No, the moralising here is largely secular, and largely self-defeating, given that every single clarion call for black dignity (which I hope we can all agree is a good thing) is nestled inside the context of racial stereotypes that wouldn't have felt out of place in a particularly lazy '30s movie, if you could depict hookers and druglords in a '30s movie (which of course you could, but not, like, really).

I did mention, at one point, that I wasn't going to go too far down the rabbit hole of race theory in this retrospective, being as I am, basically, the whitest white person ever (the "herbal tea and Beethoven before bed" kind of white). But it's just so damn fascinating to see it working in this film, right there on the surface; Tyler Perry remains a wildly unsubtle filmmaker, but where the first two Madea pictures are little more than tragicomic morality plays with the delicacy of a sack of bricks, Daddy's Little Girls is legitimately trying to dig into some complex sociology that 40 years of post-Civil Rights Era thought hasn't been able to make sense of, and seeing a filmmaker of Perry's arch-populist bent try to get his head around that is sublimely weird just in its failure. Once again, he failed here to actually make a movie that was effective at its stated goals, but the mess left behind is infinitely more captivating for its outrageous ungainliness than a great many more proficient filmmakers have ever been able to manage.

OBVIOUSLY

2012-01-25T23:44:00.004-06:00

The first thing is, the accusations that Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is exploitative 9/11 porn, while true, miss the point. That particular bed had already been shat in by the horrendous 2005 source novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, which leaves only the argument that, well then, maybe they shouldn't have made the book into a movie. Also true, and also missing the point, because they did. To be fair, the film is a lot better than the book, or at least (and this is close enough to the same thing), more tolerable than the book. This is at least partially because Foer does, in fact, have ideas and talent and a keen sense of inventive formalism, which he persistently used in the worst imaginable way in his sophomore novel, making it not just irritating, but irritating in a splashy, gimmicky way. The film's screenwriter, Eric Roth, is a hack of the first order, whose chief and only gimmick is to turn everything he touches into Forrest Gump; thus does the script never really have a chance to delve into anything as luminously misjudged as the book, except sometimes when Roth takes Foer's suffocatingly fussy prose and uses it, intact, for the main character's constant voiceover. Because of course there's fucking voiceover.

At any rate, calling EL&IC 9/11 porn is well and good: and the film opens on its absolute worst gesture in that direction, as a man falling from the World Trade Center that day, as we will soon enough gather if we can't guess from the start, is framed by director Stephen Daldry rather uncomfortably like the title character in the opening shots of the filmmaker's debut feature, Billy Elliot, which was, as you may have forgotten, not about people jumping to their deaths following a terrorist attack, and using the whole slow-motion, falling-in-space, context-free thing to open this movie is easily the most nauseating decision Daldry and crew make along the way; but on the whole, it's no more obnoxious than it might be, and it at least skips out on ending with the same wildly tacky gesture that the book did. Besides, what EL&IC does to 9/11 isn't half as misjudged as what Daldry's last film, The Reader, did to the Holocaust, so I vote for taking what little restraint and refinement we can get when we get it.

So, the movie tells us of a 10-ish-year-old boy, Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn, discovered during Kids Week on Jeopardy), whose father died on what he insistently refers to as "the worst day". Now, in life, Thomas Schell (played in the copious flashbacks by Tom Hanks) was a wonderfully happy sort of father who tried to encourage his maybe-autistic son to go out and experience the world by means of all sorts of elaborate scavenger hunts. When, a year after the attacks, Oskar finally gins up the courage to go inside his father's long-abandoned closet, he stumbles across a key in a ceramic jar, with the word "BLACK" written on the envelope, and concludes that he has just taken the first step into his father's last game; in short order, he is off on a journey through the five boroughs of New York to find everyone with the surname Black, and ask if they knew his father or the key, in the process revealing the unity of a city still recovering from its greatest modern trauma, and reveling in its great cross-section of humanity.

That's the idea, anyway. In practice, EL&IC is too emotionally bullying and manipulative to feel like anything other than an endurance test for people who, for whatever reason, don't want to have things like a weepy Viola Davis (as sad Abby Black, first of Oskar's victims) or Sandra Bullock (wasted as Oskar's mom, a role that a cardboard standee with a tape recorder could have played) cue us to understand that... wait for it... now is when you're meant to start sobbing and have meaningful revelations about how we're all connected and family is love and blah blah puke. It is unbearably shameless - in comparison to Daldry's maudlin piling on of forced, melodramatic signposts, a tearjerker like War Horse seems about as warm as a Bresson picture. And while I've already said that I wouldn't go into the 9/11 thing... I mean, hell, there's such a thing as using the imagery of that day tastefully and purposefully, and then there's smacking the viewer with it like a 2x4 to the head (a late shot that visually mirrors the collapse of the first tower to Oksar swooning is particularly galling).

The problem is mainly than Daldry doesn't understand subtlety, neither emotionally, nor in any aspect of his directorial style (I recall The Hours, which looks more accomplished with every new project he releases, but still has a bad case of being too suffocatingly over-worked for its own good). Not one cut, not one sound cue, not one camera angle can go by, without being insisted upon in the most garish, obvious way; there is no moment that can't be overblown into the most wearying assault on the ears and eyes. Particularly his handling of poor Horn, who is probably not a naturally gifted actor like Billy Elliot's Jamie Bell was and continues to be, but isn't helped at all by direction that encourages him to load up on showy tics and keeps thrusting him into close-ups where he can't do much but furrow his brow and grimace like a parody of a 1915 silent movie.

It's a horribly tricky part, anyway, given that it's the keystone of the entire film's emotional landscape, and written to be almost deliberately unsympathetic (hard to say, on that last one; it could just be that Foer has no idea how not to make a 9-year-old with Asperger's sound just like himself, and the movie blithely follows suit). Of course Oskar has to be alienating; he has to have Asperger's in order to be emotionally blocked-off, and he has to be emotionally blocked-off in order to serve as a thunderously ham-fisted metaphor for post-9/11 New York (post-9/11 everywhere else is not a place the film is concerned with exploring). But there can be delicacy in all things; there is a right way to play this, perhaps like Haley Joel Osment in the opening scenes of A.I. What we get instead is basically Rain Man played by Jake Lloyd's Anakin Skywalker.

Really, though, nobody's terribly good in the film; Horn just suffers the most because he's in virtually every scene. Hanks is outlandish and quirky and wholly irritating; newly-minted Oscar nominee Max von Sydow is just sort of there; Viola Davis is sleepwalking; Jeffrey Wright is probably the strongest person we ever see, but he gets one whole scene, and half of it is in mute flashbacks. Chris Menges's cinematography is soft-focused to the point of self-parody; Alexandre Desplat's score is an unusually syrupy Koyaanisqatsi knock-off. There's nothing anywhere in the film's rushed but still deadening 129 minutes that isn't forced and obvious and cloying, and it is probably most interesting for giving Daldry the status of having directed the worst Best Picture nominee in two different years, the kind of achievement not seen very often since people like Sam Wood and Mervyn LeRoy stopped making pictures.

4/10

TYLER PERRY: MADEA'S FAMILY REUNION (2006)

2012-01-24T23:43:00.003-06:00

Diary of a Mad Black Woman made a lot of money. Like, a whole lot, particularly relative to how much it did not cost to make. If one is in the position of a Lions Gate executive, and one has just released a film that cost practically nothing, and made a huge amount, what does one do? Obviously, make sure the exact same thing happens over and over again, which is why Tyler Perry, the come-from-nowhere hero who brought black evangelical Christian message movies and staggeringly unconvincing drag to American multiplexes, was given a swell contract to keep cranking out movies based on his series of hugely successful plays (which at that point already ran to seven entries). At the same time, a bunch of other studios perked up and noticed that Lions Gate and The Tyler Perry Company had scrounged up a whole new marketing segment, full of something called "black people", who had the temerity to want to see movies in which the protagonist were not twentysomething Caucasian males, throwing out over one hundred years of conventional wisdom, in which everybody wants to see movies about white guys, because that's that the white guys who make all the movies felt like making.

It was a brave new world.

The first of Perry's films under this new deal came out one year after Diary, setting a precedent for February releases that has not only held for Perry's films, but for most movies pitched at an urban audience - I assume we all know what "urban" is a euphemism for in marketing circles, and also that the assy hinterlands of late winter are a fine time for dumping urban movies into theaters, but when the real money starts rolling in, that's when it's time for people like Ryan Reynolds and Bradley Cooper to do what they do.* I will refrain from going to far into that rabbit hole; we have a lot of retrospective to go, yet.

The point being, the second Perry film, Madea's Family Reunion, based upon the third play in the Madea cycle, is actually the first that he directed, and there has not since then been a Tyler Perry script directed by anyone else (nor, barring a fucking strange cameo in the 2009 Star Trek reboot, has he acted under anyone else's guidance to this point; this will have changed by the end of 2012). It suggests many things, one of which is that the chief problem with Diary was indeed that its director, Darren Grant, lacked Perry's innate understanding of how best to handle the peculiar tonal shifts of Perry's screenplay; at any rate, Family Reunion is altogether the better film. At the same time, Perry's own performance of the titular Mabel "Madea" Simmons, doyenne of sass and the constant threat of gun violence, is also a hell of a lot better, so it can't all be to his credit that the new film is better than the first. At any rate, the screenplay isn't in any particular way stronger (it is, in some key ways, worse), so it can't be that, either.

Leaving that aside for the moment, the film tells another story of a woman trapped in a horrible, abusive relationship, who escapes to the comforting arms of Madea, who sagely advises her that the best response is to burn the holy shit out of her attacker. A very satisfying notion, undoubtedly, I remain befuddled by how someone as aggressively unchurched and vengeful as Madea can be made into the lesson-dispensing centerpiece of an entire cinematic/theatrical universe pivoting on the precept, "let go, let God", though this paradox is less script-breaking here than in Diary, by virtue of Madea not being such an enraged monster from the Id, slicing her way through couches with a chainsaw and waving a gun at ever homind shape she encounters. The gun is still there, sure, but it doesn't go off so many times.

So, the ingredients that make this one different: a much bigger cast and more plots, for a start. The title comes from the fact that Madea is busily trying to arrange a huge reunion of all the dozens and dozens of Simmonses in Atlanta, and while this is happening, she's obliged to help with a number of crises: her granddaughter Lisa (Rochelle Aytes), the fiancée of the very, very nasty Carlos (Blair Underwood) is one of them, as is Lisa's sister Vanessa (Lisa Arrindell Anderson), currently living with Madea and surly, flatulent Uncle Joe (Perry, role #2) with her two young children, and fretting in all sorts of neurotic ways about how to keep them safe, while also fighting her attraction to handsome bus driver Frankie (Boris Kodjoe). For her part, Madea is presently taking care of a foster child, Nikki (Keke Palmer), forced on her by court order as a result of her breaking house arrest in Diary - and incidentally, I had no idea that there was anything resembling continuity between the Madea pictures, and I am delighted to learn that I was wrong.

Madea is the title character, and the sun around which the plot orbits, but she is not the focus; ultimately, the story is mostly about the separate tales of Lisa and Vanessa, and how they are slowly drawn together as both girls learn to deal with their mother Victoria (Lynn Whitfield), who is unbelievably evil. I mean that literally. It turns out that she has, essentially, sold Lisa to Carlos in exchange for keeping her wealthy and him out of prison - whatever secrets they hold on each other are left undisclosed, but you can tell that it must be awful by the way the cluck and plot and flirt gleefully with one another in the ripe delight of their own viciousness, like Edmund and Goneril done by Cecil B. DeMille. And this is by far the nicest thing Victoria does to her daughters.

I would love to know what in the hell goes on in Perry's mind, that he can only think to construct a drama around three types of characters: sensitive, romantic women with dormant Christian morals that only need the love of a good man to be roused; depraved monsters of greed and abuse; and shrieking comic harpies that wear dresses and enormous comic fake boobs but do not, in any way, resemble women who actually exist in the real world. There's more to it than that, of course; there are many supporting players, including ones played by Maya Angelou and Cicely Tyson (a repeat of her Diary character), the latter of whom gets a gigantic monologue near the end that comes from nowhere at all, but is staged and performed with the most glorious heightened excess; I will confess that as batshit as it was in the context of the plot, the moment worked, if only because Tyson and Perry so obviously believed in it, tortured gesticulations and all.

That, as it happens, is my chief takeaway from Madea's Family Reunion: Tyler Perry is a horrible writer and confusing director whose films are weirdly magnetic anyway, because he throws himself into everything he's doing 100% (I will admit to reading ahead a bit, but this is a good place to start developing a thesis). The comparison between this film and Diary is useful, because at heart they are basically the same narrative (wronged woman gets revenge, both physical and material, on her evil rich significant other; everybody is saved by recognising the healing power of Christ except for Madea, who would, if she met Jesus, almost certainly pull a gun on Him, and is nevertheless our hero and icon); both suffer from impossible characters drawn in the crudest, most straightforward This Is Good and That Is Wicked dichotomies imaginable; both blend ridiculous melodrama with even more ridiculous drag and fart humor. But Madea's Family Reunion is miles better - no, scratch that, miles more watchable; it is still not good. It is not good, though, in bold, weird ways, and while the dysfunctional script in Diary of a Mad Black Woman, married to slack direction, resulted in a shrill, unappealing mess, the dysfunctional script and operatically excessive direction of Madea's Family Reuntion land someplace closer to outsider art than bad moviedom.

Perry may not know his way around a camera, and he may have absolutely no shred of style - unless combustively awful day-for-night counts as "style" - but he has passion, and he turns that onto his actors, who even at their most ludicrous (primarily Lynn Whitfield, who is called upon to play a wicked mother too outrageous for the standards of a Disney princess film) have a warped conviction that virtually nobody in Diary possessed; and there is, of course, Perry's own performance, which dials down the craziness and dials up, of all things, the gravitas of his central matriarch, as though a 6'5" woman with an Adam's apple, a bad wig, and rubber tits could possibly possess gravitas. Of course she can't; but since Perry doesn't know that, he goes right on and acts as though she could. The results are spectacularly weird; but it puts something across regardless, and whether that's the thing Perry wanted to communicate, I cannot say. The film may be too garish to play as a moral lesson, but its pageant-like approach to family history and intense sincerity somehow feels more compelling, if far less persuasive, than a sedate, rational approach to the same material would have. It is, in fact, a bit like Madea: hardly credible as a source of wisdom, but so horrifyingly unique that you hang on its every word, regardless.

SOME THOUGHTS OF A NOMINATION MORNING

2012-01-24T09:07:00.010-06:00

So, now we know what the bizarre new rules end up doing, and all the other things that were such big question marks for so long. And now the only stage of the three-month Awards Season that actually matters can begin in earnest.

Below, my thoughts on these categories, so far as I can have them at an hour before I am accustomed to being away or in any other way functional, along with my 100% non-binding gut reaction predictions for what I expect to end up winning on February 26.

For those interested in such things, of the 118 nominations I predicted, 83 came to pass; or if you roll that way, 74 of 103 not including the three short categories. One cannot express this as a straight percentage, because of those naughty Best Picture and Best Song categories, where I missed the correct number of eventual nominees. I consider this to be an unsatisfactory, but not screamingly embarrassing, record. In the Big 8, I went an awful 33/44.

Best Picture
The Artist
The Descendants
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
War Horse

Will Win: The Artist

My predictions: 6/9, though I only predicted 7 total
Missed: Extremely Loud, War Horse (one of my alternates), Tree of Life (another one of my alternates)

Was anyone predicting 9? I mean, golly. And for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, too, which absolutely nobody was predicting anymore. I cannot have an opinion, given that I am seeing the film just this very afternoon, but it seems like a dubious choice. Meanwhile, I am fucking over the moon that my Tree of Life managed to scramble in there.

Best Director
Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
Alexander Payne The Descendants
Martin Scorsese, Hugo

Will Win: Michel Hazanavicius

My predictions: 5/5

No real surprises there, but did anybody watching notice how not in any particular order they announced the names? For a second, it seemed like Allen missed out. Once again, the mere fact of Malick is enough to keep me excited in a slate that really pretty much covers the whole gamut of possibilities, quality-wise

Best Actor
Demián Bichir, A Better Life
George Clooney, The Descendants
Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Brad Pitt, Moneyball

Will Win: Brad Pitt

My predictions: 3/5
Missed: Bichir, Oldman

Gary Oldman is surely a nice surprise, the best one we got in the acting categories. I guess the time has come to finally watch that A Better Life screener that I have been studiously avoiding for two months now. This is, as it has been, a death match between Pitt and Clooney, and it's hard to get very excited about it beyond that.

Best Actress
Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs
Viola Davis, The Help
Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn

Will Win: Viola Davis

My predictions: 4/5
Missed: Close (my alternate)

Poor Tilda. Maybe she just needs to make another George Clooney movie, the challenging arthouse route clearly isn't going to get her there. Anyway, no real thoughts other than that last year, this category was just about as great as it has been for my entire life, and now it's pretty much solely up to my girl Viola to class up an otherwise unimpressive slate of well-meant mediocrity. Hey, just like she did in The Help!

Best Supporting Actor
Kenneth Branagh, My Week with Marilyn
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Nick Nolte, Warrior
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Max von Sydow, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Will Win: Christopher Plummer

My predictions: 4/5
Missed: von Sydow

Poor Albert Brooks. That role fit in so nicely with this category's recent history, too (evil guy played in a weirdly heroic way). When people were clamoring for a surprise in this category, I don't think von Sydow was what we had in mind, but again, I haven't seen it. Hard to complain about Branagh, Nolte, or Plummer, anyway, all doing damn steady, less than career-best work.

Best Supporting Actress
Bérénice Bejo, The Artist
Jessica Chastain, The Help
Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs
Octavia Spencer, The Help

Will Win: Jessica Chastain

My predictions: 4/5
Missed: McTeer (my alternate)

May I be petty? I am extraordinarily happy that Shailene Woodley didn't get a "welcome to Hollywood, here's your Oscar" nod for doing absolutely nothing interesting in The Descendants. A perfectly fine set of five women doing sturdy work, and my quick estimate calls this the best overall acting slate this year.

Best Adapted Screenplay
The Descendants, by Nat Faxon, Alexander Payne & Jim Rash
Hugo, by John Logan
The Ides of Marc, by George Clooney & Grant Heslov and Beau Willmon
Moneyball, by Stan Chervin and Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, by Bridget O'Connor & Peter Straughan

Will Win: The Descendants

My predictions: 4/5
Missed: Ides of March

I have a friend who had a heart attack and died at that Ides nomination. My condolences to his boyfriend and parents. Me, I'm not so put out, mostly because it's still the best George Clooney vehicle in the running. Nothing here is a shock, though Tinker Tailor is far and away the only title here that I feel very happy about inside.

Best Original Screenplay
The Artist, by Michel Hazanavicius
Bridesmaids, by Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig
Margin Call, by J.C. Chandoor
Midnight in Paris, by Woody Allen
A Separation, by Asghar Farhadi

Will Win: The Artist

My predictions: 3/5
Missed: Margin Call, A Separation

I know that people were predicting it, but I was absolutely not primed for the Separation nod. When they said, "Asghar Farhadi", a scream of joy went up in the Brayton home that freaked out my cat rather nicely. Of course it has no chance in hell of winning, but if it gets even one extra person to see the film, the Academy has done God's work. Best non-Tree of Life moment of the day.

A far, far better slate than Adapted, as is usually the case.

Best Cinematography
The Artist (Guillaume Schiffman)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Jeff Cronenweth)
Hugo (Robert Richardson)
The Tree of Life (Emmanuel Lubezki)
War Horse (Janusz Kaminski)

Will Win: The Artist

My predictions: 5/5

Whoever ends up beating Lubezki, I hope they have the class to be gracious about it. This is, admittedly, one of the pretty slates in recent memory, though it is matched by being awfully dull (seriously, War Horse is about as nonspecific as any of the Kaminski/Spielberg collaborations outside of maybe The Terminal, which was at least a technical challenge).

Best Editing
The Artist (Anne-Sophie Bion & Michel Hazanavicius)
The Descendants (Kevin Tent)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Kirk Baxter & Angus Wall)
Hugo (Thelma Schoonmaker)
Moneyball (Christopher Tellefsen)

Will Win: The Artist

My predictions: 4/5
Missed: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Of all the places where War Horse was probably weak, this isn't the one I actually thought it would miss out. Michael Kahn is, like, Michael Kahn. Regardless, it's hard to get all that exercised about a category that so often plays as "Best Picture Gets Another Oscar", and to point out that e.g. The Descendants is not in any way compellingly cut together in a year that The Tree of Life and Margaret, to name two of many possibilities, both existed.

Best Art Direction
The Artist (Laurence Bennett; Robert Gould)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Stuart Craig; Stephenie McMillan)
Hugo (Dante Ferretti; Francesca Lo Schiavo)
Midnight in Paris (Anne Seibel; Hélène Dubreuil)
War Horse (Rick Carter; Lee Sandales)

Will Win: Hugo

My predictions: 4/5
Missed: Midnight in Paris

If I had to pick the one I thought was vulnerable, it sure as hell would have been War Horse. That is true of many categories this morning, actually. In retrospect, though, this was an easy get for Midnight. As for the rest of it: a pretty obvious set, no real clinkers, and dismayingly "more"-ish, as is typical of this category.

Best Costume Design
Anonymous (Lisy Christl)
The Artist (Mark Bridges)
Hugo (Sandy Powell)
Jane Eyre (Michael O'Connor)
W.E. (Arianne Phillips)

Will Win: Hugo

My predictions: 5/5

Wait, I seriously went 5/5 here? Y'all, W.E. was kind of a joke. I haven't seen the film, so there's that, but... wow. Also: Oscar Nominated Film About That Murdering, Drunken Glover's Son. I can just see the DVD cover now.

Best Makeup
Albert Nobbs
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
The Iron Lady

Will Win: The Iron Lady

My predictions: 2/3
Missed: Albert Nobbs

Shit. I had that set of three until less than two hours before publishing my predictions. So now we know, failing entirely to make Janet McTeer look like a man (it's as glaring a make-up flaw, in its own way, as the mummification of Armie Hammer in J. Edgar) can net you an Oscar nomination.

Best Score
The Adventures of Tintin (John Williams)
The Artist (Ludovic Bource)
Hugo (Howard Shore)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Alberto Iglesias)
War Horse (John Williams)

Will Win: War Horse

My predictions: 4/5
Missed: Tinker Tailor

All in all, it's a touch on the obvious side other than Iglesias, whose really fine work never took center stage but added so much to the texture of the movie. I also really do kind of love the Tintin score, and The Artist is damned impressive as a feat of endurance, even if it's not the most stirring bit of music to come down the block. A solid enough set, I guess.

Best Song
From The Muppets: "Man or Muppet"
From Rio: “Real in Rio"

Will Win: "Man or Muppet"

My predictions: 0/2, I had predicted 3
Missed: The whole damn thing

Would somebody please remind me why this award is given out?

Best Sound Mixing
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
Moneyball
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
War Horse

Will Win: War Horse

My predictions: 2/5
Missed: Girl w/Dragon, Hugo, Moneyball

No real surprise there - the second that the Cinema Audio Society announced their nomination, I knew that I'd completely muffed this category in my predictions. Maybe not quite in this direction (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), but what goes on in the sound branch's head during nominations is one of the odder mysteries of the Oscars.

Best Sound Editing
Drive
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
War Horse

Will Win: War Horse

My predictions: 2/5
Missed: Drive, Girl w/Dragon, Hugo

Case in point. This is the sole nomination for Drive?

Best Visual Effects
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
Hugo
Real Steel
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Will Win: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

My predictions: 4/5
Missed: Real Steel

Real Steel. Oscar Nominee Real Steel. Not Tree of Life. Not Captain America. Not even Pirates: On Stranger Tides. Real Steel.

