Film Punk

Some rejected photograms I dug out of the garbage today

2012-02-07T21:40:00.000-08:00

The Suburbs- work in progress

2012-02-05T19:47:00.000-08:00

Hey guys! So I've been working on my song for our next album cover project thing and thought I would post a sort of work in progress version for you all to see/hear. I'm not sure who checks this blog on a regular basis, but you're here now, so I guess that's all that's important.

The Grey

2012-01-28T21:17:00.000-08:00

Joe Carnahan is a tough director to track. He's made five features, four of them major releases and their themes and styles are split more or less down the middle. Narc, his first real feature, is a gritty and brutal cop drama filmed in insane hand cam with wild saturated colors. His two middle films are just the opposite. Smokin' Aces utilizes an enormous cast to play out a video game script thats entertaining but definitely silly. The A Team was Carnahan's true entry into Hollywood filmmaking. He had major movie stars and a 110 million dollar budget so he went to town. I enjoy all his previous efforts and his name was really the only reason I ventured into the theater to see The Grey.

I'll try not to really talk about the actual events of the film as that'd really just end up giving things away. The trailer does a fairly good job of setting the movie up though but it fails at everything else. Yes there are wolves in this movie. Yes they're antagonistic. And yes, everyone, once and again they are digitally rendered and not really the best looking. But the amount they're shown in the trailer is in stark contrast to how much they appear in the film, percentage wise. The real villain in the film is the harsh Alaskan elements themselves and I'm happy that Carnahan didn't create a digital creature film.

One thing I noticed nearly right away is the films similarity to Narc in its staging and photography. There's a lot of hand-cam and low light photography so the whole movie looks like it's covered in snow even when it's not falling. The gain onscreen forms a nice look and definitely works. But The Grey is far less manic than Narc. It's slow. Not necessarily slow paced as the two hour run time goes by pretty quickly. The slow nature of the film comes from Carnahan actually slowing down to let his cast of great character actors do their jobs. One scene in particular stands out to me. The whole scene is comprised of three angles and over the course of about ten minutes you only see about 4 edits. It's very un-Carnahan and it's actually pretty brilliant.

Now when they aren't trying not to die from the cold weather they're trying not to die from wolf attacks. They set up early on that the reason the wolves are after them is because the humans are in the wolves' territory and seen as a threat. I don't know if every viewer will buy that but I did, so, there you go. The wolves end up being incredibly scary even when you don't see them. They do an amazing job sound mixing the distant howling of a pack of wolves of unknown size. When the wolves finally are seen Carnahan does a great job of intercutting digital wolves with actual wolf footage to preserve the illusion. When the wolves actually attack the cutting of the shots is insane and incredibly frantic, making the maulings that much more intense and disorienting.
The last thing I'll say is that the films ending is a bit shocking. Not in the events that transpire but more that Joe Carnahan had the balls to end the film the way he does. It's very different from anything you would expect from him. The audience I saw it with grumbled into the lobby about it but I really loved it. I hope those of you who bother to see it will do.

Best Films of 2011

2012-01-02T06:49:00.000-08:00

stinkerDizzy!

I didn't see as many new films this year as I would have liked to, but out of the ones I did see, these are my favorites.

1. Beginners
2. Super 8
3. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II
4. Voices of the Transition

5. Water for Elephants

5. Cowboys & Aliens

6. Rio

7. Thor

8. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
9. Another Earth
10. Tree of Life

Best worst movie:
Limitless - Hilarious!!!!!
Runner up: Breaking Dawn
While this film is CLEARLY the worst movie made this year (ever?) it isn't as much fun to watch because, honestly, you feel like your brain is leaking out of your ears for its entire duration. While watching this I somehow felt personally insulted while being bored out of my mind (worst worst movie).

Fox!

War Horse
The Adventures of Tin Tin: The Secret of the Unicorn
The Trip

The Tree of Life
Super 8

Submarine

Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows
Rango

Midnight in Paris

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

Drive
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Contagion
Conan O'Brien Can't Stop

Beginners
Shame
The Muppets

Hugo

Melancholia
Red State
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Anonymous

Basho!

