A Man For All Seasons

I write film and TV reviews at DVDFanatic.com. Here are synopsis' and links to those reviews.

We live in a world of compromise. Right or wrong, we do not flinch at cutting corners or bending our integrity should the need arise. We justify our actions, claiming the greater good, while all the while our honor is torn to shreds at our own behest.

It is a world that Sir Thomas More, a highly respected English statesman who would rather sacrifice his life than betray his conscience or his God, would have found both utterly foreign and profoundly frightening. I think he may be right.

A Man For All Seasons is one of those great old classics that never dulls with age. In fact, it is among a select few films that actually grows more impressive the further from its inception it moves. Perhaps that is because, unlike most films whose message grows stale with age, A Man For All Seasons represents the sort of moral reminder we could do with a lot more of these days.

Henry VIII is king of England. Forget your high school textbook images of a rotund king lobbing the heads off his wives. This is before all that. Henry is young and dynamic, a maelstrom of passion and emotion. His Lord Chancellor is Thomas More, a friend and confidant. Things go awry for the two when Henry decides to end his relationship with his wife, Catherine and replace her with Anne Boleyn. Forbidden a divorce by Rome, Henry splits with the Vatican and declares himself the “Supreme Head of the Church of England.” More, a pious Catholic, cannot in good conscience serve him any longer and quietly resigns.

But More’s silence is widely perceived as disapproval of the king’s actions, though he has never spoken publicly or privately on the matter. The king and his men come after More, igniting a compelling game of cat and mouse in which the sheer force of the monarchy is brought to bear on More’s wily and nearly impregnable legal strategy: if he maintains his silence he cannot be accused of opposing the king.

In the end, More must give up his freedom and eventually even his life, martyred for his convictions. Some have viewed A Man For All Seasons and wondered why More didn’t simply tell the king and his men what they wanted to hear in order to save his life. Surely the price was too high for his silence? And yet the answer is in the film, in a line that More gives his daughter, who has similar doubts:

"When a man takes an oath," he explains, holding his hands before him, "he’s holding his own self in his hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then — he needn’t hope to find himself again. Some men aren’t capable of this, but I’d be loath to think your father one of them."

A Man For All Seasons won six richly deserved Oscars, including Best Picture (1966), Best Director (Fred Zinnemann), Best Actor (Paul Scofield), and Best Screenplay (Robert Bolt).

It boasts a cast that is second to none, without a false note to be found among them: Paul Scofield, who originated the role theatrically and portrays More with an astonishing restraint and disciplined wisdom and humor; Robert Shaw as the tempestuous and unbalanced Henry VIII; Orson Welles as the conniving Cardinal Wolsey; Leo McKern as the diabolical Thomas Cromwell; John Hurt as the sycophant Master Rich; Wendy Hiller and Susannah York as More’s wife and daughter; and an uncredited cameo by then up and comer Vanessa Redgrave as Anne Boleyn.

Yes, A Man For All Seasons is a talky, but oh such words! Robert Bolt’s screenplay, fashioned after his own play, is essentially a character study, one prolonged conflict of wills. That ideological clashes are difficult to translate visually should be obvious, and yet this cast and crew have crafted one of the riches thematic films ever made, full of conviction, conscience and inspiration.

After the credits have rolled, the film continues to ask unshakable questions: Who are you really? What defines you? After the transitory elements of your life are removed, what remains? What part of you is utterly not for sale at any price no matter what the pressure? Or, given the right circumstances and incentives, are you infinitely malleable? At this distillation you will find your true self. The hundreds of years old moral debate encapsulated in this film is every bit as fresh and relevant today.

To read the full review, click here.

Amazing Grace

Who’d have thought that the most compelling and thoughtful film to be presented during Black History Month would be a formal British import set in 18th century England with men running around in wigs? Amazing Grace was a film no one had heard of until a month or so ago when Samuel Goldwyn began a promotional blitzkrieg in theater lobbies and on movie screens. It just may have done the trick.

Amazing Grace is the story of William Wilberforce, an 18th century British parliamentarian who made his money as a merchantman before turning to politics while still astonishingly young. Admittedly green around the edges, young William is known as a force to be reckoned with. In Parliament, he is more than a formidable mind — his is a biting, sarcastic wit capable of tearing an opponent apart with a well-timed barb as likely as with a brilliant legal maneuver. People are sitting up and taking notice of this young, idealistic firebrand.

Privately, Wilberforce is in something of a quandary. A re-awakening of his dormant childhood faith has got him thinking about abandoning politics for the church. He sees God everywhere around him — from gossamer spider webs to his unshakable feeling that the enslavement of his fellow man is an abomination to his Creator.

“You found God, sir?” Wilberforce’s well-read servant asks one day.

“I think he found me,” Wilberforce replies. “Do you have any idea how bloody inconvenient that is?”

Sensing the resolve of his best friend’s principles, to say nothing of a unique political opportunity, William Pitt, angling to be Prime Minster, suggests that the time is right to confront the slave trade’s stranglehold on England. He introduces Wilberforce to abolitionists, Quakers, and ex-slaves who take his well-intentioned inclinations and rapidly turn them into hardened, unyielding convictions. They convince Wilberforce of his necessity to be both preacher and parliamentarian — the perfect fusing of action and meditation. He, they suggest, is to be God’s weapon to eradicate the blight of slavery.

From that moment on Wilberforce is unstoppable, like a man possessed. He introduces a bill in Parliament suggesting that the slave trade be abolished and is shouted down in derision. No matter. He had not expected it to be easy. The bread and butter of England’s vast coffers, the slave trade is the towering Goliath to wee Wilberforce’s David. Every year, for fifteen years, he introduces the same bill and each year, for fifteen years, it is defeated. His youth is eaten away. His health plummets. And a difficult war with France has pushed many to label his actions as treasonous insurrection. Disillusionment and bitterness inevitability set in. Enter the beautiful and stimulating love interest...

Produced in part by Walden Media, best known for bringing us The Chronicles of Narnia and other mostly children’s films, the Christian production company here throws its hat into the ring for more mature subject matters. While certainly illuminating the wellspring of Wilberforce’s religious convictions, the film never uses its captive audience as a bully pulpit. It strikes a beautiful balance between one man’s ardent beliefs and an unassailable moral outrage. If it ever gets preachy, it’s a sermon with which one can hardly take issue.

As such, it’s a pity it’s not more moving than it is. Amazing Grace has several moments of true pathos, but taken for all in all, the film is oddly uninvolving. True, the sentimentality is supposed to reside with Wilberforce and his struggles, but by showing so little of the reasons for that struggle — actual scenes of slavery are never seen other than in a surreal dream sequence — the film fails to tell the full emotional story. Likewise, in their efforts to create a worthy and long-overdue tribute to Wilberforce and his tireless charge, screenwriter Steven Knight and director Michael Apted have created a moral giant without complication or fault—more an idolatrous figure than an identifiable man. As a result it doesn’t resonate as deeply as it could or should.

Still, it is a fine looking film with terrific performances. One of my undergraduate professors used to joke that there are only so many actors in England and every once in a while a movie comes along in which nearly all of them are trotted out. Amazing Grace feels like that. And who am I to complain over such an abundance of riches? Ioan Gruffudd is now longer the man/child of Titanic, and he obviously got no end of practice wearing costumes such as these helming ships for A&E’s Hornblower films. He’s grown into his skin, a confident and assured man. He is joined by the likes of Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Gambon, Ciarán Hinds, Toby Jones, Rufus Sewell, and Albert Finney as the former slave trader turned minister, John Newton, who wrote the song “Amazing Grace” and is still very much haunted by his old sins: “I am not strong enough to hear my own confession.”

Though it’s not as solid or inspiring as its creators might have wished, Amazing Grace is, nonetheless, a respectable and admirable historical biopic about unimpeachable single-mindedness and taking action for what’s right no matter the odds.

The Holy Moment

What can I say, I belong to the André Bazin fan club. And after our class discussion tonight in Film Theory, which focused on the famous French theorist, I was reminded of this excellent exchange from Waking Life and thought I'd share it with everyone. Enjoy.

Into Great Silence

“The Lord said, 'Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.' Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper…” -- I Kings 19: 11-13


In 1984, German filmmaker Philip Groning approached the Carthusian monks, considered the Catholic Church’s strictest order, for permission to film their monastic lifestyle. They responded that they were not ready for him.

In 2000, almost two decades later, Groning got the phone call he’d been waiting for. He was finally welcome to come. And Into Great Silence (watch the trailer) was born.

