Year End List

I still want to see Blue Valentine and Biutiful (Innaritu!) and I'll probably watch whatever foreign films and documentaries that get nominated for Oscars and are available on netflix streaming (shameful way to choose what to watch I know), but other than that, I've just about seen what I want to see for 2010.  I only really loved one movie but I liked a lot of others and have only seen a few I'd consider bad (time to stop trusting that Ridley Scott/Russell Crowe combo).  Anyways, I hope to rank everything I've seen in the next week or so.

Rabbit Hole - 7.0

I initially had Rabbit Hole pegged in the Revolutionary Road, Little Children suburbia is hell category.  Well it turns out this film actually fit into the Ordinary People losing a child is hell category.  It's hell either way but it's better (no, worse) this way because at least in this movie there is a legitimate reason for the characters to be so miserable and treat each other like crap other than mere boredom.

So once I figured out what exactly Rabbit Hole was about, I was able to appreciate it.  It's definitely the type of movie you appreciate instead of enjoy.  It's set in the aftermath of the protagonist couple, played capably by Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart (Kidman is apparently close to a lock for an Oscar nomination, though I was personally just as impressed by Eckhart's performance), losing their 4 year old son in a freak car accident in front of their house.  It's sad to watch both characters turn to outsiders to try to deal with their grief, and it's not hard to imagine how losing a child tears so many marriages apart.

On a random note, I saw a teaser trailer for this movie when I was watching TV the other day and the ad sold this movie as funny.  Like the voiceover guy explicitly said "Rabbit Hole is funny."  I will never trust another teaser trailer in my entire life.  If I went to see this movie expecting a comedy and ended up watching two people grieve the death of their young son for the next hour and a half, I'd be pretty freaking pissed.

NBC Thursday Night

So I watched all six of the NBC comedies tonight.  My ranking of the 6, based on a combination of tonight's episodes and how much I've been enjoying them lately:

1) 30 Rock - it's been hilarious this season.  Even had a good Dr. Spaceman cameo tonight.

2) Community - I really liked tonight's episode.  I haven't loved it in the past but I'm going to pay more attention when it's on now (less multi-tasking).

3) The Office - it's hit or miss these days.  The Daryl, Dwight, and Andy combo tonight was good (probably my 3 favorite characters at the moment) and the supporting characters are always good for a few laughs per episode.  But the Michael/Holly, Jim/Pam, Dwight/Angela couplings are all just blah.

4) Parks and Rec - Amy Poehler tries to walk that Steve Carrell tightrope between annoying and funny and comes down too much on the annoying side for me.  Aziz is freaking hilarious though, and I found myself enjoying some of the other supporting characters tonight.

5) Perfect Couples - I laughed a few times during the pilot.  Nothing spectacular but not as terrible as...


6) Outsourced - god this show sucks.

Winter's Bone - 7.5

Winter's Bone opens with a young boy riding a skateboard, a young girl playing with a doll, and a slightly older girl doing laundry, set to a presumably traditional Ozark folksong, all taking place in what becomes a familiar setting of a dilapidated, broke down trailer home.  The scene combines the universal (kids playing), with some of the unique aspects of this particular story (the Ozark culture and the decrepit  conditions its people endure), and brilliantly sets the tone for rest of the movie.

Besides the acclaimed, outstanding, surely soon to be Oscar nominated performance from Jennifer Lawrence, what stood out most in Winter's Bone was the bleak, hopeless atmosphere.  The film really had a cinema verite feel, so the story felt real, like it was a situation that you could easily imagine happening often in that part of the world, or at least some variation of it.  Set against this gloomy backdrop, a 17 year old girl was just trying to do what she could to keep her family together.  I'm already a sucker for stories about kids being raised by slightly older kids (think Wallace or Michael in The Wire), so watching Lawrence's character fearlessly navigate the Ozark drug underworld was quite an experience.  The patriarchal nature of that society, where it seemed it was a man's right to aggressively grab a young girl's face whenever he wanted to tell her something, made that experience even more harrowing.