Super 8
Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Part 2
Tree of Life
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

13 Assassins

Scout!

If you're looking for a little suspense, you can skip to the bottom and work your way up. Me, I like suspense, but I don't kid myself, I know why you're here. Luckily the best film of the year received nothing in the way of a theatrical release before a semi-dignified DVD release with a less-than-impressive transfer and butchered subtitles. The first time I saw it, in a packed theatre, was perfect. That's the kind of experience I live for. Feeling a room moving with you in time to a movie is exhilarating to say the least. Which is why it's a mixed blessing that most of the films I saw and loved this year were done in movie houses, instead of at home. Now, that's not to say that there weren't a lot of tiny art films viewed at 2 in the morning by my lonesome in my living room, but I felt as if last year was a particularly good year for that. The only films I saw that put me back in the mindset I occupied this time last year were Lo Quattro Volte, Ne Change Rien, Archipelago & Silent Souls. Which isn't a bad thing (one more thing to think of fondly) because I love me a good time in the cinema, multiplex or otherwise. If anything I take great hope from the fact that I had as many great times in movie theatres as I did this year. People with imagination are coming back into favour after what seemed like an impossible dry spell during the Bush years. Of my top ten in 2008, I saw one of them in a multiplex. In 2009, I saw three from my top twenty in a multiplex. Last year the number jumped to eight. I just feel more optimistic about the future of big budget filmmaking and I also feel like weirder little films are starting to get bigger releases. Never would I have dreamt that the film being touted as the most over-rated by most critics this year is a silent, French dramedy, which I didn't find time to see. There are still dozens of films left that I wanted to see before making this list, but a year is a year and this one's come to an end. So without further ado, here are 100 great films I saw this year.

1. 13 Assassins

by Takashi Miike

I've been slightly disappointed to discover lately that some films have a half-life. I went and saw Drive a second time and while it's still better than most films this year (or fuckin' ever made), I noticed that it didn't have the same complete control over me that it did the first time. I could see it working on my friend Mark who was sitting next to me the second time. I could enjoy it as a piece of filmmaking and it's undeniably topshelf at that, but the feeling of being taken for a ride had cooled slightly. Which was a bummer, but I guess the rule is that if you make a film that relies on tearing up genre conventions like so many draftcards, you can only be blindsided once. And then Colin Frangicetto traded in 13 Assassins at Siren Records. I hounded Blair, the manager, to price it for me so I could buy it as soon as possible. And I tried out watching it with someone else, in this case my Dad, to see A. if it would have the same effect for him and B. if I'd still love it. The second viewing of this film had many strikes against it. Watching it on a small screen in a not terribly good transfer while my sister and her friends chatted loudly in the other room. My first viewing was at the Boston Independent Film Festival in a packed house full of people holding their breath just as intensely as Fox and I were. We lucked into the best seats in the house and were practically hitting each other we couldn't believe how amazing it was. Even with the diminished conditions, even having seen it once before my hands still shook from the moment dawn came and the scout came in to tell his companions that the enemy was in reach and numbered 200 to the moment the final head is cut off. Based on that, and much, much more, this has to be called the best movie of the year.

