Oscar-nominated Shorts

This may be the year when the long-lived boom in high-quality documentary film makes the transition from trend to entrenched institution. At least, that’s what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences seemed to think when it opened up a new space for documentaries in the Academy Awards this year.

The Best Documentary (Short Subject) category joins Best Short Film (Animated) and Best Short Film (Live Action), offering Oscar completists and fans of short films a total of 15 nominees to catch before the Oscars air and short films vanish from theater marquees for another year.

The first crop of documentaries are all from the USA, except for one USA/Papua New Guinea coproduction. They’re all pretty somber, looking at the human costs of manmade horrors like catastrophic pollution, war, or the non-state-sponsored killings targeting a particular religious or ethnic group that seem to be the curse of the 21st century. But they manage to work in that trademark American optimism too, mostly by examining their problems through the lens of a person or group that is working to give peace, or people, a chance.

The teachers and administrators in Strangers No More run a thriving secular humanist school in Tel Aviv that welcomes traumatized teens from all over the world. They offer the kids not only a good education but a nurturing community, from which they can rebuild a broken sense of trust and hope, even find surrogate parents to replace those they have lost. They’re clearly doing the work of the angels, but the real heroes are the students themselves, who deal with the often unspeakable traumas they have suffered with dignity and grace, while shifting their focus – with the help of their teachers – from the past to the present and future.

There’s a little too much self-congratulation on the part of the teachers, and things are too often said rather than shown – generally by school staff rather than the children themselves – in this talking heads-heavy film. That diminishes its impact, though what we learn about the children’s backgrounds and what we see of their characters is so strong that it’s still very moving. But if Strangers No More doesn’t dive deep into the lives it shows, it does raise pointed questions about the millions of children who aren’t lucky enough to find a sanctuary like this. As a bittersweet exchange between one father and the school administrator points out, the basics offered here – a high school education, freedom from persecution, social acceptance – are out of reach for so many international refugees that they make even Israel look like a safe haven.

Poster Girl has the opposite problem. It homes in close on its subject, former cheerleader and National Merit Scholar Robynn Murray, as she copes with PTSD, fits of rage, and a deep sense of shame and betrayal after a tour of duty in Iraq. Director Sara Nesson makes us mourn the blighting of such a promising young life, but she doesn’t quite make the connection to the tens of thousands of other young vets coping with similar problems. The movie’s title refers to a poster of a cocky-looking Murray and a couple of her fellow soldiers in full combat gear, which the Army used to recruit other young women – but it also represents a missed opportunity. This is one movie that could have used a couple more talking heads, maybe including a psychologist or someone from one of the anti-war vet groups, to provide a wider context for the damage that was done to Murray and talk about what could be done to protect others from the same fate. As it is, Murray comes off more as a pitiable victim than the powerful voice she is trying to be for her fellow wounded warriors and the Iraqi civilians they terrorized.

Sun Come Up, the Papua New Guinea coproduction, is a competent account of the plight of one of the first groups of a whole new kind of refugee. Calm, reasonable, and saddened by the prospect of abandoning the idyllic island where their people have lived for hundreds of years, the peaceful citizens of the Carteret Islands (the islands are right next to PNG) are poster people for global warming refugees. The film follows them as they look for another home before the rising ocean, which is already flooding their fields with salt water and ruining their crops, engulfs the island altogether.

Killing in the Name 
highlights a Jordanian Muslim named Ashraf whose wedding party was blown up by a suicide bomber. Despite the dangers of speaking out against this form of self-proclaimed jihad, Ashraf is waging a campaign to get Muslims to speak up against suicide bombings, which he condemns as defying the teachings of the Koran. And in Warriors of Quigang,
a self-taught lawyer named Zhang leads the other citizens of his tiny farming community in a campaign against the factories that are poisoning their air, land, and water. They’re fighting for their own home, but what they do could affect the whole world’s health. If, that is, they manage to stand up to the goons who beat, jail, and terrorize people who protest the poisoning of China’s environment. Zhang and the handful of other environmental activists shown in the film don’t look like firebrands, but what they’re calling for is truly revolutionary – nothing less than a political system in which the will of the people supersedes that of the corporations that rule more of the world every year.

One of the nominees for best animated film, Let’s Pollute (USA), is also about protecting the environment, but the preachiness and the hamfisted “humor” of this spoof how-to, which parodies those didactic voice-of-God educational filmstrips nobody’s making or watching any more, neuter its message.

The other animated shorts include The Gruffalo, a sweet but too slow and predictable (though I suppose very young kids might like those qualities) UK/German coproduction. It’s about a squirrel mother (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter) who teaches her babies about the dangers of the forest by narrating a sunny story-within-a-story about a mouse that outsmarts a monster. The Lost Thing, a UK/Australian coproduction, is a melancholy meditation on technology and waste with a retro-modern steam punk look. Day & Night, a sometimes appealing, sometimes opaque imagining of the rivalry between daytime and nighttime, comes from the USA courtesy of Pixar, which bundled it with Toy Story 3 last year.

My favorite of this batch is Madagascar, A Journey Diary (pictured at top), an impressionistic hand-drawn account of French writer/director Bastien Dubois’ time in that country that shimmers with life, drawing us into a landscape and culture that he appears to have seen with more sensitivity and depth than most tourists achieve.

My pick of the live-action shorts is Na Wewe, a suspenseful, nicely detailed account of a vanful of Africans in 1994 Burundi who refuse to yield to intimidation when a contingent of soldiers commands them to separate into two groups, the Hutu on one side of the road and the Tutsi “snakes” on the other. The director – like a man picked up by the van just before the soldiers stop it, who witnesses the event – is from Belgium.

The other four live-action shorts are all about the angst of a pre-teen or adolescent boy. The Confession, a beautifully photographed and expertly edited British film, starts out sweet and then goes surprisingly dark as a little boy tries to do something bad so he’ll have something to tell the priest at his first confession and wreaks unintended havoc. Wish 143 (UK) also changes tone partway through, but with less success. It starts out with promise, as a young man with terminal cancer tells someone from a make-a-wish foundation that his only wish is to have sex before he dies, but it becomes disappointingly maudlin. Ireland’s The Crush is a wryly funny revenge story about a boy who saves his beloved teacher from a man who, as he rightly insists, doesn’t deserve her. And in the slight but entertaining God of Love (USA), a dorky young adult suffering from a bad case of unrequited love finds his prayers answered in an unexpected way.

I’m sure there were a lot of short films made last year that I’d like as much as these or more. I liked Bill Plympton’s The Cow Who Wanted to be a Hamburger, which made it to the Academy’s short list but didn’t get a nomination, better than most of the animated shorts that were picked, and other shorts I saw at last year’s South by Southwest film festival didn’t even get on the short list. But then my favorite features don’t usually get nominated for Oscars either, so why should shorts be any different?

Even so, it’s good to see short films get a little play once a year, and there’s plenty to like – maybe even love – in this batch.

Written for TimeOFF

Biutiful

Watching Alejandro González Iñárritu’s emotion-drenched Biutiful soon after Clint Eastwood’s stillborn Hereafter, I kept noting surface similarities between the two – and thinking about what made Biutiful succeed where Hereafter failed.

Eastwood's film earns its few moving moments by playing out the sadness of premature death – a heartstring that’s easily plucked. Biutiful strums that same note, but only as part of a plaintive refrain about the beauty and pain in everyday life and the sadness of having to leave it. Hereafter is packed with painfully expository speeches, while Biutiful shows us what’s happening rather than trying to tell us what to think about it. (A good example is the drawing that gives the movie its name, a bright painting by the daughter of the main character, Uxbal, on which she wrote, apparently practicing her English: “The picnic was biutiful.” We see this poignant artifact of a rare happy family outing in passing, as we would if we were standing in Uxbal’s kitchen and scanning the walls. In Eastwood’s movie, in contrast, the camera zooms in on a photo in George’s apartment so the woman he has invited in can ask him about it, leading to a clunky speech.)

