SXSW 2010: Day Two

No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson. Whenever the great documentarian Steve James (Hoop Dreams, The New Americans) has a new doc, he shows it at SXSW, and it's always one of the festival highlights for me. This year's world-premiere screening of No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson was no exception. The 90-minute doc was shot as part of ESPN's 30 for 30 series (it will air on April 13), in which 30 directors each tell a story about an athlete "that really resonates for them personally," as James put it at the screening. The films are about sports, but — at least in the ones he's seen so far—always as "an avenue to something else."

As told by James and his crew, Iverson's story is a great American tragedy, a harrowing look into the gaping racial fault line that runs through America in general and Hampton, Virginia, in particular. The city is the filmmaker's hometown as well as the ballplayer's; James even played basketball there in high school, his father lettered there in three sports, and his mother still lives there.

Without those strong roots in the community, he said at the screening, he could never have made this film — and even so, he had to work hard to get most of his subjects to talk to him, since they didn't want to re-expose rifts they have worked hard to paper over. But in the end, he got a good sampling of the community on film, including people who coached or otherwise mentored Iverson, community leaders and lawyers who supported him after his arrest, reporters who covered the case, retired policemen and other community officials, and a few people who thought he got what he deserved. Almost all are frank and articulate about what they thought and felt about his arrest 17 years ago — and still do, just as strongly.

Iverson himself never talked to the filmmakers, so they piece together their portrait from archival footage and what others say about him. He comes off as a soft-eyed, soft-spoken, proud, easily wounded, and incredibly gifted young man with an iron will. "Go to a hardware store, pick up the smallest nail in there, and try to bend it. You can't. It's tough. That's Allen Iverson," says one man who knew Iverson as a boy.

It also seems clear that his sense of responsibility comes from the street. (Loyal to family and friends but suspicious of institutions, he essentially raised himself and his two younger siblings for several years while his young single mother was addicted to drugs, often skipping school to take care of family obligations.) That street code has not served him well as a professional athlete. Iverson was the NBA's first draft pick in 1996, but his habit of abruptly quitting teams and his reputation for not being a team player or listening to coaches has kept him from the kind of stardom achieved by Michael Jordan (who we see Iverson outplaying in one thrilling clip.)

As James asks in the voiceover that guides the narrative, "Barely six-feet tall, is Allen Iverson, pound for pound, the best basketball player ever? Or...is he a thug in basketball shorts?" People convinced he was a thug made sure he and three of his African-American friends were arrested and charged with felony crimes as adults when they got into a brawl with some white kids at a bowling alley (none of the white kids were charged with anything). That incident, which led to Iverson's doing time and then being expelled from high school, was a turning point for him—and for the town of Hampton, whose black churches and community leaders rallied behind the jailed boys and, as one community leader recounts, very nearly rose up in rebellion.

Time and again, James returns to the image of that beautiful young man in handcuffs, being led to and shoved into the back of a police van. It's an eloquent illustration of what one of the organizers who he interviews said at the time: "The plantation of the 21st century is the penitentiary."

Animated Shorts. Free from the laws of gravity, the geography of the natural world, and the personalities, charisma, physical appearance, and chi of live actors, animation provides about as clear a window as you can get into a filmmaker's imagination and perceptions. Some of the animators at this year's SXSW use their art to focus on familiar situations or emotions, while others want to create new worlds or play around with some of the components of our own. A couple are after nothing less than spiritual transcendence.

The Polish Language, an Irish filmmaker's tribute to Polish poets, is a dreamily seductive concrete poem of a movie, creating visual metaphors for phrases chosen from poems in "this sonorous, consonant tongue," and The Orange is an original take on origin theories, tracing the journey of an orange that ruled the world for a while (the orange always glows, often against a black-and-white background)—until the narrator buys and eats it.

One Square Mile of Earth, a very funny tour of a gay bar with stops to eavesdrop on some familiar types, is fun to look at. One character looks like a cross between Peter Lorre and a rabbit; another has a long, horsey face with lips you just can't stop watching. It's even more fun to listen to, with lines like: "I think before you can call yourself an artist, you have to complete one project."

This year's entry by Bill Plympton, The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Burger, is as alive and dryly funny as all his work, with its vibrating lines, vibrant colors, and clearly motivated—and often quixotically deluded—characters. The star this time is a determined little calf, who pumps iron and runs away from her horrified mother to try to live her dream of becoming one of those happy burgers she sees on a billboard.

A couple of the animated shorts were disappointingly literal-minded, though they made their points. Bygone Behemoth, a heavy-handed metaphor about Hollywood, shows an aged movie monster surrounded by his posters at home, reading depressing news in Variety about the death of his cronies and the rise of CGI characters. And Poppy, a tale of two WWI soldiers from New Zealand behind enemy lines in France who find a baby with her dead parents and save it at their own peril, is the kind of story that works better when you hear it from someone who experienced it (as director James Cunningham did from his great-grandfather) than if you see it on film, where it feels sentimental and contrived. This also felt like a misfire as an animated movie; I think it might have worked better in live action. The characters look startlingly real in long and medium shots, but their heads look like chiseled plastic, giving them a GI Joe feel in close-up. The best thing about a film is the expressions on the soldiers' faces, thanks to the performance-capture technology the filmmakers used. So why not just show us the actors? Bygone Behemoth would like to know.

Written for The House Next Door

SXSW 2010: Day One

I first became aware of filmmaking brothers Jay and Mark Duplass when I saw their feature The Puffy Chair at South by Southwest '05. The brothers are SXSW favorites, and though that may be partly because they're local talent (they went to film school at the University of Texas), it's not the main reason. Their funny, truthful character studies, which respect all their characters without putting any on a pedestal, fit right into the festival's laidback yet professional vibe.

In Cyrus, John C. Reilly plays John, a man whose new romance with what appears to be the perfect woman (Marisa Tomei) is threatened by her diabolically passive-aggressive son (Jonah Hill), who wants to keep her all to himself. The three are funny and touching, and the kind-eyed Catherine Keener is wonderfully wry, as always, as John's ex-wife, who's patiently weaning him from emotional dependence seven years after their divorce.

Cyrus is their first studio-funded movie, but the brothers were determined not to lose the intimate working style that has served them so well all these years. In a Q&A after the screening, Mark said their rule was to "treat every scene like a nude scene," allowing only essential personnel on the set in order to avoid crowding it with the extra crew that tend to dampen the creative spirit of multi-million-dollar movies.

Read the rest on Slant Magazine's blog.

South by Southwest 2010: Mmmmovies

I've been in Austin since Saturday at the South by Southwest film festival. I love this town. Before I met my Texas-averse but otherwise most excellent husband, I lived here three different times, since I kept moving back here whenever I had no compelling reason to be anywhere else. I love New York too, so no complaints about my life now, but it's always a treat to come back to Austin, especially to wallow in movies all day at the festival.

This year for the first time, I'm writing at the end of every day about the movies I've seen for The House Next Door, the blog for Slant Magazine. I'll start posting links to those posts here, in case you want to see what I'm up to.

Alice in Wonderland

By Elise Nakhnikian

High expectations can ruin a perfectly acceptable movie, which may be why I was disappointed by Tim Burton’s visually interesting but overly derivative Alice in Wonderland.

An homage/sequel to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, this Alice picks up about a decade after the others left off. Nineteen years old and about to be engaged to an upper-class twit, Alice escapes a formal garden party to follow the White Rabbit down another hole, winding up back in Underland (one of the film’s more original conceits is that Alice had been misremembering the name all that time) and a new set of adventures.

Screenwriter Linda Woolverton has said she wanted to empower Alice by making her the opposite of a well-bred, passive Victorian girl. Boy, does she ever. This Alice even goes to war, killing the dragon-like Jabberwocky to break the Red Queen’s stranglehold on Underland.

I’m all for empowered women and girls, but this Alice feels too programmed. A role model with a capital R, she’s stubbornly one-dimensional even in 3-D.

The original Alice was much more strong-minded, for all her dreamy passivity. As she – and we – wandered through the trippy world she had fallen into, she accepted whatever she encountered with a kind of Zen equanimity, but she was no patsy. She always knew her own mind, and so did the readers that accompanied her.

I suspect that that loss of self-confidence, which happens to so many girls in adolescence, is part of the point Woolverton wants to make, but she never manages to illuminate Alice’s inner life. Mia Wasikowska, who as spiky and vulnerable as a rosebush as a gifted and guarded teen in HBO’s In Treatment, tries hard to give Alice the same transparency she brought to that character, but we rarely get past her scowls or smiles here to share what’s in her head. When we do, it’s usually because Alice is literally voicing her thoughts, a clunky device that slows down several scenes, including an already badly paced battle that's supposed to be the climax.