Groning lived as one of the monks for six months in the picturesque Grande Chartruese monastery, a medieval enclave built into the side of a hill beneath the shadow of the monolithic French Alps outside Grenoble. He carted his own gear, shot his own footage, recorded his own sound — all without the benefit of assistance or supplementary lighting. Sometimes his camera captures exquisite clarity; other times it registers barely enough light to decipher an image — and yet, regardless, each and every shot is magnificent.

This film isn't interested in merely recording the mundane activities of monastic life, but rather immersing the viewer so completely that the barrier between projection and reception vanishes completely. Never has a camera been more intimate or observed as closely. It becomes a thing metaphysical rather than mechanical, trading the natural for the supernatural.

It is a well-known fact that once someone goes blind, their other senses are hyper-sensitized. There is a monk in Into Great Silence who has gone blind and now threads his way through the monastery’s passageways with a tentatively probing cane. His untrimmed eyebrows are so long they hang over his useless eyes like a feathered shroud. He praises God for his malady, confident that it allows him to focus unhindered on his worship.

In a very real way, the audience is like that monk. The brothers of Grande Chartruese have taken a vow of silence, and aside from prayers, chants, and a once-a-week excursion outside during which they are allowed to converse with one another, there is no dialogue in the film. Nor is there any sort of musical score. For over two and a half hours, we simple exist as one of the monks, living as they live, our 21st-century polluted minds desperately trying to understand our suddenly hyper-perceptivity.













It is a mistake to say this is a silent film. If anything the absence of human speech reveals how much sound we miss. This is a soundtrack of sandals slapping marble, gurgling brooks, songbirds, the swish of fabric, the rustle of pages, the ringing of bells. So powerful is the silence that it seems to embody a sound all its own. One begins to imagine the noise light makes as it streams through windows, splashes across wood, reveals dust particles dancing in the air.

Director Gronig captured the introduction of several new initiates into the brotherhood, including a strikingly beautiful young African, the only man of color in a sea of mostly elderly white, bearded faces. He takes his vows and visits the barber, where his head is shaved in a scene eerily reminiscent of a half-dozen military boot camp films. This simple act is one of the few moments during which there is any sort of physical contact between the men.

As with their worship services, the hermit monks of Grande Chartruese live their lives in the thrall of liturgy — a sacred rhythm of prayers, mass, study, work, physical labor — a ritual essentially unchanged in the order’s thousand year existence. The film opens with the alpine campus hemmed in by deep drifts of bitter, blowing snow. Soon the snow will melt, verdant buds will crack the permafrost and spring will appear. And by the time the film ends, winter will have returned. The circle of life is seen in the seasons, the daily routine, the young men entering the monastery where old men now tread. It is a cycle of harmony — with God, with themselves, with nature, and with their own souls.


















The monks spend most of their days in their tiny cells, lost in prayer and solitude. Theirs are lives of unadorned simplicity. Having embraced a life of destitution and poverty, their living spaces are austere and spartan, ascetic shells devoid of any earthly distraction. A straw bed, a tiny tin stove and a desk are all that adorns their cell. They spend their days largely alone, only coming together for mass in the chapel and at the Sunday noon meal. When not cloistered in prayer, they wash their own clothes and dishes, prepare meals, garden, cut wood, read or engaging in chores. Even their nights are not their own. The monks do not sleep through one full night in their lives, waking for several hours in the middle of the night for collective prayer.

Once a week, after the Sunday noon meal, the monks are allowed four hours rest time in which they take a walk into the forests surrounding the monastery. During this time, they are allowed to freely talk amongst themselves. More often then not, the conversation still turns to issues of spirituality, faith, philosophy and the daily practice. On one snow-bound outing these pillars of religious devotion devolve into schoolboys, using their flowing robes as makeshift sleds to careen down steep hillsides to the giggling delight of their brothers below.













Punctuating the film like chapter markers, Gronig captures his subjects in close-up, pausing for long moments to allow the monks to look directly and often uncomfortably into the glass eye of their beholder. It is amazing how much individuality and personality these men have, despite the fact that we hear so few of them ever utter a word.


















Some of Into Great Silence’s most haunting moments occur when we are reminded of the unavoidable presence of modernity: a massive jetliner streaks silently through the sky, the abbot manages the monastery’s finances on an old laptop computer, a novice practices his chants with the aid of a small, electronic keyboard. These moments jolt our senses, crack our reverie and remind us that this is a film and not a time portal into a world long past.

Into Great Silence is hypnotic, lulling the viewer into a trance. It is not a censure to say that at times you feel sleep tugging at the edges of your consciousness; the film is so serene and tranquil that it is a testament to the craft and subject matter. This is more meditation than movie — a mesmerizing, poetic chronicle of spirituality.

You are aware, while watching, of just how much you have and just how much you lack; of the omnipresence of the divine in the most mundane of activities; of the pervasive majesty of the natural world utterly squelched by our urban lives; of the inspiration these men arouse. To watch this film is to be humbled. To watch this film is to be in awe. Into Great Silence is a transformative theatrical experience, a spiritual encounter, an exercise in contemplation and introspection, a profound meditation on what it means to give oneself totally and completely, reserving nothing, to God.

I have never before experienced a greater example of utterly transcendent filmmaking.

And then the lights came up, and I shuffled out onto the street and was greeted by the angry din of Manhattan. It was almost enough to make me weep.

Annual Oscar Predictions

Well, the Academy Awards have arrived. Be sure to watch this weekend. You’re invited to my yearly Oscar party, but if you’re not in Manhattan on Sunday night, here are my annual predictions.

I know you’re used to a lot more chatter and opinions on the following predictions. Sorry. This year it’s a cut and dry affair. Blame the midterms. I am.







Best Picture
The Departed
The Queen
Little Miss Sunshine
Babel
Letters From Iwo Jima

Will Win: Babel
Should Win: The Departed







Best Achievement in Directing
Martin Scorsese The Departed
Stephen Frears The Queen
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu Babel
Paul Greengrass United 93
Clint Eastwood Letters From Iwo Jima

Will Win: Martin Scorsese
Should Win: Martin Scorsese







Best Actor
Forest Whitaker The Last King of Scotland
Peter O'Toole Venus
Will Smith The Pursuit of Happyness
Leonardo DiCaprio Blood Diamond
Ryan Gosling Half Nelson

Will Win: Forest Whitaker
Should Win: Peter O’Toole







Best Actress
Helen Mirren The Queen
Judi Dench Notes on a Scandal
Meryl Streep The Devil Wears Prada
Penelope Cruz Volver
Kate Winslet Little Children

Will Win: Helen Mirren
Should Win: Helen Mirren






Best Supporting Actor
Eddie Murphy Dreamgirls
Jackie Earle Haley Little Children
Alan Arkin Little Miss Sunshine
Mark Wahlberg The Departed
Djimon Hounsou Blood Diamond

Will Win: Eddie Murphy
Should Win: Having not seen Dreamgirls, I am going to excuse myself from this category.







Best Supporting Actress
Jennifer Hudson Dreamgirls
Cate Blanchett Notes on a Scandal
Abigail Breslin Little Miss Sunshine
Adriana Barraza Babel
Rinko Kikuchi Babel

Will Win: Jennifer Hudson
Should Win: Having not seen Dreamgirls, I am going to excuse myself from this category.

Best Original Screenplay
Babel
Letters From Iwo Jima
Little Miss Sunshine
Pan's Labyrinth
The Queen

Will Win: Babel
Should Win: Little Miss Sunshine

Best Adapted Screenplay
Borat
Children of Men
The Departed
Little Children
Notes on a Scandal

Will Win: The Departed
Should Win: Notes on a Scandal

Best Achievement in Cinematography
The Black Dahlia
Children of Men
The Illusionist
Pan's Labyrinth
The Prestige

Will Win: Children of Men
Should Win: Children of Men

Best Film Editing
Babel
Blood Diamond
Children of Men
The Departed
United 93

Will Win: The Departed
Should Win: United 93

Best Foreign-Language Film
Water - Canada
The Lives of Others - Germany
After the Wedding - Denmark
Days of Glory (Indigenes) - Algeria
Pan's Labyrinth - Mexico

Will Win: Pan's Labyrinth
Should Win: Pan's Labyrinth

Best Documentary Feature
Deliver Us From Evil
An Inconvenient Truth
Iraq in Fragments
Jesus Camp
My Country, My Country

Will Win: An Inconvenient Truth
Should Win: An Inconvenient Truth

Best Animated Feature Film
Cars
Happy Feet
Monster House

Will Win: Cars
Should Win: Cars

Best Art Direction
Dreamgirls
The Good Shepherd
Pan's Labyrinth
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
The Prestige

