Hugo Scorsese

I went into the picture, Hugo, expecting it to be a lot softer than it was. No, this isn't a Taxi Driver or Goodfellas type toughness, it's the emotional side, particularly the based-on-reality story of how Georges Méliès, the pioneering father of the "cinema of the fantastic" with influence running all the way through Star Wars and Avatar, had been forgotten after WWI, his 531 films almost all lost, living a life of anonymity with a little shop in the Paris train station.

The pathos of this great man's situation, as told through the drama of the titular character, Hugo, is ultimately turned into a very emotional triumph, and a tremendous montage sequence capping a highly spectacular film experience throughout. From the very first shots of historic Paris recreated and thrown in to 3D relief, director Martin Scorsese rewards the viewing with a surfeit of visual riches, in what can only be described as a fairytale steampunk aesthetic.

Scorsese cleverly reminds us that trains, clocks and motion pictures (before digital) were all based on the same complex analog technology of circular gears, but with film it's all about the innate desire for mimesis, as represented by a robotic torso, the mystery of which drives the narrative for the first two thirds of the film.

My kids, ages 12 and 8 1/2, both loved the movie. I was struck that, for the first time, a Scorsese movie got me all choked up. I was also struck that, for the first time since Avatar, it made sense that the movie was made and exhibited in 3D. In fact, it is easily the best 3D movie I've ever seen. It just won the National Board of Review award for Best Picture 2011, and I would not be entirely surprised to see it score top Picture and Director awards at the Oscars. I think it's the type of film that will grow on viewers in memory and in reputation over time. Sure, it's a little long, but as is typical with Scorsese, there's a visual density to the material that makes it something new.

By using the most modern/futuristic of technologies to take us back to the dawn of film, Scorsese has won the conceptual award for use of 3D. With standout performances by Sir Ben Kingsley (perfecto casting) and Sacha Baron Cohen (naturally funny in any role? funny in spite of himself in this one?) and a look that isn't quite like anything you've ever seen before, yet hearkening back to the best fantasy films of the 40's, 30's, 20's and before, it's quite a pleasure to absorb for oneself on the biggest screen you can find.

Per Travis Bickle, yes, I'm talkin' to you.

The Incredible Shrinking Rick Perry

Not only has he been displaced as a leading candidate for the GOP Presidential nomination by Herman Cain, he's getting less than lackluster reviews for his debate performance and has topped it off post-debate by forgetting in which century we had our Revolutionary War.

Off by two.

Working Help

The movie version of The Help, so to speak, works, which is both surprise and a relief. It's the best kind of Hollywood common reader movie, a.k.a. "middlebrow" entertainment designed to enlighten as well as, ultimately, uplift and delight. In the tradition's best movies -- say, The Best Years of Our Lives, To Kill a Mockingbird, there's enough complexity that we accept the movie as a truthful reflection of a problematic real world era.

We accept the flattening of historical complexities into good guys and bad guys in return for the superior performances of actors like Viola Davis, who holds the movie together as focused voice and biggest journey, the journey of self-respect that was the foundation of the Civil Rights Era and resonates in the ongoing struggle today.

While being fairly labelled as Civil Rights light, it's effective in bringing painful questions back, including what led up to the era.

Slavery, America's original sin, was about the complete denial of a human being's identity, the person as property, that identity to be bought and sold no matter how many times it breaks up a slave family. The uneasy truce that followed the Civil War for 100 years was essentially a recodification of the old system, with personhood still denied by an epithet, by the devilish nerve to kidnap young men and women in the night and hang them from trees.

The biggest historical news moment in The Help is the shooting of African-American rights activist, Medger Evers, happening in the very town of Jackson where the movie's set. Considering the tripling of death threats against the President when Obama took office, there's something palpable about the film for our time, a safe place to think about a time when America was not as fair, in law or custom, as it is now. As the film has a comedic heart, its irony is more ultimately more positive than negative, but it's an emotional experience throughout, in large part due to the exemplary cast of women.

Viola Davis' Abiline is given the main voice, not Emma Stone's Skeeter although the trailer would have you fooled into thinking it's all through the white chick's eyes. Davis, 41, has won two Tony's and was nominated for an Oscar for Doubt, so I think the only question is whether she gets nominated in the Best Actress category or the more likely chance of dominating as Supporting Actress. There's an argument to be made that it's an ensemble piece, but you can't submit Stone as Best Actress without betraying the story. I haven't read the book, but saw that it uses three voices -- Abiline, Skeeter and Minny -- which the filmmakers wisely consolidated into Abiline.

Davis is the lead, with Stone close behind and the terrific Octavia Spencer as the rebel, Minny. I loved seeing Jessica Chastain playing the opposite of her idealized mother figure in The Tree of Life, Allison Janney is great as Skeeter's mom, Sissy Spacek and Cicely Tyson are welcome anchors at the senior end, and Stone does come out of this a leading lady who can act, is naturally attractive in an interestingly non-bombshell way, and may just be the current smart it girl of her young generation.

I don't want to post the trailer because it's both misleading and spoiler-filled. Just trust me that you don't have to feel guilty going to see it. Even white Liberal guilt.

Someday, it'll probably be a musical.

Another Masterpiece

The Tree of Life is the rare movie you come out of feeling wiser than you went in. I saw it on a fairly large screen, sitting relatively close and low, which worked as much of the movie is shot at kid's eye level as fits the main story, Terrence Malick's autobiographical memory film of growing up with two younger brothers under a domineering father (Brad Pitt, just note perfect throughout, a role for which he'll be remembered) and angelic but subservient mother (Jessica Chastain, luminous) in smalltown Waco, TX in the 1950's. The viewing angle also fit the swirling uber-modern city sequences with Sean Penn as the boy grown up, a successful architect, in spiritual crisis remembering the time and then projecting into some heavenly plane.

And it was fitting for the extraordinary beginning of time sequence, taking us from big bang through dinosaurs, their extinction by asteroid, putting every one of our lifespans in epic historical perspective, as it does the young life that's lost off-screen and off in time.

With a liquidity in the editing that flows backwards and forwards in time, eschewing dialogue in favor of voices drifting in and out, an idyll that asks the deeper questions and begs to be experienced on as big a screen as possible, Malick takes us on a dream journey that feels more bracingly real and natural than anything I can imagine onscreen from recent years. Maybe long passages of Gus Van Sant's Elephant, maybe Malick's last movie, the all-too-overlooked The New World which gave us the origin of our nation, America. It plays like the movie Malick's been working towards ever since Badland back in 1973, at once his most personal and most courageous.

While I've heard quibbles about the end, which were actual boos from one section of a balcony at Cannes, I can't fault Malick for how he tries to wrap things up. I'm left reflecting, haunted by the evocation of a time very close to my youth, just a few years before and in an era when change was not yet fully bubbling, nothing like the lighting lifestyles of today. A time when a young boy could reflect on his place in the world by a stream, running out unlocked screen doors, into the street, by the abandoned house with the windows begging to be smashed, at a dinner table where the wrong word could provoke an awesome wrath.

Not a plot movie, not even really a character movie, more of a time and space movie, a 2001 with an earthly setting and a flickering light. Maybe not for everybody, but it will be known and seen and seen again, because it is truly art and it is truly provocative -- not by violence or shock, but to the spirit.

Malick's next movie is reportedly a romantic story, and one can reasonably hope that by putting so much of what he's wanted to say for so long in The Tree of Life, he'll have a cleansed palate and give us something we truly never expected from him.

But I'll bet one thing: the movie won't unfold in a way that anyone cab anticipate.

Not this artist.