Alice’s opacity can’t be blamed entirely on the flatfooted script, since the camera never adopts her point of view either. Burton films Alice the same way he does everyone else in the movie, either admiring her doll-like beauty or emphasizing her freakish size as she keeps shrinking and growing.

The other characters from the book, originally so mysterious and powerful or genuinely eccentric, are mostly shrunken down to mere curiosities. One exception is the nicely matched pair of queens.

Ann Hathaway’s suspiciously saccharine White Queen is a parody of a Disney princess, gliding about in a cloud of self-adoration. As her older sister, the evil Red Queen, Helena Bonham Carter delivers the movie’s most nuanced portrayal, giving us a petulant tyrant who sees herself as a misunderstood victim. She’s also one of its most successful blends of live action and computer-generated imagery, her grotesquely oversized head demanding your attention whenever she’s onscreen.

Johnny Depp looks great as the Mad Hatter, painted and wigged like a gorgeous ventriloquist’s puppet. His manic, unstable energy and the adoring gaze he fixes on Alice (yes, this Alice even has a love interest) are indelible too, but his spotty Scottish accent doesn’t help us get a fix on his character, who ultimately feels more like a plot device than a person.

But this is, after all, a Tim Burton joint. Burton’s Underland is dripping with atmosphere, dark, mostly decrepit, sometimes scary but always interesting to look at, and it contains some truly wonderful things.

There’s a darkly funny bit with the Red Queen’s terrorized frog courtiers, and the hookah-smoking caterpillar looms out of a cloud of smoke with a nice mix of menace and mentorship. He sounds even better than he looks, since Alan Rickman’s lugubrious, honeyed voice fits him to a T.

The 3-D, which was added in post-production rather than being shot with expensive special cameras, hurts more than it helps, looking downright clumsy in the early scenes in England, where the trees behind Alice sometimes look like a projected backdrop. But it adds to the oddness of Underland, and there are a couple of times when that hokey device of having things seem to float or thrust out into the audience is used nicely.

Burton’s set, like Woolverton’s script, samples liberally from other fantasies, especially The Wizard of Oz. That’s no sin, of course, but I’d expected more originality from a movie that takes its title from one of the most creative children’s books ever written.

Carroll’s books were all about the journey and the strange creatures and concepts Alice meets along the way. Burton’s film is more focused on the destination, which is by definition less interesting – especially when everyone’s rushing toward yet another armed battle. But if you don’t go in expecting too much, there’s plenty to enjoy along the way.

Ghost Writer

By Elise Nakhnikian

Like its title character, an unnamed man hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of a retired British prime minister, Roman Polanski’s latest film is a bit of a ghost itself, fading away in front of our eyes.

The ghost writer is another of Ewan McGregor’s quietly angst-ridden antiheroes, a man more used to watching others than to being watched. When he’s tapped to rewrite a bland memoir ghostwritten for retired prime minister Adam Lang, (Pierce Brosnan), it looks like he’s come into some luck at last. “Two hundred and fifty thousand for one month’s work on a manuscript that’s already written!” burbles his agent.

But that elation barely lasts an hour before things go south. People threaten the writer, the prime minister gets testy when questioned, and the bunker-like atmosphere at the PM’s luxe beach house gets so tense that our man starts to wonder about the ghost who wrote the first draft – and lost the job when he washed up dead on the beach.

Soon he’s using all his investigative skills to find out what his predecessor learned about Lang’s past that might have gotten him killed. When the PM is accused of war crimes by a political rival, the writer’s rush to get the book done on a tight deadline turns even more urgent.

Robert Harris, who wrote the book the movie is based on and cowrote the screenplay with Polanski, used Tony Blair as a model for Lang, a charmer who followed the U.S. president into Iraq. The crime he’s accused of is colluding with the CIA to hand over suspected terrorists to be tortured and killed, and the explanation given for why he did so plays into our most cynical – or maybe realistic – notions about the real motives behind the wars that politicians pump up with such flowery speeches. There’s a certain grim satisfaction in that for those of us who never believed the reasons our government gave for occupying Iraq.

In the Loop, another fictional exploration of what got Britain into Iraq, took that ball and ran it into the end zone, but Ghost Writer runs out of juice.

Alexandre Desplat’s scratchy-sounding, agitated score has to do too much of the work of creating a sense of dread, infusing color into several scenes where not much else is happening. The dense sense of suspense and mystery established early on just fades away, turning into a wispy series of chase scenes and talky confrontations. Even the big reveal at the end has been hinted at so broadly in advance that it – or anyhow its method of discovery – feels anticlimactic.

There are a few nice riffs on American culture and politics, like the writer’s painfully quaint hotel, with its self-consciously costumed desk clerk, or the sanctimonious ad he finds on the Internet for a Halliburton-like global conglomerate. I felt Polanski’s hand there, but not in enough other places.

The main exception is the lead character’s sense of claustrophobic entrapment, something most of Polanski’s protagonists share – presumably with him as well as each other. (For those who don’t know, Polanski grew up in the Warsaw ghetto in WWII, and his mother was killed in the Holocaust. He has also done time under the bell jar of fame, first after his second wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson family and then again after his own arrest on charges of sexual assault and subsequent trial. He was arrested again on that charge last year, decades after fleeing the U.S. in mid-trial, and he edited the film while under house arrest.)

The writer’s growing sense of isolation and nerve-shot vulnerability is the most vivid thing in the movie. Inside Lang’s luxurious prison of a house, too many people with too many agendas keep bumping up against each other, galvanized every so often by one of the ceaseless news reports on the charges against the ex-pol. There’s no relief outside either. The relentless rain paints the streets the same gray as the concrete walls of Lang’s home, and the island’s thick foliage turns roads into tunnels.

It’s all very artfully done – even a mediocre Polanski movie has a lot going for it. But in the end, Ghost Writer’s whole world feels like Lang’s house: handsome but cold, and a bit underfurnished.

Oscar-nominated shorts

By Elise Nakhnikian

Watching a well edited set of short movies is like having tapas for dinner. You get to sample a wide range of styles and stories, including some you might not come across much in your regular movie viewing. And the ones you don’t like so much don’t last long enough to leave a bad taste, while the ones you love leave you wanting more.

You’d think that would be the ideal form of movie watching for our ADD age – after all, what is YouTube but a free online video store that stocks nothing but shorts? – but Hollywood has trained us to ignore short movies. With a few exceptions, like the Pixar short that always precedes a Pixar feature, pretty much the only way you can see a short in a theater is to go to a film festival – and even there, they’re kicked to the curb while features hog all the attention.

Ironically, only the run-up to the Oscars, that orgy of self-celebration created to hawk Hollywood's most commercial products, can get regular theaters to showcase short movies. Two sets of Oscar-nominated shorts are now showing near you, one animated and one live-actions. The 13 films (the 5 nominees in each category plus three animated shorts that didn't quite make the cut) are distinctive, generally memorable, and always intense. They come from 11 nations and represent even more, since several are not set in their country of origin.

Logorama, an animated short directed by France’s H5 – Franςois Alaux, Hervé de Crécy, and Ludovic Houplain – is a sharp-eyed spoof of American culture and consumerism. Set in a Lego-like version of LA whose primary colors and aqua sky exaggerate that city’s bright eternal Now, Logorama is a sea of logos peopled by characters from ad campaigns. The plot, such as it is, is also very Hollywood: A pair of tough-guy Michelin Man cops chase down a rogue Ronald MacDonald, spraying gunfire, obscenities, and curt catch phrases (“the clown’s all mine”) as they go and dodging natural as well as manmade disasters.

The New Tenants is from Denmark, but it’s set in New York. A series of people, each more terrifying than the last, knock at the door of a gay couple who have moved into an apartment. A wannabe Tarantino movie in miniature, director Joachim Back’s short comes off a bit too much like an acting exercise. Still, it’s bleakly funny and well paced until the too-long ending, yo-yoing nicely between suspense and irritated banter.

A Matter of Loaf and Death, the latest Wallace and Grommit movie, is a not-so-short (30-minute) comic gem from England’s Nick Park and Bob Baker. This time around the sweet but hapless Wallace and his solemn, all-knowing dog, Grommit, are shook up by the news of a killer who’s targeting bakers – like them. With 12 dead so far, you have to wonder, this being a Wallace and Grommit movie: Who will make it a baker’s dozen? Filming Claymation figures in stop-motion doesn’t deprive the filmmakers of any emotional range – the characters’ faces are amazingly expressive, and the voice acting is terrific – but it allows them to include wonderful sight gags, like a bomb with the world’s slowest fuse or the Rube Goldbergian contraption Grommit uses to dress Wallace and bake bread in the morning. There’s also plenty of word play, as always. And one of our heroes finds true love, though I won’t spoil it by telling you which.

I also laughed a lot at Irish director Nicky Phelan’s Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty and Instead of Abracadabra, a Swedish answer to comedies about self-deluding misfits like Flight of the Concords, The Office, and Napoleon Dynamite.

