Maya of Arabia

What's bugging me about the Zero Dark Thirty controversy is how it has blocked any discussion of the movie's place in film history.  I'm not sure if this is the result of sexism, as if Kathryn Bigelow wouldn't be thinking in those terms, or just political sensitivities (my friends to the left are the ones condemning the film by comparing it to the work of Leni Riefenstahl - an incredibly sexist comparison) but when looked at within the context of Hollywood genre's, ZDT is the increasingly rare beast of an historical epic, at a time when every so-called-epic from Hollywood is a science fiction or superhero story.  The last great historical epic was, of course, Titanic, interestingly enough made by Bigelow's former husband.

Where ZDT fits is as the bookend to Lawrence of Arabia.  Each movie deals with the West's involvement with Middle Eastern politics, one from the start in the 20th Century, the other for the 21st.  Back then it's one British officer struggling through the desert, now it's batteries of U.S. soldiers flying in and out with impunity, but it both cases there's the sense of "other," that the West can never, no matter how embedded, truly understand or have a place in the desert worlds.  The threats to Maya's life are essentially urban - an assassination attempt rather than dying of thirst - but there's watching still the lone figure coming from a great distance (a fateful car rather than Omar Sharif), the hero putting on the local headgear to operate in the area, the lonely military outposts in a hostile land.

The question isn't whether the movie endorses torture, it's "Where do you want to go?" which Chastain outed on The Daily Show as the existential last line of the movie.  In Lawrence, a man is driven insane by his immersion into this Middle Eastern world.  In ZDT it's a nation (with Maya as the metaphor).  Lawrence posits that his Western influence helped create the desert nations.  ZDT asks if and how we want to be engaged with these very same nations - if, in another twist on the same theme in Lawrence, there a brutalization like torture involved.

ZDT's immediacy is blinding the arguers to the true nature (and greatness) of this movie.  Sorry, Bigelow and Boal didn't wait thirty years to tell this huge story.  They were brave enough -- and smart enough -- to tell a nine-year epic tale just moments after it concluded.

Political Actors

Janeane from Des Moines is an unusually and cutting new movie that essentially pulls a Borat on the GOP contenders for President in run-up to the 2012 Iowa Caucuses.  It opens with a clip from ABC News where Diane Sawyer introduces footage of a desperate and emotional Iowa housewife named Janeane Wilson begging candidate Mitt Romney to "save small families" because they are falling apart.  The rest of the movie tells the story leading up to this moment, as we watch Janeane, a religious conservative Republican simultaneously going to candidate events to decide how to cast her vote and trying to keep her personal life from falling to pieces.

The secret is that Janeane Wilson is actually Jane Edith Wilson, a highly-talented Los Angeles-based actress who grew up in Ames, Iowa, and who fearlessly plays this character and takes her straight into the belly of America's political beast, sitting down in a diner with Rep. Michelle Bachmann and Rep. Steve King, questioning Gov. Rick Perry's wife on her way to the campaign bus, lobbing questions to Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich on the campaign trail.  Off the trail, "Janeane" faces her husband's layoff and their subsequent loss of health insurance, her alienation from her grown children, the potential loss of her house and a serious threat to her own health.

All of this done with a straight face, no winks, the only clues to the deception being the end credits which lists both actors/roles and politicians playing "Himself" or "Herself."  Knowing that the politicians have been duped by Janeane creates an initial feeling that the enterprise might be unfair.  It's a grueling road through Iowa, pressing the flesh and trying to master retail politics.  But as Director Grace Lee had said, the politicians are themselves all acting.  When Bachmann attempts to pander to Janeane by blaming President Obama for the rise in tax prices we see that moment when Bachmann looks to King for affirmation of her contention, not sure if she should run with the lie or not.  She does.

The main question Janeane ends up asking all the candidates regards healthcare, and the GOP candidates give her nothing to go on, just platitudes about health savings accounts (not a solution for the laid-off) and lowering costs (which Obamacare attempts to address).  What Janeane learns is that Planned Parenthood, which she's disparaged as a death-factory, is her provider of last resort, and the Obamacare the candidates want to kill is actually the solution.  This may be the first feature film where Obamacare is kinda the hero.

As a friend of Grace Lee and family, I may be biased in favor of her sensibility by familiarity, but from what I hope is an objective filmmaking point-of-view, I think she's created something new.  It's a combination of documentary, mockumentary, drama and agitprop, all executed with technical skill and beauty.  When seen in the context of Lee's previous features, both The Grace Lee Project, a very funny documentary investigating the proliferation of Asian-American women sharing her name, and American Zombie, a metaphoric mockumentary standing up for zombie rights, Janeane for Des Moines is essentially an essay on "What's the Matter with Kansas?"  Why do conservative Middle Americans vote against their own economic self-interest and well-being?

