Hope Springs

I confess that there are problems married couples encounter in their sex lives that I am not yet equipped to understand. Even after decades together, two people can reach a point where they cannot create intimacy, romance or spontaneity. They are stuck; too afraid to make sparks.

It’s one reason “Hope Springs” will resonate more with elderly audiences than it did with me. The rift between Kay and Arnold may be all too familiar to some. In that way, David Frankel has organized his film and his characters in such a way that anyone could project their own problems onto the scenario. Continue reading “Hope Springs”

Metropolis (1927)

“Metropolis” doesn’t really resolve anything. At its conclusion, the worker village underneath the Earth has been destroyed, the luxurious Garden of Eden is abandoned and the majestic city to represent all cities has been brought to a stand still.

The people of “Metropolis” have only reestablished human morality for the moment. Man is equal once more, but there is no sense things are about to change.

Fritz Lang used the most money ever spent on a German film to make an epic about mankind’s scary dependence on technology, the massive rift between social classes and the rapid decline of humanity when posed with our own ego, sin and anger. This civilization can only thrive with the gifts of modern engineering. What’s more, the wealth inequality will remain intact and sin has not been eradicated. The story ends happily, but you can see how Lang would leave the eventual fate of the world somewhat tentative.

“Metropolis” was butchered and never to be seen appropriately due to its length, its poor box office appeal, its religious overtones and its confusing imagery for American audiences, but one gets the idea that some of the themes Lang was engaging here were just a bit too much for some people to handle.

It’s an impossible gift then that Lang’s film still exists at all, and now with additional footage such that Lang’s vision can be fully understood. It’s a pivotal film because of its scale and its visionary glimpse of the future, but it’s been so captivating through the years because it capitalizes on so many fears, all of which are universal. Continue reading “Metropolis (1927)”

Wordplay

I need an eight-letter word for “clever, fun documentary.” “Wordplay.”

The simple answer to “Wordplay” is that it’s a pleasant doc about the joy of doing crossword puzzles. If, like a crossword, you think such a documentary would be a meaningless waste of your time, you may find that Patrick Creadon’s film is actually about thinking differently and finding uses for these trivial facts. Continue reading “Wordplay”

My Best (and Favorite) Movies of All Time

These are my 10 “Best” movies of all time, along with my 10 “Favorite” movies ever.

Any critic voting in the Sight and Sound poll that was announced yesterday (my coverage here if you care to compare lists) will tell you how impossibly difficult it is to select 10 films as the best of all time. Occurring every 10 years since 1952, this is really the only list that matters. They have to select with their minds and their hearts, and the two don’t always coincide. If you’ve seen all the masterpieces, how do you choose between all that is perfect? And how would you like to be the critic who finally displaced “Citizen Kane” as the best movie of all time?

I don’t have nearly as much pressure on my head (not yet), but it hasn’t stopped some of my friends from asking what are my all time favorites.

I tend to dodge the question (often pretentiously, I might add). “Well, how do you rank works of art anyway?” “Oh, you probably haven’t heard of them.” “I’ve just seen so much that it’s so hard to choose.” And then I’ll say something about how I’ve seen the Harry Potter movies a lot because they’re always on HBO and I have a sister with no qualms of re-watching stuff, so maybe those could be called some of my “favorites.”

Often, I don’t even like the word “favorite.” “Best” and “favorite” usually go hand in hand. If I called “Drive” the best movie of 2011, it’s because it’s the one I most want to see again AND because it’s the most important/best made/critic-y jargon bullshit.

There’s also the possibility that I just haven’t seen enough films. In fact, I know I haven’t seen enough. One day decades from now when my Excel spreadsheet of classic films to watch is completely marked up with yellow highlights, when I’ve written and read all I can about them and am looking back on my entire life of watching movies as opposed to looking forward to what’s coming out this Friday, then maybe I’ll make a decent list.

So for all those reasons and more, I’ve never officially made public what are my all time picks for best movies ever. I’ve always had titles in mind, but they’ve never been put on paper like this. It’s damned hard to do.

But I’ll concede that in this instant, “best” does not mean “favorite.” I’m not going to lie and pretend that some obscure foreign movie I’ve seen once two years ago means more to me than something I’ve seen dozens of times since I was a kid. At the same time, that movie I know by heart is probably not even in the same conversation technically or historically as that obscure foreign film.

It’s why I’ve decided to provide TWO lists. One has the movies I would call the most powerful and most significant movies ever made. The other has the titles that I could never forget. They define me as a critic and a person. Continue reading “My Best (and Favorite) Movies of All Time”

2012 Sight and Sound Poll Announced

“Vertigo” has now been named the #1 film over “Citizen Kane” in the 2012 Sight and Sound Critics’ Poll.

For 50 years, “Citizen Kane” has sat alone as the greatest film of all time, much like its title character locked away in a giant palace, untouched.

Now, a giant has toppled.

Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” has bested “Citizen Kane” as the number one film ever made in the Sight and Sound Poll, a list organized by Sight and Sound magazine and voted on by critics and writers from around the world.

Roger Ebert calls the list essentially the only film poll that matters, and it is such because it has been conducted every 10 years since 1952 and surveys the best of the best in film.