Granny O’Grimm is a one-joke story beautifully told. The whole thing takes place in the bedroom of a cow-eyed little girl who can’t sleep. Things only gets worse when her Granny, a terrifying sight with her huge breasts and belly, towering hair, and enormous eyes behind magnifying lenses, insists on telling her a bedtime story, putting her own bitter twist on the tale of Sleeping Beauty.

Director Patrik Eklund marinates Instead of Abracadabra in that Swedish combination of humanism and black humor that made Let the Right One In and Together work so well. Its “hero” is Tomas, a 25-year-old dweeb still living with mom and dad. Tomas is a not-very-good magician who’s convinced that his brand of “up-close, Goth, death and mayhem” hoodoo is sexy and impressive. His endless capacity for self-deception and the reactions of his onlookers, which range from terminally bored to terrified, are almost painfully funny.

All that and an abortive romance too may sound like a lot to pack into just 22 minutes, but it works. And why not? After all, a good short film contains a whole world.

The Wolfman

By Elise Nakhnikian

I guess the people who make movies have to pay their rent, just like the rest of us.

Or maybe the trouble started when director Mark Romanek and his cinematographer left The Wolfman due to “creative differences” with the producers. That’s usually a sign of a production in trouble. So is a delayed opening, and The Wolfman’s was delayed several times.

Whatever the reason, this clumsy remake resurrects an old film nobody was clamoring to see -- and it does a bad job of it. The Wolfman feels more like a story by a man who keeps losing control than a story about one.

Director Joe Johnston (The Rocketeer, Jurassic Park III) specializes in retelling stories so familiar they almost feel like part of our genetic makeup. Sometimes it works – Hidalgo was a likeably cartoonish Western crossed with a Rudolph Valentino movie – but The Wolfman begs for a new twist it never gets.

When Mike Nichols made a werewolf movie in 1994, he juiced it up in part by letting Jack Nicholson scarf down the scenery as a put-upon man who discovers his inner alpha dog after he becomes a werewolf. Nichols and his screenwriters also added some zing to Wolf by landing a few jabs at the publishing industry and ruthlessly competitive yuppie types.

But The Wolfman doesn’t update its story or use it to explore any ideas, other than the notion that there’s a beast inside us all. It just tries to recreate Lon Chaney’s 1941 The Wolf Man with better makeup and special effects and a less sound-stagey feel. Only somewhere along the way, it loses its soul.

Set in Victorian England, the movie takes place largely inside one of those neglected old mansions so decrepit you wonder if anyone has ever taken a broom to the place. The camera, which likes to hug the ground and prowl about, presumably to give us a wolf’s-eye view, zeroes in early and often on the snarling heads of dead animals mounted on the walls, lest we miss the point – you know, savagery in the midst of civilization and all that.

Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro) returns to this happy home first to mourn, then to investigate, and finally to avenge his brother’s death. He was summoned by the brother’s fiancée, Gwen (a criminally underused Emily Blunt), and I don’t think it’s spoiling any surprises to add that they soon fall in love – or that Lawrence finds out that his brother was killed by a werewolf whose gory rampages are terrorizing the village. Lawrence gets bitten and turns werewolf himself, cutting a bloody swath through the village whenever the moon is full.

This is all pretty standard stuff to anyone who’s ever seen a werewolf story, so what do the filmmakers do to make it worth watching? A few abortive attempts to be stylish, like a shot of Lawrence chasing Gwen along a ridge, the two silhouetted against the night sky, stick out like lumps in the porridge of this trendily desaturated palette. Danny Elfman’s score is surprisingly intrusive too, pushing itself to the forefront to broadcast a near-ceaseless SOS.

The dank gloom enveloping the village seems to have crept into the hearts of the actors. Nearly all of them look numbed-out and miserable, though Geraldine Chaplin is arrestingly beautiful and weird as a wise old Gypsy, and Hugo Weaving, who played the multiplying agent in The Matrix, oozes a similar blend of bureaucratic malevolence as the detective sent to stop the killer.

You’d think Anthony Hopkins would have fun as Lawrence’s creepy father, an icy-hearted autocrat given to pronouncements like “Never look back. The past is a wilderness of horror.” But he sleepwalks through the movie, frozen midway between campy and catatonic. “Look into my eyes. You see that I am quite dead,” he intones at one point. No kidding, dude.

But the real disappointment is Del Toro. With his sleepily watchful intensity, obvious intelligence, and narrow, hooded eyes, he could surely get seriously lupine, given half a chance. But the movie doesn’t give him much to do once he’s gone wild, other than howl in pain as he goes through the transformation and make like a paper shredder with his neighbors once it’s complete.

The actors were transformed into werewolves by old-school makeup guru Rick Baker, who created game-changing non-computer-generated special effects in Star Wars, Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, and Men in Black II – not to mention Wolf, An American Werewolf in London, and the TV series Werewolf.

His foam, fur, and dentures are augmented here by some computer-generated effects, but the two don’t meld well. The actors in werewolf makeup look and act vulnerable. A long fight between two werewolves at the end felt downright clumsy at times, more supermarket parking lot than supernatural. In contrast, the computer-generated beasts seem to recognize no physical limitations – including the laws of gravity.

The movie ends with another character about to become a werewolf. I sure hope that doesn’t mean they’re planning a sequel.

No Business Like Snow Business

By Elise Nakhnikian

Ah, winter. Some people head out in the snow to ski or snowboard or climb a mountain. And some of us go to the theater and watch movies about those crazies out there in the cold.

This month, we’ve got two Xtreme Winter movies to choose between. The art house version is North Face, a heavily fictionalized but often harrowingly realistic telling of a true story. The popcorn one is Frozen, the latest from director Adam Green (Hatchet), who aspires to nothing more – or less – than pure genre entertainment.

North Face is about two childhood friends – Toni Kurz (Benno Fürmann) and Andi Hinterstoisser (Florian Lukas) – from a small town in Germany. Lifelong climbers, they headed to the Eiger in the summer of 1936, where mountaineers from around the world were competing to be the first to climb its notorious north face.

It’s also the story of a fictional character, Luise Fellner (Johanna Wokalek), Andi and Toni’s lifelong friend and Toni’s kind-of girlfriend. An aspiring photojournalist, Luise gets her big break when her editor, Henry Arau (the excellent Ulrich Tukur, wasted here), brings her to Switzerland to photograph the event. A subplot about two Austrian climbers who glom onto Toni and Andi, ruining their chances of getting to the top, is also fictionalized: Kurz and Hinterstoisser planned from the start to climb with the Austrians.

The movie does some things very well. Watching Andi and Toni stride through a town after scaling the mountain that towers over it, their ropes and other relatively crude tools slung over their backs, you can guess how tame and overcivilized their surroundings must appear to them now. Kolja Brandt’s cinematography establishes the Eiger as a beautiful but merciless antagonist. Footage of the climbers from a distance remind us just how puny they are in comparison, and shots of them asleep on a narrow ledge or lowering an injured comrade down a steep slope almost gave me vertigo.

Fürmann is convincing as a reluctant action hero. Wiry and intense, his cheekbones and abs as chiseled as the mountain he scales, he could be the love child of Roy Scheider and Buster Keaton. As Luise, the luminously open Wokalek mediates between him and the audience, letting us can feel some of the emotions Toni is too stoic – or frostbitten – to convey.

But the movie gets in trouble whenever it gets horizontal. The frequent references to the Nazis who were then ruling Germany have a “protesting too much” feel. The filmmakers imply that the evil was confined to the big cities, and they idealize small-town Germans almost as much as Hitler did.

Other things, like the frequent cuts between mountaineers roughing it at base camp and the fat cats watching them from a luxurious lodge, feel overdone or amateurish, a child’s rendering of adult life. And why are we spending so much time with Arau and Luise? I don’t care what’s going on in the lodge; show me what’s happening on that mountain.

Which brings us to Frozen. This one starts strong as three good-looking American kids – Dan (Kevin Zegers), Joe (Shawn Ashmore), and Parker (Emma Bell) – bribe their way onto a ski lift, sparring all the way (Joe is jealous of Dan’s girlfriend Parker, who is coming between the two old friends.) Then the ski lift gets turned off and the resort’s staff goes home for the week, unaware that the three were left hanging, yards up in the air.

That sounds like a decent set-up for a “what would I do?” movie, one of those cathartically scary stories about more or less regular people stuck in nightmarish scenarios. But Frozen commits the same mistake as Open Water, focusing too much on the bickering and bonding between characters who just aren't that interesting.

Apparently they loved this one at Sundance, but then Sundance audiences often go crazy for something that leaves the rest of us (wait for it) cold. The serious setbacks these three experience at regular intervals play out like a series of set pieces, most of which seem to leave no lingering side effects.