I briefly complained about family relationships being hard to trace in The Fighter but that was a piece of cake compared to this film.  That minor quibble aside, Winter's Bone was a compelling, character driven story that showed that a pervasive culture of drugs and violence has ruined more places in America than the inner city.  It's a should-see (a notch below must-see in my book) for Lawrence's performance alone.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 - 6.0

Let me start by saying this chapter of the Harry Potter saga did a lot of the same things that the last few movies did well, the stuff that has been going on since (the genius) Alfonso Cuaron took the franchise in a new and much more compelling direction following Chris Columbus' first two kiddie movies.  The atmosphere was perfect, it was beautifully shot and stunning visually, and competently acted; I especially enjoyed the soft spoken creepiness of Ray Fiennes' Voldemort and the overtop, couldn't be further from Queen Elizabeth, craziness of Helena Bonham Carter's Bellatrix Lestrange.  All in all it's just a well-made film.  There was also one creative sequence that I loved -- the retelling of the story of the deathly hallows, with Hermione's narration and stick figure animation, was just awesomely creative and captivating, and exponentially better than the typical flashback scene one might expect.

However, there were several things I didn't like.  Full disclosure first, it's been 4 years since I read the book, and while I loved it at the time, I don't really remember it that well (especially the first half, aka this movie) and haven't thought about it a whole lot in the interim.  So I don't remember if it was so blatant in the book or not but it was just an all too convenient plot device that all Harry, Ron, and Hermione had to do to escape even the most perilous predicament was simply grasp hands and disapparate to where ever they wanted.  Maybe it's a necessary feature in this type of story but the ease of the trio's getaways grated on my nerves while watching the movie in a way that didn't happen at all while I was reading the book.

Furthermore, along similar lines of HP7 coming dangerously close to typical action genre pitfalls, there were a couple moments that felt so derivative that it was almost like I was experiencing deja vu.  First, when they flashed back to Dumbledore falling to his death from the Hogwarts tower, it looked so much like Gandalf's fall in the mines of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring (white hair flowing in the wind and everything) that I honestly forgot what movie I was watching for a split second.  And then in the Harry transportation scene (which was actually pretty well done, other than Mad Eye's death basically being reduced to an off hand comment that was seemingly forgotten 5 seconds later), when Voldemort keyed in on the real Harry, I could've sworn they just used stock footage from LOST and Voldemort transformed into the smoke monster for a few seconds.  Now I love both Lord of the Rings and LOST but I don't love when I feel like they're being copied.  It was only two small and relatively insignificant moments but it played into a broader feeling of unoriginality and an overall lack of freshness (which is a bit inevitable in the 7th movie of a franchise I guess).

Lastly, I'm still a little irritated they made this into two movies in the first place.  The studio's excuse that the story demands 2 films, blah blah blah, is taking the easy way out in my opinion.  The wandering through the woods part of the book was a bit drawn out as it was so when you're adapting it into a movie, why not cut that down instead of expand it even more and center an entire movie on it?  No need to answer that since it isn't exactly rocket science -- the studio is going making hundreds of millions of dollars by making two movies instead of one.  So the bottom line for me was Part 1 was mostly just a setup, a beautifully shot and immaculately crafted setup but a setup nonetheless, for the finale.  I'm still confident Part 2 will be incredible (it'd take some doing to really screw that part of the story up) but I have tempered my enthusiasm ever so slightly.

Blackmail - 6.0

Blackmail marks the beginning of a new personal quest -- to work my through Alfred Hitchcock's entire filmography.  This was inspired by the purchase of Hitchcock's first 20 movies on DVD for only $5.49 (http://www.amazon.com/Alfred-Hitchcock-Legend-Begins-Classics/dp/B000UVV25Q/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1294801322&sr=8-2) and a Hitchcock/Truffaut book I bought in which the master discusses all of his films.

Blackmail is one of Hitchcock's early features (it came out in 1929) and was actually the very first British 'talkie.'  While that's a cool piece of trivia, it wasn't the best thing for the quality of the film, as Hitchcock actually started filming it as a silent movie and changed course midway through the production at the insistence of the studio.  So Blackmail ended up being this strange combination of silent and talkie (it basically made a complete switch 20 minutes into the movie).  Predictably, the sound is clunky and the dialogue not quite synchronized (furthering the problem, the lead actress had a thick Czech accent so they had to dub in another actress' voice -- edited to add, after reading about it in the Truffaut book, apparently it wasn't dubbed in (they didn't have the technology) but the other actress stood off camera with a microphone and spoke the dialogue while the lead pantomimed her lines... I'm sure that drove Hitchcock the perfectionist crazy).  The plot is also very slow developing.  However, with all that said, if you love Hitchcock, it's fun to watch just for the early glimpses of his genius.  There was the ancestor of a tracking shot as two characters ascended several flights of stairs, clever use of reflections and shadows, and interesting camera angles.  And of course, even early on, Hitchcock was an expert at building suspense.