Following the El Santo rule of never watching a remake or a sequel without first seeing the original, I decided to watch Eiichi Kudo's Samurai Revolution Trilogy before diving head first into Takashi Miike's remake of the first chapter. I'm glad I did. Firstly because Kudo was a filmmaker with his own indelible, pitch-black worldview who to me embodies the Japanese mindset perhaps more than anyone else. I may appreciate Kihachi Okamoto's freneticism and sense of humour or Masahiro Shinoda's artistry and brute worldview more, but I think Kudo was the one guy who truly understood the emotions and code of ethics that guides Japan. Just as Nagisa Oshima sought to undo all the culture-wide conceptions about the heroics of Japan and its history, Kudo simply wanted to show them in all their ugliness. The one thing you always think while watching his movies (especially Eleven Samurai) is "is it worth it?" It's a question he never posed outright because his protagonists so thoroughly believed that it was. They'd happily kill themselves to prove how willing they were to bring about change. Having garnered this from the original films, entering the world of Miike's 13 Assassins was liking slipping into a warm bath after spending a week living in the tundra. The stakes: through the roof. The tension: practically sitting in the seat next to you and talking. The color scheme that guides the first quarter of the film is striking not only for its beauty (think Appaloosa or Images) but for the simple reason it exists. Miike usually doesn't fuck with design; his art is in his words and his violence. He's a philosopher and so to see him taking such pains to light the interiors and really present the banquet of exposition was stunning enough without it working perfectly. And then Kôji Yakusho smiles. Not only is he happy to hear that a gang has come together to defend the next shogun, he is fucking thrilled that they've chosen him to be the one to kill him. He's been living idly, fishing, getting by, resigned to the idea that he'll die for nothing. And now this. His twisted happiness is also ours because we then spend the rest of the movie just fucking itching to watch him tear the shogun a new asshole. It's a movie that is approximately half build-up and half delivery, a perfect treatment of the Chanbara. And then he gets 12 guys to do it with and they rig up an entire town into a death trap that makes Jigsaw look like the incontinent old man he is. This was all in the original film mind you, but Miike makes it come alive in a way that Kudo didn't. His approach was far more nuts and bolts because violence was a means, not an end. Miike gets to have his cake and eat it to. He's spent so much of his career squeezing himself into his viewers' head and making them watch things they would never in a million years have thought to subject themselves to. So when he wants you to get psyched for the slaughter of 200 nameless footmen, you salivate for it. I was on the edge of my seat the entire movie AND I KNEW HOW IT WAS GOING TO END! Miike is as disciplined as any samurai, even when making his nightmare inducing gore films or zany superhero fantasias. My dad pointed out to me this time that an American would have pornographically lingered on some of the film's best imagery, like the explosion that disgorges gallons of blood from a nearby building or six men crushed to death in a dead-end alley by a flaming bull. Miike knows he's got everything right so there's no need to let anything play out any longer than is absolutely necessary. Watching 13 Assassins reminded me just how flabby and undisciplined Kill Bill is by comparison. Miike isn't just a cinephile who has so studied his forebears that he could shoot this masterpiece in 2 weeks (wrap your fucking head around that one), he's a philosopher who can fill a 2 hour movie with a treatise on Japan and the way it represents itself. He can show just how fatalistic a society it can be at its most desperate and indeed that that leads to truly monstrous times, but then gets you to believe in one aspect of it. The villain of the piece openly states that he'd like to bring back the age of war because he places no value on human life and we are meant to be appalled. His allies can't even believe him when he says it. But he says so in the middle of the most impressive battle sequence ever filmed. The ideas are in there, it's not King Arthur or anything, but this movie gets so much right speaking strictly from the point of mechanics that this didn't have to be about anything and it'd still be the best samurai film since The Sword of Doom & The Seventh Samurai before it. Which is perhaps why it was a good idea to see the first one. The ideas are the plate, watching 13 men try to kill 200 is the cake. Bon Appétit.