It was bad enough when both Parker and Joe had horrible things happen to their hands but didn’t seem to feel any lasting pain or lose any noticeable functioning ability as a result. But they really lost me after (spoiler alert – skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know what happened) Dan got horribly injured and then died. Maybe we’re supposed to think he went into shock – he did say he lost all feeling in the injured parts. But he seemed way too alert and pain-free for someone who had just suffered such a gross trauma, making the scene feel cartoonish even before his over-the-top death.

Like a narcoleptic struggling to stay awake, I kept losing touch with the physical and mental agony those kids were going through as they seesawed from sobs to small talk -- and those insights and chills are the whole point of a movie like this. We armchair mountaineers may not want to risk our lives, but we do want to know how it might feel if we did.

North Face scratches that itch better than Frozen, but you can do a lot better than either one – and you don’t even need to leave home. To burrow deep inside the minds of a couple of men fighting for their lives on a merciless mountain, just pour a cup of your favorite beverage, break out the chenille throw, and pop in a DVD of Touching the Void.

Escape to Planet Hollywood

By Elise Nakhnikian

So many movies, so little time.

I see about three new releases in an average week. That may sound like a lot, but it almost never feels like enough. I’m forever triaging the titles on my list. The first to go are the big, glossy Hollywood movies, the ones so formulaic you can practically hear the pitch as you watch the trailer.

But sometimes I don’t want to be to be challenged or enlightened; I just want to be entertained. Last weekend was one of those times, so I caught up on three big releases I’d missed when they came out: a romance, a post-apocalyptic Western, and a heartwarming true story. I was hoping for a solid trifecta of escapist entertainment, and that’s pretty much what I got.

It’s Complicated is wish fulfillment for middle-aged women, a less broadly played, more upscale Mamma Mia without the Abba music. You know it’s got to be a fantasy when the 50-something woman’s boyfriend earnestly tells her: “Your age is one of my favorite things about you.”

As in Mamma Mia, Meryl Streep plays the heroine and looks like she’s having the time of her life – and few things are more joyful than Streep having fun. Once again, she plays a vibrant woman with loving kids, a loyal coterie of good-time girlfriends, and a hyperactive love life. This time there are just two men vying for her affections – her ex-husband (a comically raffish Alec Baldwin) and her architect (Steve Martin, as boyishly bashful as ever). But hey, that’s pretty good for a post-menopausal divorcee.

Director Nancy Meyers’ romantic comedies are not about verbal jousting or witty subterfuge. Her characters wear their hearts on their stylish sleeves, and they tend to revert when they fall in love, acting like hormone-addled teenagers. But nobody can run the gamut of human emotions better than Streep, and Meyers gives her a pretty wide range to explore. There may not be any musical numbers in It’s Complicated, but Streep makes it sing.

The Book of Eli takes place in one of those post-apocalyptic wastelands that’s become a genre in itself since Mad Max. Denzel Washington is the righteous avenger this time around. Striding through the barren landscape like Clint Eastwood’s darker brother, he’s literally on a mission from God.

The movie is competently directed by those nice Armenian boys, the Hughes Brothers (You may think of them as African-American like their dad, but their mom’s Armenian, so they’re homeboys to me), who choose their influences well. I saw The Road, The Road Warrior, Children of Men, and more in its picturesquely floodlit, desaturated palette; its smoggy brown air and ruined landscapes; the ragged post-apocalyptic chic of its costumes; and its fantastic twist ending. Some of the cast seems recycled too, with Tom Waits playing the proprietor of a ramshackle store and Gary Oldman, who sometimes appearing to be parodying Pat Robertson, playing a town’s psychopathic overlord. But The Book of Eli is satisfying in spite of being so derivative. Or is that why it works?

What’s not to like about Sandra Bullock? Even when she breaks out a self-conscious accent and some mighty tight pantsuits in The Blind Side, playing a titanium-tough Southern belle in a Memphis McMansion, Bullock holds us close, making us see the mensch beneath the pancake makeup. And when her Leigh Ann Tuohy invites a sad-eyed homeless teenager to sleep on her $10,000 couch, eventually moving him into his own bedroom and then becoming his legal guardian – well, you’d better have brought your Kleenex.

Quinton Aaron plays the boy, Michael Oher, who became a football player under the Tuohys’ tutelage. The script doesn’t let on much about what he thinks, but Aaron makes his feelings clear, and it’s moving to see the glum, guarded boy lighten up as he settles into a life of luxury, emotional stability, and family love.

This is based on a true story (Michael Lewis wrote a book about it, which John Lee Hancock based his script on), which may explain why Leigh Ann and her family aren’t perfect. To its credit, the movie tackles their biggest blunder – the fact that they, like everyone at Michael’s otherwise-white school, assumed he would play football just because he was big and black.

When Leigh Ann finally asks Michael: “Do you even want to play football? Do you even like it?” he answers that he’s good at it. It’s a poignant response, making you wonder what else he might have found out he was good at if he’d landed somewhere else. But then the movie reminds you that that’s how families work: kids often follow in their parents’ footsteps, and our interests and priorities are always shaped by the people who raised us.

Shadings like that give The Blind Side a little depth, which was a pleasant surprise. But on the whole, it was just the cheerful, uncomplicated feel-good story I expected –and wanted – it to be.

Crazy Heart

By Elise Nakhnikian

Accepting the Best Actor Golden Globe last weekend, Jeff Bridges thanked his dad for having convinced him to go into the family business. “He said, come on, it’s fun!” he recalled.

A lot of actors wouldn’t have found much fun in playing a soul as tattered as Bad Blake, the train wreck of a country singer Bridges plays in Crazy Heart. Fifty-seven going on seventy, he scratches out a living playing seedy little joints. When he’s not onstage or on the road, chances are he’s in one of a series of even seedier motel rooms, drinking until he passes out. If he has any company, it’s an equally drunken fan who’s probably got as many miles on her as he does. In other words, to quote Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), the woman who shows up to interview him and falls in love, Blake is “dying a slow death.”

But Bridges locates the joy in the good ol’ boy too. Peering up from under heavy eyelids to take Jean’s measure or beguiling her little boy like a ragged Pied Piper, his Blake is a trenchant observer who hasn’t had much to look at for a long time.

Pauline Kael said Bridges might be “the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor that has ever lived.” In Crazy Heart, he’s found a script as truthful and authentic as his acting. This intelligent, quietly nuanced, often heartbreaking performance reminds me of the work Bridges did in American Heart, another brutally honest story about a deadbeat dad whose drinking has him just about beat.

Gyllenhaal, who did her own brilliantly wrenching turn as an addict hitting rock bottom in the excellent Sherrybaby, plays a stable single mother who falls for Blake in spite of herself, offering him an unexpected last chance at love. Their wary delight in each other and his interactions with her son feel as real as dirt, making you root for their relationship even when you know you shouldn’t.

Blake has at least one other thing going for him, besides his abundant talent: his best friend back home in Houston is played by Robert Duvall. Duvall gives Wayne just the right heft and heart as the kind of guy who picks his friend up from the bathroom door and takes him fishing. He also brings with him the ghost of Mac Sledge, the drunken country singer he played in Tender Mercies, and the memory of that movie’s artfully sanded edges made me appreciate Crazy Heart’s raw emotions and tough-minded realism all the more.

Blake pays a higher price for his irresponsibility than Sledge did, but his story has notes of hope, a cautiously upbeat ending, and those moments of joy that Bridges picks up on with such gusto. This is not one of those voyeuristic parades of pain, like The Wrestler, whose whole purpose seems to be to wallow in its main character’s humiliation and self-destruction.

Bridges gives a vanity-free performance, letting himself go flabby in the middle and often leaving his mouth a little agape, as if he can’t be bothered to close it. He still looks a lot like Kris Kristofferson, but he acts more like Townes Van Zandt, a brilliant but self-destructive singer-songwriter with a fatal attraction to booze (one of Townes' hauntingly sad songs is on the excellent soundtrack.)

Bridges has said he would not have done this movie if his friend T Bone Burnett weren’t writing Bad Blake’s songs, and he’s right about how crucial Burnett’s contribution is. Blake’s songs are beautiful and sad, a little bit Leonard Cohen and a little bit Robert Earl Keene, and lyrics like “I used to be somebody/Now I am somebody else” and “Funny how falling feels like flying for a little while” fit him like an old pair of boots. Bridges does all his own singing, as he did in The Fabulous Baker Boys, in a soulful voice that’s both rueful and defiant.

There’s some nice, authentically Texan-sounding dialogue, laced through with the black humor of a smart country boy, in Scott Cooper’s script, which is based on a novel by Thomas Cobb. And the contrast between Blake’s way-below-the-radar “tour” and the great glossy production that is the traveling show of Tommy Sweet, his former backup musician made good, shows us just how far Blake has fallen from the commercial heart of country music.