Perhaps most importantly, both Matt Damon’s George in Hereafter and Biutiful’s Uxbal (Javier Bardem) talk to the dead, and both are reluctantly convinced to practice their psychic skills by desperate mourners – and by their need for cash. But Hereafter makes that one simple notion the core of its story, flogging it nearly to death, while Uxbal’s communion with the dead is just one small part of a much more compelling narrative.

The thread that connects a string of crystalline moments in Biutiful is Uxbal’s headlong race to come to terms with his own imminent death while providing some measure of security for the children he must leave behind. Uxbal, who lives and works in hardscrabble, majority-immigrant parts of Barcelona that Bardem’s character never showed those glossy young tourists in Vicky Cristina Barcelona,
is a realistically complex man: a sad-eyed hustler, a strict but loving father, and a loyal friend and former husband.

As the story begins, he learns that he has metastasized prostate cancer. As he wastes away physically over the course of the movie, the sadness of the body’s inevitable decline registers all the more intensely, as it did in Before Night Falls and The Sea Inside, because of the vitality and intensity Bardem brings to the role – not to mention the soulful power of those deep-dish dark eyes and that Easter Island profile.

Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Amores Perros, 25th Hour, Brokeback Mountain) finds the beauty in impoverished settings and Uxbal’s increasingly gaunt face without romanticizing too much, though the harshness may be softened a bit too much in Uxbal’s Camille-like death scene. And right up to the end, Uxbal makes the most of the life he has left, getting chemo and seeing a curandera, trying to square things with his unstable but loveable ex (Maricel Alvarez, an unconventional beauty with a nose to match her costar’s), and doing whatever he can to add to the wad of cash he stashes in his bedroom.

Thankfully, González Iñárritu doesn’t fall back on the overlapping stories and fragmented timelines that felt revelatory when he and writer Guillermo Arriaga used them in Amores Perros, but tiresome by their third collaboration, Babel (though, to be fair, they might not have if so many other filmmakers hadn’t jumped on the idea.) This time around, the director and his co-screenwriters, Armando Bo and Nicolás Giacobone, simply follow Uxbal around enough to give us a sense of what’s happening on some of the side streets he’s rushing through. Besides Uxbal’s own physically deteriorating but psychologically stable home, we glimpse the family lives of a Senegalese street vendor and his wife, a group of undocumented Chinese pieceworkers, and the Chinese manager of the factory where the undocumented pieceworkers labor and live, camped out on the floor of an unheated basement room.

Not all of this movie’s many tangents work – the Chinese workers, in particular, feel more like symbolic victims than actual people. But Biutiful serves up enough pungent little slices of life to make up for its misfires.

Written for TimeOFF

Carancho

Specializing in gritty city stories about everyday people hurtling toward a dead end in his native Buenos Aires, director Pablo Trapero carries the torch lit by Warner Brothers in the 1930s. In Crane World, a middle-aged man loses his job and can’t find another. In Lion’s Den, a mother struggles to raise her baby in prison. In El Bonaerense, a young man from a small town in the big city gets falsely accused of a crime, then strong-armed into joining the police force.

Carancho, Trapero’s latest, is set in a literally shady underworld where gangsters exploit uneducated people who are injured or killed in traffic accidents, roping in washed-up lawyers to sign them on and then taking almost every peso their insurance companies award. Those bloodsuckers really exist, but after establishing the basics with a few documentary-style title cards at the start, Trapero couches his facts in neo-noir fiction. Flecked with bits of black humor, anchored by a poignant romance, and dressed down with studiously realistic lighting, sound design, sets, and makeup, Carancho is a darkly entertaining urban legend. (It was Argentina’s pick for a Best Foreign Picture Oscar nomination this year, though the Academy decided to take a pass.)

Ricardo Darín of The Secret in their Eyes and Nine Queens plays Sosa, the lapsed lawyer at the center of the story – and the ambulance-chasing carancho (vulture) of the title. As Trapero told Michael Guillén, caranchos are no ordinary vultures: They’re striking-looking, even impressive birds, but “Still, they eat roadkill.” And sure enough, Darín’s soulful machismo gives him a Pete Hamill vibe even as the naturalistic, often sickly lighting emphasizes his pouchy eyelids and doughy complexion.

A similar tension animates Darín’s performance. Sosa looks convincingly seedy while absorbing yet another beating, and he acts deceptively trustworthy while sweet-talking another grieving widow into signing over her case to him, but when he commits to true love, his sad, searching eyes and confident body language win us over as surely as they do the drug-addicted emergency room doctor, Luján (Martina Gusman) he falls for.

Cinematographer Julián Apezteguia’s handheld camera hugs the actors close, underlining both characters’ unglamorized air of vulnerability by focusing on details like Sosa’s thinning gray hair, the little rolls of fat on the back of his neck, and Luján’s unexplained burn scar and track marks. The two live in a dispiriting world of cramped, closed-in spaces, overcrowded offices, and underfurnished hospital rooms where violence is one of the few constants. (In one of the darkly funny set pieces, Luján even has to duck gunfire in her hospital, after a couple of rival gangbangers wind up next to each other in a waiting room.)

In classic noir fashion, they’re both waiting for something or someone to come lift them out of this life, and for a little while Sosa thinks their relationship may be the change they were waiting for. But in the end, of course, there’s no way out of their marathon of misery.

And yet, despite the underlying despair, there’s an understated, fatalistic feel to the story and its inevitable end that left me shaken but not stirred. It’s as if Luján is speaking for the director when repeats her favorite piece of advice, telling traumatized victims, grieving survivors, or hyped-up gangbangers to take it down a notch or two. “Tranquila,” she coos. “Tranquila.”

Written for The L Magazine

Second Chance Cinema 2011

“For once, it’s not predominantly American independent films. It’s more international, and there are more films from France than anywhere else,” says McCarter Special Programming Director William W. Lockwood Jr. of the lineup he assembled for the 16th annual Second Chance Cinema series. Of the 11 films in the series this year, nine never played at all in the Princeton area, while the other two had theatrical runs so brief that most of their audience never had a chance to find them.

The three American movies include a USA/UK coproduction by English graffiti artist and trickster Banksy. “It’s really a hoot, but you never really know what the joke it, though I think ultimately it’s on us,” says Lockwood of Exit Through the Gift Shop, a nominee for this year’s Best Documentary Oscar. “We don’t really know for whom this film was made or who made it. Is it a real documentary or not? I think it’s a gloss on the whole modern art scene, where the artists become their own objects of desire. It’s like one of those boxes in boxes that keep unfolding on each other.”

There aren’t a lot of laughs in the other two American offerings. Winter’s Bone is a powerfully spare mystery set in a secretive Ozarks community with a fierce and merciless code of honor, and The Messenger follows two soldiers from home to home as they notify next of kin who have lost their husbands, sons, mothers and daughters in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The strength of Winter’s Bone lies mainly in its realistic settings and performances, which director Debra Granik achieved partly by casting many locals and using their homes and yards as the setting for most of the action. “They’re real people,” says Lockwood of the film’s characters. “Emotionally, the film has a lot in common with Wendy and Lucy.” In our late January talk, Lockwood anticipated several of the Oscar nominations Winter’s Bone would soon scoop up (it’s a candidate for best picture, actress, supporting actor, and screenplay). “It’s not going to win, of course, but a lot of people recognized it for the fine piece of work it is,” he says. “I’m surprised it never played here.