2. Super 8

by J.J. Abrams

I've been criticized for having mainstream tastes before, though not by my family. To them I watch exclusively semi-pornographic, foreign zombie films with pretensions towards artistic obliqueness. So when I put Super 8 on, they were surprised at how much they liked it, even if it didn't meet their expectations based on my description. To wit, "like E.T. but better" doesn't quite cover it, but I wasn't about to explain to them why I loved it as much as I did, because if I wasn't careful they wouldn't even give it a chance. If I'd said that it exists in a mainstream idiom and indeed even takes place in a lovingly reconstructed small town that could be the setting for anything from a Garry Marshall sitcom to anything from the golden age of producer Steven Spielberg's Amblin imprint, but has ambitions that outstrip all that that implies; or that it was one of the most touching first love stories, as beautiful in its realistic beats and feelings as in its surviving/soldiering on despite the outsized stakes; that it's the best monster movie in years; that it deals in monumental emotional tragedy yet never feels manipulative; that it eventually gives in to the demands of the mainstream in engaging in a high-wire act of a thrilling, explosion-heavy conclusion and handles that as splendidly as it does the tiny; heartbreaking moments in bedrooms and impromptu film sets; that it's one of the many eloquent loveletters to cinema we were given this year, and is somehow both the simplest and most effective; that the CG never really looks like CG; that there are lens flares on top of lens flares; that yeah maybe it's just a sci-fi movie, but, it captures everything about the life I want, about why film is an escape from the shit hand we sometimes get dealt and why its worth all the romantic notions I have about it; if I said any of that, it might seem like I was just trying to justify a big, silly movie as some kind of artistic experience. But in my mind it's more than that. It's the kind of movie that would inspire the amateur filmmakers at the core of the story. I know it inspired me.

3. Hugo

by Martin Scorsese

There are two sides to the ornate golden coin that is Martin Scorsese's Hugo. There is the fact that it's a beautiful children's story that manages to capture a world and experiences as a child would, a journey that children can become engaged in (if any of them came out for it) and adults can appreciate as a work of gleefully rendered art. I appreciate its story, the characters and the adventure of it all. But the other side of the coin is its place in film history. Scorsese has done more for film preservation than almost any living living filmmaker. He has done more than his fair share of making sure that so many works of art, many believed lost, others not taken care of in their time, will live on. He has a sense of responsibility to the history of the form and the many beautiful stories that have emerged from it that comes just second of his work as a storyteller himself. The history of film is folded into his best work from The Aviator to Shutter Island and not only does Hugo follow in their footsteps, it outshines them by quite some distance. For Hugo is not only about a boy trying to find his place in the clockwork of the world around him, it is about the very origin of film. And as such it's one of the most beautifully written love letters to Cinema we've ever been given. Taking the story of Georges Méliès by way of Brian Selznick storybook as the starting point for his ever-unfolding mystery, Scorsese's verve for the subject and his true appreciation for what film means shines like a beacon all through the charming children's fable. He knows all too well that film is a gateway into another world that can make even the most hopeless and horrible circumstances vanish for as long as light hits celluloid. He was once that boy, lost and trapped and it shows. With this effervescent tale, Scorsese seats himself comfortably next to heroes Michael Powell, Allan Dwan, Fred Newmeyer & Méliès himself, not only because he's a gifted creator of worlds, but because he uses his power to shine the light on the worlds that inspired him. "If you ever wonder where your dreams come from, look around; this is where they're made."

4. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

by Tomas Alfredson

As an aspiring filmmaker it's tempting to talk in the future tense. That is, I'd like very much to count my favourite filmmakers as peers, but that's not particularly fair to them. They're artists who've paid their dues and sucked the words out of my brain with their unbelievable talent. They've made great art. I'm some fucking kid with a few movies no one's seen. But I swear when I talk about movie directors as part of a group I'm a part of, it's only because they keep making me wish I was in their esteemed company. Case in point Tomas Alfredson. It'd be frankly insulting to the man if I went around saying we were colleagues, peers, or even belonged in anyone's definition of cinema as an artform because Tomas Alfredson is a fucking genius who makes me glad that I was born loving films and eventually figured out that I'm going to spend my life trying to make them. Tomas is a born storyteller. Taking his latest opus, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy as a model for his strengths, he can tell decades-long stories in single scenes by lighting them properly. His every gesture and decision has the power to move mountains even as his actors don't let on that they're being made slightly uncomfortable. Ben Foster said of Tilda Swinton's performance in We Need To Talk About Kevin that it should be required viewing for all actors who want to learn how to communicate the inner life of a character; Tinker, Tailor is such a thing for directors looking to coax that out of their actors, but also production designers. Tomas Alfredson, perhaps more than any other filmmaker of his generation, understands how to show internal turmoil not only in his characters, but also his settings. His surfaces are beautiful and accurate and so you could easily spend the whole film simply admiring them, but if you do bring yourself away from them, you see that positively everything is brimming like a kettle long since boiling. Every wall and desk the characters pass has meaning to them. Every glance is loaded. Everyone means something new depending on the room they're in, the people they're surrounded by and repression keeps them all smiling politely. But Alfredson has them doing a high-wire act to keep their secrets out of the wrong hands, especially when their actual emotional involvement is concerned. It should go without saying that homosexuality is beneath so many of their exteriors and the scenes where those relations are exposed are so gorgeously underplayed. And it's so astonishing that absolutely everyone is as fully realized as they are because looking at the visuals alone might lead you to believe that Alfredson had spent the whole production making sure that every room was depressing and alive enough. I happen to be in love with the sort of production design this film deals in: greys and browns, coated in dust and dripping with evidence of their time period. So just that it attempted to capture the era through its wooden trim and office buildings would have been enough. The fact that he got them 100% right is almost too much. The clothes and offices and machines are just as stuck in their moment as the spies who can't ever bring their feelings to the surface, lest they be used against them. And all of this is delivered using the grammar of the best of 70s espionage cinema, a la French Connection, Three Days of the Condor and The Conformist. And thanks to the muting of emotions and motives, what comes through is the texture, helped immensely by a truly wonderful and expressive sound design. It occurs to me that if I'd simply said that Alfredson got everything right I could have saved time, but that wouldn't do his craft justice. There are a lot of people out their calling themselves filmmakers, myself included. Tomas is just the best of us.

5. Norwegian Wood

by Trần Anh Hùng

I was so thoroughly knocked sideways by The Tree of Life that I'd sort of taken for granted that nothing was going to top it, despite my having reservations, for instance about the pacing of the third and fourth movements. Tree of Life tells its story in a way that I hadn't ever considered possible and I love Terence Malick for it. I respect him all the more as a filmmaker because ofTree of Life and thanks to that film I've been able to reappraise his other works and appreciate them even more. It's a remarkable achievement and I'd been operating under the belief that nothing would hit me in the same way. It'd take something both as intensely stylized andemotionally affecting to break the spell. Seeing a boy go from spending what looked like carefree time with his girlfriend to filling a car with exhaust and slowly dying from it and then seeing a spider on the floor of a forest did it. The spider has nothing to do with what goes on around its inclusion, but having the narrator talk about moving on after his friend's suicide while watching an image so beautiful and disorienting drew me in immediately. A few scenes later Watanabe walks through his college surrounded by a rampaging Vietnam protest, the period detail spot on, but relegated to set dressing, even less pronounced than the graffiti in Children of Men. Trần Anh Hùng had gotten every detail right and his camera was so assured, his gaze so intensely focused, yet he chose not to show off the work that they had done. All the signifiers that the film's 1969 setting had been done justice are hidden away from our view thanks to the swift, certain editing and piercing camera work. Trần rightly sees that there is far more importance in damaged beauty Rinko Kikuchi's face as she meets with Watanabe after long absences. She's heartbreak itself and though the film moves at an unstoppable pace, throwing out one totally flooring image after another, it slows down enough to capture what infatuation and frustration feel like when mixed. The style here is so youthful and glowing that it's hard to imagine Trần Anh Hùng behind it all. After having seen Cyclo, Hung's second film, I was picturing something far more dire and naturalistic. Here he's all business. His editing and shot length aren't all that dissimilar to Malick's, they're just more modern and self-conscious. There are long takes when he needs them (and by christ do they get your attention) but he seems driven by some unknown force, thrusting us from one beautiful place to another, his characters too numb to see that they're in the most beautiful place in the world. And that's the tragedy of Norwegian Wood. I've felt a lot of what Watanabe goes through and it makes you lose perspective. Your world becomes as small as the problem you want so desperately to solve. If you notice anything as beautiful as dawn breaking through trees outside Kikuchi's sanitarium or the smile in patient other-girl Kizo Mizuhara, you forbid yourself to pay attention or it too becomes tainted. Add to that troubling mindset Jonny Greenwood's haunting (and sickeningly perfect) score and you have the film that made me forget I'd seen anything else this year.