Will Win: Pan's Labyrinth
Should Win: Pan's Labyrinth

Best Achievement in Sound Editing
Apocalypto
Blood Diamond
Flags of Our Fathers
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Letters From Iwo Jima

Will Win: Letters From Iwo Jima
Should Win: Letters From Iwo Jima

Best Achievement in Sound Mixing
Apocalypto
Blood Diamond
Flags of Our Fathers
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Dreamgirls

Will Win: Dreamgirls
Should Win: Dreamgirls

Best Visual Effects
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Poseidon
Superman Returns

Will Win: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Should Win: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Best Achievement in Makeup
Apocalypto
Click
Pan's Labyrinth

Will Win: Pan's Labyrinth
Should Win: Pan's Labyrinth

Best Achievement in Costume Design
Curse of the Golden Flower
The Devil Wears Prada
Dreamgirls
Marie Antoinette
The Queen

Will Win: Marie Antoinette
Should Win: Marie Antoinette

Best Original Score
Babel
The Good German
Notes on a Scandal
Pan's Labyrinth
The Queen

Will Win: The Queen
Should Win: The Queen or Notes on a Scandal

Best Original Song
'I Need to Wake Up' from An Inconvenient Truth
'Love You I Do' from Dreamgirls
'Our Town' from Cars
'Patience' from Dreamgirls
'Listen' from Dreamgirls

Will Win: 'Listen' from Dreamgirls
Should Win: Once again, I didn’t see Dreamgirls but with three nominations and all the buzz, 'Listen' should be a lock.

Honorary Oscar: Ennio Morricone
I’ve loved Morricone’s music since I was a kid. The Mission was one of the first scores I ever bought; I’m now up to something like 300 plus. He had a lot to do with that.

The Best Movies of 2006

While many critics post their “Best Of” lists with the New Year, I prefer to wait until just before the Academy Awards. That way, I am able to ride the media buzz, to say nothing of getting a few extra months to catch all the films I’ve been unable to see.

I’ve heard some people complain that this was a bad year for movies. Excuse me? Did we see the same movies!?

I saw some terrific films this year — more, in fact, than I’ve seen in one year in a very long time. But I think I might know where they’re coming from. After all, this was the year of dark, apocalyptic filmmaking. Critic David Edelstein said it best in a
Q & A session I attended last month:

“This is the year in which that old Republican Clint Eastwood made not one but two films deploring war (Flags of our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima. In which the birth of the CIA signified the end of our national innocence and the spreading of evil (The Good Shepard). In which dystrophic films like Pan’s Labyrinth and Children of Men dealt with encroaching fascism and the breakdown of the social order. In which An Inconvenient Truth and even the children’s film Happy Feet dealt with the destruction of our planet.”

He has a point. For every Little Miss Sunshine there was a Borat (sure, it was hilarious, but it also reflected a grotesque picture of this country). This says a lot less about Hollywood and a lot more about the zeitgeist in which we live. They say art reflects a culture’s angst and if that’s true, we’re living in scary times.

I’ve certainly got some dark films on my favorite’s list below. Some bright, shiny ones too. Their one unifying thread is that they are all great films.

If you agree or disagree, let me know. What are your picks?


(click on any of the film titles for the trailers)

1. UNITED 93












From my review:

We’re ready. It is not too soon for United 93 because United 93 does not play like a film that is aware of the five plus years of history trailing behind those tragic events. The film contains no politics. No patriotic speeches. No finger pointing. No conspiracy theories. No Iraq. No bigger historical picture. There are no mentions of the “War on Terror” or Osama bin Laden or Al-Qaeda. This is a time before anyone found those names on the tips of their tongues. United 93 is a film devoid of any sort of commentary or conclusions because it does not allow itself to have the benefit of hindsight. United 93 garnered nearly immaculate reviews. Those who are less then enthusiastic admit to its first-rate production values and even its honorable intentions, but are at a place where they are not yet ready to deal with its subject matter. Such may be some of you. But if you think you are ready to wrestle with these demons, again, I cannot recommend this film highly enough. Like other painful and deeply disturbing films such as Shindler’s List, this is not a film you go to for enjoyment, but because you feel you have a duty to endure it.


2. THE DEPARTED













From my review:

Welcome back to Scorsese’s mean streets. Scorsese has taken the Hong Kong action classic, Infernal Affairs, borrowed its very deserving skeleton, and re-packed it with the distinctly American sensibilities of gangsters, corruption and betrayal in Irish Boston. Forget what you’ve ever felt about the inadequacies of re-makes –- The Departed is a towering, ambitious achievement. But it is not for the faint of heart. This is Scorsese working with his complete bags of tricks–subtlety and nuance as well as some of the most brazen and audacious violence you’ve ever seen. That he knows what to use when, and even knows when the two can be injected into the same time and space, shows why he is a master craftsman of the medium. The Departed is also something else, rather unexpected. It is very funny. That this comedy comes hand in hand with some of the most graphic bloodletting on the screen this or any year makes its triumph all the more extraordinary. That a movie this incessantly violent, this brutal should be this much fun is almost beyond explanation. The Departed is euphorically confident and assured, made by a director who understands cinema in both its technical and its artistic veins. The result is a film that works on every conceivable level. It is for films like this–exciting, invigorating, wicked, bloody, convoluted, hilarious, and unapologetic–that we go to the movie house in the first place.


3. CHILDREN OF MEN










From my review:

I was entranced by this movie. Hypnotized. Spellbound. In a thrall. The final quarter of the film is nothing short of an evolutionary leap forward in filmmaking. There, I’ve said it. Alfonso Cuarón (The Little Princess, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Y Tu Mamá También) has made a film of staggering power. All muscle and sinew, Children of Men pulses with a palpable energy and dynamism. Cuarón’s visual style is tsunami-like — exhausting, and physically capable of creating stomach-eroding ulcers in his viewers. It speaks to Cuarón's blistering talent then, that amidst this kind of bravura filmmaking he never loses sight of the film’s equally intense philosophical concerns. Children of Men’s political relevance is never muted by the action. Cuarón’s ideas may not be new, but the audaciousness of his execution is. He has directed a film with a searing immediacy and a ferocious velocity. This world of fear and hopelessness is more real than we can ever dream possible. Infertility is merely the MacGuffin, a metaphor to examine the possibility of a humankind endgame. Deep down, we know Cuarón’s future could easily be our own. And that is perhaps the most frightening thing of all.


4. LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE













From my review:

When was the last time you went to a theater and had a genuine community experience? I'm talking about the sort of gathering in which the entire theater was as one person whose emotions moved in perfect tandem. The sort of gathering in which the film's dialogue was, at times, lost because you couldn't hear over the sound of your own uninhibited laughter. The sort of gathering that rose to their feet at the credits in boisterous, exuberant applause. If it's been a while, might I suggest Little Miss Sunshine. Part black comedy, part National Lampoon farce, Little Miss Sunshine wears its heart on its sleeve, never failing to find the bright spot in the midst of the darkest moments, nor the love and humanity in the most inhospitable situations. Heartache and laughter are handled with equal adeptness and wisdom and dignity are shown to be the by-product not of success, but of failure. Charming, moving, warm and brilliantly hysterical, Little Miss Sunshine is easily the funniest thing I have seen in a theater in years.


5. CASINO ROYALE












From my review:

Casino Royale isn't simply the best Bond film in years. It is one of the best Bond films ever. It is like no Bond film you've ever seen. Bond reinvented for the 21st Century. Take an ailing franchise on the verge of self-annihilation and retool it to fit the sensibilities of a world enshrouded beneath the specter of terrorism. Take one of the largest icons in cinema history, a movie titan with a proven 40-year-plus track record and make him bleed, make him cry, make him human. I was wrong about Daniel Craig. Dead wrong. Initially skeptical and even a bit hostile to the choice, he is the absolute perfect person to bring Bond, kicking and screaming, into modernity. Handsome, but with a rugged menace, Craig is nearly everything the implacable Pierce Brosnan was not. And that's exactly the point. I wonder, having opened Pandora's Box, can they ever close it again? Will we never again see Bond smooth and slightly tongue in cheek, or is the darker, grittier, more vulnerable Bond here to stay? Perfect for this film, will it prove as successful for the franchise overall? That remains to be seen. But God knows I'll be watching from my front-row seat, both shaken and stirred.