While the passing of the recent election is probably not doing a ton of favors for Janeane's shelf-life, and already the 2012 GOP candidates feel like characters trapped in a time capsule as the media discusses potential 2016 candidates like Rubio, Christie and the younger Paul, conservative Middle America hasn't suddenly vanished with the reelection of their Antichrist, President Barack Obama.  This movie will remain relevant and cautionary.

Unless or until, of course, the Affordable Care Act becomes a part of everyday life and the benefits are felt by all.

Titanic Raised

Maybe I was too harsh back in 1997, teed off at James Cameron's ferocious ego and the success of the picture. Maybe the new 3D -- and IMAX, in which I saw it -- has added a layer of depth that's actually psychological in nature. Maybe it's just that no one has spent that kind of money successfully making a huge epic Hollywood movie that isn't a science fiction or superhero movie since then.

No matter what it is, I found Titanic to be a revelation in re-release when viewing it yesterday.

It's long and towards the end it may seem to drag a little, but the movie is the full meal, something so rare these days. It has touches of David Lean in scale, John Ford in Irish spirit and Stanley Kubrick in technical audacity. It not only holds up very, very well, but it puts current movies to shame. When you look at Academy Award Best Picture winners of the past several years -- The Artist, The King's Speech, The Hurt Locker -- good as they may be, none is in the same category of majesty. Cameron may have made the last great Hollywood epic the way they used to make 'em. Except bigger.

Here's the joys:

• The Actors: Not only are Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio completely believable together in the movie, but both have used their fame wisely since, moving on to artistically significant careers. DiCaprio has become Martin Scorsese's first new muse since Robert De Niro, and Kate Winslet has won an Oscar and an Emmy, notably for her fine turn as Mildred Pierce.
  
  
• The Historical Detail: Cameron did a fine job of weaving history and fiction, from the knowing touches regarding John Jacob Astor to a simple scene with a young boy playing with an old-fashioned wooden top on the deck. Like the best historical fiction, fidelity to these real-like details make the made-up story palatable, and Cameron was no slouch, particularly with regard to how each of the two men responsible for building the ship made different choices when their masterpiece was going down.
  
  
• The Shooting Style: My greatest pet peeve is the over-cut movie (i.e. Michael Bay), made more egregious when combined with handheld camerawork (from what I have heard, The Hunger Games). Both are generally for the lazy director who can't visualize in advance, just wants endless "choices" in the cutting room and hence shoots coverage rather than masterful shots, or tries to create energy from shaking the camera like an episode of NYPD Blue. Sometimes this is justified as "documentary style." But if I want to see a documentary, I'll see one; when I go to see a big budget feature, I expect artfulness.
  
  
• The Present-Day Wraparound Story: By this is should say, The Sense of Time's Passage. While the teenage girls who enjoyed repeat viewings may have pined most for Rose and Jack in the past, it's the moment when the aged Rose, played so well by Gloria Stuart, sees the drawing of herself on television and ignites the plot that choked me up. Maybe it's being a decade and a half older than when I first saw the picture, but it is rather glorious in how it captures the painful shades of history as we each live it, the massive tragic scope of human existence, defined for every one of us by birth and death, and for those of us who live long enough to experience it, those lost times gone by. And how about that footage of the real-life decayed Titanic itself? Amazing.
  
  
• The Class Consciousness: Like the best novels and, yes, movies, Titanic, shows all walks of life, from First Class to Steerage, and is clearly conscious in depicting the caging of the lower class by those working for the upper class as the lower decks fill with water and the lifeboats fill with the wealthy. The sense of class is felt in the engine rooms as well, where strong men toil in the furnace-like heat -- and are the first to drown after the iceberg is hit.
  
  
• The Sinking: It's spectacular. I can't think of another movie that has done such a great job devoting such massive resources to recreating a true-life, real-time disaster. In a sense, the sinking of the Titanic was made for the cinema. With the brilliant juxtaposition of the tender lover story comes the almost unbearably ominous and terrifying sinking of the luxury liner. I had forgotten how intense it is -- my nine-year-old had to leave the theater for a few minutes. What freaked him out the most was when Jack was handcuffed to the pipe as the lower deck around him vacated and the water rose. My favorite shots are when the stern goes perpendicular to the ocean and people start to fall, but what's so striking now after 9/11 is watching some passengers choose to jump from the insane heights, so many dropping to their deaths, one we see hitting the water and not coming up.
  