Colin Farrell, who seems to be settling comfortably into supporting roles after failing to become the new Gen X star he was set up to be, is very good as Tommy, even rocking a believable Southern accent and singing a credible duet with Bridges. It’s an uncharacteristically restrained role for the notorious bad boy, but he plays it with subtle sensitivity, making Tommy as life-sized and real as everything else in this perfectly scaled production.

Extraordinary Measures

By Elise Nakhnikian

“When I look back on those five years that inspired this film, never once did I sit back in a chair late at night with a glass of wine or a beer and think, ‘Wow, this will make an amazing film,’” says Princeton resident John Crowley with a laugh. “I was just trying to get through the next day and not get fired.”

Crowley is talking about Extraordinary Measures, Hollywood’s version of the amazing journey on which he led his family after two of his three children, Megan and Patrick, were diagnosed with a rare illness in 1998. A genetic disorder in which deficient enzyme causes glycogen to build up in the body, Pompe disease weakens and eventually paralyzes muscles throughout the body, including the heart. When the children were diagnosed, there was no treatment for the disease, and the longest anyone had lived with it was to age eight or nine.

Crowley refused to accept that death sentence. He quit the job that supported his family, leaving behind the health insurance that paid for hundreds of thousands in medical care for his kids every year, to start a biotech company to develop a replacement enzyme. Raising millions of dollars, he mobilized dozens of scientists in a desperate race against time. And he succeeded, developing a treatment that halts the progression of the disease.

“The enzyme that we helped to discover, which they’ve taken now for seven years, every other week, reversed the damage done to their hearts by the disease, and that’s given them enormous quality of life, and hopefully great quantity,” he says of his kids. But the treatment has reversed all the damage it can and is now just keeping the disease from getting any worse. "We don’t talk any more about how long they’re going to live – we don’t know,” Crowley says. “We try to live each day at a time.”

All three of the Crowley kids go to public school in Princeton. Patrick is in 6th grade, Megan in 7th, and their older brother John in 8th “They’re incredibly smart,” says their father. “Megan’s a straight A student. And they’re happy, more than anything.”

The love Crowley and his wife Aileen feel for their kids and the extent to which they have managed to give them a joyful, active, normal family life is the most moving part of the movie – and, Crowley says, the most accurate.

“It’s not a docudrama,” he says. “It’s entertainment. It is inspired by true events, but it’s not a day-to-day accounting of our lives. But it captures 100% of our family’s spirit and dynamics. Virtually every event portrayed with respect to our family is completely accurate, even down to to the medical equipment, the environments we lived in, and the things that happened.

“Other things were changed. The goals is, how do you, in an hour and 45 minutes, tell a fairly complex story in a way that people can enjoy it and understand it? It took me a while to understand that. You’ve got to composite characters. You’ve got to condense timelines – that’s about 5 or 6 years of work condensed to 18 months.

The biggest change made to the Crowley’s story may have been the addition of Dr. Robert Stonehill, the character played by Harrison Ford. It was Ford who got the movie made, approaching a producer after reading a 2003 Wall Street Journal article about the Crowleys, and Stonehill feels like the kind of character you might invent to massage the ego of an aging movie star.

The most brilliant of the scientists Crowell consults, a cranky, craggy loner in blue jeans and cowboy boots who’s forever blasting classic rock, Stonehill is like one of the characters Clint Eastwood’s been playing lately, a crusty old coot with a heart as gooey as a ripe camembert. The way he manages to always be at the center of the action, sulking as John Crowley cuts him out of a research team or smiling as the kids get their first transfusion, feels tiresomely formulaic too.

But on the whole, Extraordinary Measures is as engaging as its subjects, a briskly paced, emotionally gripping story with an upbeat vibe. Brendan Fraser plays John Crowley, and though he’s looking a little bloated and bug-eyed these days, his natural charm and lightness of spirit comes through, along with a warmth and solidity that feel right for the part. Keri Russell is equally solid as Aileen Crowley, who manages a house full of wheelchairs, ventilators, and home care workers without ever letting it feel like a hospital ward. And Meredith Droeger is a pistol as Megan, apparently channeling the real Megan’s quick tongue and dry sense of humor.

“Megan has a T shirt that says Local Celebrity,” Crowley says. “I told her, pretty soon she can take the ‘Local’ off of it.

“We’ve always tried to be pretty selective about who we talk to and when we talk to them in the media,” he adds. “It’s a balancing act. You want to get the word out to help your family and other people’s families, but you also want to keep up some measure of privacy. Though I think that may have been effectively blown in the last few weeks. When they portray your love life in a movie – and then they gave it a PG rating! Man, I could at least get a PG-13.”

Crowley is currently president and CEO of Amicus Therapeutics in Cranbury, which is looking for a next-generation treatment for Pompe disease, pills that could boost the power of the defective enzymes. But he’s had to take more time off than usual this month, promoting not only the movie but the book he cowrote about his family’s journey.

Chasing Miracles, which Crowley calls “an inspirational memoir,” tells the family’s story through its own eyes, “What we think, our perspective, what we’ve learned,” says Crowley. “It’s as much through our children’s eyes as anybody’s. We’ve learned more about life and love from our kids than we’ve ever taught them.”

The Lovely Bones and Youth in Revolt

By Elise Nakhnikian

Two movies in theaters now, The Lovely Bones and Youth in Revolt, have something to say about the perils and pleasures of being a teenager in America. One aims straight at its target and misses, while the other lands close to the bull’s eye by going for laughs.

The Lovely Bones is a saccharine ode to suburban bliss mashed up with a Gothic tale about the murderer next door. Its abiding image is Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) staring at or past the camera with a look of wounded innocence, her eerie blue eyes piercing through to our world from the limbo she’s stuck in.

Susie’s in limbo because she was murdered by a serial killer who lives across the street from her perfect family, and she can’t rest until – well, it’s not clear what. Until she can “let go” of life? Face the details of her own death? Both?

Like the novel it’s based on, the movie is narrated by Susie from beyond the grave, making the fact of her murder one of the first things we learn about her. That makes the murder itself seem less awful, since she is now in a peaceful place, her own “perfect world.” (It also helps that the killing, when it comes, is handled with merciful restraint, though scary details are flashed at intervals later.)

Susie’s death is mainly a device used to add intensity to every detail of her foreshortened life – and of her family’s life after she’s gone (the title refers to the relationships created or strengthened between people she has left behind). It works well enough at first to keep me from being too bothered by how trite most of those details are, as Susie watches her devoted father (Mark Wahlberg) unfurl a ship in a bottle, exchanges shy looks with a dreamy boy (Reece Ritchie), and fondles a snow globe, feeling sorry for the snowman inside because he’s trapped there, alone in (yup) “a perfect world.”

But when Susie and her relatives failed to ripen into anything more than archetypes, I started to feel not so much shielded from the pain of her murder as deadened to it. If a character doesn’t feel real, her death doesn’t matter much.

The killing really counts in Heavenly Creatures (1994), another movie about teenage girls and murder by Lovely Bones director Peter Jackson and his wife Fran Walsh, who cowrote both scripts. The central characters in Creatures are fierce, their relationship is intense and vivid, and the world they conjure up together feels original and primal. Jackson and Walsh may just have picked the wrong source material this time – Heavenly Creatures was based on a real case, not a melodramatic novel – but even the imagery in The Lovely Bones often seems hackneyed.

Youth in Revolt was also based on a novel, but C.D. Payne’s Youth in Revolt: The Journals of Nick Twisp is as smart, ironic, and casually profane as The Lovely Bones is earnest and sentimental.

Our hero is played by Michael Cera, so needless to say he’s endearingly awkward, soulful, and smart. He’s also a 16-year-old virgin, obsessed with sex in general – and with one girl in particular, the equally smart, self-aware Sheeni (Portia Doubleday). When the two are separated after a summer romance, Nick invents a ruthless alter ego and morphs from nice boy to reluctant juvenile delinquent, committing a series of increasingly devious acts to get Sheeni back.

Nick describes Sheeni as smart and mischievous, and that’s a good description for this movie, which keeps finding new ways to amuse us. Nick and his friends speak in a clipped, semi-formal shorthand that sounds like something Nick Hornsby might have written (“Like John Muir, I enter the wilderness with nothing more than my journal and a childlike sense of wonder,” Nick assures Sheeni when she expresses doubt that he’s dressed for a hike.)

Director Miguel Arteta throws in some sly comic commentary in visual form, like when he cuts from Nick falling in love at first sight to his face in the shower, water droplets falling in extreme slow motion as sappy music swells. Arteta and his editors also have a knack for ending a scene at the height of its absurdity.

The parents in this movie are as caricatured as the ones in The Lovely Bones are idealized, and their romantic partners are even worse. Making the most of the adults’ flagrant flaws is an excellent cast of comic actors, which includes Jean Smart as Nick’s narcissistic mother, Ray Liotta as a sociopathic cop who briefly dates her, and Fred Willard as a softhearted and softheaded neighbor.