6. ALL THE KING'S MEN













From my review:

I know I'm all alone on this one. I, as a critic, can hardly ask you, the reader, to ignore the critics, but this, in my opinion, is one of those moments when you must. All the Kings Men is a film about good men gone bad. It is a film, if you believe the Holy Bible, about man's origin from dirt and the original sin from which he is incapable of escaping. It is a film about loss, deception, betrayal, unfulfilled expectations and regret. It is a film about morality and potential thrown aside in pursuit of power. It is a film about human frailty. The true tragedy of Willie Stark is not political in nature. It is personal. The true tragedy lies in the collapse of great intentions and compromised integrity. It didn't all happen at once, of course. It never does. It happens over time, in small, almost unrecognizable steps. When the mangled end comes, it is far from the luminescent beginning but one hardly noticed the journey from there to here. And great falls never occur in isolation--they always capsize the lives of those closet to them. Willie Stark may have been a good governor of the people, but his undoing was the result of the one thing he couldn't govern--his heart--"deceitful and wicked above all things," even his idealism.


7. NOTES ON A SCANDAL











From my review:

Notes on a Scandal is melodrama at its best, a nasty, wickedly good, over-the-top story with school teachers standing in where vampires usually prowl. Using a “ripped from the headlines” template, the film is a wide-eyed and delicious examination of obsession and self-delusion. Notes on a Scandal is based on a highly praised book by Zoe Heller. Adapted by Closer scribe Patrick Marber, Scandal, like the earlier Little Children, is as close as a movie can get to literature. The film is propelled by Barbara’s malevolent voiceovers which, for all their venom and distain, are nonetheless the stuff of masterful writing, words dripping with the honey of a shimmering pen. This screenplay was born to win its Oscar. Coupled with the superb writing is Phillip Glass’ breathtaking, gothic score. Suffused with his iconic minimalism, this soundtrack is edged with a darker, more brooding soot than we’ve often heard. Oscar nomination number two. The performances are towering. Dench is something sinister, lurching in and out of the shadows like a magnificent beast we stand in awe of at our own peril. Blanchett is luminous, waiflike one moment, far more aware of her true lack of innocence than she leads anyone — including herself — to believe the next. Oscar nominations three and four. A sort of Fatal Attraction meets Masterpiece Theatre, Notes on a Scandal is an examination into the mouth of madness borne on the wind of loneliness and rejection. It is an admission that the illicit greener grass most often comes with tragic dues, and an observation that fantasies that substitute for reality can often overtake our lives until our personalities are forever subsumed. A frenzy of rage and desperation, Notes on a Scandal is a compelling and disturbing psychological drama and one of the best films of the year.


8. LITTLE CHILDREN












From my review:

Little Children is a flawed film. That said, I liked it; at times, even loved it. I was entranced by Todd Field’s (the magnificent In the Bedroom) direction and Antonio Calvache’s cinematography, so gorgeous and fluent that you can’t help but be held spellbound. The adults in the film are the little children to which the title refers. They spend the entire film in various states of juvenile immaturity, only grasping hold of their mantles of responsibility in the closing moments. Better late than never, we are told; it’s never too late to start acting like a grown up. Based on Tom Perrotta's 2001 novel (Perrotta also wrote the screenplay), Little Children is about as close as a movie can get to literature—rich, nuanced, erudite and multi-layered. The film, like the book, treads a fine line between tragic satire and disquieting, uncomfortable reality, creating a world in which judgmental looks, hidden secrets, repressed desires, and deep, dark fantasies are barely kept at bay by a flimsy social order. What is perhaps most surprising of all is the realization that Little Children is a comedy—a dark, blistering comedy, but a comedy nonetheless. Little Children is far from flawless, but it remains one of this year’s most beautiful and thought-provoking films.


9. BRICK














From my review:

This is the movie Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler would have written were they modern high-schoolers. Brick may find its time and place in modernity but its soul is straight out of The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep. Brick is what it would have looked like if Bogart went to high school--an adolescent Chinatown with shades of Kurosawa, peppered with the rapid-fire, hard-boiled, cryptic speech of A Clockwork Orange and wrapped in the very deceptive skin of a teen drama. These are not soap opera teens obsessed over who’s going out with whom. Here football studs, prom queens and social misfits are unapologetic criminals, enmeshed in a seedy high school netherworld that is as real an anything their parent’s encounter--perhaps more so. If this sounds ridiculous, it doesn’t play like it. First-time director Rian Johnson’s endlessly clever and visually arresting film completely merges adolescent angst and detective-fiction into something that is odd, yes, but also audacious and engaging. It both takes itself very seriously and allows moments of dark comedic delight. This is the sort of movie you can't help but smile at, dazzled by its cheeky ingenuity. Brick is a black-comic ballet through the peculiar terrors of suburban adolescence exacerbated and magnified by a criminal underworld that is anything but carefree and youthful.


10. BABEL













From my review:

No one Babel this film can communicate. Not people and certainly not governments. Citizens of different countries are hindered by their own linguistic barriers. Even those who speak the same language cannot connect. Not husbands and wives. Not parents and children. Not siblings. There are even those who are literally, physically unable to communicate. No gender, no class, no country is immune. Filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams) is interested in creating a unified picture that shows how the barriers of language and culture serve to divide us, but also reveal our most fundamental commonalities and connectedness. The smallest action in the smallest of countries can have a staggering ripple effect that can move like a hurricane-force gale through the halls of power of the largest and most powerful governments on the planet.


11. LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA













From my review:

What a bold, ballsy stroke of genius Clint Eastwood had when he decided to make not one, but two films about the battle for Iwo Jima—one told from the familiar perspective of the American attackers and the other from the vantage point of the Japanese defending the island. Has such a thing ever before been attempted? It seems almost unimaginable that an American director would tackle such a subject. And yet here Letters from Iwo Jima stands, having gone where no other war film has ever gone: deeply, sensitively and fairly into the mind and actions of “the enemy.” The companion piece to Eastwood’s earlier Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima is a profound meditation on the brutality, waste and human cost of war. And it is not only profound because it tells the story of a familiar battle from the perspective of the enemy, but because, rather than being a testament to the courage and ultimate victory of vastly outnumbered force, it is, from beginning to end, a chronicle of inevitable and crushing defeat.


12. THE QUEEN













From my review:

The Queen is a hybrid picture, a microscopic examination of two houses to which we have exclusive, “backstage” passes. If, in the beginning, the royals appear callous and heartless, Blair and his cronies appear as petty and petulant children. One of The Queen’s staggering strengths is that it is capable of showing two equally correct sides of the same coin and leave you feeling as if both were equally right, and both equally wrong. This film should be required viewing for all public relations majors. Blair is a man of a new millennium, just the sort of man to lead his antiquated kingdom into a new age. And Elizabeth is a woman rooted and framed in an ancient and exquisitely beautiful tradition. Her life and activities steeped in antiquity, it is, nonetheless, a life left behind by her people. The world, for now, is not done with either of them yet. As Elizabeth struggles to maintain her personal dignity in the face of immense and anguished public scrutiny, so too must Blair recognize the titanic structures of time-honored belief upon which he stands. The Queen refuses to demonize either side—it is a testament to the film that when the credits role, you find yourself left with a great affection and empathy for both sides.


13. PAN'S LABYRINTH














From my review:

Once upon a time there appeared a dark and wonderful fairy tale for grown-ups about a young girl beset by monsters, both real and imaginary. Spanish director Guillermo Del Toro (The Devil’s Backbone, Hellboy) has made a dark, violent, R-rated fantasy that is as unquenchably imaginative as it is uniquely powerful. Sinister and disturbing, the spellbinding Pan's Labyrinth is also imbued with wonder and awesome beauty. It is one of the most unforgettable films of the year, and an unlikely voice for hope in a world increasingly spiraling out of control. Pan’s Labyrinth speaks to the very real fact that stories can help us endure anarchy and affliction by giving us a narrative framework by which we can make sense of our tumultuous lives. By contrasting the clash of good and evil in the real world with the battles that take place in fantasy realms, Del Toro acknowledges what many of us have known since we were lulled to sleep by our parents bedside stories—fables, even dark and twisted one—offer worthwhile perspectives on disquieting realities and reveal the illuminative power of childlike faith to navigate a darkening world.


14. THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND











From my review:

We all know who Idi Amin is. It is no surprise when one of the most loathed figures of the 20th century begins butchering everyone in sight in a maniacal and insane quest to hold onto his power. When it was all said and done, Amin butchered hundreds of thousands of his own people. What The Last King of Scotland does so well is reveal how jovial and buoyant Amin was, a charismatic and magnetic personality that caused all around him to become instantly hypnotized. Amin’s passion is the one overarching constant of his life. That he is equally loving and charming as he is murderous and cruel is what this film is so masterful at revealing. Forest Whitaker does an extraordinary job in a tour-de-force performance that chews up the scenery without once going over the top. He portrays Amin as funny, vulnerable, tender and enigmatic — all without ever letting us forget he was a maniacal monster. Like Helen Mirren’s exquisite performance as the regal Elizabeth in The Queen, Whitaker embodies the role, channeling and not merely acting. When the film ends with clips of the actual man, you realize just how good he truly was.


