Kill List

Directed by: Ben Wheatley
Written by: Ben Wheatley & Amy Jump
Full credits at IMDb

Ben Wheatley's cryptic, loose, gory, and discombobulating sophomore feature is part kitchen-sink drama, part hit-man buddy picture, and part pagan death-cult horror movie—as though the fellas from In Bruges wandered into a version of Wicker Man directed by Mike Leigh. It revolves around Jay (Neil Maskell), an out-of-work and rageoholic assassin-qua-family man, with a Danny Torrance-looking son and an embittered marriage. For half an hour, the trio's domestic dramas play out, but unsettling jump cuts and Jim Williams's unnerving Penderecki-esque score suggest something amiss beyond family strife. Then Jay gets a new job.

Not unlike Jacob's Ladder, the movie concerns former soldiers—in this case, UK Iraq War vets—inhabiting an increasingly surreal world of nocturnal visions and peculiar encounters.

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Moneyball

Directed by: Bennett Miller
Written by: Steve Zaillian & Aaron Sorkin
Full credits at IMDb

Moneyball is a story about baseball, which means it's a story about America, right? It's a redemption story, but more to the point an American Dream story, a practically Capraesque affirmation of America, though perhaps a bit more complex; Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) has the financial disadvantage as the general manager of the Oakland A's—they're the runts of capitalism, with one-third of the payroll of the Yankees—but he chips away at their hegemony through his determination and intelligence; or, at least, the smarts to employ and listen to people smarter than him (Jonah Hill). Strangely, Beane struck me as a Mitt Romney figure; his solution to solving baseball's "medieval thinking" sounded awfully Bain Capital-esque, making systems more efficient by breaking hoary shibboleths about prizing people over statistics. Moneyball sort of celebrates a profits (i.e. wins)-over-people approach. Although Beane also succeeds only when he becomes less like Romney (in affect if not ideology)—when he drops the cold and distant thing and connects with his players.

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Directed by: David Fincher
Written by: Steven Zaillian
Full credits at IMDb

There's a pretty plain moral simplicity here: Lisbeth becomes this absurd repository for all that's awful and abusive about how men treat women, the barbarity of this misogyny highlighted by the red-herring connection of the case she's investigating to Scandinavian Nazis. And if there's one thing the Academy loves, it's movies about the WWII-era Jewish experience, yeah? I think what's most damaging to this movie's Oscar chances is that it's lowbrow and artless, a pulpy streamlining of Steig Larsson's knotty, already artless plotting—efficient perhaps, but Oscarbait's gotta be more than summer fare with a prestige-season gloss; it's gotta make at least pretenses toward significance! And probably feature fewer car chases, eh?

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin at The L Magazine


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The Help

Written & Directed by: Tate Taylor
Full credits at IMDb

All black women are wonderful and all white women are terrible—except for those who went to college, that is! If I were a woman, I would have left the theater feeling so much better about myself, whether black or white. (Not as a man, though. The movie's tangential males are either horny, boorish, violent, casually misogynistic, casually racist, and/or uxorious lily-livers.) For any black women in the audience, they can identify, or at least sympathize, with the film's wise, quasi-magical black women: so put upon by society, but so strong, so courageous! For the whites, they can take comfort in the fact that the white people (like them!) aren't at all so, so, so racist and mean anymore. Good for you, white people! Well, except, aren't some women still treated similarly to the way those in The Help are? I mean, ok, state surgeon generals don't force Caribbean nannies to use separate bathrooms. But only a quarter of Park Slope nannies get paid overtime, for example, even though that's the very first right in New York state's recently adopted Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. What I mean is that I wish director Tate Taylor had acknowledged that there's still plenty of hired help all over America, and that though they're not treated monstrously, they can be treated less than ideally. Instead, he depicts it all as problems of the past since rectified. I also wish he hadn't portrayed black women as good because they're good mothers, and white women as bad because they're bad mothers. (Though he allows that unmarried women could go to college and become writers, so they can tell the stories of mothers.)