1 down, about 55 to go (I've actually seen 20 of Hitchcock's movies now and I believe he directed 53 total).

The Fighter - 8.0

30 seconds into The Fighter (which is an absolutely horrible title by the way) I was blown away by Christian Bale's transformation into this washed up crack addict. Watching such a big star become a character like Dickie Eklund, so you forget you're watching a star at all is pretty incredible. Combine his go for broke performances in movies like American Psycho, The Machinist (which I haven't seen), Rescue Dawn, and The Fighter with his more straightforward crowd-pleasers like The Prestige (awesome, underrated movie) and Public Enemies, and of course his work as the best Batman ever, and you've got easily one of the best actors of his generation. It's about time he got some Oscar recognition, which he'll no doubt be receiving shortly. 

After admiring in awe Bale's performance for a few minutes, the rest of the movie eventually sucked me in too. About halfway through I was ready to declare The Fighter not at all a sports movie, but instead a story about a decent guy (Wahlberg's Mickey Ward) trying to overcome his dysfunctional, selfish yet loving family. Then the rest of the movie was a pretty predictable sports movie; a couple training montages, adversity overcome, some drama surrounding the central romantic relationship, and (SPOILER) the underdog ultimately coming out on top. 

But The Fighter did differ from the typical sports movie in a few ways, some good, some bad. For one, it thankfully reversed the recent trend in boxing movies where the boxing scenes are filmed in such a way that you can't tell what the hell is going on (as much as I love him, Michael Mann was a pioneer of this movement in the otherwise excellent Ali). On the other hand, the boxing scenes were also filmed in such a way that a dramatic, surprise knockout wasn't all that exciting. I respect the effort to be minimalistic but there's something to be said for hollywooding it up (for lack of a better term) a little bit in those moments. On the other other hand, I did appreciate The Fighter going the anti-Hollywood route and never unnecessarily and unrealistically vilifying Ward's opponents as cheap shot artists or heartless thugs; Ward's character was developed well enough in the non-sports first half of the movie that they didn't need to manipulate the audience so they would be rooting for him. 

While the family relationships were difficult to trace and the timeline was a little hard to follow at times (it seemed weeks and even months would pass between scenes at a few points), The Fighter told a quality story that was elevated by great acting. Bale was obviously terrific but Wahlberg and Amy Adams were good too, while Melissa Leo's turn as Ward's mother/manager was a scene-stealer (and definitely Oscar worthy as well). Overall, terrible title, good movie.

Ajami - 8.5

Ajami is an Israeli film in the same vein as City of God or Amores Perros (high praise already, the back of the DVD also compared it to The Wire and Boyz N the Hood).  It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 2009, and it's not hard to see why.  It has that gritty, authentic feel that makes you feel like you're eavesdropping on someone's real life instead of watching a movie. 

The title, Ajami, refers to a diverse neighborhood in the Israeli port city of Jaffa (which is now a part of Tel Aviv) and the story deals with the interactions and conflict between the various ethnic groups that uneasily co-exist there, including Jews, Arab Christians, Arab Muslims, and Bedouins.  According to Lily, it's a very accurate portrayal of life in Israel and really illustrates the depth and hopelessness of the racial and religious divides which lead to so much senseless violence. 

The film itself was co-directed by an Arab and a Jew (which gives me just a tiny bit of hope) and deals with multiple characters, told through five different intersecting, non-linear stories.  Now I'm always a sucker for this type of plot as it is, but putting aside my bias in favor of this structure, I really don't think it felt at all forced or gimmicky.  I'm not very good at judging acting in foreign films because I feel like I'm reading the subtitles 75% of the time, but the largely non-professional cast came off as natural and assured.  Ajami was consistently engaging, and also timely and relevant, though quite depressing as well.  I think it has earned its place alongside other modern classics like City of God or Amores Perros ... though I don't think I can in good conscience compare anything to The Wire (and no movie will ever be able to match its breadth and scope).

I'm back

I've been watching a lot of movies lately so I think I'm going to use this blog to review them. Not sure how much I'll get to in my backlog (probably not very much since I have a busy few weeks/months ahead of me), so I'll just go ahead and say, of the current crop of newish releases, I really liked Black Swan, The King's Speech, and 127 Hours, while I thought True Grit was technically brilliant but left me feeling a bit cold inside.