  
• The 3D: I've seen less than half-a-dozen movies in 3D that were at all memorable for that reason, including Kiss Me Kate, Avatar and, best to date, Hugo. Creating 3D effects after a movie is shot with 2D cameras is a much maligned process, by Cameron himself, usually creating a "cut-out" effect that doesn't happen when you shoot with 3D cameras. Well, Cameron must have supervised every frame, because this 3D transformation is gorgeous. It's not overdone but draws you it, less clearly important in the action scenes than in the dramatic ones, and (in our screening) without any obvious loss of luminosity. The worst thing about 3D is how it darkens the image, but this one seemed just as bright and vibrant as you'd want from a movie. Maybe the IMAX projection helps. It just feels very justified, and gives a good reason to return to the theater to see the movie.

Ultimately, it's a successful marrying of scale and human story, for all the reasons listed above. The spectacle never overwhelms the actors. In fact, like the best old Hollywood movies, each of the two leads gets a brilliant reveal for their entrance -- Winslet under her grand chapeau, DiCaprio from the back in his fateful poker game, both with the camera moving just so to give them power within the frame. And when they look into each others eyes, when they talk to each other, unlike so many failed big-budget pairings, they seem to actually be listening and reacting to each other.

I'm sure in a more picky mood I'd find the flaws. But to me the scene that will always endear me to the movie is when DiCaprio, having saved Winslet's life when they met, is invited to dine with her party in First Class, handles the dinner with aplomb. As I always tell me kids, learn your manners and you can dine with kings and queens. My favorite line maybe sums up how I feel about life at it's best: "Just the other night I was sleeping under a bridge and now here I am on the grandest ship in the world having champagne with you fine people."

Consider Titanic raised by this 3D release and, for some of us, rehabilitated.

Palinstein

About three-quarters into the great HBO movie, Game Change, I realized what genre the director Jay Roach and screenwriter Danny Strong were playing with. Sure, it's a great political genre movie, up there with their 2008 triumph, Recount, which did great service to the 2000 Florida recount battle which led to George W. Bush becoming President without winning the popular vote (and subsequently led to the debacle in Iraq, the crash of the economy that plays a part in this new movie and, now, the massive GOP amnesia about the eight years they controlled the Executive branch of our government). But it's something more: Game Change is a monster movie.

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The monster is, of course, 2 1/2 year Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Not only does the movie recreate her origin story as a force of hate-pandering and resentment reinforcing on the national stage, but it does a terrifying job of treating her as both representative and contributing cause to the nightmarish Republican Primary of 2012, as reactionary as any in national political memory. The fact that Willard Mitt Romney, a supposed moderate and former Governor of the generally Liberal state of Massachusetts, has veered psychotically Right trying to outflank and outpander his highly Conservative opponents, the fact that this very week past he was incapable of summoning the courage to strongly vilify Rush Limbaugh for his misogynistic smearing of citizen Sandra Fluke, proves that whatever prairie fire Sarah Palin ignited in 2008 has yet to burn out.

The progression is like something out of a 1950's sci-fi movie, only instead of an unknown virus reeled in by inquisitive scientists, it's an unknown, unveiled GOP Governor from the most remote state in the Union. Coming from the coldest state as well, it hearkens back to The Thing. She's let in through all decontamination barriers almost by accident to positive fanfare, sparking all sorts of activity including massive investment (here a rush of small-donor campaign contributions), then she begins to falter, unable to adapt to this unfamiliar environment.

But have no fear (or, rather, have dread), because like Frankenstein's monster and most others, it has the ability to learn. Palin studies the television coverage as it goes from ridiculing her to reveling in her speaking power, and she goes through a classic movie-monster chrysalis stage. In the middle of the movie Palin (played to genius perfection by Julianne Moore, ditto Ed Harris as John McCain and, carrying the main story with ease, Woody Harrelson as campaign chief Steve Schmidt) goes silent. She doesn't respond to her handlers, sinks into funks, rattles around on her Blackberry, essentially seems to fall into some sort of catatonic state that ends up feeling more like gestational hibernation.

When she emerges she's unstoppable. She can't be controlled by the campaign, takes on her signature disregard for the truth (and outright lying), whips up crowds with various degrees of hate speech and gets that scary Palin gleam in her eye. The movie doesn't hit it too hard -- it's a smart piece of work -- but it's that gleam that haunts.