...at least it's not the song from motherfucking Rio.

Best Animated Feature
A Cat in Paris
Chico & Rita
Kung Fu Panda 2
Puss in Boots
Rango

Will Win: Rango

My predictions: 3/5
Missed: A Cat in Paris, Chico & Rita

Never would I ever have guessed they'd plump for two weird little foreign nominees, but at least it kept Rio or Cars 2 - Pixar's first snub! - from getting any traction. Meanwhile, even though 3/5 is nothing at all to crow about, I am satisfied to have been so relatively alone in calling the Tintin snub.

Best Foreign Language Film
Bullhead (Belgium)
Footnote (Israel)
In Darkness (Poland)
Monsieur Lazhar (Canada)
A Separation (Iran)

Will Win: In Darkness

My predictions: 4/5
Missed: Bullhead

I've seen precisely one of these, and it's a work of consummate genius. I will not speak of the category otherwise, for fear of saying anything spectacularly ignorant.

Best Documentary
Hell and Back Again
If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
Pina
Undefeated

Will Win: Pina

My predictions: 2/5
Missed: If a Tree Falls, Pina, Undefeated (my alternate)

The Project Nim snub actually makes sense, and here's why: no filmmaker who isn't named Michael Moore has ever been nominated in this category after winning it. Also, Project Nim isn't, like, all that great, though it is way the hell better than If a Tree Falls. I haven't seen most of this category, so I shouldn't say anything else at present.

Best Documentary Short Subject
"The Barber of Birmingham"
"God is the Bigger Elvis"
"Incident in New Baghdad"
"Saving Face"
"The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom"

Will Win: "Saving Face"

My predictions: 3/5
Missed: "God is the Bigger Elvis", "Saving Face" (my alternate)

There's not really a whole hell of a lot you can say about the short categories, when you haven't seen any of the nominees.

Best Live-Action Short Subject
"Pentecost"
"Raju"
"The Shore"
"Time Freak"
"Tuba Atlantic"

Will Win: "Pentecost"

My predictions: 2/5
Missed: "Raju", "The Shore", "Tuba Atlantic"

Ditto.

Best Animated Short Subject
"Dimanche"
"The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore"
"La Luna"
"A Morning Stroll"
"Wild Life"

Will Win: "La Luna"

My predictions: 4/5
Missed: "Dimanche" (my alternate)

Double ditto.

GIRLFIGHT

2012-01-23T23:32:00.000-06:00

Steven Soderbergh has, for a while now, been conducting experiments and going through exercises, more than he's been making actual, functioning movies. Some of us find this unbearably exciting, and some of us are turned off by it. I find it unbearably exciting, and that's why I loved the living hell out of Haywire (a film he actually shot before his last feature, Contagion), which calls itself an action thriller, and this will have to do in lieu of a better tag; it is however, more of an anti-action movie, to comfortably sit on the shelf next to the director's anti-biopic Che, anti-character study The Girlfriend Experience, and anti-docudrama The Informant! (which doubles, conveniently, as an anti-farce). Which is to say, that even though it is filled with a great many fight sequences, most of them long and inventive, the overwhelming impression the film leaves is of grubby, quiet interiors and not so much of the hot chick kicking ass that the advertising promised and the studio executives clearly hope to trick people into paying money to see - not since The American has a film so conspicuously failed to be a conventional thriller. It's more like Kill Bill filtered through The Limits of Control, which is obviously going to charm a whole lot fewer people than most other combinations.

It is the third film, the first in over twelve years, to unite Soderbergh with writer Lem Dobbs; the last time they did this, the result was The Limey, which tells us something of the neighborhood we're in, tonally and thematically, though I will point out immediately that Haywire isn't is good as its predecessor, which remains one of the two or three best entries in the director's overstuffed CV, nor do I expect Haywire to match its achievement in having the all-time best DVD audio commentary, featuring a director and screenwriter just about ready to jump off their chairs and get into a knife fight (and this, maybe, is why they haven't collaborated again in over a decade). Like The Limey, Haywire plays with chronology (though not to nearly the same degree); it is again a meditation on its genre rather than being a full-throated example of said genre; it relies to an inordinate degree on casting to get the desired effect out of characters, not because of the performances involved, but simply due to the actors involved; it is color-coded (in blues, yellows, and greys), not in the programmatic narrative manner of Traffic, but according to the emotional tenor of the scene; it is edited in an unconventional manner that seems really damn weird and maybe even film-breaking, except that it seems so entirely pointed and deliberate; without violating spatial or chronological continuity, the film nevertheless doesn't care a whit about traditional continuity editing; one might be inclined to wonder how editor Mary Ann Bernard thought she could get away with it, if she wasn't Soderbergh's own pseudonym (same for Peter Andrews, the film's nonexistent cinematographer; the gorgeous shabby-chic cinematography isn't quite as peculiar as the editing, though some of the compositions are intensely strange).

What's going on, if I don't miss my guess, is that the dialogue scenes are being edited like they were fight scenes. "And the fight scenes are edited like dialogue scenes!" would be the right way to round that out, but it's not the case; they're being edited like fight scenes, too, and very well-edited fight scenes at that, with the cuts landing in time to the kicks and punches, creating a sort of visual music of physical brutality. Such brutality! Haywire has some of the most uncomfortably fleshy action sequences in recent memory (though not half so violent as to justify the movie's befuddling R-rating), with coffee pots and flat screen televisions and car windows breaking in ways guaranteed to make all but the most strong-willed wince, aided by a soundscape that rather pointedly refuses to glamorise the fights with a musical score, in favor of a heightened Foley landscape of gut-wrenching snaps and cracks and thuds.

And the fight scenes are helped even more by the fact that the lead player, Gina Carano, is not a professional actor but a MMA champion doing all her own stunts, and being unusually convincing about it. If the film is an exercise, as Soderbergh films tend to be, the chief nature of that exercise lies in fashioning an entire movie around a non-actor, tailoring everything about the project to her particular strengths and weaknesses. It is probably not an accident that the first person she interacts with is Channing Tatum, one of the few relatively important movie stars who can be reliably trusted to give a worse performance than an untested newbie; nor that the rest of an over-packed cast of faces like Ewan MacGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, and Michael Fassebender really cneeds them to be just that: faces, instantly recognisable because they are celebrities, but not required to otherwise do anything (in this respect, more even than its experimental relationship to action cinema, it especially feels like a successor to The Limits of Control). It is the kind of film where Bill Paxton shows up as the protagonist's father, and we think "wow, Bill Paxton, what was the last thing he did?" and it seems perversely to be the case that the film anticipates that this would be our response. Anyway, the point of all this seemingly unnecessary stunt casting is to surround Carano with such a weirdly over-qualified group of people that our ability to properly gauge the quality of any of the acting in the film is short-circuited for 93 minutes; because, heck, if Michael Fassbender is really doing nothing more than Channing Tatum, than who knows anything for certain?

So, the action is exciting, and the non-action is strangely electric because of its refusal to settle down, and the look of the thing, with its color-coding extensively followed through the sets and costumes in addition to the lighting, is eye-catching without being obvious. Which leaves us with the script, and another chance for Soderbergh to break Dobb's screenplay all out of sanity. This time, at least, Dobbs appears to be in on the game, given that he structures the script using flashbacks (Carano's character, a private sector spy and government contractor who has been sold out by her boss, tells the whole story to a hapless diner patron played by Michael Angrano as they drive into the wilderness) that don't explain the nest of twists and double-crosses so much as they parody their own complexity. At one point, Mallory - for that is the name of our contractor - asks her pathetic little traveling companion if he's following her story, and his attempt to recap it reveal him to be quite a pleasant audience surrogate, trying to juggle far too many details that don't fit together properly yet. The resolution is dropped on us so quickly and fleetly as to almost not register (by that point, anyway, we're either too invested in the minute-to-minute beats of the action to care, or we've checked out of the movie past the point that it's ever going to capture our attention). And throughout, there's a sardonic little sense of humor (the final line, which calls back to the first line, is the best example; another is Mallory's explanation for how her companion can mend her arm) that shows that Dobbs doesn't really take any of this more seriously than Soderbergh does.

Haywire is, admittedly, ephemeral; it is an action movie made at the scale of a chamber drama, with characters shallow even by the standards of a thriller. The degree to which this is a critique of the tropes its playing with, and the degree to which it's simply an attempt to do those tropes in a new way, is hard to pin down; but either way, the sleek weirdness of its style means that it's a fairly unique beast. An exercise it may be, but exercises can be wonderful entertaining things; and while I know that I say this as a dyed in the wool Soderbergh junkie, I won't be at all surprised if this ephemeral, lighthearted bit of stylistic experimentation and non-acting ends up in my year-end best-of calculations; to be frank, I'd be more surprised if it didn't.

9/10

BANISH PLUMP JACK, AND BANISH ALL THE WORLD

2012-01-23T15:42:00.000-06:00

There are a whole lot of films based on the plays of William Shakespeare - some of them aren't even Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet - and the great majority of them are bad. Alright, "bad" is a strong word: some of them are bad, such as George Cukor's stillborn 1936 Romeo and Juliet that tries to put over a 34-year-old Norma Shearer and 43-year-old Leslie Howard as the dazzled star-crossed lovers, or Kenneth Branagh's criminally misconceived As You Like It from 2006. The vast majority of them are just prestigiously dull mediocrities, with the stand-outs tending be the ones that significantly re-conceive the play down to its very language (Kurosawa's Ran, from King Lear, or Forbidden Planet, from The Tempest), or the ones that are exercises in their own style rather than the actual matter of the play (Julie Taymor's Titus, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet), or the ones that are from some other planet entirely (Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books).

Occasionally, though, you'll stumble across a cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare that is at once faithful to the source material and a genuinely effective piece of cinema; films that can navigate the archaic diction and verse, the staging conventions of Elizabethan drama, and the psychological gulf of 400 years without sacrificing realism or artistry. Laurence Olivier's Henry V is one of these; so is Roman Polanski's Macbeth. Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet has its share of passionate defenders, whose point I see even if I am not among them.

But the best of these "realistic" adaptations, and indeed the best Shakespearean film ever,* by my lights, is 1965's Chimes at Midnight, one of the last features completed by the benighted genius Orson Welles during the torturous European exile phase of his career. It is a combination of four plays: primarily a condensation of the matter of Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2, with a little bit of Richard II to provide context at the beginning and a little bit of Henry V to round off the plot that Shakespeare himself left on a cliffhanger. In this respect, it is the only theatrical version of any of the history plays outside of Richard III or Henry V filmed to date; a significant pity, given that the two Henry IV plays are indisputably better than the former, and at least the equal to the latter, which is their sequel.

In point of fact, though, Chimes at Midnight isn't even that; it's actually all of the scenes featuring the drunken scoundrel of a knight, Sir John Falstaff, with just enough of the historical drama left in to keep the whole thing hanging together. Sort of Henry IV: Only the Best Parts, then, and a miracle of condensation it is too, given that fat old Jack Falstaff is one of the great characters in English literature, and instead of getting some two hours of his blustering and pontificating and robustness in the midst of five hours of warfare and politicking, we just get those two hours, like a hit of pure cocaine. It is, I think, a change that the populist Shakespeare would have welcomed (he wrote a third Falstaff play, the godawful Merry Wives of Windsor, so we know he wasn't above whoring himself to give audiences all the drunken pratfalls they could possibly want to pay for).

This change in material allows Welles to significantly reconfigure the dramatic focus: from the movements of armies and countries to the relationship between a dissolute old man and the only person in the whole world he truly loves, a callow young boy who happens to the Prince of Wales. Their relationship has always been the beating heart of the Henriad, but by cutting out everything extraneous to that main narrative arc, Welles turns a political history into a personal tragicomedy, one that is far more enthralling, entertaining, piercing, and heartbreaking than it would be buried in the midst of all that chatter about events that the average filmgoer in the 1960s wouldn't have been able to place comfortably within 200 years.

It gives Welles the role of a lifetime to play (well, duh, he played it: a famous egotist and prickly auteur, failing to give himself one of the classically great roles? You jest), a compression of the whole gamut of Falstaff into a dense pack with nothing to distract us from the character or the actor, and Welles, it must be said, nails it. Even "nails it" is underselling it. I speak from a position of admitted ignorance, having not seen all of the multiple hundred film and TV versions of Shakespeare, but I can see this much without any hesitation: Welles's Falstaff is the single best filmed performance of any Shakespearean character I can name. And it's not by a very small margin, either. Obviously, that's partially because the very role is such a gift; unlike Hamlet, whose play-defining ambiguity makes it impossible for any single performance to "solve" the part, Falstaff's loud, domineering personality constantly guides the actor down a certain path; there is, more often than not, exactly one way that is obviously right to deliver every single line, and Welles finds them all.

Which isn't to say that it's a lazy or obvious performance, or that the results aren't still incredible: watching the actor's quiet glances, the unguarded moments seen only by the camera where he reveals to us just how much he understands about every other character, is to see film acting at its best, subdued in ways that a theater performance could never be. And even in his bigger, actorly moments, Welles is still a pleasure: his tired recitation of the famous "honor" soliloquy (here wisely restaged as a harangue to an unlistening Prince Hal), his naked yearning to be loved in the moment when he defends his character while pantomiming the prince, his quicksilver streams of rampant bullshit when he's caught in a number of consecutive lies following a foiled robbery: it's hard to imagine a better screen interpretation of any of these moments, among the finest in English drama. The best, I think, is at the very end, following the newly-crowned Henry V's abjuration of the fat villain, when Welles masks his face in an unknowably mysterious half smile: is it shock, or a last conviction that Hal must be joking, or pride that he has raised up such a fine young king, or some combination of all three? It's the most flexible moment in the whole part, and Welles milks it for everything; leaving us open to be completely emotionally walloped by his subsequent line, the devastating-in-context "Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound".

On its own, a great performance of Falstaff would be enough to justify; he's a fantastic character, and deserves celluloid immortality. But Chimes at Midnight is an across-the-board masterpiece; Welles ranked it at the top of his own filmography, alongside The Trial, and while it suffers somewhat from the involuntary cheapness that marks all of his European movies - in particular, the dubbing is at times just a step above a Godzilla film, with multiple characters voiced by Welles himself - it's impossible to deny the artistry of one of the medium's great frustrated geniuses. The touch of the man behind Citizen Kane is fully evident in all the shadowboxes made out of the rustic Tudor interiors, with timbers jaggedly slicing across the frame and into the cozy atmosphere like some impossible marriage of German Expressionism and Thomas Kincade. Admittedly, cinematographer Edmond Richard was hardly Gregg Toland, but he was no slouch (his first feature was that same The Trial, as gorgeous as anything to come out of Europe in the 1960s), and there are some remarkable deep-focus shots all through the movie; among the most perfect are a pair that come late in the film, after Prince Hal has become King Henry V, and stands at the far end of a dark, moody throne room separated from the camera by a flock of adoring courtiers; shortly thereafter, this shot is answered by one of Falstaff in the same position in the frame, alone in the brightly lit but horribly empty main room of Mistress Quickly's tavern. Everything we need to know about the emotional stakes for the narrative end game is established in two quick strokes.

The contrast between the castle and the tavern is, in fact, one of the mainstays of the film's visual vocabulary, as Welles and Richard bathe the former in sheets of black, and move through with purposeful, angular tracking shots, while the latter is bright and crowded and the camera swoops in and out madly, moving fluidly but without obvious purpose; they even make use of hand-held cameras long before that had become a thing that people did just because. This isn't subtle: it's contrasting the iciness of the halls of power with the liveliness of Falstaff and his circle, establishing Welles and the film firmly on the side of criticism which holds that fat Jack, for all his obvious immorality and selfishness, is a vital force; he is representative of the drive to be happy and content with oneself, and to enjoy all that life has to offer. He is lust and lustiness, in its greedy sense but also in its broader, more humanist sense. And he is not, himself, a subtle figure, so it fits that he is not expressed in subtle visual language.

I could go on and on about the imagery in the film, and how very characteristic it is of Welles, one of the best visual storytellers America ever produced, but it would reek of fanboyism (one last thing: I adore his framing of the mid-film battle between Henry IV and Percy's armies, particularly a low-angle shot of Falstaff waddling out in full armor as soldiers stream around him; it is, in a very subdued way, a parody of the big historical war epics that had been so much in vogue for the last decade or so when the film was new). Suffice it to say that if I can't quite join Welles in esteeming it at the very top of the director's career, that is only because there are so many riches to choose from in that particular filmography; and I do, for the record, think that it's his best performance. And, for what it's worth, he's got quite a few good actors surrounding him, including a terrifically broad Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly, and John Gielgud "doing a Gielgud" as Henry IV. The surprising stand-out is Keith Baxter, whose career is littered with TV and movies nobody has ever heard of, knocking the role of Hal out of the park; it's arguably the trickiest role in the entire script, easy to play as a snotty teen or to read too much of the future Henry V into it, but Baxter finds a perfect note of filial affection and puffed-up regality, making a perfect foil to Welles at every moment.

As a period film, Chimes at Midnight looks as good as its budget could conceivably allow; it helps that there are surprisingly few locations, though it never feels that way thanks to the acrobatic cinematography. Angelo Francesco Lavagnino's score does a great job of setting the period tone as well, while keeping the mood upbeat - despite its bittersweet finale, Falstaff's tale is essentially comic, and that, too, is part of where the bright visuals and Welles's gigantic performance come in handy, making this, on top of everything else, the funniest Shakespearean movie I know of, although given how few of his comedies even get filmed, and how few of those can figure out how to make his humor work, this is not a tremendously difficult record to set.

It is, all in all, a masterpiece: of Wellesian camerawork and of '60s costume drama, of filmed Shakespeare and of Shakespearean acting. Why it remains so damn hard to see, I can't say; the limbo that has sucked up Welles's Othello apparently got this one as well, though his Macbeth - in my opinion, the least effective of his features - remains a fairly accessible way to see the director's approach to a different kind of Shakespeare altogether. Some day, maybe, Chimes at Midnight will be out in the open for all to enjoy; until then, let those who can scrounge it up be glad that they have the experience of both top-notch Shakespeare and top-notch filmmaking, a rare combination that, when it works, is like nothing else in the whole world.

GO BACK TO SLEEP, PLEASE

2012-01-20T23:07:00.000-06:00

Sometimes, we compare movies to fast food: usually McDonald's and usually in the context, "Some entertainment is like McDonald's - no damn good, but it's comforting to know what you're getting". This is a lazy comparison, but it has the benefit of being a really poppy image that anybody who's ever eaten at a McDonald's, which is all of us, can instantly grasp. There are, however, other fast food joints than McDonald's, which is, while undeniably not good is also not bad, not as much as it surely could be.

A few years ago, Taco Bell had a limited-time menu item called the Black Jack Taco. It was a shell dyed dark purple, filled with their normal meat-surrogate, as well as a pepper jack "cheese" sauce. Anybody could tell it was going to be a piece of shit, but at the time I lived three blocks from a Taco Bell, and sometimes when it is 1:00 in the morning you are hungry, and the McDonald's where gay prostitutes and drug dealers hang out* sounds like a bad deal, so you go to the Taco Bell. Sometimes you even do this sober, as I was when I decided, what the hell, I have to at least see what this Black Jack Taco is meant to be all about...

It was all about the single worst case of indigestion of my entire life, in the end, like someone was pelting me with softballs right in the gut for the next hour. Curiousity assuaged, I moved on with my life, until about two weeks later - in broad daylight this time, and still sober, I found myself wondering, "could it actually have been that bad?" And being committed to the scientific method, I tried another one, and found out that, in fact, it was worse - it was the goddamnedest bad thing I'd ever gotten at Taco Bell (at Taco Bell, I declare), and I should really, at some point, learn not to toy with powers of darkness that I do not comprehend. Undeterred, I went back a third time, just to see, because, Christ, you can't make something that bad and actually legally sell it in a food-vending establishment, can you? This is the industrialised world, for God's sake. Anyway, the promotion was over by that point, for which the last tattered shreds of my stomach lining will always be thankful.

Underworld: Awakening is that Black Jack Taco given cinematic form. I saw Underworld, the 2003 steel-blue/slate-grey Matrix knock-off that can think of nothing better to do with vampires and werewolves than have them fire guns at each other. I saw, too, Underworld: Evolution, the 2006 sequel that added to this mix a whole lot of unnecessarily complex mythology stating, in effect, "werewolves and vampires are destined to forever fight one another because OOH SHINY!". I saw Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, the 2009 prequel that narrowly remains the series low point by virtue of telling, in numbing detail, a story that was already quite clear thank you from the first two movies, with a worse cast than the others. And yet, armed with more than five and one-quarter hours of Underworld's unabashed shittiness, I still managed to waltz right into Awakening while brightly thinking to myself, "Maybe this one will be good, though! I mean, vampires vs. werewolves, that's a heckuva concept! And Kate Beckinsale wearing a leather catsuit tighter than her own skin!"

Well, yes, Beckinsale in tight leather, and her one-note performance is at any rate a welcome return to normalcy after sitting out the third movie except for a small cameo. No, she is no damn good, but she is at least bad in a way that feels like a cozy, organic part of the series' background insipidity. And she is pretty much the single reason to bother with Awakening, unless you miss the days when CGI sauntered up and announced its CGI-ness with a weightless, otherworldly sheen. And here, it's doing it in 3-D; really overwrought 3-D that serves mostly to make the effects look even worse, for when CGI fog covers Beckinsale's lady parts in a singularly unpersuasive way, it is merely stupid; when CGI fog does the same, while moving back and forth and, if I am not mistaken, right through Beckinsale, it is not only stupid, but contemptible.

The plot, worked up by series godfather and Mr. Beckinsale himself, Len Wiseman, along with three co-writers (including, weirdly, Autumn in New York scribe Allison Burnett, and sci-fi/comic icon J. Michael Straczynski), starts up somewhat after Evolution ended, with rogue vampire Selene (Beckinsale) and her half-vampire, half-werewolf lover, Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman, in a blindingly short stock-footage cameo) on the run from, not the vampires, and not the Lycans, as the werewolves are called her, but from humans. You see, now humans know about the vampire-Lycan war, and they've declared genocide on both races, which has not caused the centuries-old feud to simmer down in the slightest. No sooner is this set up than Selene and Michael are caught and tossed in a deep freeze, from which Selene awakes 12 years later, to find that both vampires and wolves have been reduced to a handful of scattered populations barely able to stay alive. Also, the hybrid who escapes along with her turns out not to be Michael, who we are assured by people who weren't there is dead, dead, dead (wink, sequel hook, good Jesus), but hers and Michael's three-quarters vampire, one-quarter Lycan daughter, Eve (India Eisley, who is 19 and looks 10). Conveniently, Selene can see through Eve's eyes and vice versa, which provided a decent plot hook and a better video game mechanic as Selene chases her daughter to a vampire coven where plot happens, and then to the headquarters of the Evil Pharmaceutical Company With A Secret, where plot also happens. In both places, Selene fights a ginormous Lycan mutant who is, by a huge margin, the most convincing CGI werewolf the series has yet bestowed on us.

I had one complaint about Underworld. That is a total lie. I had a shitload of complaints, but the biggie was that there were zero stakes: other than the uninteresting Michael, the film, and its first two sequels, lacked any human beings like you and me and the rest of the audience to be our surrogates so that we actually had any visceral investment in the gun play. Gun play, I want to remind you, occuring between vampires and werewolves. Gun play. Anyway, Awakening proves me the fuck wrong: it is all about the place that humans intersect with werewolves and vampires, and it is not remotely interesting, possibly because no sooner does it actually acknowledge the really keen part of this idea (the all-out three-way war), than it konks the protagonist on the head and skips ahead a dozen years, to find that the war is already over and all that remains is a tepid little jog over here and then back to start, firing guns and striking poses in skintight leather along the way.

