Written & Directed by: Matt Reeves Full credits at IMDb
It's not arbitrarily that Let Me In, a surprisingly delicate and usually tactful remake of a Swedish vampire neo-classic, is set in Los Alamos, the birthplace of America's largest-scale violence. Director Reeves, who made his name helming Cloverfield, pulls off the impossible: not only does he retain the sympathetic portrait of pre-pubescence-the universality-from Tomas Alfredson's sensitive Let the Right One In, but he reworks its Scandinavian themes to address our own country's recent political history. (Both films are based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist.)
In the recent documentary Catfish, a lonely wife-and-mother in a flyover backwater invents an intricately idealized version of her life on the Internet. In Marwencol, a damaged man also creates a strangely glamorized parallel life. But his is analog, and thus he is, refreshingly, a mere fascinating character, not an emblem of these techno-times—except, perhaps, as a victim of small town bigotry.
Kingston, NY-native Mark Hogancamp is seriously damaged: he was beaten almost-to-death (and certainly to lasting-brain-injury) by teenage thugs outside a local bar, for reasons that become apparent only gradually. (No, he's not gay.) Afterwards, as a kind of therapy, he began constructing the model town that gives the film its name, which he populates with dolls—often heavily armed dolls—that represent characters from his own life. Around this town, he has created an amazingly imaginative narrative, a WWII espionage thriller in which he stars, in which he has a Barbie girlfriend, and in which SS officers play his one-time attackers. He poses the characters and photographs them in close-up, fashioning astonishing realism—and frequent gore—that’s simultaneously blatantly artificial.
What sets his work apart, one art-magazine editor notes, is the absence of irony. Mark’s work is deeply personal; the dolls don’t foster emotional distance here, as they often do in modern art, but the opposite. By setting his imaginary world in the context of WWII, he creates an easy kind of morality for himself—a fraction in scale of the real thing, like his town—in which he is as heroic as an Allied-Forces soldier, his attackers as villainous as modern history’s worst villains. As such, he reveals something about the weird and possibly destructive ways in which we all simplify the narratives our own lives. We don't just make ourselves the protagonists of these stories. We're the heroes. Grade: A-
The Social Network, Fincher’s fleet chronicle of Facebook’s founding, captures the zeitgeist insofar as it catches a cultural change, when not only the nerds but the kids starting minding the stores. Aaron Sorkin’s witheringly sarcastic but too-neat screenplay finds Shakespearean tragedy among these machinating whiz kids, manipulating different clichés to tell the story of how Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), the smartest prick in the room, hurt and pissed off a lot of people to become the world’s youngest billionaire; his relationship with Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), which deteriorates through the movie from biffles to opposing litigants, recalls two more embattled titans of a media empire—no less than Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten in Citizen Kane.
Sorkin’s pretentious source-list doesn’t stop there: the film points at Milton (when one character notes that “creation myths need a devil”), and at a Q&A he cited Aeschylus and Rashomon. (Just because people disagree about events in your movie doesn’t make it Rashomon.)
Keep reading this dispatch from the 2010 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine
In the past, the perpetually underappreciated M. Night Shyamalan has reserved his ire for the critics, as when a monster mauls a movie reviewer in 2006’s The Lady in the Water. But in Devil, which his nascent production company backed and for which he conceived the story, he spews his vitriol at the entire audience. All of you philistines who chided The Happening? You’re all going to Hell…unless you beg forgiveness and own up to your idiocy. After all, Shyamalan is still—remember Signs?—a good Christian!
He is not, however, a good writer. M. Night’s only saving grace has always been his superlatively elegant aesthetic style. Each effort is otherwise hampered, if not hamstrung, by lame dialogue and self-righteous storytelling: The Village is delightful to watch, but only with the sound muted. So, who would want a movie that’s slathered with the Shyamalan brand but whose images lack his graceful touch?