In the framing device, Steve Schmidt (Harrelson) is interviewed by Anderson Cooper, and it's clear the scientist no longer has any control over the monster, just a wary, chastened point of view he didn't have at the beginning. To Schmidt's credit, he was just as penitent on The Morning Joe Show this a.m. Unlike the party of Romney, Santorum, Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann, Cain, etc. etc. he's emerged as a man of honor. His party could use more of his type of candor and reality.

On the other hand, Palin is still in the celebrity politics business, the recidivist Tea Party will celebrate it's fourth anniversary this year, and 52% of Mississippi Republicans think President Obama is a Muslim.

There you have the bigger monster: the GOP electoral base.

Almost Surprise-less

I started this blog six years ago on another Oscar night, when Crash won Best Picture, surprising some who thought Brokeback Mountain had it in the bag. So without any further adieu, here's my notes on tonights Academy Awards.

If there were any surprises at this year's Oscar ceremony, they were:

(1) The Artist did not sweep all it's nominated categories, losing a number to Hugo (while retaining the big ones)

(2) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo won two of it's categories, in both Film and Sound Editing, not too shabby

(3) While not a 100% surprise, I think after the SAG Award win by Viola Davis for Best Female Actor (The Help) there was some expectation that this fine actress would finally be rewarded with Oscar gold, especially since her movie has a Best Picture nomination and that of the victor did not. However, Meryl Streep finally won again 30 years after her previous win for Sophie's Choice and I think it was due to five factors.

• Most importantly, she played a significant historical figure convincingly and aged tremendously in the role as well. That's pretty much a recipe for an acting Oscar.

• Second, the 17 nominations have been touted heavily this year, pushed by producer Harvey Weinstein and his p.r. machine, so it's a bit of a career award as well.

• Third, The Help has taken some hits from the left tarred as being too Civil Right-light. I think this is unfair considering how Hollywood traditionally makes serious "issue" movies, but it could not have helped.

• Fourth, some thought Viola Davis' role was not large enough to be Best Female Actor and more of a supporting role, although that view is really only supported by the trailer for the movie, which over-emphasizes Emma Stone's crusading white girl character, while the movie is clearly Viola's story in the main plot, giving her the V.O., the beginning and the end.

• Finally, the Academy is generally old, male and white...and Meryl is a lot closer to their demographic than Viola. One can only hope her .

At this point I find it hard to get up in arms about any Oscar slights. My three favorite films of last year, in rough order, were:

1. The Tree of Life
2. Shame
3. Bridesmaids

So there were a few nominations in the bunch, but no wins. But I still got to enjoy these movies and I expect to see them again long before I rematch The Artist, which I did enjoy, albeit not at the same level as these three.

As the director and lead actor of The Artist (both Oscar winners tonight) might say:

C'est la vie.

UberBond

My kind of art project: about James Bond:

That's right, the first minute of 22 Bond movies.

It's like an animated flag.

Split Decision

The 69th Annual Golden Globes were held tonight in Los Angeles and in an odd year that's produced a number of very good films and great performances without producing an obvious frontrunner for the big Oscar crown (although The Artist has had that buzz for awhile), the Hollywood Foreign Press delivered a rather tantalizing split decision.

In my mind, the eventual Oscar for Best Picture could go to The Artist, The Help, The Descendants or Hugo. For awhile -- before it was released -- there was a general feeling that Steven Spielberg's The War Horse was built for the prize, but it's not had the reviews, word of mouth or box office needed to make that a reality, and recently was left off of some key guild award lists.

For the record, here's the top-tier award winners tonight:

• Best Motion Picture — Drama: “The Descendants”
• Best Motion Picture — Comedy or Musical: “The Artist”
• Best Director — Motion Picture: Martin Scorsese, “Hugo”
• Best Actress — Drama: Meryl Streep, “The Iron Lady”
• Best Actor — Drama: George Clooney, “The Descendants”
• Best Actress — Comedy or Musical: Michelle Williams, “My Week With Marilyn”
• Best Actor — Comedy or musical: Jean Dujardin, “The Artist
• Best Supporting Actress: Octavia Spencer, “The Help”
• Best Supporting Actor: Christopher Plummer, “Beginners”
• Best Screenplay: Woody Allen, “Midnight in Paris”

Is The Descendants the timeless classic its producer thought it was in his speech tonight? Is Harvey Weinstein unstoppable this year with The Artist, a crowd-pleaser, if not doing Descendants type box office? Can Martin Scorsese's Hugo, also with the weaker box office, sneak in there (it really feels like a classic) and take the prize?

Then there's The Help. Classic Hollywood middlebrow take on an important historical moment, filled with fine performances and a rare female-dominated cast for a picture this size. Could Viola Davis break past Meryl Streep and Michelle Williams in their pitch-perfect historical recreations and, with Octavia Spencer looking like a frontrunner now for Best Supporting, lead the team to victory, even without a Best Director nomination?