“It just goes to show you how inundated we are by films these days. Not from the major studios, who only released 110 films last year, but there are hundreds of others. Ten or 20 movies opened every week in New York last year.”

Another film that never made it to Central Jersey is The Messenger, which Lockwood admires for “the fine acting, by Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster in particular,” and for “reminding us that the war is still going on. Usually the war films we see are things like The Hurt Locker and Restropo, which are about the fighting and the interfacing between the soldiers and the people in the occupied country. What we haven’t seen as much is this side of the war, which is the effect on the families that have lost someone.”

The French entries in this year’s series include features by some of that country’s – and the world’s – best living filmmakers: Claire Denis (35 Shots of Rum), Alain Resnais (Wild Grass), Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Lorna’s Silence -- pictured above), and Jacques Audiard (A Prophet).

The story of a father and daughter, 35 Shots of Rum is “a lovely poem, really,” says Lockwood. “It’s just delightful in how it captures the mood of loving people and the difficulty and the cost of breaking bonds. It reminds us of how complicated families are and how painful it is when they break up. The essence of it, I think, is what isn’t said – it’s the spaces between the dialogue.”

Silence is also of pivotal importance in Lorna’s Silence, whose heroine must decide whether to endanger herself by speaking up to save someone else. “The Dardenne brothers are old favorites of our series,” says Lockwood. “There’s a very moral approach to everything they do. People in their films are always having to address their ability to compromise in this world.”

Lockwood describes A Prophet as “a story about prison life and what it can do for you, in the end. This illiterate kid enters jail and comes out a man, outgrowing his reliance on the Mafia man who controls the prison and becoming a self-reliant criminal. This is not a film for the squeamish,” he adds, “because it’s pretty grisly, especially when he has to kill somebody with a razor blade he hides in his mouth.”

Wild Grass, the story of an awkward, sometimes comic mid-life romance, feels much lighter. “If Renais is still making films at 87, everybody should see them,” says Lockwood. “How many masters are still going at that age?” (Actually, quite a few. Last year’s New York Film Festival included new works by Portugal’s Manoel de Oliveira, who’s still prolific at age 102, and by Jean-Luc Godard, Frederick Wiseman, and Clint Eastwood, who were all born in 1930 – apparently a good year for filmmakers.)

Last Train Home is a documentary about the greatest annual human migration on earth, in which 130 million laborers leave cities all over China to spend a few days at home over the new year. It is the only trip home for most, including the couple the film focuses on, whose son and daughter are being raised by the man’s mother. “It shows us a side of China we don’t know about,” says Lockwood. “To see your parents just once a year….”

Japan’s contribution to the troubled-family theme that runs through this year’s series is Tokyo Sonata, the story of a family’s slow disintegration as secrets drive people apart. “It is, very apropos, I think, in terms of the problem we have with continuing unemployment and its effect on people in the United States,” says Lockwood. “A guy loses his job and he can’t bear to tell his family. It tears them apart. I think the resolution is somewhat suspect, but nevertheless [director Kiyoshi] Kurosawa is going to be a major filmmaker. I love the kid who sneaks out for piano lessons and turns out to be really pretty good.”

Set in a working-class English housing project, Fish Tank is another story of a fractured family, this one focused on the teenage daughter. “Talk about breakthrough performances,” says Lockwood. “There are two this year, both by young women. One is Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, and the other is Katie Jarvis, who played this role. They discovered her on a subway platform in London.” Jarvis’ Mia, says Lockwood, is “almost a contemporary cousin to the Truffaut character, Antoine, in The 400 Blows, because she’s very angry and she destroys everything. She’s thrown off balance by her relationship with her mother’s boyfriend, played by Michael Fassbender, who you may remember from Hunger. He take a little too close an interest in her and she responds. But you never know what she’s going to do, because Jarvis is an untrained actress. Mia’s foolish and she’s fearless – she’s almost feral. It’s another in the youth-in-trouble school, but I thought this one really stood out.”

Lockwood had to pull two of the films he had planned to show – Police, Adjective and Life During Wartime – when he learned they might not be released on DVD in time to be shown. In their place, he is showing Exit to the Gift Shop and I Am Love, a lushly melodramatic love story that was a critical favorite last year. “This one is really out of the [director Luchino] Visconti playbook, and Tilda Swinton steals the show,” says Lockwood. “It almost couldn’t have been made without her. There’s a lot of eating in it, and the sexy guy is a chef, of course. You have to have one movie in every series on cooking and love. Sex and food go together, especially in the movies.”

Written for TimeOFF

Sundance 2011: Septien

An appealing little oddball of a movie, Septien is ironic and yet genuinely sweet.

Writer/director Michael Tully’s hipster Southern Gothic starts slow, its long takes giving us plenty of time to adjust to the laconic rhythms of a family farm that’s home to two brothers who get paid by the government not to work the land. Amos spends most of his time in the barn, making cartoonish paintings that serve up an American goulash of football, sex and violent death. Wilbur, the brothers’ sweet but slow former farmhand, lives outside in a tractor tire and spends his days like Of Mice and Men’s Lennie, stroking his kitty or digging up buried treasures. Ezra plays mom, cooking, cleaning, and clucking over the others.

The first hint of trouble in paradise arrives with the third brother, Cornelius, who appears after an unexplained 18-year absence with Joaquin Phoenix’s stiff posture and I’m Still Here beard, but the real drama starts when a creepy local plumber drives up to unclog the old house’s pipes. The psychological shitstorm the plumber unleashes, like the missing puzzle piece Ezra finds at the end of the movie, is just one of many comic bones tossed our way by this deadpan drama, which breaks into a riot of quick cuts and hysterical action in a climax as overheated and quintessentially American as Amos’ paintings.

Part spoof and part homage, Septien plays with psychological-horror tropes while creating a pungent little universe all his own, peopled by characters you find yourself actually caring about.


Written for Slant Magazine

Johnny Mad Dog

Straddling the line between education and exploitation, Johnny Mad Dog is a visually sumptuous, sometimes stagy story about beautiful children doing horrible things.

Based on a novel about child soldiers by Congolese writer Emmanuel Dongala, it’s set in an unnamed African country engulfed by civil war. Johnny Mad Dog (Christopher Minie), a gorgeous 15-year-old who was conscripted into the rebel army when he was 10, takes his orders from the only adult we ever see on his side of the conflict. Johnny is in charge of a ferocious contingent of soldiers who are mostly even younger than he is. Like the marauders of some post-apocalyptic road movie come to life, they trudge past burned-out cars and smoldering trash or pile onto carjacked trucks to spread terror in the name of freedom. Amped up by their general’s constant yelling, the drugs he feeds them, and the chants he leads (“You don’t wanna die? Don’t be born!”) and costumed in things they loot along the way, like the wire-frame wings that earn one boy the nickname Butterfly, they play at being “death dealers” until the role becomes real.

At its best, Johnny Mad Dog bears witness to the horrific abuse perpetrated against and by child soldiers. I’ve read about most of the atrocities it depicts, but even so it was wrenching to watch child actors, some of them former child soldiers themselves, act out the killing, rape, and terrorizing of civilians. It’s also a stark reminder that the rules of war are made to be broken, and that even “legitimate” armies are made up mostly of soldiers not much older or less impressionable than Johnny. These feral kids’ earnest imitations of Hollywood hard guys are also a reminder of how Western weapons and war imagery have spread, a cancer that has infected the whole world.