But what gives this movie its heart is Cera’s gobsmacked reaction to all the egregiously bad behavior – including his own. Nick is like Harold and Kumar rolled into one, doing something outrageous while scolding himself from the sidelines.

I guess being a nice guy with an irresponsible alter ego is a pretty good metaphor for how it feels to thrash your way through the terrifying and exhilarating, frustrating and freeing emotional mosh pit of American adolescence.

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

By Elise Nakhnikian

How you feel about this movie, which might as well be called The Imaginarium of Terry Gilliam, will depend entirely on how you feel about its writer-director.

Personally, I like him best when he’s part of a team but not out in front. I loved how Monty Python used Gilliam’s creaky-looking, distinctly handmade, Victorian-flavored collages to punctuate the troupe’s live-action sketches, transitioning between skits with a jerkily animated cartoon of, say, a giant, disembodied foot dropping out of the sky to crush something. And Gilliam co-directed (with fellow Python Terry Jones) two of my favorite Python movies: Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Meaning of Life.

But he loses me when he goes solo as a director, particularly when he’s working from one of his own scripts.

Dystopian, disjointed fantasies like Time Bandits, Brazil, and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen don’t feel like stories to me; they feel like tours through the cluttered attic of Gilliam’s mind. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is his most solipsistic work yet, touring not only Gilliam’s mind but his other movies as well. As he told a Museum of the Moving Image interviewer, he initially conceived of the movie as “a compendium of things I’ve done and things I’ve been interested in.”

Like everyone else, Gilliam stores bits of flotsam from other people’s productions in his mental attic too. I saw shards of Lost Horizon, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Men in Black, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Titanic in his latest movie, making it feel that much less original.

Its title character, a glamorously tattered, cannily self-contained Christopher Plummer, is an ancient sage or huckster or both who claims to be immortal. He clatters through the streets of modern-day London in a rickety double-decker horse-drawn cart that doubles as his home and his stage.

Parnassus is accompanied by his beautiful teenage daughter, Valentina (the porcelain-doll-faced Lily Cole), a young assistant, Anton (Andrew Garfield of Boy A), and a dwarf named Percy (Mini-Me Verne Troyer), who serves as the troupe’s voice of reason. The four are soon joined by a mysterious stranger, the charismatic but untrustworthy Tony (Heath Ledger, in his last performance).

They’re all selling an illusion that appears to be real: Step behind the onstage curtain and, through some magical interplay between Parnassus’ imagination and your own, you enter a real-life version of your sweetest daydream.

Meanwhile, Dr. Parnassus keeps making side bets with the devil (Tom Waits), to add a little spice to his interminable life and a little tension to the story, but the plot is never the point in Gilliam’s movies. An art director’s paradise, Dr. Parnassus is more about the sets than the setup. Sometimes images advance the story, like when a doomed romance is remembered as an idyllic outing in a rowboat, which ends abruptly when the boat runs up against a cow’s bloated carcass. But more often, the story feels secondary to the images.

This movie pulls you in almost exclusively through the eyes, cramming as much detail as possible into each frame and often shooting through one of Gilliam’s favored wide-angle lenses to give you plenty to look at.

The actors mesmerize us too, pulling us past the thinly developed script and into their eyes through sheer force of character, just as their characters lure audience members through Dr. Parnassus’ curtain. Ledger and the three actors who finished his part, splitting it between them after his death, have been getting most of the attention, and they deserve every bit of the praise. Ledger makes Tony’s lazy charm look deceptively simple, and his replacements – Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell -- all follow suit, Depp in particular channeling Ledger’s crooked grin and sly seductiveness. Plummer, Cole, and Garfield also do excellent work, and Troyer redeems himself from punchline status.

But a movie that keeps preaching “the power of the imagination to transform and illuminate our lives,” as Dr. Parnassus puts it, needs to do more than just feed us eye candy. Making Parnassus clearly exercised its creator’s imagination, but it didn’t do much for mine.

With all those quotes about the importance of storytelling and imagination, not to mention Dr. Parnassus’s amazing and almost entirely ignored imaginarium, Gilliam seems to want to make a point about the difficulty of capturing people’s attention in these overmediated days.

It’s a valid complaint, but it rings a little hollow from a guy who attracts as much media attention, as much funding, and as many fans as Gilliam does for doing exactly as he pleases.

I just hope he doesn’t include himself in the ranks of the unfairly neglected.

Me and Orson Welles

By Elise Nakhnikian

Do you want to see a movie set in America’s Great Depression that makes the era feel as real, and the characters’ feelings as urgent, as your own heartbeat? Rent Public Enemies.

Me and Orson Welles is the kind of movie that’s shot in golden-brown sepia from the first frame to the last, lest we forget for a moment that our story takes place in The Past. It’s the kind of script in which a young woman gazing at a Grecian urn in a museum recites Ode on a Grecian Urn aloud – and then tells our hero what she’s quoting, just in case anyone missed the reference. Even the sets and hair and makeup are too carefully engineered, from the shiny cars lining the streets to the impeccably clothed extras crossing self-consciously in front of the camera.

Based on a novel of the same name, Me and Orson Welles is set in New York City in 1937. Still a wunderkind, Welles (Christian McKay) hasn’t yet made the leap to directing movies, but he’s already a star on radio. And he’s about to open the Mercury Theater, where he will burnish his reputation as a theatrical director and actor.

The movie ushers us backstage at the Mercury with Richard Samuels (Zac Efron), an enterprising local high school student who skips school to hang out at the Mercury. Good-looking and confident, he soon catches Welles’ eye and lands a minor role in the theater’s inaugural performance.

Me and Orson Welles is most alive when we’re inside the theater, watching the company bicker, rehearse, and then perform Welles’ inventive version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It’s interesting to see how Welles exploited, abused, and motivated his company, and often fun to watch the actors. Ben Chaplin is both laughable and touching as a high-strung, highly insecure actor. Eddie Marsan earns our respect as the long-suffering John Houseman, who managed the Mercury for the mercurial Welles. And every so often the whole ensemble clicks, making the cast’s neuroses, narcissism, and catty competition entertainingly believable.

But a few good scenes can’t carry a movie. My Favorite Year took another story of a high-maintenance theatrical genius as seen through the eyes of a starstruck young man and made it touching and funny, in part by playing the contrast between the dashing star and his young sidekick for laughs (who could forget Alan Swann’s dinner with Benjy’s family?) Me and Orson Welles falls into the same trap as Julie and Julia and The Devil Wears Prada, treating a callow sidekick as if he or she were as interesting as a savvy star, or more so.

Richard gets far more screen time than Welles, though the man is far more interesting than the boy can even dream of being. Outsized and outrageous, Welles attracts us in spite of ourselves, like iron filings to a magnet. McKay is too old for the part (he’s in his mid 30s, while Welles was just 21 in 1937), but he nails the actor-director’s resonant voice, penchant for bombast, and endless capacity to amuse himself, often at the expense of others. Most importantly, we see enough of the play he creates to know he’s the real thing, a genuine theatrical genius. That doesn’t excuse his boorish behavior, but it does make you wonder whether he, like the magazine editor in Prada, might have developed a monstrous carapace to protect a fragile creative ego.

Richard is just a kid, his ambitions too inchoate to be compelling. Welles tells him he’s “a God-created actor,” the kind you can’t help watching, but Efron doesn't earn that billing. The scenes of Richard at home or at school are uninteresting and unenlightening, telling us nothing we didn’t already know. And what a waste of potential to focus on his bland flirtation with the theater’s ambitious office manager, Sonja (Claire Danes) when we could be watching a world-class womanizer like Welles home in on his prey.

I might not have been so disappointed if I hadn’t expected so much more. Welles’ director, Richard Linklater, has a gift for making pungent slice-of-life movies – Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Tape, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset – whose characters seem to have wandered into his frame from the street.

I like Linklater’s genre movies too – how could you not like School of Rock? – but what impresses me most is how he can take movie that are all talk, like Waking Life and the bookends of Sunrise and Sunset, and make them shimmer with intensity. Like few other living American directors, Linklater can capture the dorm-room thrill of smart conversation.

A talky love letter to great theater and the characters who make it should have been right up his alley, but somewhere between the conception and the execution, the blood got drained out of Me and Orson Welles. It comes to us DOA, a wax museum tableau shot through a tea-stained scrim.

Avatar

By Elise Nakhnikian

“The legendary floating mountains of Pandora – heard of them?” a jealous colleague needles Jake (Sam Worthington) in Avatar. Matter of fact, I have, and if you’re at all interested in movies, I’m sure you have too. Thanks to Avatar’s $150 million marketing budget, we’d heard a lot about Pandora’s floating mountains – and its exotic flora, ferocious fauna, and New Age-y blue-skinned giants – long before the movie opened last weekend.