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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The Divide

Directed by: Xavier Gens
Written by: Karl Mueller & Eron Sheean
Full credits at IMDb

The heroes in Xavier Gens's The Divide don't simply stumble into some prefab horror-movie depravity. The French splattermeister doesn't take the conditions of a torture porn for granted: rather, his characters slowly fashion them—all it takes is nine normal New York neighbors locked in the superintendent's fallout shelter following a nuclear attack for a matter of weeks before shaved-hairless men are living beside the bound and battered corpse of their former sex slave, trying to rape the rest of the male and female survivors. The question is whether Gens's brutality and gore have a purpose. His breakthrough, 2007's Frontier(s), was so blatantly political that its politics were inconsequential, receding behind a pointless exercise in envelope-pushing degeneracy. But I don't think The Divide is so nihilistic, perhaps because the director is working from a script he didn't write.

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The Descendants

Directed by: Alexander Payne
Written by: Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash
Full credits at IMDb

One of the many, many things that irked me about this movie was that, despite some shallow trappings, it wasn't about Hawaii at all—it was merely set there; the archipelago's greatest functions were to provide an ironic counterpoint to the narrative's tribulations, and as weather for a comedy of casual dress. (Oh, and to allow Clooney to explain how "archipelago" is a metaphor for his family!) I got the sense that Hemmings' novel likely drew a sharp allegorical connection between Clooney's wife's death-state and Hawaiian history, but the screenwriters can hardly be bothered to establish it, despite that opening monologue and the retained title. Hey, maybe if there's a late-act speech or something it'll all become clear? But this failure just highlights a larger problem: the movie's lazy loyalty to its source material. Every year has such shit adaptations—last year, it was Never Let Me Go; the year before that, The Lovely Bones and The Time Traveler's Wife—that, in a misguided attempt to honor the original prose (usually through voice-over), spend too much time telling what should be shown, expend too much effort underlining what should be left implied—or, conversely, skipping over essential information in order to hit plot points. If Payne esteems Hemmings' book, he should have just reread it; this movie does nothing but demean it. (Unless it's bad, in which case he simply does it no favors.) The movie ends up structured as a series of meaningful conversations piled on top of each other—airings of grievances, comings to terms—that highlight the personal at the expense of any enriching, grander historical meaning, and give a lot of supporting actors (Robert Forster, Judy Greer) a chance to mug for Oscars...

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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The Iron Lady

Directed by: Phyllida Lloyd
Written by: Abi Morgan

The connection I made to J. Edgar was that both movies are about a mean and miserable old person looking to justify their poor choices—to vindicate themselves in the sure-to-be-unkind eyes of history. But those might just be my own anti-Thatcher biases at work. The movie actually seems pretty sympathetic to Lady Ironsides, which I would imagine has something to do with the unusual number of women involved in its production: director, writer, and superstar, ladies all. This is a movie about the experience of being a Western woman in the 20th century, trying to achieve more than your mother would have been allowed to, confronting and overcoming society's pervasive boy's club mentality. And the filmmakers kind of love Thatcher for everything she accomplished, as evidenced by her epic exit walk when she steps down as prime minister—in slow motion, to some Romantic aria, across a floor strewn with rose petals. Or how she totally doesn't die while washing that tea cup. The Iron Lady is more interested in the effects of her ambition on her family, a look at the loneliness that accompanies power—that sort of thing—than in the social effects of her policies, which are vaguely summed up by video images of people protesting...