But at its worst, like when a stiffly self-conscious Butterfly sings a bawdy GI death dirge over a dead comrade’s body, flicking glances at the camera, Johnny Mad Dog feels awkwardly staged or didactic. The story of a stoic young civilian trying to escape the rebel troops with her little brother and her legless father, which is intercut and periodically intersects with Johnny’s, is so underdeveloped that she feels like a symbol clumsily inserted in a realistic movie, more ghost than girl as she wheels her father through city streets. And a simpleminded attempt to assign the blame for the war falls flat in a scene where the kids file past a cemetery while a long passage from Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech from the Mall booms forth.

Worse yet, director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire sometimes seems to be getting off on the brutality he’s depicting. When he exoticizes an ecstatic nighttime dance around a bonfire or uses slo-mo, stutter cuts, and a curtain of sound to dramatize the kids’ point of view as they open fire on a town, he completes the circle, turning the dreams of these Hollywood-worshipping kids back into cinematic glamour.

The scourge of child soldiers is a 21st century scandal, and closing our eyes to the facts won’t make them go away. But I’m not sure how it helps to bathe in images like these, either. Is Johnny Mad Dog part of the problem or part of the solution?

Written for The L Magazine

The Dilemma

The Dilemma stumbles along like an amiable drunk that can’t quite find his footing. The worst he’s likely to do is annoy you, but your best bet is to stay out of his way if you can.

Vince Vaughn plays – well, you know what he plays. Ronny Valentine is a paunchy party boy on the verge of a panic attack, his motor-mouthed patter designed to draw attention away from the vulnerability in his eyes. Ronny’s pudgy best friend and partner (they co-own a small auto development business) is Nick, the Barney to Ronny’s Fred Flintstone. A nerve-shot little nerd, Nick (Kevin James) relies on his big pal for practically everything.

Their bromance is (very conspicuously) set in Chicago, but it really takes place in that arid Hollywood no-man’s land where every scene is a brief setup followed by a lame bit of schtick, and where you can see just about every plot twist a mile off. As soon as Ronny declares that Nick and his improbably pretty wife, Geneva (Winona Ryder) are his “hero couple,” for instance, you figure something bad is about to happen to them. And sure enough, Ronny soon spots Geneva making out with a hot boy (Channing Tatum) – and he’s off. As he agonizes over when and how to tell Nick, Ronny wades deeper and deeper into the morass of his friend’s dysfunctional marriage, learning things he never wanted to know while making things worse with his bumbling interference.

In a four-way dinner conversation that opens the movie, Ronny riffs on whether we can ever really know another person. It’s an interesting question, which the script explores in other ways too – mainly through Geneva, an intriguingly unpredictable character brought to brooding life by Ryder. Jennifer Connelly unearths some layers in a less well-rounded character as Ronny’s adoring girlfriend, who stays loyal to the big lug as he bangs around the joint, bruising her delicate sensibilities. But not even the almost always charming Queen Latifah can redeem the maniacally upbeat Susan (“I got lady wood!”).

Susan is a consultant hired by Chrysler to shepherd Ronny and Nick through the process as they rush to create an electric muscle car prototype they can sell to Detroit. That project is an origami tiger, just one more temporary roadblock to keep Ronny from telling Nick about his marital problems, since Ronny doesn’t want to distract his engineer friend from his work until he’s finished the car.

Director Ron Howard presumably could have made a pretty good drama about all that – not to mention the questions of loyalty and honesty that the script periodically raises -- or turned it into a sweet little comedy of misunderstanding, along the lines of his early hit Splash. Instead, he mashed together a lumpy mix of comedy and drama in which the comic bits are often awkward and the emotions realistically raw. When Ronny calls his sister, fishing for her advice on whether he should tell Nick about Geneva’s affair, his coded questions convince her that her own husband is cheating, but when she rages at him for choosing such a cowardly way to deliver the news he just raises his eyebrows and hangs up the phone. The scene is mean to be funny but it plays out all wrong, the intensity of her agony making his cluelessness seem less comic than cruel.

But no sooner has he done something obnoxious than Ronny does something sweet or goes off on another of Vaughn’s patented run-on riffs. You get the feeling the actor is doing for his movie what his character is doing for himself: tap dancing as fast as he can in an effort to salvage a desperately uncomfortable situation.

Written for TimeOFF

Getting Ready for Oscar

There are less than 50 days left to catch the nominated films before the Oscars air on the last Sunday in February, so here's a rundown of movies I expect to see nominated in a couple of weeks. Even if they don’t get any love from Oscar, most are all well worth watching.

The Social Network's combination of first-class filmmaking and social significance is catnip to the Oscars, as it has been to just about every other awards program this year, so I’m betting it’ll be nominated for best picture, director, and screenplay and for at least one acting award. All three of its leads (Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, and Justin Timberlake) deserve the statue, but Garfield has gotten most of the awards so far, maybe because his character was the only one of the three you can actually relate to.

The King’s Speech is another kind of Oscar candy, a beautifully acted historical drama with snob appeal (we Yanks just can’t get enough of those royals) and a strong populist streak (the king’s quirky self-taught therapist treats his crippling stutter by daring to treat him as a friend). The movie is likely to be nominated for an Oscar, and Colin Firth is almost sure to get a best actor nod for his buttoned-down yet emotionally flayed portrayal of King George VI, a very private man forced to assume a very public role.

Black Swan is all but certain to be nominated for best picture, best director (Darren Aronofsky), and/or best actress (Natalie Portman as prima ballerina Nina Sayers in the title role that slowly drives her mad – and, of course, as her choreographer incessantly reminds us, in the white swan role Nina inhabits so effortlessly).

Inception, 127 Hours, and The Town are all likely contenders for best picture and/or director too, and James Franco should get a best actor nod for his impressive physical and emotional work in 127 Hours. True Grit, The Fighter, The Kids Are All Right, Winter’s Bone, and Blue Valentine are also likely to get best picture or screenplay nominations and almost sure to nab some in acting. I thought Mark Wahlberg’s unshowy but rock-solid performance in The Fighter was the best work he’s done since Boogie Nights, but he’ll probably be passed over by the Academy as his character was in real life, overshadowed by his crack-addicted brother Dicky (Christian Bale), whose motor mouth alpha-dog antics are just the sort of thing that wins trophies. That said, Bale has earned whatever accolades he gets for his Dicky, a volatile antihero with electric eyes, a hungry stride, and a comically outsized ego that might actually be almost justified.

Jeff Bridges will probably earn another richly deserved nomination for his laconic Rooster Cogburn, an outlaw disguised as a lawman in True Grit, the Coen brothers’ pitch-perfect adaptation of Charles Portis’ martini-dry Western satire. Bridges’ teenage costar Hailee Steinfleld may get some love in the supporting actress category for nailing 14-year-old Mattie’s humorless self-righteousness and unbending backbone. I’d like to see Matt Damon recognized too, since he’s very funny as a preening Texas Ranger who turns out not to be as useless as you’d expect, but I think Oscar prefers Damon as a more conventional hero.

And The Kids are All Right may well earn a supporting actress nomination for the amazingly intelligent, emotionally transparent Annette Bening. Bening turned in a standout performance last year in the tasteful tearjerker Mother and Child, but I liked her even better in the funny and warmhearted Kids, which takes the temperature of family life in a particular place and time in American history as precisely as a John Updike novel.

Melissa Leo in The Fighter, Jacki Weaver in Animal Kingdom, and John Hawkes in Winter’s Bone could all win best supporting actor or actress nominations for their work in much darker family stories (Jennifer Lawrence may also get a best actress nomination for her real-as-dirt work as Winter’s Bone’s Ree Dolly). Hawkes’ Uncle Teardrop is the closest thing Ree can find to an ally while scouring her fist-tight and lethal Ozarks community in search of her missing father. Leo and Weaver both portray toxic moms, though Leo’s is all head-tossing sound and fury while Weaver’s coyly aging “Grandma Smurf” is a piranha disguised as a goldfish.