Which one is that most compelling combination of spectacle and sentiment that makes a "Most Picture?"

All the Way

Shame is the best art movie I've seen since Exit Through the Gift Shop, but a lot more minimalist. It's a film by director Steve McQueen, originally an installation artist in England, who's got a tremendous eye and a way with getting actors to commit. His first movie, which I did not see, similarly starred Irish/German actor Michael Fassbender (Magneto!) and had a one-word title, Hunger, with Fassbender as real life figure Bobby Sands, Irish nationalist who died on hunger strike in a British prison. That one looked too grueling to me. This one has a lot of nudity without the emaciation.

Brandon lives in NYC and has a super power: his gaze. Without seeming to do anything but focus his attention, his unwavering gaze, on a pretty young woman on the subway train, he can charge her erotically, to the point where her arousal turns into shame, and a chase, a predator and object of desire.

We see him, intercut with the subway as it all starts, getting out of bed and walking through his stark, stylish NYC apartment after having had sex, his shoulder's broad, penis flopping, long shot where we can see his bare feet to patterning hairline, shadowy figure emphasizing the feral. Sex is, after all, what we have in common with the beasts. Brandon the beast, as are all the other bodies he couples with, seen in beautiful silhouettes and appreciation for human form, in extended take foreplay-to-coitis, in fast-cut electroshock reaction to tortured moments of real human feeling.

Brandon is, as they're treating the movie in PR, a sex addict, and while the movie takes that seriously as a heart attack, this is no after school special. In fact, the question of whether Brandon has learned anything is open to the last frame, and I think it's meant for us to go deep in ourselves, what we believe is possible about our own capability to break out of those mechanisms we use to block feeling because, as the movie makes clear in both elliptical and visceral ways, feeling so often is about pain.

So this (incredibly well built and well-hung) sex addict (in a successful job) in Sexhattan is seducing or buying or onlining it every free moment, even in the stall at work. He seems to assume he's covering his tracks well enough, or maybe not being seen unless he so wills it, but when his sister, Sissy, comes to town, everything starts falling apart, and Brandon's addiction is exposed at work and to her.

McQueen's eye is brilliant, with surfaces reminiscent of Michael Mann's great L.A. version in Heat, but much more in mastershots, often one long Steadicam or static take with actors improvising dialogue, or sex, almost like a cinematic play, unfolding unbroken, in real time before us.

There's man times when it's reminiscent of Antonioni, where the architecture of the modern city traps the characters in defined spaces, or dwarfs them, trapped and alienated, from their own souls. There's a bravura tracking shot, something like ten blocks of jogging at night in the city, ending up at 32rd & Madison Square Garden and a broken sign that shows the lengths our addict is going to escape his shame. But as we all know, New York City is at all times the city of where fornication never sleeps.

James Badge Dale is very different than he's been in that I've seen before, playing Brandon's married hound dog boss, Nicole Beharie makes a huge impression as an office fling, as does Lucy Walters on the subway in a what's essentially a silent film performance. All the actors seem completely natural to the world, noir, distanced, darkly glamorous, almost sci-fi noir. And, yes, they're great to look at.

Fassbender carries every scene, so completely committed to every revealing inch of the role, running a slow burn gamut that leads him all the way down to hell. Several times in the movie he hangs his head (in shame, of course) so low that, shot from behind, he appears to be the headless man. Man lowered below the beast, because he knows of his sin.

But it's Carrie Mulligan who breaks out completely in this. As Sissy, the ne'er-do-well sister just looking for love and shelter but getting ditched and burned at every turn, nowhere in sight is that prim core that's even in her character in Drive, let alone An Education. She there's naked, flawed, the most human thing in the movie. She sings an almost unbearably slowed down version of "New York, New York," revealing a hell of a voice and holding an infinite close-up, her eyes breaking our hearts, and her brother's.

What is it they share? What has caused him to run away from even her, and her to run to everyone? It's only obliquely referenced, just enough of a hint, but you can use your imagination. There's an element of horror Shame, that thing that at times makes it closer to Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom than Last Tango in Paris, that the past hints at and the present dreads.

Because Shame equals loneliness, and loneliness is it's own shame. A cycle of love and pain. Shame, as my mother liked to say, one of the great twin gifts that a parent gives a child.

The other being guilt.

