Review - Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Oscar-charmed filmmaker Stephen Daldry takes us on an autistic odyssey in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. The film follows Oskar Schell (played by the impossibly precocious Thomas Horn), an insatiably curious child who struggles to make sense of his father's senseless death in wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As he scours NYC for the lock to a key left behind by his dad (Tom Hanks), he meets a diverse kaleidoscope of people, but grows emotionally distant from his mourning mother (Sandra Bullock).

Review - Hell and Back Again

You know how I always qualify my own Best Foreign Film and Best Documentary nominees with that tepid “subject-to-change” line? This is why.

Less than four days after finally settling on my award winners, not only am I going to have to retroactively adjust my nominees (and winner) for Best Documentary, but several other categories as well. Hell and Back Again, which the Academy's documentary branch recently spurred me to investigate when they nominated it for Best Documentary, is straight up one of the best films of the year.

The subject is Sgt Nathan Harris, a gung-ho Marine whose leg was crippled by a bullet nearing the end of his deployment in a Taliban stronghold in the summer of '09. Now back on American soil and limping to readjust to civilian life, we see the exposed imbalance of a fragile mind who finds himself for the first time in a fragile body. Director Danfung Dennis employs a smart chronological structure that toggles back and forth between the “Hell” of Afghanistan and the “Back Again” of America, although by the end of the film it's suspected that home may have become Nathan's true hell.

More 2011 Reviews

Some more miniature reviews to add to the pile.

Review - A Spielberg double feature

For New Years Eve I took advantage of a unique opportunity; the chance to view two new Steven Spielberg features on the same day. Spielberg has had four others years in which he released two films, but never simultaneously, so this is kind of a first both for him and his eager fans. The two films in question are awards pony War Horse and "animated" action/adventure Tintin. Both my reviews after the cut.

Reviews

As usually is the case for me this time of year, I need a space to catch up with capsule reviews I've neglected to post upon seeing the film in question. I'll update this post throughout the season as I see more films.

Review - The Artist

Silence is golden in Michel Hazanavicius' quaint silent cinema homage The Artist. The story is a somewhat slight but archetypal one about the screen stars of Hollywood's silent era falling into obsolescence and obscurity at the hands of the talkies. The novelty of a (mostly) silent film in 2011 may seem a gimmick, but it's hard not to let yourself be charmed by it.

We first meet George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) at the premiere of another one of his melodramatic hits, where the showman reveling in the noiseless applause of his adoring fans. He's blissfully unaware of the impending cacophony that will threaten not only his livelihood but the way of the world as he knows it, but not before he sends bright-eyed ingenue Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) on her own trajectory to fame and acclaim in the brave new world of talking pictures.

Review - We Need to Talk About Kevin

They say there's no greater grief than that of a mother who loses her child, but what about that of a mother who is hated by her child? In We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay uses bold cinematic strokes to immerse us in the guilt, anguish, and confusion of a woman whose son holds an inexplicable personal vendetta against her, leading up to an atrocity that shatters more than just her life.

Tilda Swinton plays Eva, a practically catatonic woman struggling to lead a normal life in the wake of a hinted-at tragedy that left her without her family and reviled by her community. Through her daily drudgery she comes across sights and sounds that trigger memories that inform us about how she came to her current pitiable station. At first, the recollections are a vague but vivid wash of colour and sound; deep reds cascade across the screen while sirens and lawn sprinklers bleed in and out of the soundtrack.

Review - A Separation

A Separation, Asghar Farhadi's exceptional domestic drama about the failure of human relationships, and not just marital ones (as the title implies), is among the year's best films.

Simin files for divorce when her husband Nader refuses to move away from Iran. She doesn't want their daughter growing up there, but he insists on staying to care for his Alzheimer-afflicted father. The divorce is denied, but Simin leaves Nader anyway, prompting Nader to hire a woman to look after his father during the day. The new day keeper, Razieh, works for Nader while keeping it a secret from her short-tempered husband Houjat, but an accusation of thievery sets in motion a series of events that suddenly slam both of these damaged marriages into a heated family court case.