Other possible nominees worth catching include:

• Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling for their exquisite acting in Blue Valentine, a realistic domestic downer about the birth and death of a love affair;
  
• Likely best foreign film nominees Mother, A Prophet, Biutiful, and Carlos;
  
• Best documentary candidates Exit Through the Gift Shop, Inside Job, A Film Unfinished, Marwencol, Last Train Home, The Tillman Story, and Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work;
  
• Toy Story 3, which is almost sure to win Best Animated Feature, and Despicable Me, The Illusionist, and Megamind, which may also get nominated; and
  
• The excellent ensemble casts of Mike Leigh’s Another Year (Lesley Manville is a likely supporting actress nominee), Rabbit Hole (Nicole Kidman could nab a best actress spot for this one), Please Give (Catherine Keener is a long shot for best actress) and Greenberg (mumblecore queen Greta Gerwig was widely and deservedly praised for her sort-of-mainstream debut in this one).

Written for TimeOFF

The L Magazine's Second Annual Film Poll

This was the second year the regular contributors to The L magazine's film page came up with a list of the year's top films -- and the first year I participated, since I started writing for The L this year. I think it's an interesting list since, as film section editor Mark Asch notes in his intro, his reviewers are a pretty varied group.

Last month The L's senior film writers, myself included, unveiled their year-end Top 10 lists; now, in an attempt to define, beyond our (sometimes profoundly) individual tastes, the sensibility of the L's film section—which, despite the somewhat chance-filled way in which our roster of critics has been assembled, seems now to exist—we present our second annual poll of our regular contributors.

Read the rest of Mark's intro and see the list on The L Magazine

Black Swan and The Fighter

Like two of director Darren Aronofsky’s other critical darlings, Requiem for a Dream and The Wrestler, Black Swan is about people – in this case, a driven diva struggling to master the part of the swan queen in a top-notch New York ballet company – who push their bodies to the limit in a search for transcendence. It’s also a horror-tinged melodrama, whose aural and visual head fakes and sometimes jittery handheld camera elicit visceral responses at regular intervals.

The Fighter is also about a man who uses his body as a path to transcendence. Until he broke free of the mother and brother who were mismanaging his career, Micky Ward was “a stepping stone,” someone other fighters walked over on their way to success, and he took some terrible beatings in the process. Aronofsky was preparing to direct The Fighter when he dropped out to make Black Swan, and you can bet this movie would have looked and felt very different if it had passed through his trippy lens. David O. Russell, who took over as The Fighter’s director, can do heart-pumping visuals with the best of them – I’d put Three Kings’ bullet’s-eye views of American soldiers getting shot in Iraq up against Requiem’s shooting-up montage any day. But Russell took his cue this time from his unshowily straight-arrow subject, mining The Fighter’s considerable drama primarily from the spectacle of Micky’s very large, very loud family, for whom fighting is the default mode (though the fight scenes can be brutal too).

Aronofsky’s movies feel as if they were made by an adolescent boy, with their naïve glorification of drug addicts and other outsiders, their simplified characters (especially the women) and plots, and their penchant for adrenaline-charged drama. In Black Swan, the company’s imperious impresario, Thomas (Vincent Cassel) seems to be speaking for Aronofsky when he announces that Swan Lake has been “done to death, I know, but not like this. We’ll strip it down, make it visceral and real!” While Natalie Portman’s Nina prepares for the role of her lifetime, rehearsing the moves and exploring her dark side like the good girl she is (one of Thomas’s homework assignments is to go home and masturbate), Aronofsky shows us more and more creepy or hallucinatory scenes that turn out to be inventions of Nina’s rapidly deteriorating mind. Apparently she is living out the story she is dancing: how very fashionably meta.

Aronofsky uses the ballet setting more voyeuristically (all those beautiful women in leotards or less) than artistically. He compensates for not having cast a professional dancer in his lead role by shooting almost all the dance from the waist up, with some close-ups of feet and legs thrown in (Nina’s more complicated moves are danced by two professionals). As a result, almost all the emotional power in the dance scenes come from Portman’s tormented facial expressions and fluttering arms, not from how the dancers’ bodies move through space or interact with one another.

But I could have done without great dancing – after all, this is a psychological horror movie set in the dance world, not really a dance movie – if the psychological part were not so tone-deaf. With its hamfisted attempts at profundity (“The only person standing in your way is you,” Thomas tells Nina) and voyeuristic attitude toward the main character, who the movie patronizes and typecasts as surely as her mother and her choreographer do, Black Swan is Showgirls in a tutu.

The women in The Fighter are also underdeveloped. Melissa Leo has gotten a lot of praise as Micky’s ferocious mother, but most people mention her heavily shellacked hairdo or omnipresent cigarette as part of their praise, and no wonder: Russell seems more interested in her wardrobe (one shot lingers on her high heels as she walks into her house) than her internal life. As a result, the film reduces her to a paper tiger, when I suspect she didn’t fold so easily in life. Micky’s girlfriend, Charlene, gets a little more back story to go with her backbone, but even with Amy Adams to bring her to solidly fleshy life, she comes out pretty one-dimensional too. And Micky’s six sisters are played strictly for giggles, a comic Greek chorus whose members never emerge as individuals.

It can feel a little patronizing, as if Hollywood is giving the working-class Massachusetts neighborhood where Micky grew up the exotic treatment. But The Fighter finds its feet when it stays with its main story: the true tale of how Micky (Mark Wahlberg) became a world champion, first by firing his trainer and half-brother, Dicky (Christian Bale), and then by letting him back in after Dicky had kicked the crack habit that was making him a walking disaster zone.

This is Dicky’s story as much as it is Micky’s, and the fast-talking, pop-eyed Bale nearly steals the film from Wahlberg, just as Dicky always stole the spotlight from his brother. A former boxer himself, Dicky is “the pride of Lowell,” as we often hear. The repetition doesn’t grate here as it does in Black Swan, though, since it’s done not to make sure we get a point but to tell us something important about the main characters. Dicky’s reputation is so big it permeates the neighborhood and the family, very nearly keeping Micky from making his own mark.

The actors are very good – when you see the real brothers at the end of the film, you appreciate the fact that Bale wasn’t overacting and see how well Wahlberg captured Micky’s quiet, self-effacing strength – and the story is moving, but I suspect some rough edges got sanded off to create what feels like a pretty predictable arc.

The Fighter didn’t quite knock me out, but it definitely got to me, its emotional acuity landing where Black Swan’s adolescent antics fell flat.

Written for TimeOFF

The Illusionist

Jacques Tati’s daughter (who was also the executor of his estate) sent her father’s unproduced script for The Illusionist to Sylvain Chomet after seeing some of the drawings that would grow into his 2003 masterpiece, The Triplets of Belleville. Good call. Chomet lends tender life to the script, which Tati considered too dark to develop for himself, doing justice to its slapstick humor and bemused affection for stupid human tricks while making sure that its wide streak of sentiment doesn’t degenerate into sentimentality.

Typical of both Tati and Chomet, The Illusionist is almost completely free of dialogue but alive with sound – naturalistic ambient sound, comically exaggerated sound effects, and aptly chosen music. Also typical is the funny business that’s often going on in the background and the animal that periodically bumps heads with the humans – and wins.