The Really Important Race

New Hampshire was a foregone conclusion -- how about this year's Academy Award for Best Picture, as often predicted by the Director's Guild of America nominations? Announced today, this year's DGA nominees, per Sasha Stone:

WOODY ALLEN
Midnight in Paris
(Sony Pictures Classics)

DAVID FINCHER
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
(Columbia Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures)

MICHEL HAZANAVICIUS
The Artist
(The Weinstein Company)

ALEXANDER PAYNE
The Descendants
(Fox Searchlight Pictures)

MARTIN SCORSESE
Hugo
(Paramount Pictures)

The semi-surprise here is Woody Allen and the big surprise is David Fincher, with the first in a pulpy trilogy, and not the first version either. The other surprise is that Steven Spielberg's work on The War Horse didn't score a nomination, even though (far afar, admittedly) it appears built to win awards.

Can The Artist really win Best Picture? Wonderfully clever and evocative, I feel like it's a bit too much of a novelty film. Midnight in Paris and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would be surprises to me as well.

Unless The Help can sneak in (a safe and respectable compromise candidate) my gut tells me it comes down to The Descendants vs. Hugo. The Descendants does not play as well with older audiences (i.e., a disproportionate segment of the AMPAS membership), but it's the most straightforward of the potential winners. A coming of age for director Alexander Payne. But is it too indy? Is it Billy Wilder enough?

It hasn't been a horrible year for pictures. There's some really good, entertaining, interesting work. My pick would be The Tree of Life, but the DGA snub for Terrence Malick means it's too esoteric to win the crowning prize. But it's not a year that's produced a clear Best Picture to fight about.

I've been saying for awhile that Hugo is the stealth candidate to win. It's big and moving and about movies even closer to the beginning than The Artist, a much deeper, richer historical value. And it could, justifiably, be the first 3D movie to win.

Don't be surprised if Georges Méliès (1861-1938) comes out on top.

A Coupla Flicks

Happy 2012. I'll open the year by mentioning two movies I've seen over the past week that were both terrific experiences, for wildly different reasons: The Descendants and Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (a.k.a. MI:4).

The former was made for a fraction of the cost of the latter and features, to my eye, zero special effects. It's what should be a small movie by today's standards but it feels big, due to the Hawaii locale, some key shots of some very important (to the plot) land in Kauai, and the care with which the moments unfold. All that, and George Clooney.

It's interesting to me who loves and does not love the movie. Although it's the closest thing to a traditional drama (or maybe "dramady") amongst the movies I've seen this year, none of the senior citizens I've spoken with about it really cared for it. Also, it's not as impressive on a screener as it is in the theater, as it's all about small significant moments, detailed expressions, the communal theatrical experience pays off with different audience members picking up different touches at different times, laughter building, shared sympathy during the tougher moments.

I took my 12-year-old, who's growing more sophisticated in his movie tastes, and we both enjoyed it, and both had the same favorite character: Sid. He's a guy who tags along with Clooney and his daughters as they go to hunt down the man who Clooney's learned has been sleeping with his comatose wife prior to her life-threatening jet-ski accident. Sid is an iconic laid-back Hawaiian surfer dude, always smiling, always on his own stoner wavelength, with some of the best lines in the movie and a little secret of his own. Everyone seems to agree that it's great to see Beau Bridges again, as Cousin Hugh, a lynchpin of he plot/sub-plot convergence around a land deal that Clooney and family are being forced to make due to changes in Hawaiian property law.

As for Tom Cruise and company, SEE IT IN IMAX. There's nothing like climbing the side of the world's tallest building, in Dubai, with special agent Ethan Hunt and a gigantic floor-to-ceiling screen. The key stunt sequence was actually performed by Cruise in the location, no joke, and it feels different than a CGI greenscreen fest.

I've seen MI:1 (directed by Brian DePalma) and MI:2 (a rather neutered John Woo) but missed MI:3 (J.J. Abrams). I found the first one to have exciting moments and an interesting false-flashback twist, with the opening credits, a suspended Cruise scene and the climactic helicopter-in-Chunnel sequence being the best parts, but the second one did not even feel like a Mission: Impossible story -- there was virtually no teamwork, lynchpin of the weekly series. Aside from Thandie Newton, not much to recommend it. This one appears to be the big winner of the series.

What makes the new one work is the emphasis on teamwork (it's even underlined at the end), great casting of Simon Pegg and Jeremy Renner and, thank the cinema gods, the inspired choice of Brad Bird as director. This is Bird's first live-action feature, but he made my favorite (hands-down) Pixar movie, The Incredibles, which recalled and spoofed 1960's James Bond-style spy thrillers as much as superhero tropes. Unlike some action directors, Bird doesn't over-cut the exciting stuff. As I'd say for David Fincher, the camera is always in the right place. There are touches that seem to be his, like a fluttering glove stuck to the side of the Dubai building, Ethan tossing a tip on a table, little things that make it more fun and more real.

