Category: Movies

Sunday, February 24.

When it comes to artistic works—movies, books, composers, bands—I prefer to think in terms of favorites rather than best. Favorites is more honest. It acknowledges the undeniable, inevitable, wonderful subjectivity of evaluating art, of ranking it as though it were something one could measure with a ruler or a stopwatch. Judging between extremes is easy enough, but attempting to weigh this very good thing against that very good thing always seems silly to me.

In theaters.

I’ve heard 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days described as “that Romanian movie about abortion,” which manages to be both unfairly condescending and reasonably accurate. The implication that writer-director Cristian Mungiu’s film is just a pedantic “issue movie” is dead wrong—it’s far too understated and artful for that—but neither can one easily step back from the brutal events on screen and imagine them to be merely allegorical or metaphoric. 4 Months isn’t vaguely about the suffering of millions under Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu; it’s specifically about the suffering of two individual women, and the unrelentingly naturalistic filmmaking demands that we recognize and experience that. 4 Months is “about abortion” because anything less would be a betrayal of the characters.

In theaters.

Writer-director Martin McDonagh’s feature film debut is extraordinarily preoccupied with mortality and guilt, the finality of death, the weighing of one evil against another—which is a bit odd because of its genre. In Bruges is, in many ways, an archetypal black-humored crime flick—packed with stylized banter, quirky characters, and self-consciously weird juxtapositions—and that genre lends itself more to wry, amoral detachment than earnest ethical evaluations.

Obviously, it’s not impossible to do the latter. I know many would disagree, but I happen to believe that Quentin Tarantino—surely the godfather of the breed—has produced work with a strong moral center. I mean, the climax of Pulp Fiction is a revelation from God, Jules solemnly declaring that after years enforcing the “tyranny of evil men” he’s going to try to act as a shepherd. But I digress. My point is that McDonagh is attempting a very delicate balancing act with In Bruges, and I’m not sure he totally pulls it off. The dialogue sometimes lumbers when it should be more subtle. The self-conscious weirdness sometimes feels off point and distracting. Yet In Bruges also has flashes of genuine power, scenes in which the artsy allusions to Bosch actually seem to work and the film transcends its genre—if only for a few beautiful moments.

On DVD.

No one knows quite what to do with the Western these days. Maybe the genre has just gone out of fashion, maybe it became too riddled with clichés, maybe movie-goers love CGI too much to appreciate a nineteenth-century action flick, but I suspect the core problem is that the classic Western is a fairy tale: the violent, lawless wilderness breached by the noble forces of civilization. Those stark black-and-white morals—conveyed literally with the iconic black and white hats—seem archaic now, not necessarily because of the rigid ethical dichotomy but because this particular metaphor is obsolete. We’re uncomfortable demonizing the American Indian (as we should be), we tend to romanticize the untamed wilderness, and we know too much about how the West was won to celebrate that victory without some reservation.

The romance of the Western can be charming, yes, but it’s a musty charm, even in most contemporary examples of the genre, and 3:10 to Yuma is one of that majority. Despite the fresh acting, smooth direction, and Deadwood-esque profanities, it still feels very much like what it is: a remake of a fifty-year-old movie, a lovingly preserved museum piece.

In theaters.

I have loved Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies for years. I admire the cinematic artistry and the gorgeous thematic arcs and the finely drawn characters, but what I love most is the profoundly empathetic quality of Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love. Anderson has a remarkable ability to take characters we might otherwise dismiss with a sneer—a dim-witted porn star, a drug-addled but repentant gold digger, a painfully shy man with anger management issues—and create clear-eyed but exquisitely human portraits, quietly insisting that we see shades of ourselves in them. There is nothing cynical or cruel about the stories Anderson tells. The honesty, patience, and tenderness of his films move me each time I see them.

So I don’t know quite what to do with There Will Be Blood, Anderson’s latest. It has all those great aesthetic and artistic qualities: long dramatic tracking shots, brilliant lighting, striking use of music. The arc of the movie, with Daniel Day-Lewis’s intense performance in the central role, is beautifully wrought, not a simple rise-and-fall storyline but something more interesting and muddy. But There Will Be Blood is also much colder than I expect from Anderson, and that saddens me. Without the warmth of his previous films, Blood left me impressed and intrigued but unmoved.

In theaters.