15. HALF NELSON












From my review:

If you’ve stayed away from this one because you think it is another recycled Stand and Deliver, a Dead Poet’s Society set in Brooklyn, think again. While Half Nelson may wear the outer garments of a traditional teacher-inspires-rough-around-the-edges-students, its heart beats to a very different drummer. Take, for instance, the fact that the inspirational teacher is hopelessly addicted to crack cocaine. Ryan Gosling, who is fast becoming known as the peerless actor of his generation, here gives a magnetizing performance as a dedicated and charismatic teacher of history at an inner-city Brooklyn middle school populated predominantly by African-American children. Don’t let the fact that he’s a coke-head fool you. Dan Dunne is a phenomenal teacher, sweet-natured and intellectually committed. He truly gives a damn about his students. And they know it. But his life is unraveling one night at a time. All the good he does during the day is threatened by nights spent feeding his habit, carousing at bars and never quite sleeping it off at his seedy, dilapidated apartment. Gosling does not play Dan as a hypocrite who takes pleasure from the fact that he continually fools his co-workers and lives only for the revels of the night. Instead, he plays him as a human being, desperately broken, trapped in a self-destructive cycle he knows is killing him and will destroy all he believes in, but is powerless to stop. Dan is a man being split apart at the seams by two conflicting extremes--idealism and cynicism. Half Nelson trades melodrama for authenticity, cliche heroics for genuine heart, cheap cinematic parlor tricks for blessed restraint.


16. Volver












From my review:

Pedro Almodovar’s Volver is amazingly bright, fresh and clean for a film dealing with murder, adultery, incest, malignant disease and the occasional supernatural apparition. It is a testament to Almodovar’s vision that in a film in which half the characters are dead or dying, there should be this much life and vigor. Volver is a film that rejoices—opulently and ferociously—in the power and vitality of womanhood. Volver’s predominantly female cast is nothing short of magical. Maura is warmth personified, Duenas a gentle comic genius, and Portillo the sad, lost shell of a former beauty we are never allowed to see. However, as good as they are, this is Cruz’ film and she plays every scene with a luminescent intensity that easily explains her Oscar nomination. She is nothing short of radiant, exuding the sort of raw, Latin sensuality not seen since Sophia Loren.



The Ones That Got Away:
Army of Shadows
An Inconvenient Truth
Thank You For Smoking
Superman Returns
A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
Borat
Inside Man
Venus
Marie Antoinette
A Prairie Home Companion
Stranger Than Fiction


Ones I Missed:
Inland Empire
Dreamgirls (I'm sorry, I simply have no desire whatsoever to see this one)
Blood Diamond
The Painted Veil
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
l'Enfant
Apocolypto
Hollywoodland
For Your Consideration
The Good German
The Good Shephard
Climates
Old Joy
The Proposition
49 Up
Most of the documentaries

Disclaimer

I know several of you expressed an interest in reading the following three reviews ages ago. I apologize. I know I’ve been quiet lately.

Truth is, a harddrive crash killed these already-completed reviews as well as everything else on the computer I hadn’t already backed up. My school schedule being what it was, I haven’t been able to devote the necessary time to re-writing them.

And now that I have, the second go-round doesn’t strike me nearly as well as the first.

Oh well, what can you do? Enjoy…

Children of Men

People always second-guess the films that win an Oscar for Best Picture. And often times with good reason. Chariots of Fire beat out Raiders of the Lost Ark. Oliver beat The Lion in Winter. Ordinary People beat Raging Bull. And don’t even get me started on the instantly impotent A Beautiful Mind. Then there are those films that don’t even get nominated in the first place: King Kong, Modern Times, Bringing up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Third Man, Singing in the Rain, The Searchers, Some Like it Hot, and virtually any Hitchcock or Kubrick film to name just a few.

Add Children of Men to the list.

I realize there are only so many nominations the Academy can put forward, and to be honest, I approve of all five of this year’s nominations, but regardless, I can’t help feeling that years into the future, some of this season’s crop will be all but forgotten while we’ll be still be talking about Children of Men. As well we should be. It is a superlative piece of filmmaking.

I was entranced by this movie. Hypnotized. Spellbound. In a thrall. The final quarter of the film is nothing short of an evolutionary leap forward in filmmaking. There, I’ve said it.

Based on the novel by P.D. James, Children of Men is Blade Runner for the 21st century, a dystopian thriller that, like all good science fiction that utilizes the future to reflect the present, feels frighteningly contemporary. Though set in 2027, this is a very recognizable and believable future — not so techie or advanced as to be implausible.

Terrorism has crippled the planet. The great superpower is in shambles. Civil wars rage planet wide. The garbage strewn streets are war zones. Only Britain “soldiers on” by becoming a suffocating police state in which Homeland Security has been given carte-blanch to detain anyone it deems suspicious. The flood of illegal immigrants hoping to escape the even greater horrors outside England’s shores are rounded up and cast into ghettos nearly identical to those the Nazi’s constructed. And they are liquidated just as ruthlessly, leading to terrorist attacks by The Fishes, which advocate for immigrant rights at the end of homemade bombs. England has become exactly the sort of seething, paranoid, fascist nightmare from which our current world leaders claim to be trying to protect us.

But something far worse than atomic bombs, insurgents or global warming threatens to bring humanity to its knees. Women have mysteriously stopped having children. The last child born was almost two decades earlier. In a single generation we will all be gone. Not satisfied with the utter futility of its predicament, the human race seems bent on destroying itself before nature has a chance.

Within this hell, we meet a former activist turned burned-out bureaucrat Theo (Clive Owen). Rumpled and despondent, Theo has virtually shut himself off from the world. The only real human contact he allows himself is an old friend and hippie named Jasper (Michael Caine), a former political cartoonist who now hides out in the woods, growing pot. One day, after visiting Jasper, Theo is kidnapped by The Fishes and discovers that the Fishes' leader is Julian (Julianne Moore), his ex-wife, with whom he’d had and lost a child some 20 years before. Julian entices Theo into using his government connections in order to secure transit papers to a secret facility called “The Human Project” for Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), a young African immigrant who, it turns out, is mysteriously pregnant and soon to deliver. Theo finally agrees, little realizing that that decision will put he and Kee squarely in the crosshairs of both terrorist factions and government troops alike.

Alfonso Cuarón (The Little Princess, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Y Tu Mamá También) has made a film of staggering power. All muscle and sinew, Children of Men pulses with a palpable energy and dynamism. Cuarón’s visual style is tsunami-like — exhausting, and physically capable of creating stomach-eroding ulcers in his viewers.

Much of this film is composed of incredibly long and complicated takes filmed with handheld cameras. Some of these scenes go on for nearly ten minutes and cover vast amounts of terrain and action, the camera literally splattered with dirt and blood by the end. Cuarón's audaciousness, which pays off like few things I’ve ever seen, is jaw-dropping — doubly so when you consider the shocking amount of attention to detail that had to be employed in order to edit within the camera and not in the Avid booth. Cuarón builds scenes within the camera's frame instead of the editing room, crafting a film as theatrical as it is cinematic.

It speaks to Cuarón's blistering talent then, that amidst this kind of bravura filmmaking he never loses sight of the film’s equally intense philosophical concerns. Children of Men’s political relevance is never muted by the action. The film addresses fertility, racism, war, terrorism, immigration, decaying social infrastructures, technology, mass paranoia and even life itself.

It is no mistake that this film, bleak as it is, was released on Christmas Day. This is a modern day nativity story with Kee as the Black Madonna and her child a very real savior for mankind.

Cuarón’s ideas may not be new, but the audaciousness of his execution is. He has directed a film with a searing immediacy and a ferocious velocity. This world of fear and hopelessness is more real than we can ever dream possible. Infertility is merely the MacGuffin, a metaphor to examine the possibility of a humankind endgame. Deep down, we know Cuarón’s future could easily be our own. And that is perhaps the most frightening thing of all.

The Last King of Scotland

There is a line, three fourths of the way through the mesmerizing The Last King of Scotland, in which Ugandan tyrant Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker) asks his personal physician Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) about the likelihood of an obviously impossible physical abnormality.