Citizen Kane has been number 1 since 1962 when it overcame Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves,” the reigning champ from 10 years prior. Since then, “Vertigo” has been on every list since 1972, climbing to as high as number 2 in 2002. This year, “Vertigo” received 191 votes from its 847 participants, dwarfing “Kane’s” 151.

This year’s full list is as follows.

  1. “Vertigo” – Alfred Hitchcock, 1958
  2. “Citizen Kane” – Orson Welles, 1941
  3. “Tokyo Story” – Yasujiro Ozu, 1953
  4. “The Rules of the Game” – Jean Renoir, 1939
  5. “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans” – F.W. Murnau, 1927
  6. “2001: A Space Odyssey” – Stanley Kubrick, 1968
  7. “The Searchers” – John Ford, 1956
  8. “Man With a Movie Camera” – Dziga Vertov, 1929
  9. “The Passion of Joan of Arc” – Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1927
  10. “8 1/2” – Federico Fellini, 1963 Continue reading “2012 Sight and Sound Poll Announced”

Rapid Response: The Untouchables

When I first saw “The Untouchables,” I thought it was highly overrated for just being kind of lame and stupid. It seemed cheesy, and so it is. Brian De Palma is clearly making a modern day crime drama in the fashion of an Old Hollywood gangster movie. But now I think it’s overrated because it’s so plainly obvious that he’s doing that.

The problem with De Palma is that he’s a leech. He makes “homages” of classic American films, but he lacks his own personal style. His aesthetic is big and bold, but its without a defined pacing or tone. This is loosely true of “Scarface” too, a film that thrives based on its charismatic lead performance from Al Pacino, and one he also dedicates to Howard Hawks.

“The Untouchables” is the story of how Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and his small team of vigilante cops took down the Chicago organized crime lord Al Capone (Robert De Niro). But rather than take a truly interesting approach to this historical story, De Palma concocts an intentionally adorable and token back story for our hero and a series of big budget action set pieces that are bloody, but look clearly shot on movie sets, have corny dialogue and gigantic musical swells in a score by Ennio Morricone designed to place the viewer back in 1930 when this movie is set and could’ve been made. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Untouchables”

Rapid Response: The Circus

There’s real terror in our eyes as Charlie Chaplin dances atop a tight rope in the closing set piece of “The Circus,” and yet the Tramp turns it into a larf. He makes this goofy looking stunt where he’s pulled skyward by a wire look effortlessly graceful, and he’s such a showman as he awkwardly gags as a monkey puts its tail in his mouth as he’s trying to stay balanced. Watch carefully in a cutaway shot of the audience, and you’ll see a guy watching intently and eating his popcorn waiting for the Tramp to fall as everyone else screams in terror. It’s this little gag that makes the scene all the more delightful.

And the added surprise? He’s really up there on that rope.

“The Circus” is the first of Chaplin’s silent stragglers, a gigantic mess of a production in between “The Gold Rush,” “City Lights” and the rise of the talkie that still managed to be an uproarious comedy gem. If it doesn’t innovate in the way that “The Gold Rush,” “City Lights” and “Modern Times” do, it’s just as good and funny, if not better, and with just as much pathos. Continue reading “Rapid Response: The Circus”

The Dark Knight Rises

The bat signal is lit. Since 2008’s “The Dark Knight,” the world needed another proper superhero movie, one that tested our minds and rattled our core.

Christopher Nolan’s follow-up, “The Dark Knight Rises,” is more of an enduring challenge than some will expect. For others, it will even feel little like a superhero movie. But its heavy themes of untapped emotion and social anarchy dwarf the flimsy blandness of “The Avengers” and “The Amazing Spiderman.” It does the Batman franchise proud. Continue reading “The Dark Knight Rises”

To Rome With Love

“To Rome With Love” is a disappointing follow-up to Woody Allen’s delightful “Midnight in Paris.”

Woody Allen’s “To Rome With Love” is a movie about living out your fantasies of love and discovery. Its stories aren’t likely, so it’s a fantasy of its own, but not in the way of “Midnight in Paris.” Rather, it’s like the warm and gooey dream that feels embarrassingly stupid after you wake up.

In the last few years, Allen has made a trilogy of films in Europe, first in Barcelona, then in Paris and now the Italian Eternal City of Rome. The first problem is that this feels more like a travelogue than any of the others. It invites you into the city and makes time for sightseeing and an admiration of architecture, but then it makes its native Italians into goofy caricatures.

We see Romans as adulterers, Communists, sex craved, tabloid craved, wanderers with no sense of direction and angry mothers brandishing butcher knives.

The movie itself has this two-handed approach to its fantasies. “To Rome With Love” simultaneously tries to pull you toward and away from the romance of the story. The four anecdotes it tells are too dopey to be taken seriously and too familiar and incidental to really laugh at. Continue reading “To Rome With Love”

The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom

The Japanese word “sakura” refers to the blooming of Japan’s cherry blossoms in the spring, but it literally translates to “beautiful, but not showy.”

The documentary short “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom” is steeped in artistic beauty, but it feels just right in capturing the mood between tragedy and hopeful optimism for the future.

Lucy Walker’s Oscar nominated short documents the tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011. The opening sequence is a cell phone video of the destruction in near real time. It all happens so quickly, but as we see it unfurl, it seems to be gradually happening as though time has slowed to a sickening crawl. It’s a powerful sensation. Continue reading “The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom”