Sideways

I watched “Sideways” at least three times before I decided I liked it. The characters are smug, entitled, loutish, pretentious and depressing, and yet like a good bottle of wine it required a delicate aging until I savored it for its maturity, beauty and perfection.

Miles (Paul Giamatti) is the Pinot Noir of pricks, a rare survivor of someone who’s likeable, clever and dopey all at once. Divorced for two years and scraping to find a publisher for the lengthy novel he keeps in not one but two shoe boxes, he goes on a trip to wine country for his best friend Jack’s (Thomas Haden Church) bachelor party.

Miles listens patiently as Jack announces his plans to get laid one last time before a life of marriage. Because he’s only tacitly unsupportive, we get the feeling we shouldn’t feel pity for either of them. Miles is in such a rut and yet still notoriously sarcastic, pitiful and righteous in everything he does we hope he might act up if he just gets laid too.

Alexander Payne’s film is darkly funny in this way, overwrought and pretentious at times but sincere and touching in a way we wouldn’t expect.

“Sideways” is a wonderfully well-crafted love story and coming of age drama for a group of middle aged men little seen in the movies. Miles and Jack’s courtships with the locals Maya (Virginia Madsen) and Stephanie (Sandra Oh) are lovingly relatable.

In one instant Miles can give a crash course on snobbish wine tasting, systematically examining its smell and its color before hilariously berating Jack for chewing gum. But contrast that with his and Maya’s theories on when a bottle of wine is at its best: even drunk they are mature adults capable of generating thoughtful metaphors on how drinking reflects mortality and the possibility of missing out on life’s luster and flavor if you don’t enjoy it at its peak.

“Sideways” matches its characters’ level of pretension with a trendy window panel montage and a jazzy soundtrack. It stays distant from these people and their tendency to embarrass themselves, and in the process finds pitch perfect comedy in some wonderful set pieces on the side of a hill, on a golf course and in the house of a local couple having sex.

This is a terrifically heart wrenching, intelligent and sincere film with a great ending that doesn’t last a second too long. Its tricky characters may be an acquired taste, but my pallet has developed the maturity to appreciate their charms.

4 stars

The Hurt Locker

“The Hurt Locker” is a pulse-pounding, hyper-realistic war epic but also a moving character study.

It happens to every Best Picture winner: the average Joe movie goer comes out to see the big prestige film of the year, and it gets criticized in all the wrong places.

For “The Hurt Locker,” one of the few memorable masterpieces to win the Best Picture Oscar that will be remembered as a symbol of the 2000s years from now, it was soldiers claiming it was hardly as realistic as it appeared. No soldier would ever be able to leave the FOB alone and in street clothes.

This is true, and no soldier would ever drop a smoke bomb to blind the vision of his team as he went to defuse an elaborate ring of six bombs on his own either.

“The Hurt Locker” is not merely the most pulse pounding, intense and theoretically authentic Iraq War film ever made; it’s a harrowing character study pummeled home through a tightly made action and suspense movie in this modern warfare setting.

Kathryn Bigelow’s film is strikingly visual and compelling, sometimes awesome and at others harrowing. Each moment is so finely tuned and precise in its cinematic perfection that it reflects the care Alfred Hitchcock would’ve enlisted had he made a war film. Continue reading “The Hurt Locker”

Rapid Response: Picnic at Hanging Rock

 

I don’t know anything about the Australian New Wave. I assume that if your country did not eventually have a New Wave, perhaps your country’s cinema is not worth discussing (although even that’s not true).

But what I did notice upon seeing “Picnic at Hanging Rock” as part of the IU Cinema’s Australia in the ’70s series was that many of the directors emerging in this period are modern day staples and C-list directors at worst. Nicolas Roeg, Phillip Noyce, Bruce Beresford and this film’s director Peter Weir are amongst the talents emerging from this period.

Their films carried one theme above all: “beautiful cinematography and stories about the chasm between settlers from Europe and the mysteries of their ancient new home,” as Roger Ebert describes in his Great Movies piece on “Picnic at Hanging Rock.”

And maybe it’s my lack of familiarity or that I watched “The Tree of Life” recently, but “Picnic at Hanging Rock” struck me as a largely spiritual film. It’s lack of narrative clarity and a stunning sense of still life cinematography make the entire film seem other worldly. Continue reading “Rapid Response: Picnic at Hanging Rock”

Contraband

Why is everyone in “Contraband” a smuggler, a screw-up, an idiot or all three? Better yet, why do these people from New Orleans talk with Boston accents?

“Contraband” is a thickheaded heist thriller with a laborious plot and a whole lot of contrived violence against women and children to make up for it.

Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg) is the best in the biz, and although he’s out of the game, he’s doing “one last job” (sigh) to pay back his kid brother-in-law’s debt after a drug run gone bad.

These guys are in love with the idea of smuggling. They call Chris the “Lennon and McCartney” of smugglers. They discuss their work with their wives, family and friends. They walk right into danger and plot an elaborate heist just because they can, and then they act surprised when things go horribly wrong.

I grew irritated at how many times Chris walked right up to his brother-in-law’s attacker, Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), and then could think of nothing better than to run another job just to pay him his money.

Although, it was not as irritating as Briggs’s voice, an accent so thick and fake (“Say g’bye ta ya wiiife!”) his presence as a villain is laughable.

What’s more, Wahlberg’s tough, bad guy turned straight is getting weary. It’s a role he’s played so many times he better be getting a tax write-off.

Their dull performances do nothing to energize this ugly film shot in a cliché documentary style.

It’s often so slow and without vitality it has to concoct elaborate set pieces like a boat threatening to crash into a pier or a van dangling out of a high flying shipping container, none of which chalk up points for the film as intelligent.

Please let “Contraband” be the one last time Wahlberg does one last job.

2 stars

Carnage

When Alan Cowan’s cell phone vibrates, everything stops, or at least on the surface. Eyes still twitch and appendages fidget, and Alan doesn’t forget whose company he’s in. We wouldn’t want to be rude.

Yet the never ending, subtle anxieties nagging us in social situations, like wanting to drop Alan’s cell phone in a flower pot, make Roman Polanski’s “Carnage” so devilishly enticing. “Carnage” makes the compulsion to be rude immensely enjoyable.

Polanski’s 79-minute nugget of a film is based on Yasmina Reza’s play (she co-wrote the screenplay with Polanski) “Le Dieu du carnage.” It was “God of Carnage” on Broadway while I was in New York, and it starred James Gandolfini, Marcia Gay Harden, Jeff Daniels and Hope Davis. I didn’t get to see that version, so I was thrilled when I heard it was being made into a movie with a cast I admire even more.

Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz, Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly play two married couples discussing what to do following Winslet and Waltz’s son attacking Foster and Reilly’s son with a stick. It’s a dark and dryly funny character study of society, civility and judgmental human nature in Western culture.

The families are on edge from the beginning, choosing their words carefully but making their honesty heard.

Michael and Penelope Longstreet (Reilly and Foster) are parents who know best; they have a belief for everything and a blind right to exact justice and understanding for their children. Alan and Nancy Cowan (Waltz and Winslet) are wealthy, busy and intelligent; they disagree but hold their tongues and condescend in private.

This is true at least for awhile, and although there’s a clear sense of how compelling this one-room drama could be on stage, Polanski’s camera show us the finer nuances in these characters’ social awkwardness. He carefully frames each at a variety of lengths and paired with a different partner, so what remains interesting is all that is not being said, the wonderful acting being done when they are not the center of attention and how the screenplay remains nimble and complex to allow changing allegiances.

If in its brief running time “Carnage” devolves to childish bickering too quickly, it’s a forgivable sin because of its naturalism. Perhaps unlike “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, to which it is often compared, “Carnage” is never strictly goofy or morose and never heavy or frivolous. It doesn’t monologue profound social philosophies and it doesn’t take sides.

“Carnage” is a balanced and delicate character drama that never stops spinning its tiny gears, even if a phone call interrupts it.

3 ½ stars

2012 Golden Globes Recap

“Ricky Gervais’s monologue is over, and we’ve heard all we need to about Jodie Foster’s Beaver. Can I stop watching the #goldenglobes now?”

So I tweeted roughly five minutes into the ceremony. I did watch the entire evening, and because they kept Gervais locked in a cupboard (or occupied at the bar) all night, it never reached that same level of amusement, but it at least did not sink to absolute wretchedness and languish the way last year’s Oscars did.

But what the evening lacked was a clear winner or any convincing surprises that would give us a deeper insight into the Oscars. Continue reading “2012 Golden Globes Recap”

The Tree of Life Revisited

“The Tree of Life” deserved a second viewing to fully appreciate it. It’s a masterpiece after all.

“That’s where God lives!”

If there was any film in 2011 that deserved revisiting, it was “The Tree of Life.” It may have been polarizing, but in a year of some great and some mediocre films, it stood as far and away the most important film of the year.

And what’s more, it took watching it twice to realize it’s a masterpiece.

When I originally reviewed the film, I was caught in a state of perplexed awe. I called the film a purely cinematic ode to life itself, but remained unclear of the symbolism and without a feeling of emotional levity.

And yet “The Tree of Life” is so much more than just an ode to life. Watching “The Tree of Life” resembles the feeling one might experience after a rough mid-life crisis: a feeling of peace, acceptance and embracement of life’s beauty.

Terrence Malick’s film is averse to the bitterness, negativity and cynicism that motivate us to search for unanswerable questions in life. Instead, it is a constantly beautiful film that views the color and frivolity of life existing all around us. Continue reading “The Tree of Life Revisited”

Rapid Response: Once Upon a Time in America

What’s funny about “Once Upon a Time in America” is that 1984 Robert De Niro made up to look 35 years older doesn’t look all that different from the way Robert De Niro actually looks today only 28 years later.

But what is noticeably different is the fantastically storybook world of early 20th Century America in comparison to the bleak present. Maybe blame Steven Soderbergh, but it’s hard to imagine a fairy tale set in the 2000s. Sergio Leone however takes pleasure out of envisioning a picturesque America as it once was, with orchestral elegance and lilting pan flutes filling the city streets and with lively color and sound paired with every romance and every knife fight.