6. Tree of Life

by Terence Malick

In order to get the 'why' of Tree of Life, you don't need to get Tree of Life. Picture this if you will. It's opening day in New York in a theatre literally underground. It's the only theatre in town playing this movie so far as my search concluded, which means that it was the only screen in the north east playing it (it wouldn't open in Boston for another week and no place else had it yet). So naturally the theatre is full, me and my dad had to sit separately as it was too full and the movie was still twenty minutes from opening. Everyone seems to be biting their nails in anticipation. The people in front of me couldn't stop talking, but there was a nervousness to it, like they were afraid to sit in silence in anticipation. I for one couldn't keep my legs from shaking. One of the theatre employees came out at about five minutes to show time basically to remind us that we could buy food at the counter we'd all passed on our way down here. Even the staff was nervous. Why? The movie had just won the Palme d'Or for christ's sakes, what did anyone have to be nervous about. I can't speak for everyone else there, but I knew this movie meant something. It's been six years since Terence Malick's last film and this movie had been on his IMDB page pretty much since The New World lost its deserved best cinematography Oscar. I loved Emanuel Lubezki's photography in that movie; he gave the film the look of an oil painting that had come to life to whisper the secret history of our country in our ear. So I was chomping at the bit for their next collaboration because in the meantime I'd seen Children of Men and revisited all of Malick's past works over and over again. And I stayed that ready for between watching Children of Men and the time I sat in that basement. The lights dimmed and we all fell deadly quiet and no one said a word until the film was over and the couple behind me asked me to sit down so they could read the credits. Maybe it was the quality of the print or the size of the screen, but it felt very much like a spell was cast on all of us. The film, at least presented in that theatre, was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Its photography was completely unique, unlike any other movie ever made. I'd tried to understand just what the motivation was, whether it was supposed to mock the energy of the children, flying around the den like one of them. But on second view I came to see it as the point of view of the god their mother believes in. The camera is everywhere at once and floats like a ghost; he sees your sins and your desires and can do nothing about them. The film, I maintain, is about the subtleties of existence, about suffering and how we all choose to live in its shadow. Do we choose to inflict it upon others, or rather can we avoid inflicting it on others? It's in our nature to do harm, but some of us are able to rise above the urge. Some of us are graceful. Malick never answers to the fact that the heavenly mother would not have the boys she wishes to instruct in the "way of grace" were it not for her brutish husband and his seemingly unquenchable anger, but its clear that he wishes we were all a little more like Jessica Chastain's saintly matriarch. A word about the performances: they're invisible. The actors are so entrenched in their world that there is no distinction for me. We are simply watching people live. That's a huge turn off for a lot of people, but for christ's sakes think of the achievement. Every movement, every word, every decision was made as this person and the fact that people don't understand why we're watching them is all the defending this movie will ever need. They don't get how outstanding the acting is because Pitt and his family are simply living. To be an actor and to be given an opportunity like that must be like being given the keys to the city. But none of this would be possible without Malick's unorthodox methods. As much as I like giving credit to the filmmakers who inspire this scene or that angle in a given film, I realized after watching The Tree of Life and then revisiting The New World that everyone who aspires to be an artist with a camera is a student of Terence Malick and he still has so much to teach us.