Written & Directed by: Apichatpong Weerasethakul Full credits at IMDb
Uncle Boonmee (Loong Boonmee Raleuk Chat) puts mystical Buddhism in action, the abstract into practice. It’s a treatise on the illusion we call our lives, a densely spiritual and politically symbolic film about fungible borders: between life and death, between animals and people, between the hallucinatory and the real, even between nations. Shooting in Northeast Thailand, where he grew up, Apichatpong adopts the region’s animism and suffuses the lushly verdant landscape with so much life it becomes a character—or, stuffed with characters, a natural world swirling with spirits, where Monkey Ghosts dine with men, catfish fuck human princesses, and Laotians mingle amicably with native Thais.
Keep reading this dispatch from the 2010 New York Film Festival at The L Magazine
Written & Directed by: Woody Allen Full credits at IMDb
After Whatever Works proved a failed homecoming, Woody has again expatriated to London, the site of his greatest recent success. Match Point marked Allen's aughties high, a triumph recaptured in neither Scoop nor (the nevertheless underrated) Cassandra's Dream. In Stranger, Allen gropes again for that English magic, once more exploring matters of fortune. There's even a scene at the opera! Not to mention the soap-opera jealousies on display among the philandering cultured classes. But Allen fails at his art here as spectacularly as his own characters.
Directed by: Rodrigo Cortés Written by: Chris Sparling Full credits at IMDb
You needn't be particularly claustrophobic to feel unnerved by the opening of Buried, in which Ryan Reynolds wakes up in a wooden coffin buried a few feet under sand. His panicked gasps are contagious. (After all, the fear of being buried alive must be as old as the burial ritual itself.) But the initial anxiety soon morphs into the American can-do spirit, as an agitated Reynolds buckles down to figure this thing out. It goes to show that a protagonist, or an audience, can get comfortable anywhere, even in an airless box.
Unlike the similarly claustro-billed Lebanon, which is set in a tank but frequently peeks out at the surrounding landscape, Buried really is 90 minutes with Ryan Reynolds in a seven-foot crate—no prologue, no flashbacks, no periscope. (The kidnappers are kind enough, from our point of view if not Reynolds', to bury their captive with a cell phone and Zippo, so that he has something to do and something to show him doing it.) But what the movie packs in formal daring it lacks in narrative gumption; it's about one conspiracy short of a compelling script.
Written & Directed by: David Michôd Full credits at IMDb
Is Australia the new Romania? That former Soviet-bloc nation became the darling of the festival circuit when its New Wave movement broke through in 2005, after Lazarescu killed at Cannes. But a new decade needs a new cinema movement to get behind, and the hottest national cinema is currently coming from Down Under.
If people are starting to take Australian Cinema seriously, it’s thanks solely to Blue Tongue Films, a collective of filmmaking friends who have been hitting the festivals with shorts for years. Their feature debut, The Square, released earlier this year, was a solid if unremarkable noir, an excellent example of genre that added nothing new. The latest, Animal Kingdom, isn’t too different. Again, the focus is crime and the details, familiar, having been mined from decades of genre film. What sets this movie apart, from not only The Square but its generic forebears, is the sensitivity of its telling.
Newcomer James Frechville stars as the immoveable J, a cusp-of-adulthood 17-year-old thrust, when his mom ODs, into his grandmother’s clan of criminal uncles. “I’m invisible,” he tells one uncle (the underused Joel Edgerton, the hottest Australian actor in America!!) after an automatic bathroom hand dryer fails to activate; it’s a bit on the nose, but the point’s well taken: J serves as the blank slate, the blank face, the audience surrogate who gives us an emotional in to this family of low-laying bank robbers.
The Cody Family are well-known to the local Armed Robbery Squad; the latter kill one of the former to send a message, the former kill two random beat cops in retaliation. Police pressure intensifies, and the increasingly paranoid Codys, Uncle Pope (a weaselly Ben Mendelsohn) in particular, begin to wonder whether they can trust newbie J, who’s being aggressively courted by Detective Leckie, played by Guy Pearce with a smart moustache, making J a kind of adolescent Jim Hawkins, caught between a Long Pope Silver and a Leckie Livesey.