This time the alpha animal is a recalcitrant rabbit, the little white bunny the title character, an aging magician, pulls out of his top hat – assuming he’s managed to chase the thing down and stuff it in there to begin with. Their chases are one of the movie’s best sight gags, the rabbit always staying one hop ahead of the big, ungainly illusionist, who looks like Tati and moves like his Mr. Hulot, with his storklike walk, his self-effacing, slump-shouldered posture, and manic bursts of activity.

The magician is going nowhere fast when he lands on an island where, like Wendy Hiller’s character in I Know Where I’m Going! and Peter Riegert’s in Local Hero, he’s ambushed by a local resident who takes his life in a whole new direction. She’s a shy but headstrong servant who follows him off the island, adopting him as her surrogate father after becoming convinced that his magic is real. It’s not, of course, but she inspires him to pull off the impossible, giving her the girlhood she never had.

The backdrops are often only barely sketched in, the better to focus our attention on Chomet’s distinctive characters, with their richly expressive faces (those noses!) and body language. As in Belleville, his subject is partly the underbelly of show biz: faded vaudevillians (the story is set in the ‘50s or ‘60s) who band together in threadbare but homey surroundings. The boardinghouse where the illusionist and the girl wind up also houses a ventriloquist who looks way too much like his dummy and a cheery family of gymnasts, who cartwheel down the stairs every morning. What we glimpse of their private lives has the same poignantly comic tone as the illusionist’s tale.

Throughout it all, neon blinks on and off outside a window or the cold winter light hits a Scottish hillside as Chomet’s evocative use of light and sound condense time, place, and season into a concentrated essence.

Written for The L Magazine

My 10 Favorite Movies from 2010

It’s time to write those final holiday cards (if you still do those), get those last gifts, and plow through the latest crop of Top 10 lists. So here are my 10 favorite movies from 2010, in no particular order.

White Material
Everyone loses in this tragic tale by the great French filmmaker Claire Denis, who went back to Africa, her girlhood home and the site of her first feature, for this collaboration with the lionhearted Isabelle Huppert. Denis developed the scenario (the script is by Marie N’Diaye) for Huppert, whose ropy body and blazing light-blue eyes make her convincing as a French coffee grower convinced that her country’s obsession with skin color doesn’t apply to her, even though white skin is now almost as big a liability as black skin was in colonial times. Huppert’s Maria is a compellingly repellent character, so sure of her own righteousness that she can’t see anything or anybody else. You can’t help but admire her courage and grit--and yet, in a damning repudiation of the blindness to white privilege and colonialism's ruinous effects that make characters like Maria and movies like Mugabe and the White African so infuriating, Denis and D’Diaye make it clear that her fight is doomed, destructive, and more than a little unhinged.

Last Train Home
Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan got amazing access to his subjects in this wrenching portrait of the human price of China’s rapid transition to a form of state-controlled capitalism. Focusing as crisply on the long view as the close-up, he hones in on one disrupted family without letting us forget the ocean of people that are in the same boat. Zhang Chanhua and Chen Suqin, a worn-out middle-aged couple from a rural area, support themselves and their family by doing factory work in the city of Guangzhou. But China’s migrants, who are treated like second-class citizens, are not allowed to bring their families with them to the overcrowded cities. The couple’s two children live in the country with their grandmother and see their parents only once a year, when they make the long trip home for the holidays. That distance inevitably turns into an emotional gulf filled with heartache and anger.

12th and Delaware
A report from inside a powerful campaign of domestic terrorism that may already have won, 12th and Delaware takes place almost entirely within or just outside two innocuous-looking one-story buildings on the sunny Florida street corner of the title. One is an abortion clinic and the other is a "pregnancy center" run by Christian foes of abortion, put there to confuse and divert the women who come to the clinic for abortions. Cutting back and forth between the two, this knockout documentary anatomizes anti-abortion zealots' relentless fight to end abortion by any means necessary. Co-directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Jesus Camp, Freakonomics) switch back and forth between the two camps, penetrating equally deeply into both.

The Social Network
A 21st-century version of What Makes Sammy Run?, The Social Network is a portrait of a driven young man that’s interesting mainly because of what it implies about the rest of us. The movie doesn’t really get into how technology is degenerating our social networks: It's interested in Facebook as an idea Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) develops and a lot of other people fight about, not as a social phenomenon. But it opens the door to that idea by showing how we're making kings of people so socially inept that they actually believe an online "community" like Facebook is a way of "taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online," as the Zuckerberg character puts it. Director David Fincher creates a bracingly kinetic film about ideas, thanks in part to the fast talk that is the movie’s main engine. His cast does Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue justice, talking as if their tongues can barely keep up with the hard drives spinning away in their skulls.

The Kids Are All Right
If there were a cinematic equivalent of the Great American Novel, The Kids Are All Right would be a contender. Not that it's weighty or self-important (on the contrary, its self-aware humor is part of its charm), but it takes the temperature of family life in a particular place and time in American history as precisely as a John Updike novel. It is also – like all of director Lisa Cholodenko's films – an exploration of the blurry lines we try to draw around our sexuality but often fail to maintain. Cholodenko and her co-writer, Stuart Blumberg, make us fall half in love with an upper-middle-class California family whose only problem seems to be the inevitable tension between intimacy and autonomy. Then the two teenagers, whose lesbian mothers conceived them through artificial insemination, get in touch with their sperm donor “dad,” and his intrusion into the family circle brings some long-simmering conflicts to a boil.

Winter's Bone
Just about all the extras and some of the actors with speaking roles in this film are from the hardscrabble part of the Ozarks where it takes place, and it was filmed on location in some of the actors’ homes. That probably goes a long way toward explaining how director and co-writer Debra Granik made such an unpatronizingly authentic-feeling film of Daniel Woodrell’s novel. Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) is a stoic 17-year-old who takes care of her younger siblings and her mentally ill mother, her grit and quiet competence just barely keeping the ramshackle roof over their heads. When her father skips out on a bond, leaving the house as collateral, Ree heads out to find him and save their home. Her grim odyssey turns up some horrible secrets, but the real subject of this beautifully shot, fiercely acted movie is the merciless code of behavior that has endured for generations in that part of the Ozarks. It's also about the meth that makes men like Ree's daddy even more dangerous than they already were.

No One Knows About Persian Cats
Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi specializes in documentary-style features, in which nonprofessional actors play themselves or people like themselves and the stories are, as a title at the start of Persian Cats informs us, "based on real events, locations, and people." But where his earlier films are about the struggles of rural Kurds, his latest is a thoroughly contemporary tour of the underground music scene in Tehran. Two young musicians, Negar (Negar Shaghaghi) and Ashkan (Ashkan Koshanejad), are trying to get to London to perform. Getting the gig was the easy part. What’s hard is piecing together a band to replace musicians who have fled the country, getting black market visas or passports for everyone, and buying one of the musicians out of his obligation to serve in the army. It's all very dangerous, very expensive, and very precarious, and they never know who they can trust. Ghobadi takes us through beautiful old streets and into secret rehearsals and performance spaces, giving us a clandestine tour of the city and what amounts to a series of underground music videos as Negar and Ashkan audition a wide variety of musicians. As we see these gentle souls forced into becoming outlaws, songs urging people to get past "the fences around your mind" take on deeper meaning.

Exit Through the Gift Shop
Layer upon layer unfolds in this “street art documentary” by street artist Banksy. The first is the dryly funny story of Thierry Guetta, an eccentric Frenchman who loves street art so much that he films it obsessively, following the artists with his omnipresent video camera. The second is a quick gloss on the art form with an emphasis on Banksy and Shepard Fairey, who play with iconic images to critique popular leftie targets like corporate control and consumer excess. The third is the commoditization of art and the hype-happy commercial art world, which is depicted as unable to distinguish between real art with a unique style and vision (like, well, Banksy’s stuff) and the derivative dreck Thierry hires minions to crank out when he puts down the camera to make his own street art. The fourth and deepest layer is the question that emerges about the story itself: Is Thierry for real or is he just another Banksy invention, dreamed up to tweak the status quo? By finding a new way to ask an old question – what is art? – this smart, funny film jolts us into thinking about what we’re looking at.