“Almost all aberrations of nature are possible,” Garrigan responds.

We all know who Idi Amin is. It is no surprise when one of the most loathed figures of the 20th century begins butchering everyone in sight in a maniacal and insane quest to hold onto his power. When it was all said and done, Amin butchered hundreds of thousands of his own people.

What The Last King of Scotland does so well is reveal how jovial and buoyant Amin was, a charismatic and magnetic personality that caused all around him to become instantly hypnotized. Amin’s passion is the one overarching constant of his life. That he is equally loving and charming as he is murderous and cruel is what this film is so masterful at revealing.

The Last King of Scotland begins not in Uganda, but in Scotland. There, Nicholas Garrigan graduates from medical school and prepares to settle down to a dull, bland medical practice with his doctor father. We’re only given one scene with Garrigan senior but it is enough to justify the younger’s frustrated scream out loud later when contemplating his fate. Instead, the fool-hearty Garrigan comes up with a fool-proof plan: spin a globe and wherever his finger first falls, that’s where he’ll go.

Canada.

Not quite wild enough for Garrigan’s tastes. Spin again.

Uganda. So be it.

We see only a few seconds of Garrigan’s native Scotland in the opening moments of the film, but it is enough to implant a lasting contrast between the lush, green, fog-enshrouded hills of his homeland and the dry, red, sweltering palate of his new, African home. Adventurous and full of life, Garrigan takes to his new job at a mission clinic with delighted zeal. He seems to have found the perfect match for his temperament, an outlet large enough for even for his restless, pleasure-seeking soul. It also helps that he’s fallen in lust with the mission doctor’s wife, played by Gillian Anderson in a small but crucial enough role to make one yearn for larger, meatier stuff in her future.

At a political rally, Garrigan is introduced to General Idi Amin, a military general who has just disposed of the corrupt and inept administration in which he formerly served. Fascinated by the young European, Amin shows him the presidential palace, wines and dines him, lavishes him with gifts and begs him to become his personal physician. When Garrigan half protests that he came to Africa to treat its hurting people, Amin tells him that if Uganda’s population is the body, he is the head — how better to serve Uganda than to ensure the head is healthy.

Supposedly the speech convinces Garrigan. But we know better. We’ve seen the posh apartment, the Mercedes convertible, the tailored suits. Garrigan’s is made to feel important, vital, irreplaceable. His every whim is coddled to, his every fantasy fulfilled, his sense of importance massaged and built up. He is drunk on power and money and praise. Moreover, Amin becomes a sort of benevolent father figure, filling a void in Garrigan’s life and creating a relationship more familial than friendship.

At first everything is perfect. Garrigan spends most of his time as a playboy, only rarely consulting at the city’s main hospital. His visits to Amin are frequent but more often for cocktails than complaints. However, the more time he spends around Amin, the more he comes to realize that all is not as it seems. After an assassination attempt on Amin’s life that Garrigan is witness to, the true character of his benefactor’s loathsome and murderous nature is revealed.

“He’s always been like this,” Amin’s neglected third wife and Garrigan’s secret lover, tells him. “He simply chose not to show you until now.”

It’s not as if he didn’t have any warnings. The capitol city is swarming with Uganda’s British puppet masters, the European men who pulled the strings in order to hand Amin the throne only to find that in the quest for Britain’s self interests, they have elevated a mad man. When Garrigan is approached and asked to spy on Amin, initially his idealistic skepticism and fierce Scottish resentment over English manipulation wins out. But the more Garrigan sees, the more he realizes the horrors are true. Worse, in his blind trust of Amin, he is at least tangentially responsible for some of the dictator’s more unsavory actions.

It is not that Garrigan is a bad man. He’s not. He’s actually a very caring, compassionate and loving man. But he is young, and interested only in himself, in what fun can be had. Endowed with a disproportionate hedonism, he blinds himself to the suffering his narcissism allows and in some cases, produces.

Forest Whitaker does an extraordinary job in a tour-de-force performance that chews up the scenery without once going over the top. He portrays Amin as funny, vulnerable, tender and enigmatic — all without ever letting us forget he was a maniacal monster. Like Helen Mirren’s exquisite performance as the regal Elizabeth in The Queen, Whitaker embodies the role, channeling and not merely acting. When the film ends with clips of the actual man, you realize just how good he truly was.

Only slightly less praiseworthy is relative new-comer James McAvoy who plays Nicholas Garrigan with just the right balance of narcissism, idealism and compassion. Garrigan represents all of us — everyone deceived, tricked or seduced by great power and praise. But there comes a time when you can no longer run from what you’ve done, when you must confront the culpability of your own actions and face the consequences of your sins committed either by commission or omission.

The Last King of Scotland is a brutal film — a commentary on manipulation, a cautionary tale on the terrible dangers of self-absorption and even manages to become a commentary on political meddling. Ultimately though, one is left with one disturbing and nagging question: to what degree are we all complicate in evil and guilty by association?

Notes on a Scandal

Notes on a Scandal is melodrama at its best, a nasty, wickedly good, over-the-top story with school teachers standing in where vampires usually prowl. Using a “ripped from the headlines” template, the film is a wide-eyed and delicious examination of obsession and self-delusion.

Like the best allegories of Middle Ages, the characters’ extra-Biblical names reveal almost as much as their personifications — one is the namesake of a objectified beauty a king will lie, cheat and murder to posses, and the other is one of the original seven deadly sins.

Bathsheba Hart (Cate Blanchett) is the new art teacher at an urban London school where teaching has been traded for crowd control. Wealthy and with a “bourgeois bohemian” sense of status, this beautiful, happily married mother of two quickly finds herself unable to stay above the choppy working class waters. Thankfully, she is befriended by a most unlikely ally in Barbara Covett (Judi Dench). Barbara is the sort of unyielding battle-axe who was there from the beginning, a cold and disillusioned woman who is disliked by her students and shunned even by her peers. Loneliness has turner her bitter and resentful. It is no surprise that she finds the new girl attractive.

For her part, Sheba is grateful for the advice and the friendship, and theirs is an unlikely alliance. But Sheba is naive and guileless, never suspecting that Barbara has designs on her that go far beyond friendship.

One night, when Barbara happens upon her new friend and a student engaging in the sort of activity Bill Clinton famously denied is actually sex, she senses a golden and perverted opportunity. Confronting Sheba, Barbara claims she will keep silent about the affair provided it ends immediately. This has exactly the intended affect on the distraught and guilt-ridden Sheba. Thinking she has found a most incredible and understanding friend, Sheba has no idea that Barbara wants her entirely, wants to consume her, to possess her mind and body completely. Deluding herself into imagining that Sheba is her lover, Barbara grows livid when Sheba spends any time apart from her. When Sheba decides to attend her son’s play instead of help Barbara grieve the loss of her pet, hell hath no fury as Barbara scorned.

In the end, the truth will out as it must in films like this. Lives will be destroyed, careers will be ruined, and a confrontation will take place the likes of which Shakespeare himself would be envious.

Notes on a Scandal is based on a highly praised book by Zoe Heller. Adapted by Closer scribe Patrick Marber, Scandal , like the earlier Little Children , is as close as a movie can get to literature. The film is propelled by Barbara’s malevolent voiceovers which, for all their venom and distain, are nonetheless the stuff of masterful writing, words dripping with the honey of a shimmering pen. This screenplay was born to win its Oscar. Coupled with the superb writing is Phillip Glass’ breathtaking, gothic score. Suffused with his iconic minimalism, this soundtrack is edged with a darker, more brooding soot than we’ve often heard. Oscar nomination number two.

The performances are towering. Dench is something sinister, lurching in and out of the shadows like a magnificent beast we stand in awe of at our own peril. Blanchett is luminous, waiflike one moment, far more aware of her true lack of innocence than she leads anyone — including herself — to believe the next. When Sheba discovers the truth of Barbara’s intentions she becomes possessed of a titanic fury, a mythical rage that will cyclone through whatever gets in its way. Oscar noms three and four. And we can’t forget Bill Nighy. It seems the mercifully rediscovered actor has not taken a break since bursting onto the scenes several years ago, and his roles just keep getting richer and deeper. Proving he can play drama and comedy, independent and blockbuster, Nighy here adds tremendous gravity to an adoring cuckolded husband.

A sort of Fatal Attraction meets Masterpiece Theatre, Notes on a Scandal is an examination into the mouth of madness borne on the wind of loneliness and rejection. It is an admission that the illicit greener grass most often comes with tragic dues, and an observation that fantasies that substitute for reality can often overtake our lives until our personalities are forever subsumed.