Directors Måns Mårlind More and Björn Stein (credited, awfully, as "Mårlind & Stein" like they're some sort of damn world-renowned duo) push through this folderol with maximum attention paid to the series' trademarks: low lighting, blue all over, really damn loud fight scenes, close-ups of Beckinsale's pale face and artificially bright blue eyes; it's not their fault that this is the fourth time we've heard this tune, and it wasn't very good in the first place. There are a few good patches every so often - the choreography of an early car chase is uncharacteristically thrilling, and Eve's makeup when she goes crazy vamp girl is genuinely unsettling - and a whole lot of solemn mugging by Beckinsale while anonymous music screams in the background. The removal of all the tedious mythology of the earlier films in favor of lots of forward action is welcome; too bad that they removed the only thing resembling a tweak to the formula, the war with humans, in the process. What's left is super-slick; and it is irritating and chaotic and dumb as a box of rocks. Really damn dumb rocks. All the Kate Beckinsales in all the catsuits in all the world can't face that down.

3/10

TYLER PERRY, A PROLOGUE: DIARY OF A MAD BLACK WOMAN (2005)

2012-01-19T23:34:00.001-06:00

It's really kind of odd when you reflect on it, given how much the man has become a national point of reference, but a mere seven years ago, white people had no idea who the hell Tyler Perry was. Leastways, I did not, nor did my white people friends. This fact is, and should be, taken as a sign of the pronounced disconnect in how Americans of different skin tones take in culture (as is the related fact that Perry's movies continue to make shitloads of money despite no white person seeing them, nor knowing other white people who see them), but I am not going to spend this retrospective talking about race in America as filtered through Perry's cinema, a subject that I am not qualified to discuss at that kind of level, though I will note that if I were going to talk about that, I'd probably fall in line with Spike Lee's famous disparagement of Perry's shtick as "coonery".

No, mostly I'm just trying to give some context to the fact that when the teaser poster for Diary of a Mad Black Woman first popped up in late 2004, I was one of many people who had no idea what the words "Tyler Perry's" over the title meant. Just one of those dozens of cases where a book I'd never heard of that lots of people liked had been turned into a film, I assumed. Regardless, it was quite an appealing teaser, with a bold use of bright purple and a really lovely bit of subtlety to the design. Go back and take a look at the top of this review, tell me that I was wrong: if you didn't know what the movie was about, that teaser would be enough to make you think that it's a graceful, atmospheric character study. Or at least trying to be.

Then the second poster came out, and it looked like this:

I stopped expecting a graceful character study.

(Weirdly, several subsequent Perry films have used the same "classy teaser"/"godawful, broadly comic one-sheet" marketing strategy).

We know better now, of course, and that's what seven years' worth of perspective does for you. "Graceful", is of course not a word customarily used to describe anything that Perry touches, and the somewhat outraged bad reviews it received on its initial release - it still holds the lowest scores on both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic of any of the author's features - are perhaps due to shock on the part of the critics of the day (who, being typically white and cosmopolitan, would probably have been about as ignorant of the man as I was), completely flummoxed by the whatever-the-hell in front of them.

And, admittedly, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, adapted from Perry's 2001 play, is what-the-hell sort of movie if ever such a thing existed, jamming together not two but three separate genres that probably should have remained that way: a dementedly melodramatic love story about the titular woman, Helen (Kimberly Elise), who is kicked the curb with outsized glee by her scuzzy, cheating, corrupt lawyer husband, Charles (Steve Harris); a staggeringly broad drag farce centered on Helen's grandmother, Madea (Tyler Perry himself, but you almost certainly knew that), who takes the sad-eyed woman in and teaches her the ways of self-assurance; and, in a staggeringly sharp third-act turn, a public service announcement for Southern black Christianity. Not an apologetic. Not a missionary piece. Perry seems entirely unconcerned with the viewer who is not already fully invested in his brand of faith; he is, rather, reminding all of the people who already agree with him how they are meant to behave in a world that frequently tries their faith.

To be fair, the Christian message movie and the absurd melodrama fit together reasonably well, insofar as the spectacular mustiness of the main plot can fit together with anything that addresses life in America in the 21st Century. Problems are introduced, character crises are set in motion, not just for Helen but for virtually everyone she knows, those crises are solved at a big, noisy church service, and they are solved with a literal deus ex machina - the minute that the characters remember that God is there for all their woes, they stop being sad. That however many people, three or four anyway, would have this revelation at the exact same time strains credibility, but on the other hand, everything about Diary of a Mad Black Woman is so blatantly and pridefully artificial that it almost wouldn't fit if it didn't end on a huge contrivance. The film is, in essence, a modern day version of the medieval theology plays that presented simple situations in blindingly obvious colors and resolved them with big, showy gestures. Subtlety? Fuck subtlety. And as much as that means that Diary feels massively broken (and, in truth, probably is massively broken), I admire its commitment to itself.

Speaking of fuck subtlety: Madea. Holy God. Even when you know what you're getting into, it's hard to be ready for it. Madea does not fit into the rest of the film, in any way whatsoever: only the scenes where she banters, i.e. screams invective at, her brother Joe, mostly because Joe is also played by Tyler Perry in a nightmare of latex. But at least Joe resembles a cartoon version of a human being. Madea resembles nothing at all: not least because Perry's onscreen performance of a character he'd introduced five years earlier in a play titled I Can Do Bad All By Myself (which was, eventually, turned into a movie) ranks among the all-time worst drag performances in history, even counting the ones that are deliberately bad, like Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot. Spike Lee and other media theorists have argued that Madea sets the whole of African-American society back to the '20s, by presenting a degraded view of black femininity and dignity (a view refuted by people like Oprah, and I mean, shit, if you can't trust Oprah...), and this is perhaps true; there is something extra-toxic about Madea that just isn't there in things like The Klumps or Big Momma's House. Perhaps it is that Madea seems genuinely violent and dangerous.

However, I must break from Lee and his colleagues by arguing that Madea isn't just an insult to black dignity, but to the humanity of all people: she, if I can use that word fairly of such a genderless monstrosity, is anti-funny and anti-charming and anti-life in every possible way. It is no accident that of all the characters who find Christ at the end, even the ones who aren't remotely plausible (the film tries is damnedest to sell us Charles's conversion to the side of good; this might have possibly worked if it hadn't done so well making him a one-dimensional psychopathic sleazebag), Madea ends with as little respect for God or church as anybody in the film has ever demonstrated. And we're meant to love her, adore her all to pieces; this doesn't seem to be a tension Perry is remotely aware of.

In the face of Madea, all of the film's other problems don't seem like such a big deal: the subplot with Helen's hunky new beau, Orlando (Shemar Moore), who is actively stripped of all agency that extends further than "be the prop in Helen's rebirth, present exactly when she needs you, with no personality of your own", for example, or the mind-boggling ten minutes when, from out of nowhere, Helen shifts into torture porn mode to get revenge on Charles. Through out all of this, Elise remains the one thing that is constantly good, playing the decent, rich humanity in her character when she is able, and simply pretending that it's still there when it's not. Nobody else survives the script's reduction of their characters, not even Cicely Tyson in a small role as Helen's mother.

No does director Darren Grant survive; if I have not mentioned him before this moment, it's because he doesn't seem to matter very much, except in a negative way (he's done hardly anything in the years since). This was the only Tyler Perry Company production, of the only Tyler Perry screenplay, not directed by Tyler Perry, and there is a distinct sense of the director not having a handle on the material: the tonal shifts (which are many) clang against one another, and the performances do not connect to each other in any meaningful way, and the whole affair is the worst possible combination of visually and emotionally flat, and comically vile. I do not know that a stronger hand, with a better sense of what was supposed to be happening, would have saved Diary of a Mad Black Woman; but then, that is the journey we are about to take, straight into the heart and soul of the movies Perry himself made, to his own specifications.

MILESTONES

2012-01-19T10:00:00.000-06:00

Last night, a little bit after midnight in Chicago, Antagony & Ecstasy hit one of the grandest milestones in the life of any blog: its one millionth visitor.* I have taken a snapshot of the evidence, for all posterity to enjoy.

Thanks to all of you for helping me get there, especially you, visitor from Syndey, Australia, using Safari on a Linux machine. Here's to the next million!

I'm not certain if it's the best way to celebrate, but later today I'll be inaugurating a new series: since it is a slow time for new releases, it seemed like a good moment for a retrospective, and there's a filmmaker with a new movie just about six weeks out, and I've been thinking for awhile now that It might be a decent thing for this much-dismissed auteur to get his due critical tribute, even if that tribute largely consists of me finding variations of the phrase, "yes, this is awful, but in such a remarkably unique way!"

That's right, tonight is the kickoff of Antagony & Ecstasy's retrospective on the works of Tyler Perry.

WHO'S STILL AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

2012-01-18T22:45:00.001-06:00

There is possibly no filmmaker now living better-qualified to direct a movie set entirely within a single apartment than Roman Polanski, whose historical basis in such locations includes an entire "apartment trilogy" of horror films: Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, and The Tenant, each of them a master class in giving physical location a breathing vitality that makes the setting as important a character as anybody in the cast. And sure enough, his new film Carnage, adapted from Yasmina Reza's play God of Carnage by the playwright herself alongside Polanski, is a terrific demonstration in how fluid a motion picture set can possibly be in one location and taking place in real time (except for the first and last shots, and one single cut midway through - a hugely regrettable cut, insofar as it comes at no point in particular and only saves the movie about 45 seconds).

Indeed, the film is so damn good at taking place in a very small, unchanging space and yet still feeling pretty much like a movie and not like filmed theater, that after a while it starts to feel like it's not doing much of anything else. Right around the point that I found myself more concerned with puzzling out if there was an errant lighting stand visible in a corner of a mirror than with what the characters were saying (there's not; it turned out to be part of a lamp), it became clear that the cleverness and ingenuity of how Carnage was made was pretty definitively trumping what Carnage was ostensibly about; that it was, essentially, a fun exercise for the director and nothing else, notwithstanding its impressive run of awards in its previous life as a stage play. And for all I know, maybe this absolutely murders onstage, when you're right in there with the actors screaming at each other; this is not what happens onscreen. And sure, Polanski scrounged up four pretty much unassailable actors to do the screaming and self-revealing, and they have probably as much fun playing their modestly fleshed-out archetypes and chewing on some really big dialogue and moments, as the director has coming up with nifty ways of framing them doing it. But that doesn't translate into much for the viewer besides a good chance to reflect on the considerable mechanical skill of the numerous people involved, which is a perfectly fine and not terrifically edifying way to spend 80 minutes, and God bless the film for its admirable brevity.

The four actors involved are Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly as Penelope and Michael Longstreet, and Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz as Nancy and Alan Cowan. The Cowans, you see, have just arrived to pay a visit to the Longstreets on the occasion of a nasty altercation in a park, when the Cowans' son hit the Longstreets' son in the face with a stick, knocking out teeth and causing temporary, but massive disfigurement to the boy's face. What reason the two couples have for getting together isn't totally clear - it becomes obvious eventually that it's not totally clear to them, either, which is meant to be illuminating of something or other - but while they try to hash out a mutually-beneficial solution that teaches both children the value of non-violence and open communication, the parents' carefully-manicured personalities start to break down through a series of incidental moments that would, individually, mean nothing at all, but in concert with one another demonstrate the moral vacuum at the center of the upper-middle-class lifestyle enjoyed by all four. Though how Michael, a traveling luxury hardware salesman, is meant to be on the same economic footing as Alan, a corporate lawyer working with a pharmaceutical company, is a question the script doesn't even seem aware could be asked. Perhaps in Reza's native France, people love the shit out of expensive doorknobs.

Anyway, that's the intent: in practice, the movie runs is too much a part of the very same world it's putatively satirising to do much damage, and it has to reduce the characters to stock types in order to get its point across. It's still funny enough as it shuffles through its various permutations of characterisations to be a completely engaging watch, though it's not half as intelligent as it plainly assumes itself to be, which is more frustrating by far than if it simply owned its lack of depth and devoted itself to making fun of Penelope's cardstock liberalism, Michael's barely-veiled thuggery, Alan's sarcastic awfulness, or Nancy's neurotic defensiveness, without trying to tie those traits into bigger social currents.

It gives the actors lots to play with, at least, and plenty of grandiose moments of conflict in every possible permutation other than Penelope-Alan vs. Nancy-Michael, while giving everybody plenty of lines to say that bear no resemblance to how people in real life have ever talked, but are still robust and dramatic enough that it's satisfying to watch. The four co-leads are not equally matched: Foster, sadly for those of us who love her, is the obvious pick for Worst in Show, as she is least able to navigate the breakdowns her character goes through in the third act without resorting to overwrought hysterics. But even she gets her good moments, and the other three are pretty stellar throughout - Winslet is the best, playing her moments as subtly as possible and therefore standing out from what really does amount, frequently, to a Baked Ham-Off; Reilly is impeccably cast as a jolly bourgeois husband with a mean streak, and Waltz, given the most cartoonish character to start with, is quite content to play Alan as a parody of how Jeremy Irons would have attacked the same character 25 years ago, which I mean to be a compliment even if it didn't come off that way.

It's amusing, full of entertaining Oscar clip moments, and wholly disposable, which is the one thing that it probably shouldn't be, given the pedigree; but better that than disposable and boring. I will concede that, ingenious filmmaking and striking physical manipulation of the actors aside, it does not seem at all up to the standards of Roman Polanski; when it briefly seemed last year that The Ghost Writer might be his last film before an indeterminate time spent in jail, it felt like a good send-off, whereas right now, I just desperately hope he can stay out of trouble long enough to do something special to make me forget this minor toss-off more than I already have.

6/10

THIEVES' SEAWAY

2012-01-17T23:16:00.001-06:00

I shall begin with a parable.

Barry Ackroyd, in more than a quarter of a century as a cinematographer, has been responsible for many fine pieces of work, with at least a handful of award-worthy turns in projects like The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Green Zone, and The Hurt Locker (for which he received an Oscar and ASC nomination). To those who care to look, it's been obvious for a while that he's a talented man and his presence a welcome sight, even if he's not the most versatile kid on the block. And for all that, I don't think I was ever quite as blown away by just how good Ackroyd is at his job until I'd seen what he made out of Contraband, a working class thriller about smugglers that is the absolute epitome of the words "a January release". Not that Contraband is his masterpiece, or something absolutely ridiculous like that. But it's not as far off as you might think, and here's why it strike me as important: it's one thing to do great work in a Ken Loach or Paul Greengrass film, or in an Iraq War picture made with enough integrity to eventually dance into a healthy clutch of awards. It's quite another to do that in a quiet little Mark Wahlberg vehicle that is not, by any stretch of the imagination, going to end up in the best-of-year conversations next January. And yet, this film does, in fact, boast great cinematography, not the showy noir kind of cinematography that some might have thought to use, but an appealingly rough-hewn mixture of artificial lighting and pointedly graceless handheld camera that magnificently captures the rhythm and texture of the film's unrefined mise en scène. Ackroyd did not have to do this, but he did; maybe because he was paid to, maybe because honor drove him to, maybe because he's too good to allow something crappy to come out under his name.

My point isn't that Barry Ackroyd is a consummate professional and a fine craftsman, although if it was, it still would have been worth the saying. Rather, I am struck by how much the whole of Contraband is basically the exact same thing as the cinematography, over and over again: it is a film made by people who do not seem to notice or care that they are making a crappy mid-winter action film that people only see because there's nothing else out. It's a film that it would be incredibly easy to regard as make-work and to accordingly look down on it, except that not a single person involved appears to have done so. They are all Ackroyds, giving their level best, however good that is (it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody that J.K. Simmons's level best is a shitload better than Lukas Haas's level best, for example), and always treating this grubby genre material as though it really does deserve their respect and effort. That sort of attitude is eminently respectable, and honestly gratifying, for meat-and-potatoes films like this are a dying breed. Contraband certainly doesn't reinvent the wheel, but on the other hand, it's such a very nice wheel, perfectly round and with the spokes in exactly the right places. The world needs good wheels.

In this film, Wahlberg plays Chris Farraday, a former smuggler based out of New Orleans who has since gone straight and started a modest business as home security specialist (this information - the smuggling part - is communicated in glaringly ham-handed expository dialogue that is the only really obvious misstep in first-time writer Aaron Guzikowski's adaptation of a 2008 Icelandic film). As it happens, Chris's brother-in-law Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) has taken up smuggling himself, only he's terrible at it, and has managed to get himself deep in debt to an erratic local gangster, Tim Gibbs (Giovanni Ribisi, whose twitchy, mannered performance is readily the worst part of the movie). In response to Chris's overtures to smooth all this over, Gibbs has threatened the ex-smuggler's wife, Kate (Kate Beckinsale) and sons. This spooks Chris enough that he agrees to go on One Last Job, leaving Kate under the protection of his best friend, affable crimelord Sebastian Abney (Ben Foster) while he jaunts off to Panama City to bring back a pallet of counterfeit money the size of a small car.

The pleasures of all this are utterly simplistic: watching a smart, capable man execute a well-oiled crime and save his family. Not a blessed thing about the film is challenging, though a good deal of it is smarter than it has to be; perhaps as a side-effect of casting Wahlberg, one of our great reigning cinematic avatars of blue collar toiling, Contraband ends up working better than it has any particular reason to as a study of how the working class of New Orleans lives and feels. It's not a great work of social realism, but it also understands that social realism is a thing worth admiring; similar in tone if not in ambition to Rocky and its blend of social document and rousing sports movie. Indeed, playing around with genre is one of the things Contraband does best, though not insistently: the first part is a drama about the rough life of an ex-smuggler, the second is a gritty caper film about the planning and execution of a smuggling job that goes wrong, and the finale is an action movie and chase sequence. Each of these three different movies all works quite well at what it does, though the climax of the action film rather betrays the moral perspective of the working class social study that opens (turns out that there isn't anything wrong with a little dirty money).

Making his first wide-release English-language feature, Baltasar Kormákur, of the breakthrough Icelandic picture 101 Reykjavik, directs crisply and effectively, keeping the pacing and thrills up (a cat-and-mouse sequence among the containers on a cargo ship sets a standard for nail-biters that the rest of 2012 will be hard-pressed to maintain), and dragging good performances out of everyone from Beckinsale in her rare "I'm actually trying" mold to an absolutely delightful J.K. Simmons being all kinds of burly and huffy as the captain of a ship with a sharp mistrust of Chris. It is a brisk movie, and a terrifically engaging one; not designed to win any awards, mind you, but frankly, it's more successful at what it's doing and a hell of a lot more watchable than most of what is designed to win awards, even if it has a significant tendency to evaporate pretty much the second the credits begin to roll.

7/10

OSCAR NOMINEE PREDICTIONS, 2011 (OR 2012? I CAN NEVER KEEP TRACK OF HOW YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO PUT IT)

2012-01-17T11:00:00.005-06:00

Updated 1/18 in light of Best Foreign Film bake-off list

One week from today, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce the nominees for its 84th annual awards. I try not to admit it in public too often, but being a huge Oscar junkie, it's hard not to want to try my hand at predicting the bastards, though I also take the cheater's route of waiting till most of the work is done to figure out what's what, with the only challenge being in all the "fifth slot" nominees.

I was extremely good at this game last year, nailing a personal-best 82/105 overall and 39/45 in the Big Eight - Picture, Director, Acting, Screenplay. Keep those stats in mind if you have any office pools you're looking to win, though also keep in mind that I have done spectacularly poorly every other time I've done this in public.

Best Picture
*The Artist
*The Descendants
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Help
*Hugo
*Midnight in Paris
Moneyball

Because of the new rules, there can be any number of noms between 5 and 10. If there are more, my additional predictions in order of probability:
War Horse
The Tree of Life
The ides of March

First off, there are the easy ones, which I ticked with a * up there. I very nearly put The Help in their company, but I maintain the hope that it's just too damn andoyne even for AMPAS. Moneyball is one of those films that everybody seems to really like, and while the new rules don't seem to have much room for "like, not love" pictures, it seems better to make those prediction tweaks next year, when we know how the new system plays out. Girl seems wildly not-Academy, but it has been tearing up the Guild circuit, and that's not the sort of thing you argue against lightly.

In my also-ran tier: War Horse has been emphatically not tearing up the Guilds, and that is a huge tell for a Spielberg film, but the subject matter is way too quintessentially Oscary to dismiss it outright. TOL has intensely passionate followers; I can't bring myself to believe that there are quite enough of them. And Ides, a pleasant enough gloss on a much better play with fuzzy characterisations and visual language to match, has that whole "Clooney is everybody's favorite" thing going on.

Best Director
Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
Alexander Payne The Descendants
Martin Scorsese, Hugo
Or maybe:
Steven Spielberg, War Horse

A reprint of the DGA, with the substitution of Malick for Fincher; all season, I've been nursing the feeling that Tree of Life is a classic "Lone Director Nod" kind of movie (artsy; a director hugely beloved by other directors), and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is so not in the Academy's wheelhouse that, while I can squint enough to see it getting into a vaguely defined top 10-or-less, I truly can't imagine it hitting the top 5.

Best Actor
George Clooney, The Descendants
Jean Dujardin, The Artists
Michael Fassbender, Shame
Brad Pitt, Moneyball
Michael Shannon, Take Shelter
Or maybe:
Leonardo DiCaprio, J. Edgar

A pretty conservative set, other than Shannon; but he is the kind of actor that other actors like, and he got a previous Oscar nomination from the clear blue sky three years ago. Anyway, I'm just not feeling DiCaprio, whose performance didn't really land with anybody, and who has had difficulty getting traction with the Academy in previous years; and as much as I would love to see Gary Oldman make it in, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has been shut out pretty hard all season

Best Actress
Viola Davis, The Help
Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Tilda Swinton, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn
Or maybe:
Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs

The only questions that seem worth considering are: is Mara's rising star momentum in a showy role in a film that people apparently really love sufficient to take out one of the two older actresses in hard-to-like vehicles? And if yes, is it indie darling Swinton in a tremendously nasty film, or workhorse Close impressing nobody at all in a labor of love that nobody likes? And those questions could be answered in any number of ways, up to and including, "Fuck it, go with Charlize". Consider this my official, but unsettled, take.

Best Supporting Actor
Kenneth Branagh, My Week with Marilyn
Albert Brooks, Drive
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Nick Nolte, Warrior
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
Or maybe:
Brad Pitt, The Tree of Life

As is often the case in categories where we all have known the eventual winner for what feels like months (Plummer, if you've been living without electricity since August), everything after that is tangled up and weird. I'm completely unconvinced of my own prediction, and I can't quite figure out why - maybe just because the phrase "Oscar nominee Jonah Hill" makes me want to stab out my eyes. Patton Oswalt in Young Adult (which I'd believe more if the movie seemed to have any support at all) and Ben Kingsley in Hugo (not an actor's movie) are just as likely as anybody outside of Plummer and Branagh, and maybe Brooks. Praying for a surprise here.

Best Supporting Actress
Bérénice Bejo, The Artist
Jessica Chastain, The Help
Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
Octavia Spencer, The Help
Shailene Woodley, The Descendants
Or maybe:
Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs

Back to steadier ground. It's McCarthy vs. McTeer, with Vanessa Redgrave poised to be a gratifying but at this point inordinately unlikely surprise. I am inclined to favor the movie people have actually seen and enjoyed, but I will note that Close getting nominated in Actress makes McTeer a certainty, while the opposite is not true.