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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The Best Films of 2011

I wrote up a Top 10 list for The L Magazine, which I slightly amended for its contributors' poll. Here's my ballot:

1. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
2. Drive
3. Cold Weather
4. Poetry
5. A Separation
6. Meek's Cutoff
7. Tuesday, After Christmas
8. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
9. In the Family
10. Silver Bullets
11. Putty Hill
12. Weekend
13. Pina
14. Carnage
15. The Trip
16. The Artist
17. Melancholia
18. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
19. Tree of Life
20. Hugo

Honorable mentions: Bellflower, Into Eternity

The Artist

Written & Directed by: Michel Hazanavicius
Full credits at IMDb

Talk about your escapist prestige seasons. Over the past few weeks, I haven't yet seen a 2012 Oscar contender set in the present day; I've hardly even seen one set in America. Scorsese chose to make a movie not only set far in the past, but also in Europe. The Europeans have also been focused on the past and on Europe, as in My Week with Marilyn, or the upcoming Iron Lady. France's The Artist is the apotheosis of this escapist trend: it's set in the 20s-30s, in Hollywood (escapist for French people), and it's not only black-and-white but silent—that's right, an honest-to-goodness silent movie, a sort of ode to the charm, physicality and romanticism of Chaplin. How much more distanced from unpleasant realities could you be? Though, the film more often references talkies of the 30s and 40s. It seemed more enamored of a different kind of Hollywood than the one it ostensibly celebrates; I saw a lot more direct "quotes" from Casablanca, Citizen Kane, The Broadway Melody of 1940 and, especially, The Thin Man than I did anything by Melies or Harold Lloyd.

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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A Separation

Written & Directed by: Asghar Farhadi
Full credits at IMDb

Have Iranian censors gotten sloppy? I suppose they might consider A Separation a straightforward domestic drama; it could certainly pass as one. But to these Western eyes, this shaky cam melodrama, this soap opera for sophisticates, is implicitly critical of its country, an indictment of systemic oppression. Yet it wasn't smuggled out of the country on a USB drive—it's Iran's official submission for the best foreign film Oscar...Farhadi avoids contriving heroes and villains: every character is sympathetic, stuck in some pitiable position, doing the wrong thing by trying to do what seems right for their families and selves. There are no bad guys; if the movie has a malevolent force, it's Iran itself.

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Hugo

Directed by: Martin Scorsese
Written by: John Logan

I'm surprised that Hugo has literary origins. It's such a tactile and mechanical film—it's so cinematic! Such an ode to the analog, the industrial, the mechanical—clocks, cranks, gears, trains, robots—so possessed of a nostalgia for all things pre-digital. So, though it tells the story of post-heyday Georges Melies, and restores appropriate awe and majesty to the works of the Lumieres, Edwin Porter, the silent comedians, the silent beauties, and of course Melies, I'd say it's less a love letter to cinema's origins than to its foundations: to light, legerdemain, and whirligigs. So isn't it funny then that some of the movie's most magical moments—the dance of the wind-up mouse, the epic train-crash nightmare, the jaw-dropping opening shot—are obviously achieved with the help of computers?

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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My Week with Marilyn

Directed by: Simon Curtis
Written by: Adrian Hodges
Full credits at IMDb

This sort of reminded me of The King's Speech. There's a scene in which production-assistant protagonist Colin takes Miss Monroe on a sight-seeing tour of England's grandest grounds and institutions while narrating their histories—and then gets Derek Fucking Jacobi himself to meet them as a kind of ambassador! Since when did American movies get so sentimental for the English crown? If the Academy defines these kinds of monarchy-boosting as prestigious, and then we raise our daughters to idolize Disney princesses... this is how democracy dies. Anyway, do we really have to talk about this movie? I guess just for Miss Michelle Williams' embodiment of Miss Monroe, eh? She does a thorough job of impersonation, but that's easy because, like any icon, Marilyn was all signifiers: mole, white dress, platinum curls, a whispery coo and lipstick as red as a Coca Cola can. But Williams also captures her emotional life—the insecurity and private anguish. The gratitude pouring out of her eyes every time she's paid a compliment made me want to cry, until maybe the sixth or so time she does it. It's a good performance—Williams is always terrific—but I'll take Meek's Cutoff, thanks. (Even Dawson's Creek DVDs, honestly. Those crazy kids!) The role is straight-up Oscarbait: the tortured soul of the bombshell superstar, the private life of the public figure.

Keep reading my conversation with Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine


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