7. Submarine

by Richard Ayoade

At the risk of sounding completely unlikable, you kinda had to be an asshole in high school to like Submarine. Granted, you wouldn't like Submarine if you were still that asshole, so hopefully I'm doing ok. My wonderful girlfriend, god bless her, felt too bad for Zoe Preece to like Oliver Tate or Jordana Bevan, which I realize is actually the right way of thinking, which says to me that I really was something of a bastard not too long ago (or maybe I still am. I'm giving myself the benefit of the doubt). She never had to take a step back and realize she was being an egomaniacal sociopath at any point in her life, so that's a small price to pay for not seeing eye to eye on Submarine. I however did. I like to think I'm at least a slightly better person than I was in high school, otherwise I wouldn't see just how bittersweet and perfect the ending is. Or...no, let me put it another way: If I wasn't at least a slightly better person than the ending wouldn't seem so bittersweet and perfect to me. There we go. Any child with divorced parents will probably see something of him/herself in Oliver, but I especially found myself cringing at his thought process. That's how I used to think. I'm not sure whether to give credit to Joe Dunthorne's novel or Richard Ayoade's script/direction for totally understanding the things that happen inside the head of a troubled, obsessive teenage boy, but I'll go ahead and give it to Ayoade because his visual representation of these events is what hits me the most. Take for instance his decision to give Yasmin Paige's Jordana the Louise Brooks/Anna Karina/Melanie Griffith hair cut. In an instant we know everything about her we need to. She's no good, but she's the one he has to have. Zoe Preece deserves the nicest version of Oliver, but he's too damaged to be that for her. He wants Jordana and more importantly he deserves Jordana because they need to mature together. They'll never age and be better people if they don't get all the horrid out of their system together. And that's what Submarine attempts to do: get all of the dysfunction out in the open. Everyone can see it, which is rough, but so can you and that's the only way to leave it behind. His mother's beautifully understated line about giving someone a handjob cuts to the heart of the matter. If we aren't open, then we don't change. Oh, and this movie is stylized as fuck. It's like Jean-Pierre Melville directing Rushmore, with Max Fischer staging Masculin Feminin. It's fucking awesome. Ayoade manages to enter into the Wes Anderson paradigm, while remaining so fucking sure of himself that he never once appears to be reading from the playbook. His influences are the same as the likes of Anderson, but he has different entry points (the Pierrot Le Fou/Made In U.S.A. colour scheme is huge in this film) and he remains as clinically detached as Oliver until he needs the audience to melt, at which point so does he. At this point I shouldn't be so accepting of an indie movie with fireworks in it, but the fact that I didn't notice means that he's doing something right.

8. NEDS
by Peter Mullan

Peter Mullan has been an underrated director almost as long as he's been an underrated actor. I find it criminal, for instance that while Paddy Considine's Tyrannosaur, a fine film to be sure, is getting "A" reviews here and awards there, Mullan's superior and all but unseen third film NEDS receives nothing of the kind. And not only is it a little less emotionally obvious than Considine's film, it's much more sublimely strange and follows in no one's footsteps. The only point of comparison I can think of is Lindsay Anderson and there isn't much beyond a poetic otherness guiding the journey of an angry, rebellious English schoolboy to really link them. Like Anderson Mullan's approach is anarchic in the utmost, following days and nights in its protagonist's life, trying to illustrate the strange path required to lead a promising young boy into a violent, directionless existence. In the case of John McGill (played quietly and wonderfully by Connor McCarron) it takes a shit family example including a pugnacious, knife-wielding brother and an alcoholic father, friends who deride intelligence, a school system with no patience, gangs on every corner, and the lure of the only drugs available to the council flat set. Mullan has a brilliant command of mise-en-scene and NEDS moves with such swiftness into completely bizarre and unpredictable corners. Just when you think you know the film's elements and course, there's a splendid fight with knives and chains and hammers shot almost entirely from 100 feet from the action, or a meltdown where our hero duct tapes knives to his hands or a trip to the zoo or a scene in which glue sniffing leads to christ stepping off the cross for a dance. Just when you have it pegged, it surprises you everytime in the most magnificent way imaginable. A film like no other this year.