While I can't claim to be an expert in this movie series, what struck me was that, as in all good adventure movies, the best laid plans go awry and inspired improvisation has to save the day. What feels different about this one is the understanding that cutting edge technology will almost always have kinks -- it comes with the territory, no room for grousing, just try and move on. It starts with a Russian pay phone that delivers the mission message to Hunt but doesn't self-destruct on time until Hunt gives it a smack and includes loss of wireless signals, botched mask-making, trying to do a retinal scan on the side of a moving train.

This is essential the Silicon Valley experience, something Bird is close to due to his time up in NoCal at Pixar. As a colleague of mine once said, "It's not cutting edge software unless it crashes."

That spirit gives the movie it's moxie. And the IMAX chase through a desert sandstorm doesn't hurt either.

Here's to more good flicks -- along with more aggravating politics -- in 2012. Thanks for reading in 2011, and I hope you'll keep returning to Nettertainment to ride it out, as long as I'm posting.

PS: They finally caught Omar!

The Girl with the James Bond Tattoo

It's movie season and I've seen a few over the past week, mainly good stuff. The one I was most itching to see was the adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, directed by David Fincher and screenwritten by Steven Zaillian. I've read the three books, I think about 1800pp. altogether, and saw the first of the Swedish film versions, so I've spent a whole lot of time with Lisbeth Salander (as well as Mikael Blomqvist) and have to admire the extreme high quality work in the new one. I have to admit to getting a wee bit emotional when Lisbeth first showed up and when Blomqvist finally learned of her existence -- having investigated him.

She's that powerful a character, a female James Bond for our 99% Century, the best new detective since Ian Fleming introduced Bond in 1953 (original, compelling, timely, slightly feral, attractive). The books are written in a similar style to Fleming's, third person but always very close to the characters' thoughts, with detail on the type of liquor/coffee they drink, how the meals effected them, and then of course the big action-fueling plots.

This is David Fincher's Bond movie, beautifully composed for the big screen while moving with stylish velocity, featuring a teaser followed by a main titles sequence that is just like those in the Bond series, just cranked to 11 (or 12) by Trent Reznor's supersonic cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" and the speedy dark-side animation. He even has Daniel Craig starring in it, the best Bond since Sean Connery. It's the best Bond flick since Craig's Casino Royale, which is the best Bond flick since Thunderball.

Craig, Christopher Plummer, Stellen Skarsgard and the rest of the cast is great -- Robin Wright, in particular, seems to have come into her own lately, including her work in Moneyball and guest spot on Enlightened. And while I don't think Noomi Rapace will ever be effaced for how she originated the role, in actual Swedish, Rooney Mara successfully crosses the rubicon as a legit Lisbeth. Her chemistry with Craig works, and she certainly commits physically to the role. We need to be at least a little afraid of Lisbeth and she may be a little tougher than Rapace, if lacking the touch of Asiatic that seems to make Rapace one with the dragon up and down her back.

The six hundred pages are well-compressed, making some of the same decisions as the Swedish movie but really zipping through the exposition of solving the case as well as climaxing the set-up B plot. Per the structure of the book, unique in the series as the others have no Agatha Christie-type plot, but instead focus on Lisbeth's story, the movie runs about fifteen minutes longer than most due to the "prologue" plot that's needed to set up the main characters prior to tackling this particular murder mystery. The couple slight changes to the ending were fine, and one can only hope Fincher decides to do the next two.

Will he?

Filmography 2011

An annual ritual now:

Congrats to Genrock for the edit and here's the list of what's in it.

He Just Can't Quit It

Hilarious responses to Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry's instant-classic gaybaiting ad, essentially a storm of "Dislikes" on YouTube (heading towards 300,000 Dislikes vs. 6,000 Likes as I write this) and also inspiring a bit of research that is too good to be believed:

I guess he may not want gay soldiers to serve openly and honestly in the military, but gets his fashion cues from Brokeback Mountain.

