The Iron Lady

“It used to be about trying to DO something. Now it’s about trying to BE someone,” sneers The Iron Lady’s Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) of our changing social values. She’s right, of course, but the irony of The Iron Lady is that it’s a textbook example of that trend.

Not that examples are hard to come by. Celebrities who are famous just because they look good in the spotlight aren’t anything new (remember the Gabor sisters?), but for the last 10 years or so they’ve been multiplying like flu victims in Contagion, with Paris Hilton in the Gwyneth Paltrow role. A few of the reality shows that dominate network TV ratings are built around people who can actually do something extraordinary: How amazing is it when those contestants on Project Runway make stylish outfits out of office supplies? But mostly, we watch reality shows not because of what their stars can do but because of who they are and how they behave—-or, better yet, misbehave. Read more

Crazy Horse

Asked for her definition of eroticism, one of the members of the Crazy Horse’s staff offers this: “Seduction without offering yourself. Restraint.”

That’s not a bad way of describing Frederick Wiseman’s thoughtful, undogmatic approach to filmmaking, which layers on information without commentary, letting viewers draw their own conclusions. But Wiseman’s exploration of Paris’ Crazy Horse cabaret, which bills itself as the world’s classiest purveyor of nude dancing, is the opposite of a seduction. Read more

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

In ex-British spy John le Carré’s Cold War novels about his former profession, the main weapons are intellectual brilliance and psychological acuity and the prize is a secret concealed within a secret. You wouldn’t think something that heady would be very cinematic. But the winner in le Carré’s mind games is generally the best watcher, the one who notices the most about his environment and the people around him, and that makes his stories ideally suited to a visual medium like film.

While body-rush fantasies like the Mission Impossible TV and movie series turn the spy/counterspy game into a question of who has the best techno-toys (and, in the movies, Xtreme fighting skills), le Carré is pure head rush, a mental game with the added thrill of feeling scarily plausible. Done well, films of his stories sharpen your senses, making you notice things and tune into frequencies you wouldn’t ordinarily pick up on. They give you the psychological equivalent of the thrill you imagined experiencing as a kid if you’d bought a pair of those X-ray vision glasses they used to advertise in comic books. And Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the latest adaptation of one of the author’s George Smiley books, is very well done indeed. Read more

The L Magazine's 2011 Film Poll

Here's The L's annual poll of its regularly contributing critics. We each pick 20 movies, ranked in order of preference, and the editors compile our choices into a Top 25 list.

1. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
Like the God of Job, Malick can leave his supposed intimates struggling to make sense of themselves within his cosmos: he's burned through who knows how many editors, worked sound teams to the bone, and left composers and many actors feeling cheated. But his methods have also inspired devotional loyalty among those who've achieved their capacity for grace under his eye: in The Tree of Life, he coaxes the work of a lifetime out of Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and Emmanuel Lubezki (and Jack Fisk, whose realization of Malick's hallowed spaces is his own life's work). And by prodding us to engage with our own capacities, he makes us into better, more open, attentive moviegoers. And people? Sure. Mark Asch Read more

Women Behaving Badly

We’ll know feminism has finally taken root when the female leads in the stories we tell ourselves behave just as badly as the male leads do. We haven’t gotten there yet, but two current movies are giving us an idea of how things might look when we do.

Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), the title character of David Fincher’s remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is as grimly antisocial and borderline fanatical as any male movie vigilante (think Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name). This is one woman who could care less what people think of her, mainly because she doesn’t think much of almost anyone else. In fact, the whole purpose of the spiky Goth getup that gives the movie its name is to keep people at a safe distance. Read more

My 2011 Top 10

1. The Tree of Life



The winner of this year’s main prize at Cannes and the subject of millions of pixels’ worth of online debate, Terrence Malick’s fifth feature as writer/director over the last 38 years is to cinephiles what Halley’s Comet is to astronomers: an eagerly anticipated and rarely seen phenomenon. Read more


2. Certified Copy



A French expat living in Tuscany with her teenage son drops in on a lecture by an Englishman on a book tour. (He’s James Miller; she never gets a name, but since she’s played by the great Juliette Binoche, she hardly needs one.) She leaves him her card through his Italian translator, and he shows up the following Sunday for a visit that turns into a day-long date. Read more

Talking to Pariah Director Dee Rees

After a brief post-college career in marketing, Nashville native Dee Rees returned to college to major in film at NYU. She wrote the script for Pariah, which recently won her a Breakthrough Director prize from the Gotham Independent Film Awards, while interning on her professor and mentor Spike Lee’s Inside Man. I talked to her earlier this month in the Waldorf Hotel.

I was interested to read that Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara were two of your favorite authors, since they’ re favorites of mine too. What do you like about them in particular?
They write about coming of age in a different way, and identity and self and what is home. Their characters always had internal conflict. For me growing up, those were the stories that made me feel like I was not by myself.

Pariah is so detailed and emotionally authentic that it feels very personal, but you grew up in Nashville and it’s also very specifically about a slice of African-American and gay culture in Brooklyn. Did you have to do a lot of research to get the Brooklyn part right?
I don’t research. I just write and then check afterwards. When I was coming out, I was living in Brooklyn and going to these gay clubs, so this is the scene I was kind of thrust into. Read more

The Adventures of Tintin

The two Spielberg movies opening this week represent the two sides of this prodigiously talented but often disappointing director. A mashup of deeply personal themes (mostly boys with daddy issues and/or with no parents in sight) and high-gloss Hollywood technology and tropes, Spielberg’s work seesaws between moving and maudlin. War Horse is gorgeously composed old-school schmaltz, with its relentless score and heroic low-angle shots of blue-eyed heroes against great expanses of sky. But if that stale hunk of cornbread is Spielberg at his most suffocatingly sentimental, The Adventures of Tintin is the director at his best: playful, energetic, and brimming with genuine wonder.
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Coriolanus

The theory that the United States is poised to fall like the Roman empire, and for pretty much the same reasons, is hardly new, but it’s rarely been presented more compellingly than in Ralph Fiennes’ X-treme Shakespeare version of Coriolanus.

In an impressive directorial debut, the actor transposes the classical Rome of Shakespeare’s play to an ashy, underlit modern-day Europe (the film was shot in Bosnia), packing the screen with all the markers of modern warfare and civil unrest. Brutal battles between Rome and its Volscian neighbors feature Humvees and RPGs, shot-up cars with slaughtered civilians spilling out of their half-open doors, and terrified prisoners in dank torture chambers. Meanwhile, hordes of Romans take to the street at home like so many 99 percenters, protesting the hoarding of goods by a thin slice of the oligarchy while the rest of the people starve. Read more

Like Crazy

A connect-the-dots love story, Like Crazy works as much because of what it leaves out as because of what it includes.

Director Drake Doremus, his co-writer Ben York Jones, and editor Jonathan Alberts often start or end a scene in the midst of an action or skip months at a time in the otherwise linear timeline, so we have to keep figuring out what we just missed. That helps maintain interest in what might otherwise have felt like a pretty standard story about a first love that burns alternately hot and cold but just won’t fizzle out.
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