Review - Beginners

Beginners, Mike Mills' gentle little drama about the generation-spanning challenge of finding happiness, succeeds in great part due to its three central performances and Mills' thoughtful screenplay. Ewan McGregor plays a lonely graphic artist still quietly reeling from a death in the family; his father, excellently played by Christopher Plummer, was 75 years old when he came out about his homosexuality and proceeded to try and grab once last slice of happiness before his terminal lung cancer took over. This story is told in flashback while we follow McGregor's pursuit of a relationship after his father's death. Having met an eccentric woman at a party, the softly radiant Melanie Laurent, he revels in his new found love, but his private insecurities about the finite nature of happiness threaten to sabotage the burgeoning romance. Mills' script and direction are beautifully restrained, employing a melancholy sense of humour when needed to lighten his film's understated but deep-running sadness.

***1/2 out ****

Animation catch-up

I've been behind on reviewing a lot of movies this year, including some animated products. There have been plenty this year, enough to bump the Academy's maximum nomination field to five, but I have to admit I really haven't been thrilled at the state of the medium this year. I've only seen a hand-full so far, and for posterity I've given each a summarized mini review after the cut. Others I either haven't seen yet or have been scared off by weak reviews.

Review - Rampart

Oren Moverman's Rampart, the title of which refers to the scandal that shone light on widespread LAPD misconduct in the late 1990s, follows a crooked cop (Woody Harrelson) through a rough road to realization that, for as long to as the film runs, the character resists.

Review - Hugo

A lonely orphan who winds the clocks from within the walls of a Parisian train station attempts to decipher the mystery of a mechanical man in Hugo, Martin Scorsese's courageous foray into 3D family entertainment.

Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), for that is his name, used to love fixing things with his clockmaker father before his untimely death. A rusty old automaton designed to write on paper is all he has to member his dad, and repairing the robot has become a project on which the boy has become dependent. He often pilfers parts from a sad old toymaker, Papa George (Ben Kingsley), who seems somehow connected to the machine, but reluctant to divulge. Hugo finds an ally in the toymaker's goddaughter (Chloe Moretz), an avid reader who yearns for adventure beyond her leather-bound tomes. Together, they attempt to discover the secret concealed within the automaton's intricate clockwork and seek a window into Papa George's past.

Review - The Descendents

The Descendants, Alexander Payne's eagerly anticipated followup to Sideways, tells a sad, drawn out tale of grief and growth with a mellow Hawaiian flavour.

George Clooney plays Matt King, a landowner from Oahu whose wife is in a terminal coma following a boating accident. With his two daughters Alex and Scotty (Shailene Woodely and Amara Miller) struggling to cope in their own unique ways, and with a pending business transaction that would make Matt and his extended family very wealthy at a moral cost, the stress has already reached a smothering level. The discovery that his wife was cheating on him with a slick realtor is only the grain of salt that tips Matt's scale in the direction of (for once in life) taking action, setting him a personal mission to confront his wife's lover in the hopes of finding some kind of closure – or maybe something else entirely.

Review - The Muppets

It's been a fair deal of time since we last saw the Muppets in action, but it's clear from their new film that Jim Henson's felt funnymen haven't lost a beat. The script, cowritten by star Jason Segel, isn't always focused and doesn't always keep an even keel, but it's a sidesplitting comedy/variety mash-up that clearly demonstrates an understanding of these characters and what they're all about. Sure, some of the jokes are easy gets, and maybe they throw in one self-referential gag too many, but silly though it may be, it consistently draws roars of laughter (the third best gift a anyone can give, according to the film), and the Muppets shouldn't have it any other way. Nostalgics won't be able to help but adore the dozens of classic Muppet homages, the most affecting of which is a brief but beautiful new recording of “Rainbow Connection”.

It's too bad they won't get to host the Oscars this year, but if we're lucky we'll get to see them perform one of the film's songs (assuming one gets nominated).