A frenzy of rage and desperation, Notes on a Scandal is a compelling and disturbing psychological drama and one of the best films of the year.

Volver

Pedro Almodovar’s Volver (“Return”) is amazingly bright, fresh and clean for a film dealing with murder, adultery, incest, malignant disease and the occasional supernatural apparition. It is a testament to Almodovar’s vision that in a film in which half the characters are dead or dying, there should be this much life and vigor.

The action takes place in La Mancha. Harkening back to Don Quixote and his windmills, La Mancha is festooned with massive, modern cyclone machines that capture the unabating wind and convert it into power for the small villages nearby. It is a apt metaphor for a ghost story, the root words for “spirit” and “wind” being nearly identical.

Penelope Cruz stars as Raimunda, a neglected housewife who shares a horrible secret with her adolescent daughter, Paula (Yohana Cobo) who has killed her father after he tried to rape her. Raimunda’s sister, Sole (Lola Duenas) also has a secret: their mother, Irene (Carmen Maura) has returned from the dead and taken up residence with her in her tiny apartment. Irene, who can be seen by everyone, is passed off as a visiting Russian who has to run and hide under the bed every time Raimunda drops by unexpectedly for a visit. The plot thickens when best friend Augustina (Blanca Portillo) announces she has cancer and goes on one last quest to discover what happened to her mother, who mysteriously vanished the same day Raimunda and Sole’s mother died.

If the plot seems convoluted, it makes perfect sense on the screen. And no matter, as plot is secondary to character in this radiant Spanish export.

Volver is a film that rejoices—opulently and ferociously—in the power and vitality of womanhood. Volver’s predominantly female cast is nothing short of magical. Maura is warmth personified, Duenas a gentle comic genius, and Portillo the sad, lost shell of a former beauty we are never allowed to see.

However, as good as they are, this is Cruz’ film and she plays every scene with a luminescent intensity that easily explains her Oscar nomination. She is nothing short of radiant, exuding the sort of raw, Latin sensuality not seen since Sophia Loren. Almodovar, who is gay and often fills his films with transsexual characters, is not afraid of sexualizing his actress in a manner usually reserved for more misogynistic directors. The camera lovingly hovers over Cruz’ breasts which spill out of her tight blouses throughout the film. As a friend said to me as we left the theater, “It’s not that Almodovar is sexually attracted to them. It’s more of a fascination thing, like, I sure wish I had some of those.”

Why has the ghost of Irene returned? And is she even a ghost at all?

Ultimately, though estranged in both life and death, we know mother and daughter must eventually come together. And when they do, it sets up one of the oddest endings to any film I’ve ever seen. Not that what happens is particularly weird—it’s not. But even as the film ends on a happy, high note, the visual and musical atmosphere is such that it feels like a melancholy sad denouement.

Only Almodovar.

Little Children

There is a scene in Little Children where Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) describes to a skeptical book club audience why she loved the novel “Madame Bovary.” A tale of tragedy, bravery, stupidity, passion and wickedness, there’s hardly an element of the book that doesn’t find its way onto the screen in these characters’ lives. Sarah isn’t stupid—she sees the parallels. But for the first time in her life she thinks she’s happy, thinks she’s in love. While she knows the tragedy must be right around the corner, for now she’s happy with the bravery and passion.

Little Children is a flawed film. That said, I liked it; at times, even loved it.

I was entranced by the surreal first act. Director Todd Field’s (the magnificent In the Bedroom) direction and Antonio Calvache’s cinematography is so gorgeous, so fluent that you can’t help but be held spellbound. It’s the second act where the film goes long and astray, trying, though not really succeeding in connecting the various plot elements. But by the third act, it seems to remember its earlier glory and brings everything back together in a way that almost makes you question the second act’s inadequacies altogether.

The first thing you notice about Little Children is Will Lyman. You won’t find Lyman’s name in the credits nor will you see him in the film, but he is nonetheless everywhere. Lyman, the well-known voice behind PBS’s Frontline and NOVA, narrates the film, not as a character but as the sort of third-person omnipotent observer rarely, if ever, seen in modern filmmaking. There is a rule in screenwriting: show, don’t tell. Little Children does both and it works flawlessly. Lyman’s rich voice makes us think we are watching a nature special about animals caught in the act in their native habitat.

Exactly.

The native habitat here is not the Sahara, but the idyllic suburbia of Massachusetts. Suburbia is the favorite, overused target of filmmakers these days, not that there isn’t plenty of fodder there to work with. Additionally, the film confronts another all-too common, thirty-something question: why do otherwise fascinating and appealing adults lose all semblance of interest and dynamism when they begin having children?

The animals in this nature film are comprised of a stay-at-home narcissistic father who can’t seem to pass the bar exam and gets high on the adulation of women other than his knockout wife, the languishing academic who has traded the flexing of her mind for folding laundry and changing diapers, the ex-cop whose lost the only thing he ever knew how to be and in the process is on the verge of becoming the very criminal he used to put away, and the sexual deviant so desperate to be normal he will do to himself what others claim so boldly they wish to do.

These adults are the little children to which the title refers. They spend the entire film in various states of juvenile immaturity, only grasping hold of their mantles of responsibility in the closing moments. Better late than never, we are told; it’s never too late to start acting like a grown up. The film ends with hope. There will be a lot of hard work ahead, but despite their flaws, you come to care for each of these characters and want the best for them--even the sex offender.

Based on Tom Perrotta's 2001 novel (Perrotta also wrote the screenplay), Little Children is about as close as a movie can get to literature—rich, nuanced, erudite and multi-layered. The film, like the book, treads a fine line between tragic satire and disquieting, uncomfortable reality, creating a world in which judgmental looks, hidden secrets, repressed desires, and deep, dark fantasies are barely kept at bay by a flimsy social order. What is perhaps most surprising of all is the realization that Little Children is a comedy—a dark, blistering comedy, but a comedy nonetheless.

Little Children is far from flawless, but it remains one of this year’s most beautiful and thought-provoking films. (And it has what just may be the best trailer--click above--I’ve ever seen).

Brokeback Mountain

I write film and TV reviews at DVDFanatic.com. Here are synopsis' and links to those reviews.

I saw Brokeback Mountain at the Telluride Film Festival in 2005. As we settled into our seats for a film few of us knew anything about, we were informed that the Venice Film Festival, running concurrently, had just called and asked us to delay the film for one hour to allow the world premiere to take place in Italy. Telluride agreed and while we all found ourselves with a bit more time on our hands than we'd anticipated, we also realized that we were obviously about to be treated to something special.

Yes, Brokeback Mountain is a gay cowboy movie. But to label it with such a broad, simplistic and frankly dismissive brush is to rob the film of its genuine power and depth. Because at its core, Brokeback Mountain is not a gay love story--it is simply a love story.

This is a tale of two people (not simply men), Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), itinerant ranchers who meet on a summer sheepherding job in Wyoming under the shadow of Brokeback Mountain and fall in love. Constrained by society and their own guilty consciences, the two part ways, marry, and raise families. And yet their bond is so strong that it brings them together time and again, revealing a passion that, if anything, has grown across the time and distance. Tragically, in order for them to be together, they must derail the lives of their families in the reckless pursuit of their love. Some may call their love sin, but they cannot call it false.

Sad and melancholy, Brokeback Mountain is, in many ways, a tragedy. How many among us, nevermind sexual orientation, find true love? These men do, in each other, and can do nothing about it. Master craftsman Ang Lee's haunting, moving film is an examination of social and personal constraints and the churning passions that lurk underneath. No stranger to this sort of story, Lee exchanges ancient China and Victorian England for that most iconic of American scenes--the West.

Brokeback Mountain was an instant cultural touchstone when it came out, a breakthrough in mainstream cinema. Despite the banners, armies and agendas amassed on each side of the debate, Brokeback Mountain is, at its core, a simple, heartbreaking love story that is as universal as it is authentic.

Adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from Annie Proulx's New Yorker short story, Brokeback Mountain is composed of unparalleled acting, graceful and luxurious direction, and deep and abiding emotion--a universal and yet uniquely American love story.

To read the full review, click here.

Running with Scissors

I write film and TV reviews at DVDFanatic.com. Here are synopsis' and links to those reviews.

Running With Scissors is a schizophrenic film. It simply doesn’t know what it wants to be — a witty and wacky satire, or a serious and heartfelt drama. As a result, the entire film wheels around wildly on unstable cinematic feet before collapsing in a heap of earnest yet irreconcilable best intentions.