Marwencol
A fascinating trip down the rabbit hole of the human imagination that’s as carefully constructed as the 1/6-scale town it depicts, Marwencol is a portrait of an artist who doesn’t think of his work as art. In a way, it’s the flip side of Exit to the Gift Shop. Mark Hogancamp, this documentary’s subject, was beaten so badly in a bar fight that he was in a coma for days. Released from the hospital long before he was ready to function (his Medicaid payments ran out), he created his own form of physical and mental therapy, building a model town, Marwencol, that he populated with dolls representing himself and the people in his life. Like a real-life Lars from Lars and the Real Girl, Mark feels more comfortable with his dolls than with most of the humans around him, even bringing them along when he ventures out into the real world. Filmmaker Jeff Malmberg introduces Mark’s quirks gradually, letting us get to care about him as a person first, so they feel more like details than labels. Meanwhile, stop-motion photography and Mark’s own luminous photographs show us Marwencol as he sees it: irony-free and full of life. A photographer and editor who “discover” Mark get him a show in Greenwich village, 100 miles and several worlds away from his hometown of Kingston, New York, but he could care less about achieving fame or fortune as an artist. For him, his work is simply his lifeline, an essential part of “the process of finding out who I am.”

Please Give
Ever since her first feature dissected a pair of best friends who were pushing 30, writer/director Nicole Holofcener, now 50, has chronicled the internal lives of people like herself and her friends. With her latest comedy of bad manners, Please Give, she enters the sandwich generation, with an emphasis on Kate, a guiltily comfortable upper-middle-class Upper West Sider played by Holofcener muse Catherine Keener. Most movies with multigenerational casts favor one generation over the others, but Holofcener gives almost equal time to Kate's teenage daughter and two twenty-something sisters, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet), and their 91-year-old grandmother (Ann Morgan Guilbert). They're all alternately unreasonable, ridiculous, and surprisingly sympathetic.

In case that’s not enough, here are the others that made it into my top 20 for The L Magazine A Film Unfinished, Mother, Carlos, 127 Hours, Toy Story 3, A Prophet, Let Me In, The Illusionist, The Strange Case of Angelica, and Winnebago Man.

Written for TimeOFF

Rabbit Hole

Nicole Kidman aims a blow torch at her ice queen image with this one, obliterating it as deftly as her character, Becca, glazes a perfect crème brulee. Kidman produced Rabbit Hole too – and not just by using her name to attract funding or attending a few meetings. She bought the film rights when Rabbit Hole was still playing on Broadway (where it wound up winning a Pulitzer), enlisted the playwright, David Lindsay-Abaire, to adapt his script into a screenplay, and lined up director John Cameron Mitchell, the diva-director of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, another fiercely truthful tale about a character fighting for her emotional life. Along with costars Aaron Eckhart (who plays Becca’s husband, Howie) and Dianne Wiest (as her mother, Nat) and a uniformly excellent supporting cast, Kidman and her collaborators have created a tactfully but powerfully moving movie for grownups, which includes the best work the actress has done in years.

As a mother fighting to regain her emotional footing after the death of her four-year-old son, Kidman seems at first to be playing yet another too-tightly-buttoned control freak, making like Martha Stewart in an Architecture Digest-ready house on a hill overlooking the Hudson. But Lindsay-Abaire and Mitchell pull you into Becca’s and Howie’s internal lives rather than pinning them under a magnifying glass and watching them squirm, as movies about tormented couples (Revolutionary Road, for example) so often do.

As we watch Becca go about her daily life, putting on her clothes like costumes and her expression like a mask, we start to see how hard she’s working just to get herself through the day – and how hard she’s trying to spare the people around her, even as her tightly suppressed grief and rage keeps leaking out, and, occasionally, exploding. The dialogue rarely feels like speechifying, and even when it does it sometimes works, as in a beautifully written monologue Nat delivers about how “the weight of it all” shifted over time as she learned to live with the death of her own son. Even that glazed, too-smooth look Kidman has acquired over the years works here, when Becca is hit by a wave of grief so unexpected it knocks down her defenses, leaving just that stunned, frozen face.

Lindsay-Abaire has a good feel for the rhythms of intimacy, both in Becca’s marriage and in her dealings with her mother and her rebellious younger sister, Izzy (Tammy Blanchard). There’s clearly a lot of love in all those relationships, but buttons can be pushed with frightening ease, so conversations and situations that start out quiet, even cosy, can blow up at a moment’s notice. Nobody is always right or always wrong, and people often fail to say the right thing even when they mean well. There’s also an inevitability that feels right in how everything always circles back to the hole left by the death of the boy, like water flowing down a drain.

Some of the plot devices feel a little too pat, like the conveniently created comic book that gives the movie its title and overarching metaphor, or the parallel secret relationships Becca and Howie develop, both of which come to a cathartic resolution on the same day in a breathlessly cross-cut scene. But there’s real life in this film and these characters, and real heartache and wit in the dialogue (when Howie denies that he’s trying to “rope” Becca into having sex, she stares at him stonily. “Al Green isn’t roping?” she says. “Al Green?”). And there’s enormous pent-up power in the acting, which lingers after the movie ends.

Written for The L Magazine

Tiny Furniture

A 24-year-old triple threat (writer, director and actress) with a sharply honed sense of humor, Lena Dunham makes films that land like a flurry of darts. It’s fun to watch her puncture deserving targets, like hipster poseurs who love the idea of being artists more than they love making art. In the best of her work, there’s also a warmth and maturity, a bemused acceptance of her characters’ flaws and insecurities, that softens us up and makes those darts land even harder. Because, unlike the snark that so often passes for wit these days, Dunham’s social satires don’t just make us snicker, they make us wince in recognition too.

A product of the New York art scene (she went to Brooklyn’s arty St. Ann’s school, which she describes as a creative haven, “like Hogwarts, basically,” and her mother, Laurie Simmons, is a fine-art photographer), Dunham knows a thing or two about both real and wannabe artists. In Tight Shots and Delusional Downtown Divas, the Web series she started out with, and now in her films, Dunham seems to be creating a satiric version of her own life, playing characters who presumably share her ambitions and insecurities but have little or none of her self-awareness and talent.

Tiny Furniture, her breakthrough second feature, was voted best narrative feature at this year’s South by Southwest film festival. Made soon after her graduation from Oberlin, it’s the tale of a 23-year-old young woman adrift in what she calls “a post-graduate delirium.” Dunham was 23 herself when she shot the micro-budget but beautifully photographed film, which is set mostly in her mother’s light-filled Tribeca loft and co-stars her own mother and sister (both very good) as the mother and sister of her character, Aura.

Dumped by her boyfriend, Aura goes back home to New York only to find herself feeling like an intruder in her mother’s and younger sister’s apartment. She gets a part-time job, picks up a sort-of boyfriend who turns out to be a leech, clashes with her high school supernova sister, fights and bonds with her mom, and subjects herself to one masochistic situation or relationship after another while trying to figure out where she fits in the world.

An average-looking young woman whose rounded limbs and pasty complexion don’t fit the standard definition of beauty, Dunham shows herself in a bracingly unflattering light. Aura can be very pretty, but Dunham generally uses low camera angles and too-tight clothes to make her look slightly pudgy and awkward. That physical humiliation is brought to a head in the YouTube video that gave Aura a taste of fame. She’s proud of the video, kind of, since it’s her first attempt at public art and it earns her some attention. But she’s embarrassed too, since nearly all the attention consists of snide comments about her looks (she’s wearing a painfully unflattering bathing suit).