**1/2 out of ****

Review - The Ides of March

One only need know the title of George Clooney's The Ides of March – aptly named for the day of a fateful backstabbing – to suspect that this political drama is less to do with public policy and more to do with the cutthroat chess match that plays itself out on the other side of the curtain. As designed by Clooney and his co-writers Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon (the latter of whom penned the original play), the actual issues are peripheral as seen from the vacuum in which jaded campaign strategists ply their splenetic trade; people are played against each other, secrets divulged, secrets kept, trust severed, but all with a purpose. All for the cause of The Campaign.

Review - Moneyball

Like the game of baseball itself, Bennett Miller's Moneyball is mostly a slow-moving affair that picks up here and there, but carries a payoff that's well worth it for those who stuck the whole thing out.

Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, player-turned-scout-turned-GM whose promising MLB career fell through and left him embittered towards the whole system. He despairs that the league is governed by a financial hierarchy that sees the rich teams get richer and the poor teams (specifically his own Oakland As) get poorer, and he's equally cynical about the archaic scouting philosophy faithfully practiced by his older staff. Naturally, he's intrigued by the number-crunching sabermetrics of recent Yale graduate Pete Brand (Jonah Hill), a system that emphasizes statistical player projections for runs and wins while minimizing cost. It flies in the face of conventional wisdom about drafting superstar players, but Beane, unsatisfied with what he considers an unaccomplished life, is willing and eager to rock the boat.

Review - Project Nim

Project Nim, from Man on Wire's Oscar-winning director James Marsh, tells the harrowing life story of a chimp named Nim who, back in the 70s, was separated from his mother at birth so that he could be taught sign language. The film avoids ever feeling too clinical or obsessed with the science of the situation (which is more than can be said for some of the people involved in Nim's tale). Rather, Marsh makes a point of bubbling the emotions to the surface of this sobering tale; Not only Nim's emotions, as they are perceived by the human teachers and caregivers who surrounded him for years, but their emotions as well, if not more so. While there are strategically manipulative moments of optimism and joy to be had, it's ultimately an appalling and very sad saga that raises serious questions about what standards should exist for the humane treatment of animals, and also the dangers that working so closely with animals pose to people. It would make a fascinating double feature with this summer's Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

*** out of ****

Review - Drive

A few thoughts on Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, an art house character study wrapped in a violent crime drama and advertised as a high-speed action movie:

Ryan Gosling plays a nameless driver for hire, running the gamut from Hollywood stunt work to manning the getaway car for various mob jobs. He is a soft spoken man of few words, but beyond his humble facade lies a dangerous disposition. When the mother and son who live down the hall from him become innocent, unintended targets of a tense mob conflict, the circumstances unleash the driver's deceptively powerful sting.

Review - The Lion King 3D

It's become all too fashionable these days to hate on 3D movies. And not completely without good reason. Many films use the technology merely as a vacuous gimmick to jack up ticket prices, and just as many more employ a relatively inexpensive post-production conversion process that can result in an image that's dim and/or distractingly cluttered. I don't consider myself an advocate of 3D movies, BUT I do make a point of championing those of them that use their medium effectively. To that end, if you must pay the extra three bucks to wear those silly glasses to any movie this year, make sure it's for The Lion King 3D, a magnificent exemplar of the potential effectivity of the post-conversion process, and indeed, for 3D in general.

Review - Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris opens, as one would expect from a filmmaker as nostalgic as Woody Allen, with a music montage starring the great city itself. And yet what we see is not quite the same city immortalized in art, song, and story from decades past. While landmarks such as Le Champs Elysees or The Eiffel Tower feature prominently, Allen carefully includes in each shot some peripheral reminders of how times have changed the City of Love; a scaffolding here, a chain-link fence there, tourists reading maps, the lights of congested traffic overpowering the old-fashioned streetlamps – all juxtaposed against a 1920s jazz standard on the soundtrack, recalling his 1979 masterpiece Manhattan.