Watching the movie, I felt unsettled, crushed, dismayed, stung, battered—and completely bewildered that it was not a horror flick but an ostensibly life-affirming film that was so brutally wringing me dry. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is absolutely beautiful to see, an astonishing cinematographic vision of light and color and breathtaking imagery, but that artistry is in service to an emotional bludgeon of a movie.

In theaters.

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel/memoir of growing up in revolutionary Iran is interesting in its contradictions. Part of the appeal, for Western readers, is how identifiable young Marjane is, with her love of Bruce Lee and Iron Maiden and other icons of American pop culture. She’s a normal, impish little kid. We feel we know her. Yet a central theme of the memoir, particularly the second volume, is how Marjane herself doesn’t feel as integrated in our culture as we imagine her. Attending school in Europe, she feels isolated, the classic stranger in a strange land. She detests our tendency to see her as “exotic.” She resists our inclination to adopt her. Marjane’s coming-of-age story is largely about coming to terms with her identity as someone apart from us.

The film adaptation of Satrapi’s memoir (written and directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Satrapi herself) preserves that conflicted push-pull quality and virtually everything else about the acclaimed work, from Marjane’s distinct voice to the episodic storytelling to the almost cartoonishly simple black-and-white aesthetic. The result is idiosyncratic but powerful, a reminder of just how versatile and compelling animation can be.

In theaters.

The score of Atonement haunts me. Its theme—romantic but foreboding, emotional but restrained—is undergirded throughout by the percussive beat of a typewriter: keys clicking, typebars striking paper, carriage shuttling home. At first, the effect might seem mannered, even over-literal, but it sets a mood of disquiet, and as the film unfolds, its meaning becomes apparent.

That orchestration is beautifully characteristic of the movie’s artistry. The aesthetic choices often call attention to themselves—we notice the painterly framing, the slippery sense of perspective, the evocative set pieces—but none of those choices is arbitrary, existing solely for its own sake. Rather, each lends itself to the storytelling to create a strikingly cinematic realization of novelist Ian McEwan’s literary prowess.

In theaters.

Mysteries—everything from detective stories to police procedurals to tales of random people stumbling upon crimes—have been a guilty pleasure of mine for years, but serial killers have always been my least favorite type of subject. They don’t interest me because their motives are all but incomprehensible. They’re not functioning as normal people. Every fictional serial killer (I can’t pretend to know anything about the real ones) lives in his own universe, with obscure, arbitrary rules that don’t make much sense from the outside. In short, a serial killer is crazy, and his madness bores me.

I mention this because, intellectually, I don’t think Sweeney Todd is a bad musical or a bad movie, but emotionally, it leaves me so unmoved, so indifferent, that I giggled through half the film. Maybe Johnny Depp’s performance is too opaque, maybe Tim Burton’s direction is too garishly gothic, but to be fair, maybe it’s just me.

Both on DVD.

I didn’t see Infernal Affairs in the theater—few Americans did; it played for a matter of days on just a handful of screens nationwide, no doubt to fulfill contractual demands connected to the purchase of remake rights—but I read about the Hong Kong thriller, Netflixed it as soon as it became available on DVD, and absolutely loved it. The smart, relentless plot, the exquisitely crafted parallels, the powerful central performances—it was already great, and I cringed to think of it being remade.

So when that remake, The Departed, came out in theaters last year, I ignored it, despite its great cast, despite the good reviews, and despite the fact that Martin Scorsese had directed it. Seeing The Departed, I feared, would be a betrayal of Infernal Affairs, which I already served as an overeager missionary. (“Ignore the DVD case! I know it’s cheesy, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with the movie. Which is great! Tony Leung! You saw Hero, right? No? Well, he’s amazing. And everything intertwines so perfectly. It’s so much fun! Really! So you want to borrow it? Oh, The Bourne Identity? Well, yeah, that’s fun, too, of course, but it’s on TV all the time. You sure you don’t want to watch Infernal Affairs instead?”)

But TiVo recently recorded The Departed on its own, and I came down with a miserable cold (which, incidentally, is why it’s taking me so long to get anything written), and I thought, what the hell. It’s Martin Scorsese. Infernal Affairs will understand.

And now I’m torn. Having seen the American remake and revisited the Hong Kong original, I have to admit that The Departed is sleeker and more polished that Infernal Affairs. (To be fair, few directors can go toe-to-toe with Scorsese.) But just as back-to-back viewing forced me to face some of the flaws of my beloved cops-and-criminals flick, it also illuminated some of the original’s strengths.