There’s nothing new about the brutality of the judgments young women face in adolescence — in public, in their closest relationships, and especially in the mirror — but Dunham shows us how it feels to run that gauntlet in the age of Internet, which exposes young people to mob-think on a global scale.

At first Aura seems like a natural loser in a callous, winner-take-all world, but Dunham’s slyly witty script soon fleshes out that first impression. Aura’s relationships with two former best friends — a high-maintenance friend from high school who she props up emotionally and a loyal friend from college who she left stranded when she moved to New York — show Aura’s own capacity for insensitivity and remind us of how quickly loyalties can shift in adolescent female friendships. At the same time, Dunham keeps her comedy of manners upbeat by showing us how Aura’s stubborn strength, her basic decency, and her complex but close relationship with her mother anchor her even as she flounders what is surely one of the least grounded points in her life. Like the TV theme song said, about another fictional young woman who set out to find herself after her boyfriend dumped her: She might just make it after all.

Written for TimeOFF

Tell Them Anything You Want

A portrait of an artist by a group of fellow artists, Tell Them Anything You Want is an entertaining and inspirational documentary.

Film is an inherently collaborative medium, though you wouldn’t know that to listen to most big-name filmmakers or those who write about them, who tend to make it sound as if feature films spring full-blown from the head of a single man or woman. But not Spike Jonze, a joyful collaborator who has always found his creativity within the context of a clan of kindred spirits.

Jonze’s team for Where the Wild Things Are, a marvelous movie that captured the spirit of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book while taking the story in new directions, included screenwriter Dave Eggers and actress Catherine Keener, one of Jonze’s most frequent collaborators. While he was working on that film, Jonze enlisted the help of video documentarian Lance Bangs to shoot this 40-minute tribute to Sendak, a free spirit Jonze was getting to know and love while consulting with him about his book.

At a Q&A after a screening in New York City last February, moderator Mike Myers, a longtime friend of Jonze’s, noted that Jonze, Bangs, and Sendak are each “an odd combination of emotion, intellect, and imagination.” Was it that shared sensibility that attracted them to their subject? he asked.

“Maurice’s imagination is certainly inspiring, and that’s what initially drew me to him,” Jonze said. “But the thing that I find most deeply inspiring is his ferocious honesty and his fearlessness to be honest. He has no ability for small talk or chitchat. He is who he is and he doesn’t have the energy to pretend that he’s someone else.”

That winning directness infuses the film, which was shot over a couple of years, when Sendak was in his early 80s, in his Connecticut home. While Tony Kushner, Meryl Streep, and James Gandolfini – not exactly chopped liver – offer brief tributes to Sendak, what sticks in my memory these months later is Sendak’s impish presence and things he said to his friends Jonze, Bangs, and Keener, who we see now and then but who mostly stay off-camera.

Funny, frank, and charming, the self-described “spoiled brat” talks about his unhappy childhood, his obsession with death, and the “permanent dissatisfaction” that dogs him in a kind of running monologue that manages, like his books, to be profoundly life-affirming while acknowledging the scariest and worst life has to offer.

He speaks lovingly about his dog Herman, his live-in assistant, and Ursula Nordstrom, the great children’s book editor and writer who discovered him, but he barely mentions Eugene Glynn, his life partner of 50 years. That near-silence was Sendak’s choice, Jonze and Bangs explained in the Q&A—Glynn was dying while the film was being made, and Sendak wanted to keep that part of his life private. But he does recall the difficulty he had in coming to terms with being gay, and his need to keep his sexuality secret for years for fear that coming out would kill his career as a children’s book author.

He also talks about the seminal event of his life: the kidnapping and presumed killing of the Lindbergh baby. Sendak was just three years old when he saw the tabloid news photos and heard the talk, but they made an indelible impression, making him realize that even a child could die. All the elements that have obsessed him since were contained in that incident: death, the peril that lurks under the surface even of the most placid domestic environment, and the vulnerability and sensibilities of the very young. He thinks he may have gotten stuck in childhood, in a way, because of the intensity of that experience, which “certainly invested me in children forever.”

Even when he was a child himself, Sendak says, he always watched other kids and then retold their stories in the drawings he made. His close observation has taught him that children are a lot smarter and more observant than adults generally give them credit for. “I don’t believe in children. I don’t believe in childhood,” he says. “I don’t believe in ‘You mustn’t tell them this, you mustn’t tell them that.’ I tell the truth. Tell them anything you want.”

Two Friends

Jane Campion’s first feature (it was made for Australian TV in 1986) and one of her best, Two Friends is a quietly observant, deeply felt, and expertly acted study of female friendship and the thin line that separates the winners of the world from the outcasts.

It starts at a wake for a dead teenage girl, where Janet (Kris McQuade) wonders if her daughter Louise (Emma Coles) or Louise’s friend Kelly (Kris Bidenko) could also be at risk. “They’re all at risk, aren’t they?” says Jim, Janet’s estranged or former husband. The rest of the film is an unpreachy object lesson in how right he is about that, showing how wrong things can go when a bright, loving girl doesn’t get the nurturing she needs.

Two Friends scrupulously avoids exposition, so we pick up a lot by context or inference, and some things are left a little unclear. But there’s no doubt about the important things, like the fact that, while Louise’s mum and dad are no longer a couple, they’re still friendly to each other and excellent parents to her.

Kelly isn’t so lucky. She’s saddled with an absent father, a disapproving stepfather, and a mother too cowed to stick up for her. The main thing she has going for her is her best friend, Louise – and she loses her in the end. Or, more precisely, the beginning, since the story of their friendship is told in reverse order.

That backward unspooling of time, which was not in Helen Garner’s excellent script but was added by Campion, makes Kelly’s decline feel as inevitable as a Greek tragedy. The final shot of the two girls celebrating at the height of their closeness and innocence, brimming with potential, would have seemed merely joyful if it had been shown in chronological order. Instead, coming as it does after Kelly has gone off the rails, it’s powerfully poignant.

Campion had only made three shorts before filming Two Friends, but this feels like the work of a savvy old vet. Each scene is a self-contained unit and the connections between them are not always clear at first, but in the end they snap together as surely as a pile of Legos. By almost always filming her characters in pairs or in groups, Campion reinforces the film’s message about the power of our primary relationships. By relying almost exclusively on medium and long shots rather than close-ups, she pulls us into her main characters’ environments and lets us get to know them, yet maintains enough distance that they retain some of their mystery. She does the same with minor characters and extras, like Kelly’s Billy Idol-looking boyfriend, who never speak. These people, most of them teens or younger children, are often unobtrusively observed in the background as they go about their business, providing a social context for the girls’ story.

We see Kelly and Louise in their homes, at school, and out in public, and every environment feels as authentic as their interactions. We also see a lot of Louise with her mother, a relationship that’s entirely free of cliché and always believable, with its intimate blend of unconditional love, annoyance (mostly on Louise’s part), hurt feelings (mostly Janet’s), and domestic routine. Janet’s comfortable, easy friendship with her upstairs neighbor is also nicely calibrated. Not only does that relationship give us a window into Janet’s thoughts (this is essentially Kelly’s story, but it’s filtered through Janet and Louise), but it serves as a reminder us that the volatile, fast-shifting allegiances of adolescent girls are often just training wheels. Once they drop off, the girls will be free to launch the rich and grounded female friendships they’ll rely on as adults.

Written for The L Magazine