Best Adapted Screenplay
The Descendants, by Nat Faxon, Alexander Payne & Jim Rash
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Steven Zaillian
Hugo, by John Logan
Moneyball, by Stan Chervin and Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, by Bridget O'Connor & Peter Straughan
Or maybe:
The Help, by Tate Taylor

Predicting 101: it's safest to stay in the Best Picture race in the writing categories. With the caveat, regarding The Help, that the writing categories are famous for avoiding the really overt mistakes of Best Picture, year in and year out. And TTSS is such a writerly movie, irrespective of any judgments about its quality

Best Original Screenplay
The Artist, by Michel Hazanavicius
Bridesmaids, by Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig
Midnight in Paris, by Woody Allen
Win Win, by Thomas McCarthy & Joe Tibani
Young Adult, by Diablo Cody
Or maybe:
50/50, by Will Reiser

Same rule, with fewer BP candidates to choose from. My gut tells me that Bridesmaids is safe by virtue of being a popular comedy, while Win Win, 50/50, Young Adult, Margin Call, maybe Beginners, and just barely The Tree of Life are all jostling around in an indie film hell, where something has to end up there, and the rest is kind of throwing a dart at a list.

Best Cinematography
The Artist (Guillaume Schiffman)
Hugo (Robert Richardson)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Jeff Cronenweth)
The Tree of Life (Emmanuel Lubezki)
War Horse (Janusz Kaminski)
Or maybe:
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Hoyte Van Hoytema)

4 of 5 is a fair bet for ASC nominations translating to Oscar, and TTSS seems far and away the weakest. Despite the overall chilliness to War Horse that appears to be happening, the Academy somewhat tends to skew somewhat prettier than the ASC in those years where they disagree.

Best Editing
The Artist (Anne-Sophie Bion)
The Descendants (Kevin Tent)
Hugo (Thelma Schoonmaker)
Moneyball (Christopher Tellefsen)
War Horse (Michael Kahn)
Or maybe:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Kirk Baxter & Angus Wall)

I've been harboring a suspicion that lazy BP-focused nominating gets The Descendants in the top 5, and yesterday's ACE nominations pretty much sealed it for me. Michael Kahn is an editing god, and I feel this is one of the beleaguered War Horse's best chances to find any kind of footing; if I am right, he takes the record for most nominations in this category at 8, breaking the three-way tie that now holds.

Best Art Direction
The Artist (Laurence Bennett)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Stuart Craig; Stephenie McMillan)
Hugo (Dante Ferretti; Dorthée Baussan, Francesca Lo Schiavo)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Maria Djurkovic)
War Horse (Rick Carter; Lee Sandales)
Or maybe:
Jane Eyre (Will Hughes-Jones; Tina Jones)

The first three are obvious, TTSS is considerably less so, and it all goes to hell after that. I will confess that my unassailable logic is that I'm also predicting War Horse for Best Cinematography, and the two categories frequently stick together.

Best Costume Design
Anonymous (Lisy Christl)
The Artist (Mark Bridges)
Hugo (Sandy Powell)
Jane Eyre (Michael O'Connor)
W.E. (Arianne Phillips)
Or maybe:
Immortals (Eiko Ishioka)

A category famous for paying very little attention to the quality of the movie at large if the costumes are to their tastes, which is why I feel comfortable with Anonymous and W.E.; The Artist and Hugo are just good sense. I very nearly threw Immortals in there over W.E., but I can't shake the sense that the whole industry would prefer to forget that movie ever happened.

Best Makeup
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
The Iron Lady
Or maybe:
Hugo

Categories with shortlists are always a touch easier, even one this notoriously inconsistent. The one thing we can be sure of: The Iron Lady wins. Past that, I am seduced by Guy Lodge's logic that if something as off-the-radar as Gainsbourg can make the shortlist, it can probably be nominated too, but too much cleverness in predicting can always bite you on the ass. As for Harry Potter 7.2: it has to get in somewhere besides Art Direction, doesn't it?

Best Score
The Adventures of Tintin (John Williams)
The Artist (Ludovic Bource)
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (Alexandre Desplat)
Hugo (Howard Shore)
War Horse (John Williams)
Or maybe:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross)

The double John Williams bid is probably riskier than I think it is, but he's surely getting one of them, and I couldn't pick. Desplat is my most perverse prediction anywhere, but this is a category noted for its love affairs with specific composers, and he's not apt to get in for anything else; weird films sneak in here at least once every couple of years.

Best Song
From Captain America: The First Avenger: "Star-Spangled Man"
From The Muppets: “Life's a Happy Song”
From The Muppets: “Pictures in My Head”
Or maybe:
From The Help: "The Living Proof"
And/or:
From Hugo: "Coeur Volant"

The only category other than Best Picture with a variable number of nominees, which makes it very hard to get a real bead on what's happening. "Star-Spangled Man" and "Pictures in My Head" are the closest there are to locks; I don't really know what to think after that. They've gotten better lately at not including end-credits songs unless they are big hits or by famous artists or they're feeling sweep-ish. But who the fuck knows. I'm not sure why this category is still here.

Best Sound Mixing
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Rango
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
War Horse
Or maybe:
Super 8

Who knows. There's usually an animated film, and I think that Rango has more behind it than Tintin. There's usually a war film, and War Horse is the most prominent one this year. Big action movies do the rest: the biggest one of the summer, the most critically-acclaimed of the summer, and the big December surprise that took everybody's breath away just before ballotting started.

Best Sound Editing
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Super 8
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
War Horse
Or maybe:
Rango

A lot of the same logic applies. 3/5 or 4/5 are the best bets for overlap in the sound categories; I assume you saw what I did with my six top guesses, and I apologise for being totally boring.

Best Visual Effects
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
Hugo
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Or maybe:
The Tree of Life

Out of a 10-film shortlist already announced. Somehow, I feel like the classy arthouse work in TOL, led by the legendary Douglas Trumbull, should be in there, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it would knock out.

Best Animated Feature
Arthur Christmas
Kung Fu Panda 2
Puss in Boots
Rango
Winnie the Pooh
Or maybe:
Rio

Frankly, I'm sort of angry at this category. I truly do believe that even with as hard as it will be to fill five spots, the animators' branch is going to "punish" Pixar for Cars 2, but with underperforming films to the left, shitty kiddie fare of the sort that that hasn't made the cutoff in years to the right, and the much-hated motion capture in the middle, I truly don't know what I think is apt to replace it. Might be a great chance for one of the tiny foreign movies with no US distribution yet, as happened to The Secret of Kells two years ago.

Best Foreign Language Film
Footnote (Israel)
In Darkness (Poland)
Monsieur Lazhar (Canada)
Pina (Germany)
A Separation (Iran)
Or maybe:
Warriors of the Rainbow (Taiwan)

I didn't do as bad guessing at the films to survive the reduction to nine finalists as I expected to. Anyway, it's never tremendously easy to figure out what's going on here, though I do think Pina for all its international acclaim, is the shakiest. In Darkness and A Separation can pretty confidently be considered locks at this point.

Best Documentary
Bill Cunningham New York
Hell and Back Again
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory
Project Nim
We Were Here
Or maybe:
Undefeated

I am flying pretty much blind. I do not think, though, that the characteristically boring documentary branch is going to see fit to include the visually and formally bracing Pina, which pushes the word "documentary" about as far as it will go.

Best Documentary Short Subject
"The Barber of Birmingham"
"In Tahrir Square: 18 Days of Egypt's Unfinished Revolution"
"Incident in New Baghdad"
"The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom"
"Witness"
Or maybe:
"Saving Face"

Here's where we start to just get silly. There's an 8-film finalist list, which is a godsend to the predictor. In order, the ones I went with are a film about an octogenerian remembering the civil rights movement, a message picture about one of the biggest international stories in 2011, an Iraq message picture, a culturally-specific study of nature, and a conservation message picture. Please note that 24 hours ago, I'd heard of none of these films.

Best Live-Action Short Subject
"I Could Be Your Grandmother"
"Love at First Sight"
"Pentecost"
"The Road Home"
"Time Freak"
Or maybe:
"Sailcloth"

"Love at First Sight" and "Sailcloth" both star John Hurt, which is how I know that one - but only one - will get in. Other than that it's pretty much guessing from the 10-film shortlist, and I have generally favored coming-of-age stories and the sole French picture.

Best Animated Short Subject
"The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore"
"La Luna"
"Magic Piano"
"A Morning Stroll"
"Wild Life"
Or maybe:
"Dimanche"

More guessing - I have seen one of the ten finalists, the neo-Sylvester and Tweety short "I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat", and I will confidently say that it won't be in the top five. Otherwise, this is mostly guesswork based on the animation styles as revealed by stills. Scientific! "La Luna" is the new Pixar short, and thus the closest to a lock we have here.

I WANNA GET DOWN ON MY KNEES, AND START PLEASING JESUS

2012-01-16T23:32:00.001-06:00

If you had wanted to see Joyful Noise for its promise of a whole movie full of Queen Latifah versus Dolly Parton camp-offs - and I can truly not imagine any other possible reason that a person could have for wanting to see Joyful Noise, unless they were related to somebody who worked on it - you would end up rather disappointed (if, on the other hand, you did not want to see Joyful Noise for any reason, then congratulations, because you are much, much smarter than I am).

Which is not to say that there are absolutely no Latifah/Parton fights, for there certainly are, and they are very much the best part of the movie, with the caveat that being the best part of Joyful Noise is a pretty easy thing to do. It's a ridiculously plain thing, with absolutely no personality that it didn't still from other movies, mostly Footloose - the original, not that it makes all that much of a difference. Not being a Warner Bros. executive, I can't swear to it that the pitch was "Footloose with gospel music", but I would be absolutely stunned if that phrase wasn't used at least once during the film's pre-production (and if it wasn't then "Footloose meets Sister Act" absolutely had to have been). This should tell you most of what goes right with the film and all of what goes wrong.

It should also tell you the bulk of the plot, but for the look of the thing, I will go ahead with a synopsis: a denominationally non-specified church in a sleepy Georgia town has just lost its choir director (Kris Kristofferson), who had a heart attack right onstage at the local choir championships. He's replaced by steel-fisted Vi Rose Hill (Latifah), over the objections of his widow, and the church's sole financial backer, G.G. Sparrow (Parton). They bicker and argue over where the church's music should go, an argument that is sharpened when G.G.'s grandson Randy (Jeremy Jordan, whom I understand to be a Broadway person making his film debut) shows up in town, with a whole basketful of ideas about how to jazz up the tired choir with pop music. He also attempts to seduce Vi Rose's daughter Olivia (Keke Palmer), while helping Olivia's brother Walter (Dexter Darden) express himself through the wall of Asperger's syndrome, and this intrusion into her family's business does not meet with Vi Rose's approval, no, not at all.

If your suspicion is that eventually, G.G. will prevail upon Vi Rose to listen to Randy, and this causes them to make it all the way to the national choir championships, you may have a cookie. If you believe that en route, Olivia decides that it is better to chase her heart than be cowed by an authoritarian parent, you may have another. If you assume that the film has a shitload of pop songs re-orchestrated with gospel settings and performed by all of the various musical figures littering the cast, you had just as well go buy a whole box of cookies, though this last thing is at least part of why the movie works and not part of why it is ungodly mediocre. Whatever can be said about Parton's acting skills (they are charmingly terrible), or Palmer and Jordan's (they are only terrible, especially Palmer, who doesn't can't stand still without looking like she's trying too heard), the three of them all have pretty great voices and if you do not love Dolly Parton's voice then you may go to hell directly. Latifah, meanwhile, has a great voice and is a tremendous actor; at least, she has an incredible ability to dominate the camera without visibly trying, and that might ultimately be a more important thing than being a tremendous actor. The role of an icy, unfeeling parent with an extremely sharp tongue and fast wit is a natural fit for her presence and natural authority, and that is the reason that Vi Rose is ultimately a far more credible character than the paint-by-numbers psychology of writer-director Todd Graff's script would apparently call for. She is brilliant in her handful of comic insult-trading scenes with Parton (I am not proud enough to deny that a scene where they fight in a restaurant, and Latifah suggests that she cannot see things from Parton's point of view "because I can't get my head that far up my ass", made me unnecessarily happy), she is utterly convincing as a prideful woman crippled by her fealty to tradition and the most suffocating kind of inflexible religiosity, and she sells the living shit out of her big third-act confrontation with Olivia, all clichés and weirdly-motivated beats that must have absolutely crawled away and died on the page, but actually manages to be convincing and potent here.

Needless to say, there's absolutely fuck-all else about Joyful Noise in anything like that class, though Parton's southern-fried comic supporting turn is appealing in its playing-to-the-back-row way. And the gospel numbers are pretty satisfying in the sense that listening to talented people performing songs is always satisfying, though a part of me, nor a small part, wishes that there had been more actual gospel and less gospelfied pop songs (the world may or may not have been suffering for not knowing what a Dolly Parton cover of Chris Brown would sound like, but if so, it suffers no longer). I could have done without the flashback Parton/Kristofferson duet - turns out their voices are incompatible in every way two voices can be - but it's not a movie full of musical clinkers, even if it lacks any musical masterpieces.

Mainly, though, and despite my incredible enthusiasm for pretty much everything Latifah does when she's onscreen, Joyful Noise is a damn slog: the leads, despite the poster, the trailer, and the opening credits, are not Latifah and Parton, but Palmer and Jordan, and they're neither charismatic enough not do they have enough chemistry to put over the main love story that Graff finds so inexplicably engrossing. Certainly, they're no Kevin Bacon and Lori Singer; they're not even Kenny Wormald and Julianne Hough.. Hell, Jordan and Darden have more chemistry than Jordan shares with his leading lady, a fact which the filmmakers note and uncomfortably dispose of with a feeble gay panic joke.

And it's not like Graff does very much to prop up the rest of the movie: save for a couple of sequences that desperately want to make us think that this is all some kind of economic parable for the endless recession we now live in, there is absolutely nothing resembling visual storytelling, and the only thing that the director manages to pull off with more than the absolute minimum of competence is to give the rest of the choir beyond our four leads some measure of personality and depth, even if those personalities are only slightly more complex than you'll find in a daily comic strip. I mean, it's a complete nothing movie. Latifah's presence and Latifah's voice (and Parton's) make it easy to wish that it was something, anything, but if wishes were the same as reality, they wouldn't be wishes.

5/10

REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED WET

2012-01-15T23:31:00.000-06:00

In addition to their classier, better-known status as the most mature decade in the history of mainstream American cinema, the 1970s could also be rightfully called the Decade of the Rip-Off; not since the onset of World War II taught the world a healthy sense of shame had such a robust culture of knock-offs and knock-offs of knock-offs pervaded the cinema of so many countries. It started in 1973, when The Exorcist broke big, and just about overnight Satanists and taciturn priests with faith issues were inescapable in movies houses from the New York grind house to the Philippines. That was nothing compared to what happened after 1975, when Steven Spielberg's Jaws redefined what "money" meant; I do not suppose that any one person could accurately count the number of films that were straight-up copies of the shark picture, let alone the even greater number that were merely influenced in some way or another. Killer animals were damn near everywhere for quite a while, until eventually zombies and surly Australian biker gangs taught the world's exploitation producers a couple of new tunes to ring in the '80s.

In those days, anywhere that the word "rip-off" raised its head, the word "Italian" was sure to be right along, and even though the country never completely threw over Exorcist fever in favor of nature-gone-amok pictures, there are more than a few classic - anyway, classically bad - entries in the subgenre to come from Rome and environs. And of course, where the words "Italian rip-off" show up, the words "Dino De Laurentiis" have probably already shown up, eagerly bounding ahead with untouchable ebullience. Where money was to be made, the prolific producer was right there at the forefront making it, or at least attempting to. There's nothing quite like a really top-shelf De Laurentiis cash-in; they combine the absurdity native to all Italian exploitation films with a truly demented sort of ambition, the kind that seems to believe that if you can't have talent, you can at least fail to have it in giant splashes all over the screen.

Orca was not De Lautentiis's first attempt at doing a Jaws (that honor goes, weirdly and famously, to his unholy 1976 remake of King Kong), though it is his most explicit, being about a very large, very toothy seagoing creature wreaking havoc in the North Atlantic, and all. Nor, for that matter, is Orca an Italian film, being as it was financed in the US, shot in Canada, and directed by a Brit; this seems rather like a technicality, though, for there is a certain Italianate tackiness that bursts out pretty much from the first minute and never stops for all of the movie's 92 minutes, which undoubtedly has something to do with the fact that the screenwriters were Sergio Donati and Luciano Vincenzoni, veterans of the Italian genre scene from all the way back (look deep in their filmography, and amongst all of the expected hokum, you'll even find a few Sergio Leone films in each man's career). Hell, Michael Anderson even directs like an Italian, with a whole lot of confusingly unmotivated zooms and close-ups, and images that are chiefly memorable for how crazed they are, demonstrating none of the personality he brought to Oscar-nominated work like Around the World in 80 Days, perhaps because you can't demonstrate something that doesn't exist.

So, an honorary Italian film, anyway. The more important part is that it is quintessentially a Dino De Laurentiis film, which both encompasses and transcends national identity. It's right there in the central focus of the movie, a tremendous rarity among the killer animal films of that generation: we are meant to sympathise with the killer animal in question, and very possibly even root for it, though that might also be that the human beings that have been cast opposite the beast aren't quite up to the challenge of putting over something as complex as an "emotion". This peculiar assumption that the key to making an even better Jaws was a sympathetic monster is seen in King Kong as well, along with De Laurentiis' famous (and inconsistently-reported) quote, "When Jaws dies, nobody cry. When Kong dies, everybody cry."

On to Orca, then. It is not, as such things go, a particularly shameless Jaws knock-off; other than the fact of an aquatic killing machine, the plot is pretty much completely new (in fact, it rather uncomfortably prefigures some of the worst elements of Jaws: The Revenge). This makes it, in a strange way, one of the most honorable of the form (contrast e.g. Great White, which Universal managed to sue right of theaters in 1982), though no smarter or aesthetically defensible than your Grizzly or your Prophecy. The situation is that there is an Irish fisherman, Nolan (Richard Harris, in one of the performances where he's not even trying to pretend he's not drunk), working the ocean around Newfoundland, hunting Great White sharks, which he can sell too aquariums (or maybe not) for a sweet $10,000 a linear foot (what?). He has his eyes on a particular 25-footer, knowing how easy it shall be to charge a public institution a quarter-million dollars for an animal noted for its tendency to die in captivity, when he crosses paths with a mirthless whale biologist, Rachel (Charlotte Rampling, looking more brittle than anywhere else in her career), who is diving in the same area, and is nearly eaten by that same monster shark, when from out of nowhere an equally huge killer whale slams into the fish and kills it. Because, in Dino De Laurentiisland, showing your aquatic monster slaughtering Spielberg's aquatic monster (the same outrageous size, even!) is ipso facto the same as having a better aquatic monster (the next year, the Jaws folks would have their shark kill an orca in Jaws 2; we can only pray that it was a snitty comeback).

In the first of many scenes that fail, spectacularly, to convince that Harris and Rampling are a) secretly falling in love, and b) living on the same planet, Nolan confesses to Rachel his new plan to capture an orca, though he sadly does not quite a price-per-foot. The scientist icily - no, make that "bitchily", "icily" would require more nuance than Rampling was interested in supplying - tells the fisherman that he is of the most uncompromisingly bastardly morals and more contemptuous than any man who scraped across the surface of the sea, which shockingly does not dissuade him. Even more shockingly, they continue to speak after this point and, Rachel starts to warm up to Nolan, though not in an organic way, so much as it is simply turned on in one scene, later on, like a light switch.

In brief, Nolan's plan goes spectacularly wrong, and he ends up mutilating a male orca's dorsal fin, while wounding his mate so badly that she feverishly attempts to commit suicide by swimming into the ship's propellers, because that is something that a whale would totally do. There is a loving shot of the male's eye with water splashing over it, just like it's crying, because that is also something a whale would totally do. When Nolan hauls the dying female aboard, she erupts with a dead whale fetus like the yet-to-be-released Alien, and the male orca goes insane. That is literally what the film wants us to believe. It goes insane because its made and child are dead, and then it exercises what Rachel calls its chief link to humanity, it's "profound instinct for vengeance", by hounding Nolan and his crew and destroying the livelihood of the town where he's hiding (including, in one of the film's most awesome moments, executing a cunning plan to blow up a refinery hundreds of yard inland). Eventually, Nolan and the few people still clinging to him journey into the sea to face the animal, which leads them to the frozen north, played here by the Mediterranean Sea and a great many giant foam "icebergs". It is, in essence, a Biblical fable played by a drunk Irishman and a psychotic, grief-stricken cetacean.

One of the other things that Rachel says - in a class lecture that ladles out so damn much ridiculous exposition that I cannot possibly do it justice here - is that orcas have extraordinarily sophisticated communication skills, and "what we call language, they might call unnecessary or redundant... or retarded". Upon careful consideration of the Orca script, I am forced to agree with the whales.

Now, just about everything that there is to Orca is some combination of idiotic and incompetent, though occasionally it manages to be only one of those things. It's really quite spectacular: we have, first, the mismatch of stock-footage that occurs throughout the movie (the shark killed in the beginning is portrayed by at least four obviously different animals, all performing entirely different actions), the unmistakably rigid, plastic quality of the orca models - and thank God De Laurentiis didn't just kill and maim actual killer whales as needed to get his movie finished, a more plausible possibility in 1977 than you might care to imagine - the unmistakably rigid, plastic quality of Charlotte Rampling, and the camera that never seems to be entirely certain that what it's looking at is, in fact, the most interesting part of the set, and so always seems framed about 25% off to the side, like it's about to pan to the far more nuanced and intelligent sight of rocks jutting out of the ocean. Best of all is the single shot of an orca breaching out of the water in a big playful arc and sliding back under, that gets used not fewer than five times, including a very crude job compositing it in front of the burning refinery, and once near the beginning where it is literally used twice in the same frame, only mirrored, so you can't tell, Because dammit, if you have a photogenic shot of a whale jumping out of the water, you milk that shit.

I pretty much love it, regardless, and only somewhat ironically. I mean, it has to be ironic, because there is virtually nothing beside Ennio Morricone's characteristic feminine-vocalisation-heavy score that really holds up as per-se filmmaking. Harris, for all his cartoon gesticulating, is still the best member of a cast that includes a debuting Bo Derek as a member of Nolan's crew who can't even outact the cast she has to wear later in the movie, and Will Sampson as the Wise Native, perfecting the role that he first played in every single film he had been cast in to that point, and would play once again in every single film he would be cast in subsequently. Throughout, there are the sort of quintessentially strange Italian cutaway shots that feel more like an accident in the editing room than a deliberate choice, and so on.

But dammit, it has so much energy! It is so very easy to compare the film to fellow marine-carnivore-revenge-thriller Jaws: The Revenge, which is only a bit more clueless as a work of cinema, but is incomparably more boring. Orca is not boring at all. It is positively fucking giddy, the kind of movie that is so deranged in every way that you legitimately cannot guess where it's going next, and sort of can't wait to see it get there. That is surely not what Dino and Co. were looking for, but it really doesn't matter: the film's staggering awfulness is so one-of-a-kind that it becomes legimately compelling and entertaining, and as we know in these parts, if you cannot have a mock-Italian genre cash-in that is truly great, then you should have the grace to settle for a mock-Italian genre cash-in that is truly bugshit.

THE MOST UNKINDEST BITE OF ALL

2012-01-14T01:22:00.001-06:00

"I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."