As Will Truman wrote this week, the 2012 GOP Presidential nomination process has entered an entirely new realm never seen before: satire. You couldn't write a clown show like this:

It occurred to me the other day as I was leaving a comment elsewhere: if someone had written a TV show and the plot followed the current Republican primary, I would have some serious problems with it. Namely, I would pan the show as unrealistic. A joke. Liberal Hollywood’s parody of what the Republican Party is. Herman Cain? Who the hell acts like that. There is no way that a party would seriously give a serial-adulturing, ideologically muddled, lobbying-compromised former House Leader a shot at the nomination. Hollywood couldn’t devise a more repugnant figure as the potential head of a party that they want noting to do with. The comparisons between Rick Perry and Rob Ritchie have, of course, frequently been made. But in some sense, Ritchie would seem downright normal compared to a lot of the candidates. And though the connection hasn’t been made, I see some similarities between Mitt Romney and Bob Russell, the simply unpalatable (to many) candidate who doesn’t belong there but is there because he’s there and his biography doesn’t entirely discount his presence.

Meanwhile, in the real world, a reporter who asks a stupid question echoing the GOP (especially Romney) canard that President Obama is somehow an appeaser of America's enemies, gotta love the smackdown from Mac Daddy Barack:

Yeah, ask Bin Laden. At the bottom of the deep blue sea. My prediction holds: the 2012 Obama landslide will best his 2008 win.

You read it here first.

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.

Bunch of Endings

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) announced his retirement from Congress today -- he won't be running again next year -- at age 71. This is a huge bummer legislatively, but hopefully he'll turn up on news commentary a lot more, especially as he promising not to become a lobbyist. Consistently the smartest and wittiest guy in the House, Frank was no different today:

[Barney Frank] on the House under Republican rule: “It consists half of people who think like Michele Bachmann and half of people who are afraid of losing a primary to people who think like Michele Bachmann and that leaves very little room to work things out.”

Goodbye to Ken Russell, legendary British film director known for his combination or erudition and over-the-top visuals. Classics include: Women in Love (Oscar for star Glenda Jackson), Altered States, Tommy, The Lair of the White Worm, The Devils. Who can ever forget Tina Turner as the Acid Queen?

Goodbye to pre-IPO Facebook, between April and June 2012. The stock options will never mean the same thing again, the innocence lost, time for quarterly analyst calls and big annual reports. Guaranteed to have more investors than anyone imagines.

Goodbye to 2000's European prosperity. And maybe the Euro.

And, as much as we all hope not, we may be saying hello to a new global depression.

Saul Bass

The Title Design of Saul Bass from Ian Albinson on Vimeo.

Evidently in honor of a new book coming out about the work of Main Titles designer extraordinaire, Saul Bass.

What's striking is how modern his work seems -- still. With most of his work created pre-CGI, it's shocking how visionary and vivid so much of it is. Vertigo, of course, is a favorite, along with Psycho which I recently saw in the theater again -- the opening credits with the Bernard Herrmann music really set you on edge from the start, give the sense that something really twisted is already underway. And the work for Otto Preminger as well as Martin Scorsese is ingenious.

Enjoy.

Moneygoodness

Moneyball is the best kind of throwback movie, one that feels completely new because it's tackling a subject that hasn't been done by a big movie before and it doesn't bobble the ball. It's a 1970's movie in tone, the kind of high end Robert Altman-type picture with long lenses, a quasi-documentary feel, but looking at great, unvarnished performances.

It feels very, very honest, not just for the naturalistic shooting style, but also because it's a true baseball movie, one of the rare true baseball movies, because it isn't about winning. Baseball, as anyone who really knows the game will tell you, is really about losing and how you handle that, how you tackle that, how you come back from that, and how it happens over and over again. No team in baseball is World Champion forever, no manager has a perfect record, and if you're successful only 1/3 of the time you get up to bat, you're the best player in the game most years.

Brad Pitt carried this project, this adaptation of Michael Lewis' book, from when Steven Soderbergh was going to direct it with a Steve Zaillian script to the current version directed by Bennett Miller (building nicely on his debut feature, Capote) with the Aaron Sorkin rewrite, and he was smart to do so. His Billy Beane, the major league draft who turned down a full Stanford scholarship to underperform all expectations as a player and sought redemption moving up the scouting ranks to General Manager of the then-hapless Oakland A's, is a great, driven, relatable movie character. We're with Pitt the whole way, infusing the leading role with character touches, an easy, flawed guy to root for, especially when he picks up Jonah Hill's Peter Brand character, based on a real-life Ivy League Economics Major who taught Beane the Bill James way of looking at evaluating players, capsizing the entire value proposition of the player salary game.

I'm sure this movie will work fine on a big TV with your Pay-Per-View, HBO, Academy Screener, whatever. It's not spectacularly filled with special effects. It doesn't rely on a throbbing soundtrack or familiar pop tune. It's all about character, story, and how we battle big to make good on regrets.

And it's a pleasure to be in a theater with Beane, Brand, Coach Art Howe and rest of the players. It's actually about something.

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.