Running with Scissors was highly anticipated. Based on the popular memoir by Augusten Burroughs of the same name, Scissors tells a wildly unbelievable yet supposedly true story (after the “Million Little Pieces” scandal, who can tell anymore?) of an awkward teenage boy (Joseph Cross) sent to live with his mother’s psychiatrist after she has an emotional breakdown and comes out as a lesbian.

Living with his creatively-depressed mother (Annette Bening) who likes to give her kitchen utensils moon baths and his alcoholic father (Alec Baldwin) who sees nothing of himself in his son was weird enough, but nothing has prepared young Augusten for living with the loony Finches in a house that would have terrified the Adam’s family.

Dr. Finch (Brian Cox) prescribes psychotropic drugs by the dump truck full and divines the future from his bowel movements; the long-suffering Mrs. Finch (Jill Clayburgh) has watched her own personality and ambitions sink beneath those of her husband; eldest daughter, Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow), communes with dead animals; youngest sister, Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood), likes to play with old electroshock machines; and an earlier adopted son, Neil (Joseph Fiennes), is a 33-year-old pedophile who lives in a shed out back and introduces the teenaged Augusten to homosexual sex. Despite being abandoned, Augusten never gives up on his increasingly unbalanced mother, nor himself, struggling to simply stay sane and discover what it means to be a part of a family in the midst of the insane asylum he must now call home.

If you think this sounds hilarious, you’re right. If you think it sounds horrific, you’re right. The problem is that the film tries to capture both moments at once and aside from a few lucky breaks, utterly fails. There are indeed some laugh-out-loud moments as well as some genuinely moving moments of surprisingly great power. But when placed in the same time and space, they cancel each other out, making for a grotesque sludge of a film that works in parts but not as a whole.

With all that said, there is something to lavishly praise here: Annette Benning. Benning is simply terrific—at turns loopy, maniacal, sweet, and despondent. Her role as Augusten’s unstable mother was easily one of the best performances of the year. That it was forgotten at Oscar time is a sad testament to this film’s inadequacies, not to hers or her terrific cast members’.

To read the full review, click here.

Sherrybaby

I write film and TV reviews at DVDFanatic.com. Here are synopsis' and links to those reviews.

Sometimes, a phenomenal story and an explosive performance coalesce to form a perfect film. Well, one out of two ain’t bad.

It’s not that the bleak indie Sherrybaby is a bad film. It’s not. It simply doesn’t rise to the level of a great film. Maggie Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, is an actress you simply cannot take your eyes off of.

Sherrybaby tells the story of Sherry Swanson, an ex-con and recovering drug addict trying to reorient her life after she’s released from prison. Her brother has looked after the one thing she cares about most, her 5-year-old daughter, Lexie. Obsessed with doing right by her child, Sherry grows frustrated by law enforcement oversight, her lack of a home or job, and what she perceives to be her brother and sister-in-law’s supplanted roles in Lexie’s life. It is only a matter of time before Sherry’s old habits catch up with her again.

Sherry is the sort of woman whom many people have simply given up on. It would have been easy for the audience to have done the same were it not for the mesmerizing performance of Maggie Gyllenhaal, who has had a wonderful past year (World Trade Center, Stranger Than Fiction). Authentic, sexually candid, and charged with a dynamism at once bubbly and melancholy, Gyllenhaal’s fearless and effervescent performance is nothing short of captivating. I sincerely cannot recall an actress who has received the sorts of gushing praise Gyllenhaal has for this film only to be ignored come the Academy Award nominations. Shame on you, Oscar!

To read the full review, click here.

Infamous

I write film and TV reviews at DVDFanatic.com. Here are synopsis' and links to those reviews.

I first saw the Academy Award festooned Capote when it was shown at the 2005 Telluride Film Festival. A sumptuously beautiful film with captivating performances, Capote deserved the lavish praise it would later get in wide release. So it was that when I discovered another film about Truman Capote’s life — specifically the time period during which we wrote “In Cold Blood” — was being made at the exact same time, I was skeptical of its quality. I had no reason to be, of course. Just because Capote was the first of the two through the gate hardly made it the superior film. But those who come in second are always cursed with a certain amount of inferiority, and unfairly or not, I did not make the time or the effort to see Infamous when it hit theaters a few months later.

That was a mistake.

Sadly, director Douglas McGrath had the misfortune to become fascinated with precisely the same subject that informed last year's Oscar-lauded Capote. It's impossible to know how we might have reacted to McGrath's Infamous had there been no Capote. Those who saw the earlier movie will inevitably be watching the two simultaneously, perhaps trying to decide which movie trumps the other. As it turns out, there's room for both.

We know the story. Capote told it well. In the fall of 1959, famous author and Manhattan socialite extraordinaire, Truman Capote, reads a story in the New York Times about the brutal butchering of a Kansas farmer and his family. Thinking it sounds like a terrific story, he enlists the help of childhood friend and soon-to-be famous author herself, Nelle Harper Lee (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) and travels to Kansas to poke into matters himself. Rural Kansas does not know what the make of the effeminate, flamboyant Capote and he finds himself shut out everywhere he goes, especially by the local law enforcement. Using his charms, Capote wriggles his way into their good graces, even getting permission to spend as much time as he wants with the accused killers, now in prison. Dick Hickock is brutish and vulgar and Capote dislikes him immediately, but Perry Smith, moody and introspective, fascinates him.

While Capote is surely using the men as fodder for his newly conceived true-fiction novel, he nonetheless cannot help falling in love with Smith. Capote becomes the master manipulator, writing his book in real time by guiding Perry’s actions and steering his decisions. In order to convince Perry to trust him, Truman must lay bare his soul. While he gets what he wants, it comes at a high price, perhaps the loss of his own soul. In the end, for his book to have a perfect ending, the two murderers must be executed. That the man he loves must die in order for this to happen is, in his tormented eyes, the way in which an artist must suffer for his craft. ("Life is painful," Capote tells a friend. "I suppose I'm able to endure it because I'm able to alchemize it into art.") Capote’s book is hailed as a masterpiece, and his personal life, so haunted by his reprehensible actions, is ruined. He will never write another thing of substance.

Despite Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Best Actor Oscar for Capote, Infamous easily has the higher profile cast with Daniel Craig, Sandra Bullock and Jeff Daniels in significant parts, and Sigourney Weaver, Peter Bogdanovich, Hope Davis, and Gwyneth Paltrow in cameos sprinkled throughout. To aid in the chronology of events, McGrath utilizes most of these cameo appearances in various “talking head” interviews. While he was no doubt shooting for something like Warren Beatty achieved in Reds, the interviews feel forced, out of place, and artificial.

Bullock is effective, but never rises to the level Catherine Keener's interpretation of the same character in Capote. She, like so many actors in this film, always appears to be acting instead of disappearing into her character. In fact, the British actors Toby Jones and Daniel Craig (aka, the new James Bond) are the only truly solid performances in the film. And boy are they solid. Craig offers a riveting, raw, powerful performance as the murderer Perry Smith, giving the role a far greater depth (to say nothing of sheer menace) than Clifton Collins Jr. did in Capote. It is unfortunate that Jones must forever live in Hoffman’s shadow for his portrayal of Capote. While Hoffman’s Oscar was well deserved, Jones’ performance is no less amazing. While elements border on caricature, especially early on, once Jones and the film find their stride, both are hypnotic. Bearing a far more startling resemblance to the real Capote, the diminutive Jones is more physically flamboyant than Hoffman. Rest assured, if Infamous had been the film that made it to our screen first, we’d all be talking about Jones’ portrayal, not Hoffman’s.

Infamous spends both more time in Capote’s New York social circles and in the prison cell with Perry, allowing us even greater insight into the two men and the worlds they inhabit. There is more comedy here than in Capote — not yuks, but the sort of genuine laughs that the real Capote no doubt inspired due to his mannerisms and tall-tales — but there is also a far greater dose of humanity. If Capote was a morality tale warning us of the perils of ambition, Infamous is a parable of love, loss, and the deals we make with the devil that come back to devour us in the end. It’s not guilt that ruined Capote in the end, Infamous argues, it’s grief.

Infamous doesn't feel like a remake. While it covers the same ground, the pitch is completely different. Where Capote was cool, distant and even antiseptic, Infamous is warmer and more emotionally fulfilling. It can easily be argued that Capote was the better overall film, but Infamous is easily more accessible. The two films do not eclipse, but rather complement each another. Both films are not only worth seeing, but also represent a fascinating glimpse into the creative pulse of Hollywood and the way in which that creativity is interpreted and constructed. Rarely do dueling productions result in equally remarkable films, but that's exactly what has happened here.


To read the full review, click here.