-Michael Caine

It is commonly observed of Jaws: The Revenge - in those fortunately rare moments when Jaws: The Revenge is brought up to begin with - that it establishes the widest gulf in quality between two movies in a given franchise ever. This is accurate, and a little bit superfluous; it's the kind of thing that only really needs to be quantified because Jaws: The Revenge exists, and is so infinitely worse in every possible way than the first Jaws that it feels like you might be able to deal with it better if it were possible in some way to quantify it. But it's really not even a close race for second place: in order to find a franchise that spans the gamut of masterpiece to absolute bottom-scraping shit more thoroughly, you'd have to find a movie better than Jaws to start with, which is hard; or you'd have to find a movie worse than Jaws: The Revenge, which is almost harder. The Star Wars series doesn't really come close: for all their flaws, it's a stretch to say that The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones are any worse than most soulless summer blockbusters. Rocky IV almost gets us to bad-enough territory, but I don't suppose anybody seriously considers Rocky a better film than Jaws. Ditto Hannibal Rising and The Silence of Lambs (or Manhunter, if that's how you roll). The James Bond franchise deserves a seat at the table, but let's not start getting silly. If there are any other obvious candidates, I cannot immediately call them to mind.

Now, this may seem like a transparent attempt to fill up space without talking about the movie itself, and that is because there's not much that's less fun to do than to seriously grapple with Jaws: The Revenge, which surely deserves to be counted among the very worst big-budget studio tentpoles of the 1980s. If you have seen it, you might be thinking at this point, "What the heck is he talking about? That movie was a cheap rush job! Just look at how awful the effects are!" And they certainly are awful, which is a cool comfort when we note that at $23 million, Jaws: The Revenge was the most expensive film in the franchise (not adjusted for inflation; but what's really unnerving is that, even adjusted, Jaws remains the cheapest of the four). It's hard to say where, exactly, the money went. Up the producer's nose would be one guess, or maybe the entire film had been shot and then they accidentally dropped the film into the ocean, and had to redo it from the start. And then they did the exact same thing again. That would at least explain why this film's shark prop, though in some respects the most advanced in the series - it's on rods and all, and they could film it from all sorts of angles that hadn't been possible before, and you can only see the rods some of the time - looks like it was covered in tattered burlap. It is a seriously ratty, sorry thing, looking not just incompetently made but badly aged on top of it. The only thing that keeps it from being the shittiest shark mechanism in the entire series is that horrid stiff baby shark prop in Jaws 3-D, although that at least felt sort of desperate; in Jaws: The Revenge, you sort of get the feeling that they were actually showing off their raggedy-ass patchwork fish - it gets a lot of screentime.

The film returns to the familiar streets of Amity at Christmastime, after the last film's Florida vacation, though as becomes obvious soon enough, Michael de Guzman's screenplay doesn't really exist in the same continuity as Jaws 3-D, less because he is trying to return the story to its roots, and more because he basically doesn't seem to give a damn (and if you were assigned this project, and given the limitations he was, you would like not give a damn either). After some POV shots at the surface of the water in the harbor outside of town, set to a pumped-up orchestration of John Williams's classic theme (it doesn't really work for me, but it's still the best thing, by far, in the movie), we arrive in the home of our old friends, the Brodys; though one of the first things we learn is that Martin Brody has passed away in the ten-plus years or so since Jaws 2 (Roy Scheider was approached, and turned the project down flat, partially because of the callous things they intended to do with the character). Which leaves our hero for the evening as none other than Ellen Brody (Lorraine Gary), who has not to this point been exactly the reason we've bothered with any of these movies, but okay. She's making dinner with her younger son Sean (Mitchell Anderson), and they swap all kinds of irritating banter that supplies us with exposition in the most painfully ham-fisted way possible. I will spare you the pleasure of sharing it with you.

Eventually, Sean, who has followed in his dad's footsteps and become a policeman in Amity, is sent to deal with an annoying problem out in the harbor: a a pole has gotten itself lodged on a buoy. It's not his job, exactly, but nobody else is around to handle it (one of the other officers is off helping with a cow-tipping incident; I was all set to make fun of this, but it turns out that there are in fact cow farms on Martha's Vineyard, the real-life analogue and filming location for Amity). In his little boat out in the water, Sean does indeed find the pole, and does not notice, though we do, that it is covered with bite marks. And then a shark jumps out of the water and takes off his arm (reluctantly defending Jaws: The Revenge, part 2: it is often said that the water is already bloody before the shark attacks Sean. That's certainly how it looks, but it's just the red light from the buoy reflecting on the water). This is ironically contrasted with the local high school choir practicing their Christmas carols, demonstrating that de Guzman and director Joseph Sargent (who has some actual great films in his career, and should not have been reduced to this) have ever seen any movie.

Ellen is traumatised, so she goes to the Bahams where her elder son Michael (Lance Guest), his wife, Carla (Karen Young), and their shrilly "cute" daughter Thea (Judith Barsi) are living in tropical luxury while he completes his doctoral work before becoming a proper marine biologist. There she flits with the local rapscallion of a pilot, Hoagie (Michael Caine, who famously took the role mostly for a free vacation, and to pay off a new mortgage), and there is a shark, and blah blah blah. It ends with the shark roaring over and over like Godzilla storming through Tokyo - a gross distortion of the comparatively discrete growl the shark emits in Jaws 3-D - and then it is pierced with a boat's broken prow and it blows up like a goddamn Death Star full of blood. I mean blows right the fuck up. Did you know that sharks were combustible? Michael de Guzman did.

At only 89 minutes, Jaws: The Revenge is unquestionably the flimsiest of the Jaws pictures, taking a solid hour to even start to remember that there is a shark going on in all of this, devoting a huge portion of its running time to character dramas that never go anywhere, either because Michael and Carla Brody are tremendously uninteresting to watch (not helped at all by two relentlessly poor performances: Guest's is worse, he stands around looking like he needs to devote all of his brain space to remembering how to breathe), or because the parts of the script where all the innuendo about Hoagie - CHRIST, that name - is paid off. It is savagely dull, though at least it is tremendously incompetent as well, and thus marginally amusing, especially when the shark is actually onscreen.

But let's not go too fast: let us return to that cameo-then-dead scene for Sean Brody - which was initially intended for Martin Brody, and now maybe we see why Scheider decided that this was not the right job at that point in his life - when it becomes clear that in grand '80s horror fashion, the killer in Jaws: The Revenge fashioned a cunning trap for its victim, the kind that involves a number of uncontrollable contrivances working out just so (seriously, cow-tipping). Lots of killers like that in '80s movies. This one, however, is unique in being a 20-foot Great White shark.

That, of course, is the Original Sin from which Jaws: Oh, The "Revenge", Good Jesus can never recover: it presents its shark as being an implacable killer out to take vengeance on the entire Brody family and all their kin. This was actually set up in a rather feeble attempt to give Jaws 2 some extra plausibility: Martin Brody asks a marine biologist if the shark he'd killed in the first movie could have communicated its death throws out to the shark world at large (he uses the whale comparison, because apparently he is totally stupid). "Sharks don't take things personally", she replies drily. HA HA, THE JOKE IS ON YOU marine biologist from Jaws 2 whose name nobody cares about because it isn't Matt Hooper. Sharks do take things personally in the fucked-up world these films take place in. How, exactly, the shark we are currently dealing with is related to the first two is absolutely not clear; but the blood feud is there, and that is partially why the body count is so low here: because this shark is not an indiscriminate machine, but a ruthless assassin. That does, in fact, kill one non-Brody for no reason later on, when a Brody is just right there for the taking. And later fails to kill two people who both absolutely should have died, except for bullshit reveals later that, in the face of all the evidence, they're fine. One of these was the result of test audiences, the other is because Michael Caine is too famous to kill. Caine is asked how he escaped, and his answer is pure Bad Movie genius: "It wasn't easy!" And he probably throws "bloody" in there five or six times, because that is how this script characterises British people.

Better yet, I mean, let's allow that sharks are intelligent, and have a rigid sense of honor, better yet is how it keeps track of where the Brodys are. As is quietly but unmistakably suggested at least three separate times, the shark has a psychic connection to Ellen Brody.

No, seriously.

That's not a story that anybody was going to turn into high art, and maybe that's why Sargent just up and gave up trying; everything here is slack and flat, proving that, in fact, you can be incompetent to make the Bahamas look boring on camera. It really is a miracle of not caring: what he didn't steal from the first movie has no personality at all. And what he does steal from the first movie is plain offensive, particularly including a scene where Michael and Thea recreate the famous Martin/Sean dinner scene with facial mugging, only here it's awful and not sweet, and to make sure that we Get It, even after a flashback to that exact same scene earlier in the movie, Ellen says, "I remember when your dad did that", or however she exactly says it. I'm not looking it up. Later, Ellen gets her own version of the steely-eyed "smile you son of a bitch" moment, and it is even worse, though thankfully much shorter.

It's not scary at all, it's not fun at all, but it is apocalyptically stupid. That counts for a little something. And Caine, bless his mercenary whore's heart, is quite content to just goof off and have fun, and in the midst of a whole lot of stiff performances and one phenomenally bad Caribbean accent perpetrated by Mario Van Peebles as the funny ethnic sidekick, Caine's shit-eating grin and freewheeling attitude actually even save his scenes, a little bit. This it not something to take for granted: no stranger to really bad movies, Caine doesn't always grace them with even a halfway decent performance, as the legendarily rancid The Swarm proves.

One cheesy Michael Caine performance is not, of course, very much in the plus column, and Jaws: The Revenge is pretty much uniformly a waste of time. Though a tremendously zesty waste of time; if you can survive the ungodly first half, with its wall-to-wall character scenes, the staggering ineptitude of the shark effects is enough for a laugh; and the first half is furthermore so adept at breaking your spirit that you'll be extra-grateful for that laugh, and it will seem even better than it deserves. As falls from grace go, they don't get a whole lot more comprehensive.

THE SHARK THAT ROARED

2012-01-12T23:12:00.002-06:00

The current printing of the DVD box calls it Jaws 3, while the onscreen title of the same is Jaws III. Ignore these lies! They are only feeble attempts to hide a secret shame, for make no mistake, the title of the thing is Jaws 3-D. For it came during the enthusiastic flurry of 3-D movies in the early 1980s, and was the second of the three great horror franchise sequels that made the cutesy-pie marketing decision to have the third entry be in 3-D, following Friday the 13th, Part 3 and preceding Amityville 3-D. There is an extremely strong argument to be made that Jaws 3-D is the best of these three films, which is an object lesson in how fucking bad bad '80s movies could be.

How fucking bad is Jaws 3-D? This fucking bad: the very first thing we see before the movie proper even begins is a snazzy 3-D variation on the Universal studio plate, in which the spinning planet and the word UNIVERSAL wrapping it zoom out towards the audience (presumably - to my knowledge, there is no home video release of the 3-D version of the film, which means that all I'm going on is that a whole hell of a lot of things seem to point unnecessarily at the camera, or get larger in otherwise pointless ways. More on this later). It's tacky as shit, and it promises us a tacky experience to follow, which promise is absolutely not broken in the slightest. This is a relentlessly dumb movie - not as willfully and viciously stupid as the fourth and thus-far final entry in the series, Jaws: The Revenge, but far dumber: though there is never a second in which it seems like we're not meant to take this all quite seriously, the whole thing is so hokey and so incredibly incompetent in execution that it feels less wicked in its ignorance and more like a comic relief hillbilly, of the sort seen in this very movie's water-skiing interludes.

And really, doesn't it say just about all there is to say about Jaws 3-D, that it is a killer shark movie with comic hillbilly water-skiing sequences?

But for all I know, that could be entirely the fault of the location, and not of the filmmakers at all. Jettisoning Martha's Vineyard, which for two movies had stolidly doubled for the beleaguered community of Amity, Jaws 3-D was filmed instead at SeaWorld Orlando, the third in the chain of aquatic amusement parks, and in a fit of absolute insanity on the part of some SeaWorld executive, the sort that really ought to have ended a career or two, the filmmakers were even given the go-ahead to use the SeaWorld name for their merry tale of killer sharks invading a theme park and endangering the lives of tens of visitors. The result, even despite the whole "SeaWorld's attractions are so ill-conceived that they are practically begging to be turned into deathtraps by impossibly big Great Whites" angle, feels uncommonly like a particularly desperate bit of corporate synergy, though there was absolutely no kinship between the parks and Universal whatever. But it's still all there: the fixation on SeaWorld shows and the pornographic display of SeaWorld's attractions and aquarium-ringed dining room and stingray petting zoo and all. Particularly the water-skiing shows, which take up at least as much of the film's running time as shark attacks do, unless it just seems that way.

At one point in the film's development, it was going to be done as a self-defeating parody titled Jaws 3, People 0 (John Hughes was involved - Vacation-era John Hughes. Alas, the possibilities...). The studio, allegedly with some goading from an outraged Steven Spielberg, who really oughtn't care at that point, pushed instead for a "serious" movie, although they did not get it: Jaws 3-D is full of some of the most illogical moments in the whole franchise, so many that it's tiring just to think of them, and some of the most grandly absurd misjudgments about sharks not just in the Jaws series, but the whole corpus of killer shark pictures. At one point, the shark roars like a goddamn lion, and if you can find room for that in a "serious" shark picture, you have more creativity than I.

At any rate, it is an indefinite period of time after the events of Jaws 2, that is at any rate more than the 5 years departing this film from Jaws 2, given that 17-year-old Mike Brody has grown up enough to become a whiz-bang engineer who has just accomplished one of the most exciting achievements a career could have: he has built a huge artificial lagoon with a connection to the sea, with an hourglass-shaped walkway submerged 40 feat under the surface to offer park visitors an unparalleled chance to study aquatic life. He is also played by Dennis Quaid, who refuses to acknowledge this film's existence - and that is his right, although a) he's actually pretty good and has nothing, personally, to be ashamed of; b) respect your damn roots, man, and c) people who were in both Dragonheart and G.I. Joe: The Revenge of Cobra should really watch what stones they throw, and in which direction.

So Mike Brody, it would seem, has turned the traumas of his two shark summers into a fascination with the sea (note that when he speaks of this time, he refers only to "that" summer), while his younger brother Sean (John Putch) has gone the exact opposite direction, and has taken the opportunity of college to ship himself square into nice, safe, landlocked Colorado. Still, he's not enough of a hydrophobe to pass up a chance to hang out with his brother for a summer, which is why he shows up just as SeaWorld's Murdering Sharkland is readying for its big premiere.

Mike and his longtime girlfriend, the park's main marine biologist Kay Morgan (Bess Armstrong), are a little too busy with getting the new area up and running, so Sean drifts into the arms of water-skier Kelly Ann Bukowski (Lea Thompson, in her first film role) for a passionate summer romance. Meanwhile, SeaWorld's one-note manager, Calvin Bouchard (Louis Gossett, Jr. in his immediate next film after winning an Oscar for An Officer and a Gentleman, though he could not have known that at the time) is dealing with his own set of problems, but mostly glad-handling the unctuous adventure documentarian Philip FitzRoyce. Earl of Haddonfield (Simon MacCorkindale), who is present as part of the grand opening festivities, though in what exact capacity a world-famous game hunter can serve the PR department of a wildlife-themed park, is sort of left up in the air

Being attentive, you have perhaps noticed that I have not yet mentioned any sharks. Well, Jaws 3-D isn't especially concerned with that, outside of a really charming opening in which a fish is devoured by an unseen, but huge, predator, leaving only its head, mouth still bobbing open, to float at the audience in one of the only decently-handled process shots of the whole picture. Somewhere along the line, one of SeaWorld's technicians makes a point of going out alone at night to inspect something that could wait until the morning, and is eaten; and while Sean and Kelly cavort in the lagoon, two coral poachers on the other side of the water and at least one whole ecosystem away are taken care of in similar fashion, but since none of the character find out about the first death until ages later (and nobody ever finds out about the poachers), this plays not as the merciless growing tension of Jaws or even the lumbering build-up of Jaws 2, but as a hail-Mary attempt to keep the audience diverted until the plot can kick in, rather like the grubby horror films popping up all over in the early 1980s with no regard for anything like "art". The plot does, eventually, ramp up, well past the 30-minute mark; longer than it took for the same moment in the first two Jaws pictures, and Jaws 3-D is every bit of 20 minutes shorter than they are.

Basically, there's a ten-foot Great White swimming about and terrorising the local fauna; our heroes manage to catch it with no big difficulty, and at Kay's urging attempt to keep the first such animal in captivity. Long story short (so long...) they fail because Bouchard is a towering idiot, so blindly motivated by greed in the most narrow sort of Evil Movie Capitalist manner possible that he throws a tremendously fragile animal into a wading pool with a hand-painted sign next to it (the best possible way to advertise your once-in-a-lifetime exhibition). Here things would stop, except that on top of all of this, Bouchard has commanded one of the lagoon's gigantic turbines to be shut down, so that it doesn't burn itself out over some kind of indeterminate blockage.

The second the water stops flowing through the pipe, that blockage extricates itself: for that blockage is a 35-foot Great White (that can swim backwards, no less, not a feature of any shark ever), the little shark's mommy, and though the film thankfully never plays around with the idea that it's out for revenge, the effect is the same: a shit-ton of hungry fish knocking about in a lagoon filled with daft stereotypes played out on water-skis and magnificent tubes deep underwater filled with gawking tourists. The rest of the film pretty much writes itself, saving Carl Gottlieb (his third go with the series) and Richard Freaking Matheson the trouble. In defense of the ordinarily supremely-talented Matheson: by all accounts, the script he worked on bears fairly superficial resemblance to the one shot - no SeaWorld, for starters, and what that could possibly leave, I can't begin to guess - and he just had the poor luck to end up with the onscreen credit.

So, here is what we know so far about Jaws 3-D it is fucking squirrelly (a 35-foot Great White, a solid 10 feet longer than the implausible behemoth of the first movie, takes care of that), it is focused on the character drama at the expense of sharks for the first 30 minutes, making us desperately antsy, and then when the shark attacks kick in, we dearly wish it would go back to the character drama - underwritten and vaguely (and less-vaguely) sexist and hackneyed as it is, at least the four actors involved give it some pep. We know that Bouchard is a particularly stupid example of the Evil Capitalist that can be found in every killer animal film that came after Jaws (which does not, itself, have an Evil Capitalist, on a desperately self-deluding one). We know that FitzRoyce is a ghastly part played gamely by the overqualified MacCorkindale with an eye to making such implausibilities as "I am a brilliant game hunter who will now go swimming with explosives strapped to my waist!" go over even a little bit.

All of these things make Jaws 3-D bad; all of these things make it, perhaps, so transfixingly bad that it would be enough just for the loopiness of it to be a better distraction than Jaws 2 (whose dull competence, ironically, makes it a less enjoyable film than the objectively more terrible third film). But then there is the effects work, which is positively shocking: obviously, the budgets for these things kept dropping, but even so, you cannot be prepared for how all-encompassingly shitty this movie looks. There is first the matter of the sharks: Big Momma is actually a tolerable model, maybe even the second-best of the series after the fish in Jaws 2; at any rate, she is equipped with lips that move independently of her jaws, a key feature of real sharks found nowhere else in the franchise, and that alone is enough to make one agree to silently gloss over how unfortunately fiberglassy those teeth look. And it certainly doesn't help matters that that first- and last-time director Joe Alves, the production designer of the previous films (as well as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Escape from New York, so you know he's bona fide), is so eager to show off the shark in aaaalllll its glory - we see more of the prop here than in any other film in the series - that we get a nice long look at, for example, how a portion of the shark's tail bends funny, exactly like there was a piston or something, right under the plasticky skin. But, in the main, I like the mother shark. Let us pass on.

Because holy motherfucking shit, the baby shark looks awful. At least two props were used: one is a little mechanical job that, when it hits a wall while swimming greedily after two dolphins, has its neck telescope back into its body like a retractable knife, in what is very nearly the most desperately faked shot in any Jaws picture. And I say "nearly", because it's still a veritable masterpiece of realism compared to the prop they use for the baby in captivity, in all the shots when actors have to walk it around the pool. This one is not a mechanical job; it resembles, in fact, a novelty surfboard, and is roughly that flexible. If there was nothing else to recommend Bess Armstrong's performance - and all things considered, she's a lot better than the role should allow - the scene in which she uses all her might to position an obviously uncooperative and awkwardly buoyant shark doll in such a way that it looks, somewhat, like a sick and dying animal would be enough all by itself to earn her, if not our respect, at least our endless sympathy.

Seriously, it looks pathetic - it is as bad a visual effect as anything could possibly have been in a studio picture by 1983. It is Ed Wood bad.

In comparison, the many effects shots almost don't look terrible. Almost. See, Jaws 3-D had to do two kind of tricky things: it had to use a lot of process shots to make various sharks and submarines interact with various models and various matte paintings in somewhat realistic ways; and it had to also make those models and paintings look swell in 3-D (in amongst a stunning number of tasteless 3-D gewgaws; the film has F13 Part 3 beat cold, at any rate. The effort defeated the filmmakers. For the most part, the visual effects in Jaws 3-D look rather like a photo of a shark being crudely pasted onto a glass frame that's wobbled back and forth in front of a blurry photo. I can only imagine that this looked marginally less dreadful in its original theatrical presentation, with actual 3-D; as it stands, the effect is sort of like the aggressively flat animation of Yellow Submarine only less convincing.

And that is what pushes Jaws 3-D into So Bad It's Good territory: the sheer unmitigated incompetence of the whole thing, married to the idiot plot, married to the random directorial gestures, including a hellaciously dumb final shot that is one of the funniest damn things you can imagine. Jaws 3, People 0 itself couldn't have ended on a broader, weirder, or more stupefyingly insulting note. God bless it, for the next film would double down on its idiocy without possessing any of its moronic charm.

At any rate, it has forever been saved the title of "Worst 3-D Shark Film". Shark Night 3D sure as hell saw to that.

THE SHARK IS NOT WORKING

2012-01-12T00:34:00.001-06:00

It is often suggested that the Jaws franchise represents the steepest decline in quality between the first/best and last/worst entries in a given series anywhere in cinema history. This is almost certainly the case, but to tell the truth, the bulk of that drop was done right away - it might, in fact, also stand as the steepest decline between two concurrent entries in any series*. The 1978 Jaws 2 isn't awful by any means, not by proper bad movie standards; but it sure as hell isn't any good. And coming three years off of one of the great popcorn movies in all of history, and one of the best thrillers and best monster movies et cetera ad infinitum, the movement from that down to "isn't any good" is a lot worse than the further movement from "isn't any good" to "strips the paint of your walls, it's so bad", or at least a lot more depressing.

Jaws 2 opens the same way its predecessor did: exactly the same way, with a bubbling "underwater" sound playing beneath the Universal studio leader, followed by some POV underwater photography during the credits. This is not the last time that the film will do exactly the same thing as the first Jaws, though it will be the only time doing so works to its advantage.

We meet up with a pair of scuba divers exploring the wreck of the Orca, Quint's boat from the first movie, when from out of nowhere, a very familiar bassline picks up and we see flashes of grey as they are devoured, with a rather notable paucity of blood. One of the divers' cameras hits the sea floor in just such a way to take a flash photo right back in the direction of the attack. This is, incidentally, the point at which the film loses me - as a sequel to Jaws, anyway. One of the chief bits of genius in that film was the way that it foreshadows future events with great subtlety, enough so that it takes at least a second viewing to realise that it even was foreshadowing in some cases. That camera, meanwhile, is shot in such a way that can only tell us, "look at this PLOT POINT!" and you can pretty much bet your bottom dollar that the camera is either A) how the protagonist discovers that there is a shark attacking people, or B) how the protagonist proves the same to other people. As it happens, it is both of these things. Anyway, it's an insert shot that pretty effectively waves bye-bye to subtlety for the whole rest of the film.

I assume I can be forgiven for skimping on plot synopsis, and if not, then maybe you'd like to come over here and review the most boring of the four Jaws pictures (being as it is nowhere near as good as the first, and lacks the traces of true stupidity that make the latter two fun bad movies). Short version: we are re-introduced to Amity Island Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), whose fear of water has returned after an exquisite final pair of lines in Jaws suggested otherwise, and his wife Ellen (Lorraine Gary), who is now working with a land developer trying to build a series of chic condos on the Amity waterfront. This serves as the new film's "summer tourist season" analogue that causes Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) to nervously deny even the remotest possibility that Brody is right about a second massive Great White Shark hunting the waters around the island, when that time comes.