So does it live up to the hype? Yes and no.

Writer-director James Cameron’s movies always aim for maximum impact. First they immerse you in an extreme, often imaginary environment that feels as real as the floor beneath your feet, whether it’s postapocalyptic Earth (the Terminator movies), a deadly space station (Aliens), the depths of the ocean (Titanic) or outer space and the sea combined (The Abyss.) Then they pile on the shock and awe, with the help of state-of-the-art special effects.

In Avatar, most of our time is spent inside the world of the Na’vi, the nine-foot-tall blue humanoids who people the fictional planet Pandora. Thanks to Cameron’s immersive use of 3D and the elaborately realistic look of the computer-generated landscape and creatures, you truly feel like you’re inside that world, and it’s an enthralling place to be for a while, with plants that snap shut and collapse when they’re touched and huge, pterodactyl-like birds that let the Na’vi ride on their backs.

The thrill of immersion in a wide-screen virtual reality experience is all the reason I need to see Cameron’s movies. Sometimes it’s all I get, too. The Abyss got bogged down in ditsy pseudo-spiritualism and a tedious subplot about a troubled marriage, and Titanic was nearly swamped by cardboard characters, laughable dialogue, and poor pacing that made it feel way too long.

Avatar is close to three hours long, but except during a couple of fight scenes, the special effects were special enough to keep me afloat. And, though Cameron hasn’t gotten any better at dialogue, that didn’t bother me much here. After all, the characters were often speaking a foreign language they weren’t fluent in, as English-speaking humans spoke the Na’vi’s language or vice versa.

The humans, who have made Earth uninhabitable, have come to Pandora in search of unobtainium, a potent source of energy. Jake, who is there to help a small group of scientists who are studying the planet, explores the planet through his avatar, a beautiful body as tall and blue as any Na’vi’s.

A paraplegic in real life, Jake experiences his avatar body as a release from the prison of his actual one. Exploring the beautiful, deep-hued planet in his powerful new body is a thrill – for us as well as for him – especially since the Na’vi chief’s beautiful daughter, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), is showing him the ropes. One of the tough-girl characters Cameron loves to create, Neytiri looks something like a cross between Angelina Jolie in Beowulf and Rebecca Romijn in X-Men, and she’s so fierce she hisses when she first encounters Jake. Not that there’s never any doubt that she’ll wind up succumbing to his alpha-male charms.

The predictability of Cameron’s plot didn’t bother me much this time – at least, not until the end. The whole thing plays like a fairy tale, so you expect happy endings you can see coming a light year away. But some of his archetypes felt played-out and tiresome, and the characters were all mighty thin.

Cameron tries to play it both ways here, preaching nonviolence and ecological balance while lingering lovingly on gigantic choppers and guns and people clanking around in those metal exosuits combining armor with weaponry that Cameron introduced back in 1986 in Aliens. And in the end -- yawn -- the only way our Na’vi heroes can banish the human intruders is by beating them in a bloody battle.

To create the avatars and the Na’vi, Cameron covered his cast with motion sensors that converted their movements and expressions to digital form as they acted out the parts. Then a team of computer animators converted those streams of data into wasp-waisted, elegantly near-naked bipeds with tails, long braids, and cerulean skin. The process, which was used to create Gollum in the Lord of the Rings series, creates characters that don’t exist yet look completely alive, their body language and expressions borrowed from the actors who played them.

Sam Worthington, who radiates an old-fashioned combination of modesty and machismo, makes Jake believable as a grunt with hidden resources who can rise to almost any occasion when challenged. And it’s nice to see Sigourney Weaver (as Jake’s no-nonsense scientist boss) and Michelle Rodriguez (as a soldier with a conscience) nailing two more of Cameron’s tough-chick roles.

But much as I enjoyed watching the avatars and the Na’vi, with their huge, expressive eyes and lithe bodies, I can’t say I really cared about any of them. Just as Star Wars and Tron were eye-popping in their day despite pretty minimal plots, Avatar is significant only for the way it bumps computer-generated imagery up to a whole new level.

What will really be cool is when someone uses that technology to create a story that feels as engaging as it looks.

Best Films of 2009

Elise Nakhnikian

As always in recent years, I've heard a lot of buzz lately about how movies are going down the tubes. And as usual I don't agree, since I always find it hard to choose just 10 favorites from the films that first hit U.S. theaters this year. But I do wonder about American movies. Once again, only four of the movies on my year-end top 10 list are from the USA. The last time there were more than that was 2005.

I don't exactly feel deprived. Thanks to Netflix, movies on demand, film festivals, and the rich array always on tap in Manhattan theaters, there are always more movies I want to see than there is time to see them. But I worry about smart, gifted American filmmakers who have something to say. Is it getting so hard to finance anything other than a wannabe blockbuster that they're giving up and doing something easier? If so, that's everyone's loss, even if the online options jostling for our attention keep us from noticing right away.

Speaking of that list, I couldn’t narrow mine down to 10 this year, but we all know that number is arbitrary anyhow. So here are my 11 favorite movies of 2009, in no particular order.

The Maid. Raquel (Catalina Saavedra) has been the live-in maid for an upper-middle-class Chilean family for her entire adult life. Despite all the talk about how they love one another, she’s really not part of their family – or of her own, after living apart for more than two decades. In fact, she has no intimate relationships at all. But her little room is the only home she knows, so when the mistress of the house announces that she’ll be hiring someone to “help” her, Raquel starts acting out in increasingly bizarre ways, until a new maid comes to the house and changes everything.

Writer-director Sebastián Silva lays out the nuances of the rickety relationships between Raquel and the family with sensitivity and sly humor. Saavedra is a revelation, using her thin lips and bruised-looking eyes to convey both the pain of the emotions roiling around in Raquel’s aching head and her grim attempts to quash them, and the rest of the cast is excellent too. This story feels so real you sometimes forget you’re not watching it through a security camera.

Goodbye, Solo. It’s a pleasure to spend two hours in the company of Goodbye Solo’s title character (played by the excellent Souleymane Sy Savane), a sunny Senegalese cab driver whose insistence on connecting with the people around him amounts to a form of grace. We meet him as he’s homing in on William (Red West), a cantankerous codger who would prefer to be left alone. But Solo just keeps planting himself in William’s way, armed with a smile and a story, winning his grudging friendship while trying to solve the mystery behind this toxically lonely man’s depression.

Based on a cabbie Ramin Bahrani met in his hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Goodbye, Solo is the director’s third feature about immigrants struggling to survive in inhospitable American cities, and they just keep getting better. (The others were 2005’s Man Push Cart and 2007’s Chop Shop.) All three mix professional and non-professional actors and real locations to place a scripted story within an interesting subculture, which Bahrani films with a sensitivity that establishes him as one of America’s best living directors.

Bright Star. This deeply felt, exquisitely tender love story places us smack in the world of poet John Keats (a luminescent, gently charismatic Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), the young woman he loved. Cinematographer Grieg Fraser captures an astonishingly gorgeous England, starkly beautiful in the winter and bursting with colors and life in the springtime and summer.

Writer-director Jane Campion revives the pressures and pleasures of early 19th-century English society, but this is no stilted costume drama. It’s the story of two vivid individuals whose feelings and motivations are as compelling as our own – if not more so. Keats is a born Romantic, full of feeling and fun, and Fanny is Campion’s most self-assured heroine yet, self-confident, forthright, competent and kind. And that pairing of lionhearted equals makes Bright Star a great romance.

Gomorrah. Gomorrah is a whole new kind of mafia movie. Compared to the goombahs of Gomorrah, even Tony Soprano looks tony, and the Godfather series look like a Cosa Nostra recruitment poster, with its movie-star Mafioso.

Writer Roberto Saviano, a native of Naples, based the screenplay on his own novel, which was in turn based on extensive research into the camorra, the criminal underground that maintains a chokehold on Naples and the surrounding countryside. Saviano exposes the hidden workings of the system by showing how it affects the lives of nearly everybody in its orbit, even infiltrating parts of the global economy.

Director Matteo Garrone, a painter as well as a filmmaker, artfully translates the novel’s grim intensity, creating an absorbing world as visceral as a kick in the gut and as claustrophobic as the tanning booths that cocoon a group of paunchy gangsters in the opening scene. There’s nothing noble or melancholy about the gangsters in Gomorrah; they’re just ugly brutes who cripple the world they rule.

The White Ribbon. While Gomorrah aims for reportorial realism, The White Ribbon is intentionally unreliable. Writer-director Michael Haneke refuses to wrap up his films too neatly on principle, often leaving key questions unanswered to prod us into doing our own thinking about what we’ve just seen. In The White Ribbon, he undermines his own narrative from the start by having the narrator inform us that he can’t trust his own memory and never did know all the facts.