There’s a scene nearly two-thirds through Leone’s nearly four hour gangster fantasy where Noodles (De Niro) takes the lovely Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern) to dinner on the seaside. The dining room is sparkling white, expansive and occupied only by handsome waiters and a full string ensemble. Only in America can you have something so schmaltzy, so over the top and so gaudy and still be touched by the magic of it all. That’s the not so subtle beauty of this great nation.

Much has been made about the film’s length and complexity reaching over 50 years with dozens of characters and intricate plot layers all building to a twist in modern day 1967. It has been reasoned that the last shot in which Noodles is seen smoking opium and is left with a big stupid grin on his face indicates that the entire fairy tale was nothing but a pipe dream, and this wasn’t helped when the movie was butchered in America by 90 minutes into an incomprehensible mess when it was theatrically released in 1984.

But I think it hardly matters. In its essence, “Once Upon a Time in America” is a simple film between two friends about nostalgia and loss. The film begins at the end of Prohibition with a few scenes of ruthless violence because it signals the end of a period of true decadence.

The rest of the film recalls that period through flashback in a surprisingly touching coming of age story of a few gangster hoods in New York. Between the antics of trying to get laid by the village whore Peggy and pulling their first jobs, the film has a goofy innocence, and every moment is treated as an elegiac fantasy through the shimmering bright cinematography and Ennio Morricone’s swimmingly saccharine score that recalls Old Hollywood. Not even “The Godfather” is this romanticized.

And when we flash forward to the ’60s, the world is not nearly as pretty, and the scene is underscored twice by what other than The Beatles’ “Yesterday.” Noodles has lost the past and been wandering in the future for over 35 years, and Max, as we will learn, has been desperately clinging to that lost decadence from the days after Prohibition.

There’s certainly a lot more to be analyzed here, and that’s why this is a somewhat shorter and faster response to such a long, epic film. I’m curious for instance to understand why each of Noodles’s sexual encounters breaks the film’s element of fantasy, with him taking advantage of Peggy and raping Carol and Deborah. I also didn’t really get why Joe Pesci wasn’t in the movie more. I was sure that little kid that got shot early on would grow up to be him.

But if there’s a real answer to the film’s complex riddle, I think the truth is nothing more than a beautiful and unreal time has passed us by, never to return, but even if it takes smoking opium, there is still some giddy joy of that lost time frozen forever in our memory.

2012 Oscar Nomination Predictions

My predictions for the 2012 Oscars have eight films being nominated for Best Picture, including “The Tree of Life” and “The Artist.”

1/21 Update: I’m going to stick to my original predictions that I said I had set in stone less than two weeks back, but already with the Golden Globes, the DGAs and a variety of other nominations and awards being announced within days of one another, the field has changed somewhat drastically. Films thought dead are now serious contenders, and some considered front runners are now on the bubble to even be recognized. I detail all my new changes and thoughts in bold and italics below, but the long and short of it is that “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and “Bridesmaids” have some momentum, “War Horse” has tripped on the last furlong, and “Drive” and “Young Adult” were perhaps always too hopeful of picks on my part.

Welcome to Oscar season, where an analysis of which period pieces will be nominated for Best Costume Design can make a bracketology advocate during March Madness look sane.

This year’s race is closer than the Iowa caucuses (and most of the candidates just as mediocre) and the new voting system is more confusing than the BCS Championship.

But I’m here to coach you through what will happen when the nominees are announced on Tuesday, January 24. Continue reading “2012 Oscar Nomination Predictions”

The Anti-Oscars

In “The Anti-Oscars,” I make a list of the Best Movies and Performances of the Year that don’t stand a chance at getting nominated.

This article will not help you win your Oscar pool.

On this Oscar Nomination ballot, you will not find any Streeps, Clooneys, Plummers or Spielbergs.

No, this is the Anti-Oscars! This is the opposite of what will happen when nominations are announced on Tuesday, January 24.

I’ve made picks in five of the six major categories, but while these certainly don’t reflect what will happen, they aren’t even necessarily what I think should happen. The Academy gets some things right some of the time.

Rather this list is my personal ballot dedicated to the not-even-out-of-the-gate contenders that were marvelous in 2011 but for whatever reason will not receive the attention they deserve at the biggest award ceremony of the year.

I’ll also use this space to discuss why they are not in the race and what that means for the actual contenders. So if any of these names are in your predictions, rethink your decisions now, and watch me eat my words when I predict the real ballot next week.

 

Best Picture

  • Drive
  • Beginners
  • Super 8
  • Incendies
  • The Skin I Live In
  • Certified Copy
  • Weekend
  • Melancholia

If there’s one thing the Best Picture hopeful lineup is missing, it’s a good dose of darkness. Is “Moneyball” really the darkest movie this year’s Oscars have to offer? My list, which conveniently resembles all eight films in my Top 10 list not solid contenders for nomination (the other two being “Midnight in Paris” and “Hugo”), shows a much more even split of heavy and lighter entertainment. Continue reading “The Anti-Oscars”