Everybody says this, but only because it's true, and because it is the single biggest reason that Jaws 2 simply Does Not Work as a sequel: it beggars belief that a second record-breaking shark would come to the same waters to torment the same people just a few years later, and granting that, it beggars even more belief that the very same people who survived the previous film would respond to the idea of a giant shark in this film with such a blithe, "can't happen!" attitude. It is the kind of contrivance that no amount of suspension of disbelief can possibly overcome: a second big shark we can buy, since that is why we have come to see a film with the title Jaws 2, but the idea that everyone - every last single character who isn't Martin Brody - is so dead-set against the mere idea of a giant killer shark that they will not even, for a single minute, contemplate that it might be the case, that just seems like it's begging for an excuse to give Jaws 2 several of the same exact story beats we'd already seen in Jaws and, by 1978, several of its quickest rip-offs, only with the characters being both stupider and less sympathetic (in the first film, Vaughn's refusal to close the beaches had a tragic tinge to it; here it seems like criminal negligence).

I'm getting well ahead of myself: before Brody can think that there is a shark, there has to be a mysterious violent death at sea, and before we get to that point, we're introduced to the subplot: the elder Brody son Mike (Mark Gruner), and his passel of friends, crushes, rivals, and so on. If this movie had come out even one year later, you'd swear it was a Halloween rip-off: it feels so damn much like a spectacularly ineffective attempt to marry the killer animal film with the dead teenager slasher film.

Eventually, the shark strikes, taking out a pair of women on a water-skiing adventure; and right around the 30-minute mark, Brody starts to smell a shark. For comparison's sake, by the 20-minute mark in Jaws, Amity is already in full shark-hunting mode, and we're off and running on our way to the second hour. Jaws 2 has almost the same running time as its predecessor, and takes so much more time doing anything, lumbering along where the original is sleek and urgent. This leaves us with 90 minutes or so of Brody trying to convince people there's a shark, getting fired for being a little bit free with shooting guns at shadows in the middle of a crowded beach, and all the teens go off to get drunk right smack dab in the middle of the shark's feeding grounds. It's really not very interesting, although every now and then the nugget of interesting crops up: the bits detailing how the Brodys have put their lives back together are typically the best-acted in the film and the only ones with characterisations really worthwhile.

The slack pacing is one of the biggest problems with the film; this can be partially laid at the feet of screenwriters Carl Gottlieb (returning from the original) and Howard Sackler, and the previous individuals whose work they were revising (Jaws 2 had a fairly major overhaul in its conception shortly before shooting was to begin), for larding it up with so much deadweight. More of it can be blamed on director Jeannot Szwarc, who you have heard of for no other reason; no Spielberg was he, making a killer shark movie so brisk and excellent that it turned into a major career that would help to re-shape the medium. Simply put, Jaws 2 is more obvious than Jaws, assuming we are stupider, so that everything has to be spelled out, and showing us much more of the shark, which is a slightly more convincing machine than in the first picture, except not when you get to see such lingering close-ups of its various shortcomings. The flimsy "evil builder" subplot is so trivial in the grand scheme of the whole movie as to hardly justify its running time (it was probably stuffed in their to give Lorraine Gary, AKA Mrs. Sid Sheinberg, President of Universal, more to do), while the teen subplot is simply odious; better than you'll find in any given '80s slasher film (the kids are marginally more interesting, their personalities slightly more defined), and considerably worse than the very lowest moments in Jaws, if there are any such things.

And yet, it's not a horrible movie; it's even okay by the standards of the killer animal genre (no Grizzly, this). It is a perfectly serviceable shark movie, which shares the name, setting, and characters of the best shark movie that will ever be made, to its everlasting discredit. It is, like the original Peter Benchley novel, a trashy potboiler, but perfectly satisfying if you're looking for a bit of entertainment, with a couple of good setpieces - the water-ski sequence in particular is a marvelous little snip of thriller filmmaking, even if it feels much less organic than anything in the original, and ends with the truly stupid detail that the woman manages to blow up her own boat, giving the shark a nasty scar that... makes it look tougher, I guess? Best not to ask why things happen in Jaws 2.

There are even a few things that make me positively glad it exists: Scheider's performance, while considerably broader than it was before (I don't want to say he's mugging for the camera exactly, but it's pretty close sometimes), still gives it the most grounding it will ever have; and John Williams's score. Aye, Williams, the only significant behind-the-camera figure to return (ignoring the producers, who had next to nothing to do with making Jaws good), and while the score isn't up to the standards of the previous year's Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Star Wars, the same year's Superman, or the following year's 1941, it's still a smart attempt to continue the best parts of the original score (the tension, the shift in moods), while developing a slightly more complicated musical language - at the risk of speaking complete heresy, and strictly referring to its musical qualities, I actually think the score to Jaws 2 even improves on Jaws, bringing in some of the minor key flavoring he used to such good effect in Star Wars to deepen the soundscape.

So no, Jaws 2 isn't a complete waste; it's just a missed opportunity that probably was never going to be a whole lot better, anyway. No, the complete waste would happen the next time the franchise raised a menacing fin above the water.

THE HEAD, THE TAIL, THE WHOLE DAMN THING

2012-01-10T18:43:00.004-06:00

For some time now, I've had people raising the question, "When are you going to review Jaws?" because as we are all aware, there are not nearly enough reviews of Jaws in this world. That said, I am not immune to begging, and when the slowest week for new releases in several months stumbled into my lap, it seemed to be as good a time as any to finally pull the trigger on writing up the film so good it invented an entirely new paradigm for how moviegoing happens. Also its sequels, which did not do that thing.

This still leaves us at the insurmountable question: what the hell am I supposed to say about Jaws, one of the most thoroughly-analysed films in history? Short of flat-out making things up (e.g. "the narrative hinges on the homosexual love affair between Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw's characters") there really isn't anything left to say about the movie, only things to be reconsidered and, if I am lucky, shared with people new enough to the movie that they've managed to avoid decades of top-shelf criticism.

I will begin, therefore, with a bit of praise for the person who is perhaps most responsible for the film's success, and who is perhaps not often given her full due. I refer to the film's editor, Verna Fields, who has not been quite as well-remembered in latter times as the more obvious figures like Steven Spielberg and John Williams, though without her, it's doubtful that Jaws would exist in a watchable form, let alone be one of the leanest and most perfect thrillers in cinema history. It's well-known that, following an inconceivably difficult shoot, Fields was essentially given a pile of incoherent footage and told, "make it into a movie". That she did just that is already worthy of admiration; but the excellence of the editing in Jaws goes far beyond that. There's only a single one of the film's many famous and beloved and iconic-because-they-are-perfect scenes that doesn't primarily work because of the brilliant cutting, so it's at once too easy and extremely hard to come up with a single example, but let us take the opening scene: in which a young woman, Chrissie (Susan Backlinie), and a young man, Cassidy (Jonathan Filley) are going skinny dipping. Anyway, Chrissie is, while a very drunk Cassidy can't even pull his shirt off. As this happens, of course, Chrissie is attacked by something in the water - we don't know it's a shark yet, but if it is 1975 then we've seen the poster, and if it's any period between 1976 and the present day, then we simply have to not be complete idiots.

A simple, nasty, and unfathomably influential opening - Jaws didn't pioneer this sort of thing, but it made it almost impossible to stumble across a creature movie or really even a horror film generally that opens in any other way - and deceptively sophisticated. First, and obviously, there is the way Fields cuts between Chrissie and Cassidy, initially just silently demonstrating how far apart they are from each other. Then there is the matter of the attack itself, and of course it is wonderfully tense and horrifying, much of which has to do with Fields's choppy, arrhythmic cutting, and much to do with Spielberg's cunning (and, if the stories are true, semi-abusive) directing. But what I want to call your attention to, is that in all of this crazy, hectic flurry of motion, there is one and only one jump-cut; that is, only one moment at which the editing breaks with strict continuity; it is when the shark first bites Chrissie, a startling and horrifying moment, one that is made all the more jarring for us because of that violence against continuity. It's a simple thing, maybe even an obvious one - but how many movies don't do it? Anyway, it's the very definition of a filmmaking gambit that works even if (especially if) you don't notice it, and this is true of Jaws as a whole; it is the key to Spielberg's entire filmography, really, with its characteristic blend of precise filmmaking mechanics and a showman's desire to appeal to the broadest audience.

But we are not done with that scene yet: there is the occasional punctuation of Chrissie's violent death (it has been compared, several times, to a rape) with Cassidy's increasingly slow and sleepy attempts to get into the water, with the attendant shift in sound from loud to silent (this is a change from the start of the scene, where the land was full of noise and the water mostly silent) and the visual palette changing from greyish-blue and black to brownish-black. Then the last two shots (Cassidy asleep on the beach, the empty ocean with a buoy where Chrissie died) sum up the scene, before an absolutely beautiful dissolve matching the horizon line to the view from our protagonist's house.

Nothing exists in a vacuum, of course, and there are at least five distinct disciplines that all have to work together to make this scene work: the editing, the sound design, the cinematography, the musical score, and the directing and acting. But I have claimed and will stand by that claim, that the editing is something particularly special.

From here, the plot properly begins, and the next 15 minutes demonstrate one of the film's other great triumphs that tends to get ignored in favor of the more obvious (and, to be fair, more important) contributions of Spielberg's direction: Jaws has a really fucking great screenplay. This is a little bit surprising, given that it is adapted from a resolutely adequate potboiler by Peter Benchley, and a whole lot more surprising given that the adaptation was executed by Benchley himself, with assistance from TV comedy writer Carl Gottlieb. Not a prepossessing start, yet what came out of it is one of the most mechanically flawless American screenplays this side of Casablanca: assuredly, it is not idiot-proof in the way that Casablanca is, and without seeing the actual shooting script it's hard to say what Spielberg and even Fields might have done to improve any lapses. But based on the evidence we can see, the writing is pretty damn tremendous. It's one of those films where not a single line of dialogue nor a story beat is wasted; everything serves to either establish character or a situation, frequently both. The first scene with our protagonist, Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) is a perfect example: the information we need to know (he is the chief of police, he is new to Amity Island, he is something of a well-liked alien among the native islanders, he is afraid of water) is dribbled out piecemeal, explained to us with brutal efficiency and sweetened enough that it doesn't feel at all like exposition. Brody's first line is to complain about the sun in his eyes; his wife, Ellen (Lorraine Gary) points out that they bought the house in the fall. Boom, right there we know that they've moved in the last nine months, that Brody is a grumbler, two things that will matter for the whole rest of the movie, and it's established in his very first interaction with another character. That's how everything is explained: his profession and his relationship to the town, the town's reliance on tourism, the effect a killer shark would have on that tourism, and so on and so forth. It's a miracle of concision, and I will not bore you all by going through it piece by piece, but it's an incredible amount of information in very little time.

This makes a lot of sense when one steps back and considers the whole structure of Jaws: in effect, it needs to fit an entire movie in half the running time, for the entire thing is really a two-part narrative consisting of two three-act structures. The first half (actually, slightly more: 65 minutes of a 124-minute film) is the messy character-driven thriller of one man's attempt to save his town from its own stupidity, and in order to present this story in slightly more than an hour, it has to move quickly. I had never, in all the many times I've watched this film, actually paid attention to the timing of events throughout, but it is a far swifter narrative than I'd have guessed; the death of the Kintner boy, the big woomph! moment of the first third, comes all of 16 minutes into the movie, by which point virtually all of the conflicts that will define the first 65 minutes have been established.

At the same time, the first half has to not only function on its own terms of establishing a threat and building up a community that is reasonable and believable enough that we will feel anguished when it is threatened, but also to establish a foundation for the second half. It's no secret that the second part of Jaws is, on the whole, better than the first, which says more about the second part; it is tremendous filmaking in every regard, essentially a three-man play taking place entirely in one location, simultaneously a man vs. nature adventure as well as being a character drama about three incompatible people being thrust into a situation where they must work together in despite of their considerable differences of temperament and tone (it is one of the great glories of the film that at some point in the last 50 minutes, there is every possible iteration of two-against-one amongst the three used to propel some moment of conflict or another).

Incidentally, it is this point that has always made me regret when people label Jaws as the big honkin' blockbuster that ruined the New Hollywood Cinema and began the beginning of the long slow death of American filmmaking. For all it's B-movie trappings, I have, for one, always regarded Jaws as being a natural part of the New Hollywood movement in a way that e.g. Star Wars is not, for it is at heart a character study with class warfare overtones, nestled inside a shark-hunting adventure. No, it is not the most sophisticated character study of the 1970s. But I defy anyone to name a single big effects-driven blockbuster made anytime after 1975 that has even one character as sharply-drawn and richly played as the three heroes of Jaws; or to name another huge summer movie where the consensus pick for its best scene is a lengthy monologue captured in great long takes.

Nor should we begrudge the film its financial success: truth be told, it basically needed to be the first $100 million film of all time in order for Spielberg to have any career at all following. Not literally, but after going to massively far over-budget and over-schedule, a little hit wouldn't have done it; it had to be a great huge hit or the relatively green filmmaker would be persona non grata, and the future evidence of his career leads me to regard that as a bad thing, although I do happen to regard Jaws as his directorial peak, even if that is partially the result of happy accident (shark that didn't work, invisible menace, etc. - you surely don't need to hear that story again from me).

I was, however, talking about how wonderfully the film sets up its second half: the initial appearance of grizzled fisherman Quint (Robert Shaw), in what is effectively a first-act appearance of a human Chekhov's gun; the scene with the idiot shark hunters in which the floating pier stands in for the shark, foreshadowing the use of the yellow barrels later on; marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) telling a story of how a shark destroyed his boat. And of course, the film establishes the characters in vivid detail, all the way up to the final conflict with the big 25-foot rubber doll that we thankfully only see in bits and pieces, the evident fakeness of which isn't enough to derail a film that has completely won us over by that point - I think it is sometimes overlooked that not only does the absence of the shark in the first hour work because the unseen is scarier than the seen, but because the seen in this case looks really dumb, and the film needed us on its side before it asked us to suspend our disbelief on that grey thing being a shark.

Anyway, as I was saying, the vivid character details: the reason Jaws is still better than any other monster movie or summer blockbuster ever made. Amity is a real place, with real people who even in one little moment seem to have a whole life somewhere offscreen; meanwhile, our main characters all have real honest-to-God presence and depth, some of which comes in very unexpected ways - for example, the godawful powder blue jacket with little white anchors worn by the mayor (Murray Hamilton), a marvelous touch of characterisation through costuming; or the incredible dinner table scene between Brody and his youngest son. It helps that they're impressively played, with some really nice touches. Even as broad a character as Quint has subtle moments (thank God for Shaw's performance, without which the character might have slid into cartoon excess): his little glances and facial twitches when nobody but the camera is looking - at one point, he frowns a little when Brody reluctantly sips at Quint's homemade alcohol, and it's as great a character moment as film can possess.

Anyhow: Jaws. It's a good 'un. And I have barely touched upon John William's incredible score, horns and bass strings creating a throbbing sense of menace: the main theme is clearly a response to Bernard Herrmann's famous stabbing strings in Psycho, and it is beyond question the single finest piece of horror movie music in between that film and Halloween. Any composer would be proud to call it his best work - there is one cue, during the final day's chase, where it gets a bit too sprightly for to mood of the moment, but that is the single misstep - given the incredible run of scores he wrote between 1977 and 1983, it's not much more than a warm-up, though it's still one of the chief reasons the film builds tension as well as it does.

Nor did I so much as mention Bill Butler, a cinematographer whose career is otherwise of little note - he'd eventually shoot Anaconda, so that's something - though he and Spielberg were responsible here for the very best ship-bound camerawork in film history, turning a chaotic shoot on the water into some of the smoothest, most rhythmic shots of the ocean that you will ever see no matter how many boat movies you watch and no matter who tries to make them in the future.

But that's the hell of Jaws: it is a perfect movie. Some may complain about its relative lack of thematic depth; to hell with them. It's deep enough to have a real sense of personality, and not so deep that it ceases to be an amazingly tight monster thriller, a genre film of the absolute highest order with intelligence and pretty much the best craftsmanship that ever went into the making of a film that could honestly be tagged with the label of "horror". It is, simply put, one of the absolute masterpieces of populist cinema, and worthy of more respect and love than I or any one writer could ever send its way.

YOUR MOTHER SUCKS COCKS IN HELL

2012-01-09T18:37:00.000-06:00

If the stupid people are right and 2012 ends up being the last year of human existence, it could hardly have gotten off to a more appropriate start that The Devil Inside, which suggests at least this much: the race for Worst Film of the Year is going to be extremely competitive.

Here is how broken down to its awful little toes the film is: I can't even describe the goddamn scenario without having to guess what the filmmakers were attempting to do before they failed. Plotwise, we have here a young woman named Isabella Rossi (Fernanda Andrade), whose mother, Maria (Suzan Crowley), was committed to a mental hospital in Rome in 1989, after killing two priests and a nun under extremely bizarre circumstances. Here in 2009, Isabella has just learned from her father that what actually happened was a failed exorcism, and that the Catholic Church is officially staying as far the fuck away from the Rossi affair as it can manage. There is, naturally, only one natural reaction to all of this, which is to make a documentary film about all of this. Or anyway, to hire a snotty, bearded young filmmaker, Michael (Ionut Grama), to make a documentary for her.

The Devil Inside takes the form of the project that Isabella and Michael end up creating in the States and in Vatican City itself, although using the phrase "takes the form" is just about the worst possible phrase I could have used to describe the picture shat out by director William Brent Bell and his co-writer, Matthew Peterman, for they don't seem to understand what exactly form even is in this medium that they have chosen for their career. Superficially, The Devil Inside is yet another "found footage" picture after the fashion of Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project or [REC] or Paranormal Activity. Holy shit, especially Paranormal Activity - I presume that whether Bell and Peterman approached Paramount's new Insurge label, or whether Insurge farmed it out to them, the first words in the meeting were "Paranormal Activity with an exorcism". Which has already been done at least twice to my certain knowledge: 2010's wide-release The Last Exorcism, and the 2008 microbudget Chronicles of an Exorcism. But to its credit, The Devil Inside is probably only ripping off one of these.

Thing is, it's absolutely not a found footage picture, but an actual documentary (of course, it's not a documentary at all, but you get my meaning), with title cards identifying important people and editing being used in very conscious ways to provide storytelling. Except that sometimes it forgets to be a documentary and goes back to being found footage. Which is our first sign that Bell didn't give a fuck, or maybe just is flailing and incompetent. Or perhaps our second sign, if we paid enough attention to note that depending on which line of dialogue you're going to favor, Isabella is either 25, 26, or 28-years-old. Which is a nitpick, but when a film is trying to pass for reality - something that both fake documentaries and fake found footage pictures theoretically do - it's really damn important to make sure that the reality is coherent, and not ribboned with easily-identified continuity farts like that one. Or the one where we meet David (Evan Helmuth) and Ben (Simon Quarterman) when Isabella and Michael sit in on exorcism class in Rome, and that same night we discover that they are rogue freelance exorcists who have to be careful not to let the Church find out what they're doing. Which would theoretically include calling attention to themselves by attending exorcism class and loudly disagreeing with the teacher's conclusions. Or, y'know, allowing themselves to be filmed by a documentarian while they're busy breaking Church law.

That latter point actually becomes a major part of the plot when Isabella tries to convince the pair to help save Maria from the demons possessing her, and David grows concerned that this film might end up endangering their standing with the Vatican, and that would be a valid concern he hadn't already blithely allowed the filmmakers to tag along on one of their illegal exorcisms.

OH MY GOD FUCK THIS MOVIE. Sorry, I needed to get that off my chest.

Alright, so The Devil Inside fails to establish a remotely credible reality, and it can't decide if it wants to be a documentary or not, but by God, Bell does ride that fake documentary conceit as hard as he possibly can, though if this was a documentary, it would be an uncommonly embarrassing and amateurish one, with Isabella and Michael playing to the camera like the world's worst reality TV stars. Regardless, the film is so invested in playing at being a documentary that it even includes an opening thirty minutes that only make sense in the context of a documentary, and certainly not that of a fictional film with a script and an audience waiting to see a goddamn possession. Absolutely nothing of what happens in the opening third could possibly be described as "interesting" if there film were anything other than an actual for-real documentary about exorcisms - which it is not, despite the filmmaker's brave attempt to suggest otherwise, with their interviews and opening title card reading “The Vatican did not endorse this film nor aid in its completion” and all, and with these two postulates being the case, it follows that the opening third of The Devil Inside is itself not interesting. "Let's go to fake exorcism school!" sing Isabella and Michael. "Let's not do anything at all except present this material as though we're informing the viewer about this interesting concept they may not know much about, and still don't because this whole movie is made-up!"

Finally we meet Maria Rossi, and absolutely the only part of the movie that has any life in it whatsoever is the scene where she twitches uncomfortably and shows off her self-inflicted scars and freaks out Isabella, though even here the film completely sucks - the attentive viewer, and not even that attentive, really just the viewer who is awake, will note that sometimes Michael is standing in places where he is then immediately not standing when we cut to the hospital's security footage, and given the way things play out, plus the Vatican neither endorsing nor aiding, how the hell did anybody get hold of that footage in the place? But anyway, Crowley is still the best thing about the movie and the only actor who is worth a damn.

The rest of it is all Isabella and Michael wondering if they're uninteresting people, and shallow people for being so concerned with their movie that they lose track of suffering or some such. Yes, they are. Also, Helmuth oversells his character way too much, and plays too much to the unsurprising twist ending much too early, before it even makes sense to do it, or maybe it's that the twist is so unsurprising that I was anticipating it. Anyway, these four bland, overacted and underwritten characters putter about Rome having grim conversations that would totally call the authority of the Vatican into question if the evidence wasn't all in a fictional movie, but I think we're not supposed to notice it, or care. Along this, there are virtually no devils inside things, and when they are there, it's like every other exorcism movie ever made, except cheaper. Eventually the whole thing stops at a point that could be called an ending if you have only a theoretical understanding of storytelling, though at least it doesn't actually offer a sequel hook. I'm sure that won't stop them from making The Devil Further Inside, at which point I suppose whoever replaces Bell will just film characters hitting the camera with hammers, for that is the only way that one could violate the essential nature of cinema more thoroughly than it has been done here.

1/10

MOVIES I MISSED IN 2011: I KNOW WHAT BOYS LIKE

2012-01-07T23:45:00.004-06:00

The word of the day, boys and girls, is "ambivalent". As in, "I feel extremely ambivalent towards Bellflower, because Bellfower is extremely ambivalent about its two main characters." Not in the good way.* One gets the feeling - anyway, I got the feeling, and it does seem that Bellflower is something of a Rosarch test - one gets the feeling that first-time writer-director Evan Glodell was all set to slam his protagonists for being shallow, violence-obsessed misogynists, except somewhere along the line he started feeling too sorry for them to carry through on it; that is, anyway, my best reading of the paradox in which the story apparently pays lip serve to the idea that they're basically sociopaths with basically no grasp of reality, while everything else - the acting, the directing, and the music especially - makes them out as some variety of tragic, Romantic heroes. This is not the single problem with Bellflower, which would in any case be a "promising" debut rather than an "exciting" debut; it is, though, an overriding problem.