At first, all seems well in this creamily photographed black-and-white tale of a farming community in Protestant northern Germany shortly before WWI. But little by little, Haneke reveals the authoritarian brutality so casually wielded by the sternly self-righteous men in charge. One father canes his children for imagined sins. Another has sex with his teenage daughter. A blithely entitled baron forces the sharecroppers to put up with daily humiliations and unsafe conditions and makes a virtual prisoner of his wife.

Meanwhile, seemingly random acts of cruelty or violence are occurring. Since we never learn who is doing them, they come to seem like an inevitable reaction to rampant oppression. Where your thoughts lead you from there – to the Nazi regime that the kids in this movie will vote in as adults? To someplace closer to home? – is up to you.

Where the Wild Things Are. Though it’s cowritten by Dave Eggers and closely based on Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are is a classic Spike Jonze Joint: intelligently conceived, ingeniously crafted, and as steeped in humanity as a rum cake is in rum.

The opening and closing scenes economically convey the anger and angst that causes Max (Max Record) to run away and the love that pulls him back. His scenes with his mother (Catherine Keener) are particularly poignant, little cinematic bouillon cubes of concentrated tenderness, frustration, and unconditional love. And when he runs away, it’s to an exhilaratingly primal island peopled by wild things that are awesome in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Played by actors in giant puppet suits and voiced by a stellar cast, the wild things are vulnerable, tender, and occasionally terrifying.

Wild Things is refreshingly free of the pyrotechnics, paint-by-numbers peril, and preachy morals that gum up most children’s movies. There are things to be learned -- Max learns how to manage his own feelings and respect other people’s, and the wild things learn not to blindly follow a king. But those lessons emerge organically from a plot as impulsive and focused on fun as a child at play.

The Hurt Locker and In the Loop. Of all the movies I’ve seen so far about what we’re doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and how we got there – and I’ve seen a lot – these two may be my favorites. Director Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is a visceral, clear-eyed look at the pull exerted by the war on Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), an adrenaline junkie who disarms bombs in Iraq. Bigelow knows how to maximize the suspense inherent in a violent confrontation or an armed bomb, but she’s also good at showing how men reveal themselves even when they’re trying to hide. We get to know the taciturn James and the other men in his squad well enough to share the hurt when the war warps their lives.

In the Loop, a mordantly funny British satire based on a BBC-TV series, is a fictionalized tale of how the Bush Administration engineered the occupation of Iraq, as seen through the eyes of Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), a British politician pulled into a “debate” on the topic by an American State Department official (a tart Mimi Kennedy). Too inept to know he’s being used, Foster happily bumbles into a world in which nearly everyone – himself included – is motivated by self-interest, more interested in salvaging or furthering their careers than in deciding whether their country should go to war. The barbs fly by like darts as the Brits use their best remaining weapon, erudite sarcasm, to bully and manipulate each other. It’s all very funny, yet it feels alarmingly plausible – office politics with a capital P.

A Serious Man. A Serious Man’s Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a mid-century modern Job. He’s also a bit of a schnook, a nice guy who finishes dead last. His life could easily be played as a tragedy, but codirectors Joel and Ethan Coen – who also cowrote, coproduced and coedited, as usual – are after something more entertaining, more open-ended, and ultimately deeper.

The story takes place in a Jewish suburb of Minnesota in the late 1960s or early ‘70s, which the Coens recreate with their usual attention to detail. You can almost smell the pot the kids are smoking and feel the chilly disinterest of the aggressively unattractive secretaries. (Remember secretaries?) But there’s always just enough comic exaggeration to nudge us into the realm of fable and make us laugh. At their best, the Coens introduce us to ourselves, satirizing human weakness while celebrating human nature, and A Serious Man is one of their best.

Anvil! The story of Anvil. It took me a few minutes to get past the similarities to This Is Spinal Tap and stop smirking at this oddly named documentary about a balding heavy metal band trying to regain its past glory, but once I did I was hooked. Anvil is really about drummer Robb Reiner (for real) and lead singer/songwriter Steve "Lips" Kudlow, and it turns out these two are very likeable guys.

Good friends and good family men who grew up together in Toronto, Reiner and Kudlow started jamming together at age 14, made it big for a bit at the start of the heavy metal movement in the ‘80s, and quickly lapsed back into obscurity. But they never stopped playing – or hoping to become professional musicians. Their journey, as documented by director Sacha Gervasi, raises some interesting questions for a culture that constantly tells us to follow our dreams while making most dreams almost impossible to achieve. Are these guys admirable for sticking with the music they love or self-indulgent for risking their families’ financial security? How you answer may tell you more about yourself than about Reiner and Kudlow.

Summer Hours. The plot of Summer Hours doesn’t sound very interesting: The adult children of an haute-bourgeois French clan converge on their lovely old family home to bury their mother and settle her estate. But this elegiac work of art captures the ebb and flow of family life across generations, the decommissioning of an aging empire’s ruling class, and how globalization is weakening ancient cultures.

Some of the best naturalistic actors working today, including Juliette Binoche and Jérémie Renier, make us believe in the jokes and shared memories that keep these siblings together, the differences in temperament that still grate, and the interests and obligations – including working abroad— that pull them apart. On one level, as the movie makes clear, the estate is just so much stuff. But it is part of the roots that have nurtured the family for generations, and they will be weaker without it.

The Road

By Elise Nakhnikian

With collapsing economies and intractable wars eroding our sense of security, no wonder there are so many movies about the apocalypse these days. 2012, Wall-E, I Am Legend, and all those zombie movies (to name just a few) offer a little catharsis. First they wipe out whole civilizations, then they show how a few hardy survivors cope with the consequences.

I can’t get enough of this stuff, the trashier the better: I’ll see anything with a zombie or a tidal wave in it. I can’t resist serious apocalypse movies either, but they’re more of a risk. A self-aware splatterfest like Zombieland aims to let a little air out of your sense of dread, but it wants to entertain you too. Earnest apocalypse movies just want to pump up the dread, challenging you to question your own assumptions or behavior.

Apocalypse stories don’t come much more serious than The Road, a bleak, Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece by Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy specializes in Old-Testament-style stories about old-fashioned good guys – taciturn hombres who know how to do things like forage for food or evade a homicidal killer – pitted against implacably evil foes in perilous landscapes.

As its title indicates, The Road is a road trip stripped down to its skivvies. A father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) – identified only as “the man” and “the boy” – are making their way through a dead landscape a decade or so after an unspecified disaster. Virtually all animal and plant life has been decimated. The few human survivors are either refugees like the man and the boy, travelling on their own or in very small groups, or near-feral cannibals roving the countryside in bands.

As the Coen Brothers did in their 2007 adaptation of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, director John Hillcoat sticks like Velcro to the novel’s storyline, rarely embroidering the author’s spare but eloquent dialogue. That makes for an unusually austere apocalypse film: What interests McCarthy is what makes us human and what we will do to survive, so we don’t get the usual perverse thrill of seeing the world get destroyed.

We feel no glory or glee when people die, either: When someone pulls out a weapon in The Road, we feel the full and terrible weight of that act. But most of all, we feel the tenderness and ferocity with which the father protects his boy, nurturing his compassion, teaching him how to survive on his own, and trying to shield him from the worst of the horrors that surround them.

The trashed-looking sets and the grimly beautiful cinematography make a valiant attempt to communicate the melancholic beauty of McCarthy’s prose, but they don’t quite succeed. Maybe it’s just too much to ask any actual location to match the power of the impressions unleashed by a passage like: “The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes.”

Visual clichés, like the golden sunlight that bathes the man’s flashbacks or the handsome Pendleton blanket he finds in time for a climactic scene, occasionally make the movie feel more Hollywood than holocaust. It doesn’t help that the main actors are so beautiful, either, giving their suffering the art-directed feel of Garbo’s death throes in Camille.

Mortensen pours his formidable soul into his role, suffusing the father with tenderness and vulnerability while looking entirely capable of extracting an arrowhead from his own calf. He can’t help it if starvation just makes him look better – he worked hard to get grungy for the role – but his picturesquely gaunt cheekbones and fashionably scruffy beard are as distractingly Hollywood as Smit-McPhee’s limpid blue eyes and improbably well-nourished cheeks. (In contrast, Robert Duvall and Michael Kenneth Williams, The Wire’s Omar, look convincingly down and out in their standout cameos.)

Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penall also soften the book’s adamantine spine by giving us less of the man’s thoughts and fears and by toning down the boy’s terror and amping up his faith in human nature. They conjure up golden images of the man’s wife far too often, diminishing his grief for a lost world by roping it too tightly to that single cause. And where McCarthy follows his far from neatly resolved happy “ending” with a mournful final paragraph, the filmmakers end with happy talk, sold hard.

The movie was beautifully shot, brilliantly acted, and occasionally creepy, but it won’t haunt my dreams the way the book still does.

Does that come as something of a relief? Yeah, I guess so. But it’s more of a disappointment.