By focusing on a family of quirky, sympathetic criminals, Michod evokes the 90s—Tarantino, specifically, springs to mind during one slo-mo family inventory scored to 70s pop. But what distinguishes the film as of the present is that it’s been stripped of irony. Two uncles have one of those “you know how I know your gay?” conversations, but instead of provoking laughs it sets up a moving emotional confrontation. For one scene, Michod uses Air Supply’s “All Out Of Love,” but he does so sincerely, to undergird an affecting moment. It’s not a joke—it’s impossibly moving.
Michod makes every effort to provoke a sincere emotional connection and response; generally, the musical cues are few and understated, the takes are long. Before every murder—there aren’t that many—Michod focuses on the victim-to-be’s humanity, whether in a private moment of marital bliss or a casual encounter in the locker room. Generally, Animal Kingdom is rife with these kind of small touching details: Jacki Weaver, as the ruthless but underplayed matriarch, gabbing about television hosts; Pearce playing with a Down Syndrome daughter.
Michod’s MO here is subtlety (aside from the one cokeheaded uncle, played by Sullivan Stapleton, who twitches too much); Animal Kingdom is intimate but cool-headed. The sound often cuts out during dramatic climaxes; intense conversations are whispered. Even murder is conducted in murmurs, with minimal exertion. (Half a cc of heroin leaves the victim putting up little struggle.) When J’s stoical mien finally shatters, it’s from the sight of a make-up brush sitting on the edge of a sink. Michod produces such a mood so tense that just the littlest thing can send any character over the edge—whether it’s to tears or to murder. Grade: A-
Directed by: Ben Affleck Written by: Peter Craig, Ben Affleck & Aaron Stockard Full credits at IMDb
The Town opens with a shot of Boston's Bunker Hill obelisk, Charlestown's Big Hard Cock, alerting you that the exceptional cops-and-robbers picture to follow concerns guys and guy stuff-like, heists. Affleck's follow-up to Gone Baby Gone, which reeks of Eddie Coyle's malefactor melancholy, mines similar territory as his 2007 debut, but moreso it evokes, not least with the silly-sounding accents, the recent spate of Blue Tongue Films out of Australia (Animal Kingdom, The Square): it's solid genre fare, reinvigorating tired tropes, most notable for its efficiency and sensitivity.
Directed by: Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman Full credits at IMDb
Catfish is MySpace profile as movie, multimedia package as feature film, a non-fiction narrative stitched together from techno—ephemera: screen shots of news feeds, Google Earth, and street views; tagged Facebook photos, text messages and YouTube video after YouTube video—crude, shaky, grainy, close-up quick-takes with Nev Schulman (the co-director’s brother), a charismatic if self-obsessed New York twentysomething. The movie documents his budding relationship with a family in flyover country: an under-10 painting prodigy, her hot mom and her even hotter older sister, for whom he falls, hard; the two spend hours on the phone between sexting.
Directed by: Pascal Chaumeil Written by: Laurent Zeitoun, Jeremy Doner & Yohan Gromb Full credits at IMDb
A movie can't open by ogling a bikini-clad beauty to the riffs of "Son of a Preacher Man" and expect anyone to take it seriously. Even if it's in French. And stars Romain Duris. That is, it's the soundtrack that's your first—but not last—clue to Heartbreaker's place in the destined-for-TBS canon of romantic comedies. Duris plays Alex, who breaks up couples for a living: he seduces women who don't realize they're in unhappy relationships to show them that they are. But then he takes a job that asks him to do the impossible—to take a woman, Juliette (Vanessa Paradis), out of, like, the happiest relationship ever. Along the way, Heartbreaker (L'Arnacoeur) hits all the genre's marks...
It's not arbitrarily that Let Me In, a surprisingly delicate and usually tactful remake of a Swedish vampire neo-classic, is set in Los Alamos, the birthplace of America's largest-scale violence. Director Reeves, who made his name helming Cloverfield, pulls off the impossible: not only does he retain the sympathetic portrait of pre-pubescence-the universality-from Tomas Alfredson's sensitive Let the Right One In, but he reworks its Scandinavian themes to address our own country's recent political history. (Both films are based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist.)