Bellflower is about two twentysomething men, transplanted from Wisconsin to California, Woodrow (played by Glodell himself, who rounds out the hyphenates by co-editing and producing) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson), united by a childhood love of Mad Max, which they have carried all the way to pseudo-adulthood by means of a shared plan to create a post-apocalyptic crazy psycho gang of their very own: they shall be named "Mother Medusa", and will drive around in a muscle car fitted out with the homemade weaponry that Aiden puts together in his spare time, up to and including a fully-functioning flamethrower. Obviously, there's the pesky matter of waiting around for the right post-apocalypse, but Woodrow and Aiden are optimistic sorts, and this does not much put them out.

In the meanwhile, there is life to be lived, which includes going out and partying every night, and in Woodrow's case, meeting cute with a girl, Milly (Jessie Wiseman), when she bests him during a cricket-eating contest. A cricket-eating contest, I say. Animals were harmed in the making of Bellflower. Anyway, since Milly is such a free spirit and Woodrow is such an affable schlub that they take a spur-of the-moment trip to Texas, and become something akin to boyfriend and girlfriend. This is nice for a while, then it is not as nice, then Milly breaks Woodrow's heart, and he tries to find a way to get on with his life and feel better with the help of his good friend. Also epic amounts of violence and destruction.

Bellflower is inscrutable as all hell, partially because it's not an entirely straightforward task just to pin it all down: a large portion of it takes place inside Woodrow's mind, possibly the whole damn thing. Which is enough to give every single flaw with the film an out: it's all from the perspective of a broken, angry person! And that is why the cinematography is so aggressively unpleasant, and the characterisations so uneven, and the depiction of women so uncompromisingly filthy and dark! Except that I truly don't think that Glodell means for it to play that way. At the very least, if he does, then the movie is a failure of execution, for it does not at all. If there is any intention whatsoever that we're meant to view Woodrow as a self-deluding, tragic figure, it is buried underneath the very much more obvious intention that holy shit they built a Mad Max car.

And, well, holy shit, they built a Mad Max car. The most impressive thing about Bellflower is not what it does or says, nor how it does or says it, but that it exists. The film was made for a sum of money so tiny that it actually seems tiny: you know how you hear about how a film was made for virtually nothing, and then it turns out that it was, like $75,000, and that doesn't sound like nothing at all? Bellflower isn't that. It cost a robust $17,000, and for that there are custom cars and flamethrowers and all sorts of crazy things that exist largely because Glodell built them from the ground up. He built, for God's sake, the camera used to shoot the damn picture.

That kind of mythological production history encourages a kind of enthusiasm that the film simply doesn't justify: even setting aside somethings that are pretty much unforgivable, like the perpetual crap on the lens (there are places where that can be okay if it is an extremely specific choice, which it isn't here), as being perhaps inevitable side-effects of the dirt-cheap shot. What Bellflower still has after that, is a galling visual aesthetic that starts by coating everything in a sheen of slimy yellow - I guess to suggest the corruption of the world it takes place in, maybe? Then there is Glodell and cinematographer Joel Hodge's singularly unconventional decision to shoot absolutely everything in the shallowest depth of field that could be managed, which has the effect of making roughly 90% of the movie not just out of focus but so far out of focus that the effect of watching the movie is similar to what happens when a very nearsighted person tries to stumble about without glasses.

The film looks like shit, in short, and there is looking like shit because you're too poor to help it, and there's looking like shit because you made the conscious decision, "hey, if we did this, wouldn't it be cool?" No, it looks like shit. Or, to be strictly accurate, piss.

Then, over by here, are the characters. Unevenly played, for a start: Glodell is a tremendously unconvincing actor, Wiseman is decent, Dawson is absolutely captivating, and in the role of Milly's friend Courtney, Rebekah Brandes gives a performance all made of stiff line readings that sound very nearly like she learned them phonetically. And even less evenly written, though this returns us to that very first point: what the hell is Bellflower even supposed to be about? Because from where I'm standing, it's about how awesome teenage nihilism is when your a man in your late twenties, and also, what the fuck is with women, dude? Everything you have ever assumed about emotionally immature young men who don't understand why it's their fault that no girl has ever wanted to spend time with them; that is the very heart of Bellflower, and not ironically.

Or maybe it's just about how incredibly awesome Mad Max and The Road Warrior were (but not so much so that Glodell can be arsed to spell Lord Humungus's name right), and how cool flames jutting out of a car's exhaust can be. After a certain point, the over-directed and over-edited film really is all about its own style, which is considerable and which speaks immensely well of the filmmaker's ignenuity, and it will be absolute worth it to see how outsized his vision can get when he finds his way into some real money. At which point, I pray, he'll see fit to use somebody else's screenplay.

5/10

MOVIES I MISSED IN 2011: YOU CAN'T SOLVE ALL THE WORLD'S PROBLEMS WITH A SHOTGUN

2012-01-06T01:27:00.000-06:00

Hobo with a Shotgun is deliberately meant to be a bad movie. The reason that I know this is that the film is incredibly eager to remind me over and over again, of this fact. And that is why I'm almost tempted to say that it's bad. I mean, it is bad, but it's not completely bad. Like, the difference between a bad movie that is bad and a bad movie that is good.

Start again: Hobo with a Shotgun is such a desperate attempt at being one of Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino's '70s exploitation throwbacks that it's a little bit sad. It has the right pedigree: director Jason Eisener did in fact win a contest hosted by Rodriguez to make a fake exploitation trailer in the mold of his and Tarantino's Grindhouse project, and his Hobo with a Shotgun trailer was in fact screened in the Canadian distribution of that feature. This makes it the fourth of the Grindhouse features, after Rodriguez's Planet Terror and Tarantino's Death Proof, the original Grindhouse double feature, and Rodriguez's 2010 Machete. It is also, and this is the telling and important part, very much the worst of the four. I will return to this though.

Hobo with a Shotgun, you will be stunned and stupefied to learn, is about a hobo (Rutger Hauer), who kills people with a shotgun. There are only two important questions that are not already answered by the title: "is he a hero or a villain?" and "does he start the movie with a shotgun?" The answer to the latter is, "no", and I was legitimately surprised that it took over a third of the not very long movie (86 minutes with the credits) before he so much a glanced at a firearm. The answer to the former is that he is a hero; a vigilante in the small community of Hope Town, which as we learn in the very beginning of the movie, courtesy of a graffito'ed sign, is dismissively called "Scum Town" by the residents (it is also called "Fuck Town" in dialogue, but alas! text must take precedence). Scum Town is currently a ghastly, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome-esque realm of dystopian decadence overseen by a gleefully self-aware psychopath called The Drake (Brian Downey), who uses gory, torturous public execution as a means of keeping the populace cowed and entertained in equal measure, with his two scrawny, reptilian sons (Nick Bateman and Gregory Smith) as his lieutenants.

All the hobo wants is to buy a lawnmower and start up a nice little landscape business, but his finely-honed sense of moral justice gets in the way, and so it is that he partners with a fed-up prostitute named Abby (Molly Dunsworth) to clean up Scum Town "one shell at a time" in the agreeable phrasing of the ad campaign. His efforts make him a hero to the citizenry, and so The Drake launches an excessively cruel and widespread push-back; this ultimately includes a pair of armored and apparently immortal thugs collectively named The Plague. And it also includes so much death and blood I don't quite know how to say it.

There is a line so extremely fine that I cannot be certain that it truly exists, but if it does, I think it looks like this: on one side, you have movies like the aforementioned Tarantino/Rodriguez pictures, or Larry Blamire's The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra: knowing throwbacks to the form and content of old trash cinema, that are nonetheless aware that it is not the '50s or '70s or '80s or whathaveyou, and there is an obligation laid on the maker of such movies to smuggle some kind of commentary into the finished product, an awareness that it is, after all, a latter-day simulacrum of something old. And then there is Hobo with a Shotgun on the other side, along with almost all of the movies taking their cue from Tarantino's neo-exploitation of the last decade and change, movies that are content to replicate the bad old days with nothing to justify it but a huge wink and a cheery, "Shit, this is pretty bad and stupid, don't you think?" And is is, aye, and it takes more than self-awareness to make a deliberately bad movie worth watching. After all, if you have devoted care and time and talent to making a movie that is no good - you have made a movie that is no good, whether it's on purpose or not. Frankly, I'd rather watch a genuine '80s splatter picture like the ones Eisener is emulating: at least they're not constantly leering at me with smug postmodern detachment.

Anyway, I did mention, didn't I, that Hobo with a Shotgun ends up being not completely bad-bad. It has nothing to do with the script, which except for a few isolated gags is not at all clever or satiric, and wallows in all sorts of tawdry sexist jokes, inaccurately assuming that because it's over-the-top, it's not therefore actually misogynist; nor does it have to do with Eisener's extremely enthusiastic depiction of extremely cheap and extremely messy gore effects, which feels less like Tarantino's "let us be collectively amused by the absurdity of movie violence" and more like Eli Roth's "I enjoy staging movies about dead people".

It's because, when all is said and done, the movie actually looks pretty snazzy, in a grainy, brokedown way. Eisener and cinematographer Karim Hussain pull out one of the most unique color palettes of 2012, with everything super-saturated and turned towards rally lurid variations of the colors. Not just blood-red, but red the color of Kool-Aid; not just the hard yellow of urban night light, but freakish golds; not just cool blues in the villain's lair, but eye-searing neon. And that comes atop the design of the movie, which is actually pretty imaginative considering how much of it was location photography: it is as fanciful a vision of blasted urban waste as you could get in a Canadian city, while the costumes are delightfully grubby, and The Plague are as altogether memorable-looking as any sleazy gore movie could ever want from its bad guys.

It actually doesn't look the part of an '80s throwback at all, then; it looks, in fact, like nothing much at all. That is its saving grace: without having such a striking vision underlying everything, this would just be an exhaustively violent film that fancies itself much smarter and cooler than it actually is; and it's not not that, but it's cool to look at along the way. At any rate, it's no worse than the films it emulates, even if fake cheese is never as appealing as the real thing.

6/10

MOVIES I MISSED IN 2011: GONNA DIE IN A SMALL TOWN, AND THAT'S PROB'LY WHERE THEY'LL BURY ME

2012-01-05T10:16:00.001-06:00

The first important thing about Putty Hill is that it is, as they like to call it, bravura filmmaking. Matthew Porterfield's second feature is a plotless chamber drama that does everything in its power to convince you that it's a documentary, except that it doesn't actually want you to think it's a documentary at all, even though almost all of the actors are playing variations of themselves, reciting lines that are a melange of Porterfield's script and their own improvisations. Films that blur the line between fiction and reality are hardly new, nor are films that use documentary form to alter our relationship to their fictitious content. Still, something about Putty Hill feels especially aggressive in that respect; maybe that the film is so grubby, and its documentary nature so pointedly artless - Porterfield (or maybe the documentarian character Porterfield is playing, if there's any meaningful difference) is a constant off-screen presence, prodding at his interview subjects uncertainly - that it feels more like raw footage than a completed movie. Which is, I take it, part of the film's strategy, to create a low-rent, actively unpolished mise en scène that leaves us more open to the characters' feeling and musings and life stories as more realish.

Whatever the case, it's electrifyingly unconventional, and Porterfield surely gets points for being a young independent filmmaker willing to take risks, and that is something worthy of encouragement. Which is not enough reason to consider Putty Hill an unqualified, nor even a qualified success. The fact of the matter is, there's not much other than the bold structural and formalistic gamesmanship that gives the film much of a personality, or reason to exist; and since the formalism does not seem to be play for the sake of it, but in the service of the story and characters, that simply isn't enough.

The film takes place in the run-up to a funeral: it takes a little while to figure out whose, and a little while longer to figure out why he died, but it's not any kind of spoiler for me to say that the deceased is a twentysomething named Cory, who died of a drug overdose - and the exact specifics of how that happened are a matter of a little debate, but that's not at all the point of the movie. The point, instead, is to spend time with his family, and his friends, and his family's friends and his friends' families. If there had to be a main thrust of the movie, it would be how Cory's death has forced a confrontation between his cousin Jenny (Sky Ferreira, the only professional in the cast, according to the notes) and his uncle Spike (Charles Sauers), her father. But even that's not really where Porterfield wants to take the film.

Instead, Putty Hill is a kaleidoscope of how a great many people feel or (more often) don't know what to feel in the wake of a death that affects them personally, but doesn't come as too much of a surprise. Secondarily, it's a snapshot of an interconnected working-class community in repose, with Porterfield and cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier's camera lingering with journalistic interest on the spaces in which this small slice of Baltimore folk go through their lives. On the latter count, at least, Putty Hill is awfully successful: Portferfield's pseudo-documentary approach is exactly the best way to capture these locations with candor and simplicity, and it is uniformly the case that the best parts of the movie are those which stop to observe - and there are several such moments, of which I'm inclined to say that the two best are a lengthy scene during which several of Cory's friends are sitting around in a river, relaxing and enjoying each other's company, and Cory's memorial service, a neatly oddball affair that might easily devolve into obnoxious quirkiness if stripped of Porterfield's laconic non-aesthetic. The casualness with which he films these and similar scenes is by far the film's greatest asset, giving them the aura of a home movie, where the camera is present but not commented on, just part of the atmosphere.

Where Putty Hill falls apart, badly, is when it stops looking and starts talking - when we are put into one-on-one conversations with the characters and their director, or when they get to chatting about their feelings in small groups in front of us. The problem is twofold: for one, there are a hell of lot of characters given a prominent berth, and the film's scant 86-minute running time is altogether insufficient to get to know most of them at all well; which leaves most of them with featured scenes that play out as the same damn thing over and over, with personal variations. "Let me talk about the dead guy, who is dead. Death, death, death. No, I haven't been to a funeral before. One more thing about - guess what! - death." That is, beyond question, a snotty reduction of the script, which does try to dig into the characters a little more than that, but at the end of everything I was not taken by the feeling that I had learned anything at all about how this small segment of blue-collar strivers viewed anything other than loss. A noble enough theme, maybe, but it starts to get repetitive, and it's never all that convincing, thanks to the second part of the twofold problem.

To wit, the acting.This is maybe not the moment for such a rant, but if there's one thing that has threatened to decimate the validity of the American independent film in the last half-decade or so, it's the pernicious and demonstrably untrue idea that non-actors playing "themselves", or at least characters who occupy much the same segment of society that they do, will be convincing at it. I admire the tremendous optimism with which this belief is doggedly pursued in one movie after another, but the results are hardly ever worth it; certainly not here, where most of the cast mumbles their lines stiffly while having no idea what they should be doing with their body or where they should be staring. For all the effort Porterfield sank into making his movie look like a documentary, it's ironic that the emotional truth of his film is undone because his performers couldn't be convincing versions of themselves.

And it points out the lie of the thing: Putty Hill really is, at heart, just another damn American indie with the same played-out bag of tricks: non-professional acting, loose handheld cameras, and dodgy sound recording all meant to signify "this is real and true and not all Hollywood polish", when it serves instead to make the thing seem cheap and amateurish (especially the dodgy sound, which longtime readers will know is my bête noire). Now, Porterfield's ingenious structural choices and the film's exemplary sense of place to a whole lot to redeem Putty Hill from itself, but it's only enough to make the film tolerable; while the director clearly has a for-real great film inside of him, it's a long way from this one.

6/10

MOVIES I MISSED IN 2011: THERE'S HONOR FOR YOU

2012-01-03T21:14:00.001-06:00

As the most prolific filmmaker currently living, Miike Takashi has probably done just about everything a director can do at least once, making statements about his authorial personality almost totally meaningless. This is not enough to shame me out of making just such a statement, which is that one of the things Miike does an awful lot (after his penchant for extreme violence, maybe eventhe thing he does most) is to explore the limitations of film genre. And so it is with 13 Assassins, his remake of a 1963 film that, I am sorry to confess, I have not seen. Perhaps Miike's film bears such a strong resemblance to the original that it has virtually no personality of its very own, though I strong doubt it, from the evidence. Miike's 13 Assassins is not merely a remake of one single film, but a moderately satiric commentary on the whole body of '50s and '60s jidaigeki (costume dramas set during the more than 250-year Edo period, to us Westerners), dismantling the aesthetic tools of those films and replacing them with something far more acerbically modern.

The plot has received its fair number of comparisons to Kurosawa Akira's legendary Seven Samurai, which I think tells us more about American film critics' relationship with Japanese cinema than it does about 13 Assassins, though I take it as read that Miike was not exempting Kurosawa from his catch-as-catch-can approach. What we have here is fictionalised historical figure Lord Matsudaira Naritsugu (Inagaki Gorô), a young man who enjoys doing evil things almost solely because he can: the younger son of the last Shogun, and brother of the present Shogun, he is one of the most powerful men in the country. He takes this as a license to murder in particularly brutal ways, until eventually, one of the survivors of Matsudaira's savagery commits seppuku as a form of very public protest - it is with this beautifully-shot scene of violence that the film opens, in fact.

Recognising an untenable situation when it slices open its own belly, the high-ranking Lord Doi (Hia Mikijiro) decides to execute a dangerous plot: he hires the wise old samurai Shimada Shinzaemon (Yakusho Kôji) to assassinate the decadent prince, by whatever means necessary. Shinzaemon gathers 11 other samurai to serve as his assassination squad; while traveling to the city where they plan to ambush Matsudaira and his guard, the 12 assassins come across a weird little fellow named Kiga Koyota (Iseya Yûsuke), and thus fulfill the title.

In the international cut running just over two hours - and how damned irritating it is, too, that 20 minutes were snipped out of the Japanese release for what I imagine was no particular reason - this part of the film, the "gather assassins and make a plan" part, runs for about 75 minutes. The rest is the execution of the plot, with "execution" being a pun on the fact that they are not just performing tasks, but killing Lord Matsudaira, or "executing" him. Anyway, the much-ballyhooed 40-minute ending action sequence turns out to thus be slightly longer than 40 minutes, which means in fact that we are getting more than we bargained for. Better yet, the 42-ish-minute ending action sequence is every bit as incredibly well-choreographed and designed as you have probably heard, if you keep your ear out for good Asian action-adventure movies (which is a good thing to do - they are better than ours). It's a little bit like a violent caper movie set in a really muddy rural Japanese village: watch the assassins design traps, and then continue to watch as they trick a much, much larger army of bodyguards into wandering right into those same traps. It is the most Miikevian (Miikeish?) part of the movie, the most rousing, the most enthusiastically bloodthirsty, and the most fun, which are all reasons why it's the part that gets talked about the most.

And that's all well and good, but let's be fair to the rest of the movie: for without the foundation that the first hour and change builds, that action sequence would not be terribly interesting simply because we'd have no investment, and without the outstanding ending, which I will not spoil except to say that it is the culmination of several threads throughout the movie in which violence and authoritarianism are deplored as inherent evils, the action sequence would be so much empty sizzle and the movie itself a shallow exercise in flashy fighting. Not something Miike is inherently opposed to, but I'm rather glad he didn't indulge here.

What the film really is, isn't a delivery system for a hell of a good action setpiece; it's a deconstruction of the medieval Japanese focus on honor and discipline, in reference to similar films that either treated that subject with relatively straightforward appreciation, or similarly satirised and attacked that idea. Visually and narratively, 13 Assassins reflects back to films at least as far apart in time and disparate in tone and theme as Mizoguchi Kenji's 1941 The 47 Ronin and Kobayashi Masaki's 1962 Harakiri (which Miike remade immediately following this film - redundantly, given how much Kobayashi influence there would appear to be in every inch of 13 Assassins). It is a film about how jidaigeki function as much as it is, itself, a jidaigeki, and this extra layer of distance from the subject matter allows Miike to consider the plot critically as much as any of those films ever did - and this is not, I hasten to say, an act of counter-mythology like an American making a neo-Western that deliberately subverts the militarism and racism of classic films. The directors Miike is referencing are mocking or subverting the traditions of Edo period Japan as often as they are upholding and praising them. But none of them do it in such a smirking, playful way as Miike does, nor with the smart use of violence to underline the brutality of this period (not that they could, of course; I might also point out that Miike is not here half as violent as we otherwise know he can be). The point is the same: being driven by honor and only honor is a fool's game. But getting there, here, is a much fresher experience than would seem likely for such a well-trod genre.

And so, for all that the first hour does seem a little bit pokey and exposition-heavy - tightly-constructed and outstandingly well-acted exposition, beyond a doubt, with all of the characters making an impression no matter how little screentime they get: with the titular 13 assassins, one villain, one chief henchman, and one nobleman in charge of the assassins all qualifying as "main" characters, screentime is at a premium - it's hardly the case that 13 Assassins is just a waiting game for an outstanding setpiece, as I've seen it described; the opening hour, with all of its narrative intrigue and visual references, is every bit as important as the setpiece, the "classical" portion of the film where the action is the "Miike" portion. Taken hand in hand, the two halves of 13 Assassins do in fact add up to one very great whole, as engaging and fun as you could ever want an epic tale of corruption-fighting samurai to be.

8/10

JANUARY 2012 MOVIE PREVIEW

2012-01-03T15:18:00.001-06:00

And as it will, a new movie year starts with soothing simplicity: as the feverish crush of Oscar hopefuls open in tiny scattered doses across the country, a few movies are nudged into wide release that were thrown into January primarily so that they couldn't embarrass anybody too terribly much by tanking when anybody gives a damn instead of tanking when nobody's going to see movies in the first place.

For my part, I love January mostly because so very little comes out that I can blast through these previews in half the time.

6.1.2012

Just one wide release to star the year. One. God bless 'em. For that matter, I don't see how The Devil Inside is going to do anything at all to break out of either of its two ghettos: the first being ohmigod another exorcism movie, the second being ohmigod another super low-budget horror film. But what the hell, there's always a chance for an exorcism picture to do anything at all to be memorable and watchable, even if I don't personally see a chance of that here.

13.1.2012

If, as I assume it will, the 3-D reissue of Disney's Beauty and the Beast wins the weekend box office, I won't be seeing it and/or reviewing. Just a heads-up. Not because I don't like the idea of seeing it on the big screen again; on the contrary. But neither the trailers for this, nor for the shockingly successful reissue of The Lion King last year, have changed my rock-steady conviction that 2-D cel-style animation, by its immutable nature, is not suited to 3-D treatment.

Which leaves us with Mark Wahlberg's drug-smuggling thriller Contraband, which I am given to believe is a European remake, and Joyful Noise, and I'm not even ashamed to admit that I'm excited to see Joyful Noise, because shit, Queen Latifah AND Dolly Parton? Why not? It's better than another fucking exorcism movie to fill the winter nights, that's for damn sure.

20.1.2012

Steven Soderbergh and The Limey writer Lem Dobbs have teamed up for another movie, Haywire. That is exciting. The conclusion of a whole mess of film executives was that it didn't deserve any better than a January release. That is not exciting. But maybe it's because the film is so weird and uncommercial that they didn't know what else to do with it! That would be good, right? ...goddammit.

Speaking of films that feel like they could have snagged a better release date, executive producer George Lucas has been trying to get Red Tails made for decades now, and you'd think that a fella with his clout wouldn't have had such troubles with that, nor with getting it a nice late-summer berth. The trailer certainly makes it out to be a prettier-than-usual WWII dogfighting movie, at any rate, and I look forward to seeing what Aaron McGruder can show us as a screenwriter.

You know what absolutely deserves a third-weekend-in-January release date? Underworld: Awakening. Kate Beckinsale, fake vampires, leather, guns, 3-D. I legitimately take this as a comfort; the every-three-years release pattern for this series is a good way to have continuity and stability in one's life.

27.1.2012

So, the first time I saw the trailer for The Grey, I was sitting next to a friend and I turned to him and said, "I want to see this if Liam Neeson punches those wolves." And then he gets ready to punch the wolves. I feel even less shame about sharing this fact with all of you than I did about the Joyful Noise thing.

Filling up the cracks: One for the Money, which has apparently made the critical mistake of thinking that people enjoyed The Bounty Hunter, or if they didn't, it's because Jennifer Aniston isn't as popular as Katherine Heigl.

Also, there is Man on a Ledge, which is, I don't know. I've seen the trailer like six times, and the best I can do is that it's a caper-thingy. Perhaps it is the case that Sam Worthington is so absolutely devoid of personality, he actually causes amnesia when you see him in things, now.

2011: THE YEAR IN MOVIES

2012-01-02T19:48:00.002-06:00

In my head, people regard me as a bitter contrarian who can't like the things that everybody else does; maybe this is not so, but every time I spit out a disgusted 5/10 for the like of The Descendants or Young Adult (both of which, incidentally, I truly did expect to like), I can't help but feel like I'm being mean just for the sake of it.

Which makes this next bit kind of absurd, but I think I might have liked the cinema of 2011 a whole lot more than it deserves. On paper, despite a significant uptick in the big summer blockbusters, it follows right down the line of 2009 and 2010, years in which the vast majority of everything was bland and safe in the most offensive possible way. Especially the anointed year-end prestige pictures. And yet the number of things I actively loved was higher than it has been since at least 2007. This says less, I fear, about myself than about the movies of the year. I think it was just a matter of a whole lot of films that pushed my very specific buttons in all the right ways. Viz: a pair of very different riffs on the Western genre (Rango and Meek's Cutoff); films by auteurs I'm already in the bag for stretching outside of their comfort zone (Certified Copy, Kiarostami in France; Hugo, Scorsese making a 3-D kids' movie; We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ramsay's psychological horror flick); films that exist for almost no other reason than to praise silent movies for being so much better than anything else (The Artist and Hugo again); adaptations of books I love that only had to not suck for me to be on board (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Winnie the Pooh); popcorn movies which do a lot of their storytelling through production design (Captain America: The First Avenger and Rise of the Planet of the Apes); and the arrival, at long last, of 3-D as a proper artistic tool (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Pina, and Hugo a third time - it is fair to say, in fact, that Hugo played to more of my weaknesses than any other film of 2011).

In looking for a narrative that connects all the movies of the year, as one will do, the only one I have been able to find is that 2011 featured a lot of films that fascinated and delighted me for, often, no damn good reason. And so, if my top 10 feels sort of like a disordered grab bag, it's only because I moved through the year like a cinephilic magpie, darting for all the things that caught my attention. Perversely, the result is one of my favorite lists of the last decade, and I suspect one of the most revealing, even if it is uncharacteristically on-consensus (three likely Oscar BP noms in my top 10? for shame) and embarassingly focused on English-language projects.

(Because I am an American, and a dull one at that, this list follows Oscar eligibility rules: played in New York/Los Angeles in a commercial theater between January 1 and December 31).

The 10 Best Films of 2011
1. The Tree of Life
2. Certified Copy
3. A Separation
4. Hugo
5. Tuesday, After Christmas
6. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
7. We Need to Talk About Kevin
8. Winnie the Pooh
9. Rango
10. The Artist

(titles below link to my original reviews)

1. The Tree of Life
(Terrence Malick, USA)

I have long since run out of objectivity towards Malick's fifth and best oh-yes-I-did-go-there film in a 38-year career. I've now seen it more than any other 2011 release, and every single time it's a brand new experience: now I am floored by the sublimity of Emmanuel Lubezki's dusky cinematography, now by the thematic density, now by the blazing use of music, now by the spectacle of the creation sequence, now by Brad Pitt's severity tempered with Jessica Chastain's porcelain gentleness. I wonder if the Sean Penn material is a bit inexplicable, but saying that this wrecks the film is like arguing that the Sistine Chapel ceiling is inherently bad because looking at it hurts your neck. Not merely the best film of 2011; I have to go back at least as far as Inland Empire to find something that devastated me so completely, so many times in a row.

2. Certified Copy
(Abbas Kiarostami, France / Italy / Belgium)

Dismissed in some circles as "minor Kiarostami"; this is a) untrue, and b) irrelevant. It could be minor Kiarostami, or major Shawn Levy, and it would still be the same movie: an ingenious study of what "authenticity" and "truth" mean, delivering its message as an insoluble puzzle about the nature of the relationship between two characters whose professions involve ferreting out what is real from what is fake. Blessed with two great actors (including Juliette Binoche giving one of the best performances of her career) and delectable location cinematography that is beautiful as a picture postcard even while it adds a layer of complexity to the film's already deceptively stuffed visuals. Befitting a film whose theme could be summed up as "reality is ambiguous", the film doesn't so much as imply that it has a "solution", but its questions are so invigorating and beautifully expressed that it doesn't need one.

3. A Separation
(Asghar Fardahi, Iran)

Complex in ways that one viewing can't even begin to reveal, but we backwards Yanks just have to suck it up that one of the most universally-praised works of world cinema in 2011 was hustled into theaters for an awards-qualifying run at the ass-end of the year. That's still enough time to be absolutely flattened by its multi-layered sociology, which uses a story of casual misogyny to comment on repressive religiosity, unless it's the other way around, and there's also the bits about authoritarian governments and class issues. And just when you get your head around that, you have to confront how breathtakingly exciting it all is to watch, given how easily Farhadi turns his political fable into a nail-biting legal thriller. At that point, four of the best performances of the year are just lagniappe: insurance against the thing somehow failing, after that, to be a shattering human drama.

4. Hugo
(Martin Scorsese, USA)

I would love to be disciplined enough to feel slightly less ecstatic love for this gimmicky, spectacle-heavy tribute to the gimmicky, spectacle-heavy Cinema of Attractions of the early 1900s; I am not. The overriding artificiality of Scorsese's execution of the brashly sentimental tale about how a broken little boy and a broken old man are mended by cinephilia and grandiose production design has its detractors, not unreasonably; but there's such continuity of vision in the creation of this world, and it is so shamelessly immersive - the opening ten minutes are the definitive argument for why 3-D needs to exist - that a few narrative contrivances here or there strike me as all in good fun. Or to put it another way: I had such a good time staring at and being surrounded by the excessive style, I didn't always care whether there were legitimate human beings involved or not.

5. Tuesday, After Christmas
(Radu Muntean, Romania)

Modern Romanian cinema is like McDonald's, if McDonald's were one of the best restaurants in the world: part of the appeal is that you know exactly what you're getting into from the start (marathon-length takes, somewhat unpleasant characters, a symbolic representation of the painful post-Communist phase of that country's development), and it's going to be great. Even so, Muntean's first movie that English speakers have gotten much chance to see is special: one of the rawest studies of the emotional effect of adultery in recent years, anchored by three basically flawless performances, it is a wee bit savage and a wee bit programmatic, and a whole lot of devastating in all of the right ways. It mercilessly and at times hilariously examines the cost of lust and selfishness with terrific insight and focus, culminating in a terse final scene whose subtlety and icy honesty are as gripping as cinema gets.

6. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
(Thomas Alfredson, UK / France / Germany)

There's little emotion to be found in the mechanical precision of this wonderful adaptation's narrative march, which is exactly the point. In any medium, TTSS is about the layers of defensive lies that people put on and never take back off, which in this iteration finds physical expression in the indelibly precise Cold War era sets and costumes that double as a prison for the characters and expression of what's left of their innermost selves. The centerpiece of this chilly, broken world is Gary Oldman's career-best performance as the retired George Smiley, a man denied a place in two worlds, whose quest for the truth takes on a harder edge than Alec Guinness managed in the iconic miniseries, because Guinness just wanted to prove that he still deserved to exist; Oldman, pushed harder and faster by the condensation of the story, needs to prove that he still exists at all.

7. We Need to Talk About Kevin
(Lynne Ramsay, UK)

Two people whom I trust very much, doubly so about Ramsay and Tilda Swinton,* are both rather cool towards this collaboration between the two artists, and knowing this caused me considerable self-doubt; eventually, I gave up trying to find fault with anything beyond the ineffective casting of a very game John C. Reilly. There are just too many things I love here all being mixed together: a top-shelf Swinton performance; maddeningly elliptical storytelling that's grounded more in the effect it produces than any resemblance to reality; bombastic visuals that feel purposeful even at their most outrageous. Best of all is its fearless combination of psychological insight with psychological grotesqueness, and of course, around these parts, we are altogether in favor of movies that combine genre elements with arthouse pretension. When I call We Need to Talk About Kevin the best, nastiest horror film of 2011, I am not speaking figuratively.

8. Winnie the Pooh
(Stephen J. Anderson & Don Hall, USA)

Depressingly, it has spots of horribly regrettable character animation - not just in reference to the 1977 masterpiece that it follows, but by any standard in Disney history. I otherwise have absolutely no complaints about this exaggeratedly slight exercise in naïveté and the glacial slowness of an afternoon when you are a child & have absolutely nothing to do & take your sweet time about not doing it; in fact, I liked it more upon second viewing than before, which hardly seems possible. Partially, it's the unmitigated joy of a children's film with so much wordplay and metatextual gamesmanship beyond even the weirdly postmodern original; partially, it's how the filmmakers replicate the aesthetic of a classic they obviously revere while still pushing in enough new directions to make this its own thing. In a year thick with nostalgia, this was, to me, the most quietly satisfying blast from the past.

9. Rango
(Gore Verbinski, USA)

A parody of Western movies bursting at the seams with a fanatic's love for the Western even at its most ripe and ridiculous; a cartoon applying some of the best photo-realistic animation ever achieved to the brutally absurd physical illogic of the Looney Tunes at their most anarchic; Johnny Depp's best performance in years as a CGI lizard twisted around like a Ralph Steadman drawing. Such are the exquisite contradictions of what I have come to suspect is Verbinski's best film, an exercise in gorgeous impossibilities that lets him indulge in all of the manic creativity that live-action only allowed him to hint at. It's funny as hell and perilously overstuffed with allusions to everything from '20s Surrealism to Chinatown, but what sticks is the giddiness of the charmingly grotesque world that Verbinski and Co. have created: a world that's a little bit like ours, only so much goddamn weirder.

10. The Artist
(Michel Hazanavicius, France / Belgium)

I find it curious that almost everyone who doesn't like the film and/or is turned off by the awards season hosannas it's receiving has made the damning argument that it is totally insubstantial; that happens to be exactly what I love about it. For all the gorgeously complex artisan cuisine in the world, sometimes a body wants a piece of sickly-sweet, insanely rich chocolate, and that holds true for cinematic nourishment as well. On second viewing, the aesthetic conceit doesn't hold up as well as I'd hoped - it looks more like a film from the early-'40s than the late-'20s when you really consider the camerawork and editing choices - but the cutesey comic melodrama which remains kind of silly even at its most serious, and the shameless mugging, and that adorable fucking dog all add up to a film that treats the business of frivolity with the utmost gravity.

Honorable Mentions
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
The Interrupters
Into the Abyss
Margaret
Meek's Cutoff
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Nostalgia for the Light
Pina
Take Shelter
Weekend

Best Movie Unreleased in the US, and Likely to Remain That Way
Southwest
Visually and structurally audacious, this pitch black fairy tale is assuredly not for all tastes - it's willfully obscure and tremendously slow - but the precision of each and every shot, and of the inordinately stylised performances that the off-kilter script requires, are like nothing else I've seen in ages. It's the kind of art-house masterpiece that gives pretension a good name, and a one-film argument for a better pipeline for South American cinema to reach the rest of the world.

Three Films I Wish I Had Seen Before Compiling This List
The Arbor
Mysteries of Lisbon
Le quattro volte

Bottom Ten

(Let it be known that I managed to evade two exceptionally likely candidates: Jack and Jill and Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked)

10. Beastly (Daniel Barnz)
Yes, Virginia, there are paranormal teen romances worse than Twilight - here, a disastrous hybrid of teen soaps and Beauty and the Beast that boasts a character who announces his self-centered dickishness like the protagonist of a Victorian melodrama, played by the shockingly unlikable prettyboy Alex Pettyfer, and a "be nice to ugly people" moral that cannot begin to survive its celebration of model-gorgeous actors, including the emotionally blank Vanessa Hudgens as the "plain" girl.

9. Shark Night 3D (David R. Ellis)
It sounds like a can't-miss explosion of the most extravagantly cheesy excess one film could hold: sharks! killer rednecks! tacky 3-D! Except that in their inexplicable drive for a PG-13, the filmmakers dialed down all of the crude flourishes that were the project's sole reason to exist, and turned it into a toothless slasher with abysmal CGI sharks standing in for the masked psychopath. It's as stupid as modern horror gets, and that's damn stupid.

8. Just Go with It (Dennis Dugan)
The corpse of classic farce lies dead and twitching at the feet of Adam Sandler, who headlines a cast of uniformly awful people lying and bullying their way into romance. There is a place for misanthropic comedy, but that requires something resembling a sense of humor; as it is, only a phenomenally misplaced Nicole Kidman, who apparently did not get the memo, avoids the resentful sourness that has saturated every other inch of the picture.

7. Priest (Scott Stewart)
Incoherent action sequences and convoluted mythology that often doesn't hold together for the length of a scene are merely the most obvious flaws in what might well be the worst big-budget vampire movie ever, a slapdash mixture of horror, Westerns, and Blade Runner. A light, unserious tone could have redeemed it, except that Stewart insistently treats it with the gravity of a religious text, which might explain the crosses stuffed in damn near every frame.

6. Atlas Shrugged: Part I (Paul Johansson)
Honestly, I feel sorry for the filmmakers: obviously hoping to tap into an underserved market and change the way people think with their gushing love-letter to Ayn Rand, they instead made what looks like an unusually cheap and unfocused student project. Headlined by two of the most uncharismatic leads to ever stare glassy-eyed off to the side of a camera, the film is a howling vortex from which nothing resembling a human emotion can escape.

5. New Year's Eve (Garry Marshall)
A romantic comedy that suggests that we, as a species, are too far gone for either romance or comedy to ever bother with us again. It's not the script contrivances, nor the dubious "all-star" cast of dead-eyed teenyboppers, a visibly despairing Michelle Pfeiffer or an incomprehensibly over-qualified Robert De Niro; it's the grinding lack of joy or any other affect with which Marshall deposits these elements in front of us, that make it so hateful.

4. I Melt with You (Mark Pellington)
Four unbelievably awful, entitled douchebags spend a week buried in drugs while feeling sorry for themselves because their overwhelming success has gotten in the way of the puddle-deep punk ethos they lived by in college. So they kill themselves to keep it real. The film wants us to think that this is tragic and honest; the only tragedy I see is that they didn't do it faster and save two precious hours of my life.

3. Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder)
A nauseating demonstration of how much words don't actually mean things nowadays: Snyder actually thought he could get away with calling this slurry of the most retrograde sexist fantasies "feminist", on the grounds that his fetish-clad heroines were- I don't even know, actually, what the fuck Snyder thought, any more than I can make heads or tails of the warped three-tiered script that he uses an excuse to blend video game logic with warmed-over Tarantinoisms.

2. Hop (Tim Hill)
No, really, did I actually give this 3/10 when it came out? Good Christ. That is far too much generosity towards a film that manages to insult the dignity of childhood, Easter, rabbits, candy, and happiness in 95 horrible minutes of hip and sassy animals parading through a horrendously busy world of rancid ideas and cinematic illiteracy; a film whose chief contribution to society is the idea that the Easter Bunny's son can crap jellybeans.

1. The Roommate (Christian E. Christiansen)
When I declared in February that this would be the worst film of 2011, I wasn't necessarily expecting to be right, but I find it oddly satisfying that I didn't end up seeing anything that would outdo this uniquely heinous combination of dreadful acting by airbrushed young white people, direction that telegraphs every moment of even the slightest tension, and a script that understands absolutely nothing of how humans work. Agonising, insipid, and intensely boring.

Most Underrated
A Dangerous Method
Completely ignored in the awards season rush of prestige films with literary backgrounds, and dismissed as insufficiently weird for Cronenberg; but it is, I maintain, simply a different kind of weird, and a pretty damned effective kind at that. It's very intelligent filmmaking that sees no need to flaunt its intelligence, anchored by a trio of carefully-calibrated and pointedly discordant performances.

Most Overrated
I'faith, most of the films that I'd ordinarily expect to plug in here don't really seem to have excited all that much enthusiasm, and so can hardly be called "overrated", though I wish the sluggish, casually elitist The Descendants hadn't won so many awards. I will also concede that I am mystified by the number of undeniably intelligent and absolutely respectable people who are taken with the Sundance 101 drama Martha Marcy May Marlene.

Best Surprise
Insidious
"From the makers of Saw" is one of the very worst things you could ever say about a horror film, and yet James Wan and Leigh Whannell still managed to sneak out what might be, if not the "best" horror picture of the year, arguably the most pleasurable: a terrifically creepy ghost story with old-fashioned sensibility and new-fangled technique, and a third act that's sufficiently hokey to give it a fun, goofing-around-the-campfire tone.

Biggest Disappointment
The Muppets
It's not the movie's fault that it was so easy to expect more than it was ever going to be capable of delivering; nor is it Steve Whitmire's fault that Jim Henson is dead, or Eric Jacobson's that Frank Oz has retired. None of which change how frequently this feels nothing like an actual Muppet movie, how often it fails to cohere as a motion picture per se, and worst of all, how quickly it evaporated from memory.

Best Popcorn Movie
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Killer setpieces, great chemistry between every pole of its pretty celebrity cast, a witty screenplay that doesn't pull focus from the action, and it exploits the giant scale of IMAX as well as a movie could ever hope to do; this is what every blockbuster film should be, smart and fun to watch and made by rock solid professionals who don't feel the need to look down on the material.

Since it just barely failed to hit the top 20, I also wanted to give a little shout-out to my boy Captain America, for remembering that, wait a minute, superhero movies are supposed to be fun to watch.

Guiltiest Pleasure
A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas
It sets new lows for outright stupidity in a franchise that actually was smarter than you'd think to start; and its biggest draw is the intense tackiness of almost everything from the pothead Santa to its forthright depiction of CGI semen in three dimensions. But in a year when The Hangover, Part II, among others, reminded us of how ghastly crass humor can be, it was nice to have proof that it can be playful and endearing, too.

Film That Will Least Deserve My Positive Review a Decade Hence
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I will confess an intellectual dishonesty: feeling trapped by my rating for the original, written when the story was new to me and its salacious machinations diverting enough to keep me entertained, I dug in and found whatever I could to support a muted, but encouraging review for the remake. Just over a week later, I can recall nothing actively positive about the experience of watching it beyond the editing and the score, and the energy which David Fincher spends in trying to turn the material into a nihilistic epic seems even more wasted and frustrating. So by, "a decade hence", I really mean "right this very minute".

Film That Will Least Deserve My Negative Review a Decade Hence
Drive Angry
Actually, that's not true: it will always deserve a negative review, because it is a bad movie. On the other hand, it is a far more ingenious and joyful bad movie than I would have ever given it credit for at the time, and while it's too long - the great sin of all modern filmmaking, I sometimes think - the parts that work are cherce. After all this time, I am stunned by how much some of the imagery, and William Fichtner's exuberant performance as a bureaucrat from Hell, have lingered in my head after a great many less sleazy and obnoxious movies have slid unnoticed into the memory hole.

Film I'm Most Eager to Re-Visit
Margaret
I would like to be a full-throated member of Team Margaret, but it's a little too shaggy of a dog for me to feel completely comfortable with that kind of commitment. On the other hand, its sloppiness is an indivisible part of what makes it such a magnetic viewing experience, the sloppiness of a living, breathing humanity that captivates Kenneth Lonergan too much for him to be objective and disciplined about it. The version we've seen is going to be a release-date Blu-Ray purchase for me, assuming Fox is sufficiently ashamed to even grant the thing a video release; meanwhile, I am slavering for any smally hint that we might ever have a chance to see Lonergan's own cut.

Best Moment
In The Artist, when eager ingenue Peppy Miller sneaks into the dressing room of her celebrity crush, George Valentin, and finding his dinner jacket hanging on a coatrack, slides her arm through it and caresses herself with his sleeve. It's a damn near perfect collision of silliness, tenderness, and the kind of restrained (and therefore even smokier) eroticism of a for-real 1920s movie, and it's about as indelible an image as they come.

Worst Moment
The first time that a human being in The Smurfs tries to interact with the title characters, and you realise that you have over an hour and a half more of this to go.

The other candidate would be the shit joke in Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. I have, admittedly, not seen Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked. But I know it's there.

Best Worst Moment
Of course, the birth scene in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 was going to fall beneath our expectations - PG-13, you know - but it was still pretty damn tasteless and stupid and delightfully awful. Blood smoothies 4-eva!

Mos Superfluous Moment
The one joke in The Hangover, Part II that was exactly like a joke in The Hangover, only louder and stupider. No, not that one, the other one.

Best Cameo
Adrien Brody zipping into Midnight in Paris and right back as a rhinoceros-addled Salvador Dalí, leaving in his wake the funniest scene in a Woody Allen picture in decades.

Worst Cameo
Buzz Aldrin lending his gravitas to Transformers: Dark of the Moon, a picture that might as well have been called Fuck NASA: The Movie.

Worst Overuse of Orange and Teal
Hugo
A film whose considerable joys lie primarily in its sense of visual creativity should not, I think, bathe that selfsame creativity in the most hackneyed visual shortcut known to contemporary cinema.

Best Poster
Shame

At first, its emptiness seems cryptic, but the longer you think about it, the more it starts to reveal about the person who just rumpled those sheets, particular with the tiny and unassuming but extremely prominent positioning of the title. I somewhat wonder if it doesn't capture the idea of loneliness and self-created misery better than the film itself manages to, in point of fact.

Best Teaser Poster
The Dark Knight Rises

Nolan's final Batman film is about as pre-sold as they come, so really just about any image would have worked. But the series has enjoyed some of the finest print advertising in modern blockbuster history, and this is as good as anything they've done yet: a simple concept executed sparely, with a bleached color palette and vaguely apocalyptic spirit of destruction that both promise in the most unfussy way possible that the bleakest chapter in the franchise is yet to come.

Worst Poster
The Adjustment Bureau

Holy fuck, that is some Photoshopping going on there. Stylisation is one thing, but not when you start violating the rules of Euclidean space - I get at least at least three entirely incompatible perspective lines going on here, and Matt Damon personally involves two of them.

Most Honest Poster
When Star Trek came out, I complained that its poster was a deliberately misleading us by failing to show how overladen with lens flares that film was. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Super 8 poster.

Worst Execution of a Good Poster Idea
The Ides of March

It's so damn obvious where they wanted to go with it, and it would have been so cool if they'd gotten there. But the magazine seems to exist in a different space-time continuum than Ryan Gosling's head and I don't know whose hand that is, and the airbrushing makes it all look too waxy to take any of it seriously.

Best Trailer
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Teaser

So pounding! So intense! So dark and brooding! So much more atmospheric and thrilling than the movie it's advertising, and the worst thing is how easy it was to guess that even while you were watching the trailer, and yet you still wanted to go see it.

Funniest Trailer
The Muppets - "Green with Envy"

One joke, but it's a hell of a joke, and the narrator's incredibly confused line-readings are perfection.

Trailer Most Superior to the Film It Advertises
One of those two, I haven't decided which yet.

Best Title
Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Best Title Translated to English
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Worst Degredation of a Title
From The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which evokes a sense of mystery and possibility, to Hugo Cabret, solid and sensible as a pair of dress shoes, to Hugo, which sounds like a comedy about a fat kid who wants to be a tennis star.

Title with the Most Distracting Missing Word
Transformers: Dark ~~Side~~ of the Moon

Most Optimistic Title
Atlas Shrugged: Part I

Most Ominous Title
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1

Best Film I Saw for the First Time in 2011
Honestly, it's probably The Tree of Life. But in the interests of spreading the wealth, I shall rocket us back to the silent era, to one of the all-time great stylists, Josef von Sternberg, and his breathtakingly misty, Expressionist melodrama The Docks of New York.