9. Margaret

by Kenneth Lonergan

Advance word pegged Kenneth Lonergan's return to the screen after ten years as less a triumph than a concession. The story, as I understood it, was that he'd spent too much money and too much time trying to edit a film he'd finished principal photography for in 2006. Not even the aid of Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker could produce a version that both Lonergan and his bosses could agree on. And so finally it "limped" into theatres, damaged, broken and an incomplete version of what was supposed to be a profound artistic statement. Then I sat in a mostly empty theatre and watched a masterpiece, waiting patiently for Lonergan, his excellent cast or the editor to put a foot wrong. They never did. To me, it's amazing, one of the best films of its kind, a film about life, just as detailed and beautiful as Tree of Life, just darker and uglier. No other film gets inside its protagonist's head as well as Lonergan does here. Anna Paquin could have built herself a career out of this performance that might have precluded tv work entirely. If she doesn't get an oscar nomination, and she won't, there will be no chance for the academy to redeem itself and pretend it has the artform's best interest at heart. I've never seen a more rewarding go-for-broke performance of such a perfectly drawn, relatable imperfect character. She isn't hyperbolic, she isn't overwrought, she's completely believable. The truth isn't pretty and life, despite it's stunning complexity and unimaginable richness, is cruel. There's no denying that the story of Margaret is just as tragic as the film itself and though we may never see the version that Lonergan intended, what I know is that the film I saw is perfect and though I'd pay for the director's cut out of my pocket if I could, I am perfectly content with what I got: a definitive, emotionally wrecking artistic statement.

10. Shame

by Steve McQueen

There was no question about Shame being as profound and moving as Hunger. Hunger is peerless, there's nothing that can be done about that. Shame, Steve McQueen's second feature, is a different kind of film, but his ability to convey internal anguish in the most unbelievably gorgeous way hasn't dulled in the slightest. In between Hunger and Shame McQueen directed a short film called Giardini which represented an aesthetic break from his first feature. Whereas Hunger was all grime, blood shit and claustrophobic interiors, Giardini took place outdoors in beautiful, almost artificial looking spaces, cluttered by dogs who seemed to be programmed to roam perfectly within the frame and men in shadowy corners kissing each other. It's one of the best installations/short films I've ever seen and it also represents the transition from the cold prison in Ireland to the equally chilly streets of New York. Michael Fassbender is back, once again playing a man who cannot admit his greatest failing and suffers dearly for it. The sex addiction he feeds indiscriminately doesn't appear to be crippling until his sister shows up and shows what a slight change in his routine and responsibilities does to him. McQueen turns pristine, almost Bauhausian apartments and clubs into projections of Fassbender's psyche, trying desperately to erase himself between encounters, trying only to keep the aspects of his life that he's even remotely proud of visible, leaving only a glossy finish and expensive furnishings. But as he learns when Carey Mulligan's Sissy shows up, the things that define him outside of sex are becoming fewer by the day. His world becomes so small once his sister is in his house that he spends most of his time trying to shelter himself long enough to have sex with someone. Anyone. The film slips slightly at its depiction of homosexuality as the lowest he can sink, but I can't really think of a way to show when he hits bottom any better so I have to let it go, especially as its followed by the film's most affecting scene follows, an orgy framed around blinding light that shows both how committed to the piece Fassbender is and how fearless McQueen is when scouring the depths of his subjects. Though I think the real revelation in the film is Carey Mulligan. She's proven herself capable of a lot these last two years, but never as someone who can live in a moment like she does here. In conversation with Fassbender, she's more emotionally honest and open than she's ever been. She nails her character; the whole time I kept thinking of all the women I knew who she reminded me of. She blends right in. She's heartbreakingly herself, unable to be independent because she needs the help and support of other people to stay on her feet, but also because she needs other people. She's the antithesis of Fassbender; she can't live in isolation. Or, more accurately, she knows she can't live without people and can't let them get away from her once she has them in her life. Fassbender knows he needs people but is ashamed of what he takes from them. Watching him try to let people in and conquer the thing that most defines is one of the most satisfying experiences I've had in a movie theatre.

11. A Separation

by Asghar Farhadi

A Separation happens so quickly you don't really have time to think about it. The pacing is relentless, skipping between moments of conflict that starts with a divorce and ends with a car window being smashed, nothing being resolved along the way, at least conventionally. In fact nothing is conventional about A Separation. Its style is hidden away; Asghar Farhadi takes an objective eye to the problems of the Iranian family at the center of his drama, revealing only what needs to be seen for us to understand why everyone's so upset, parsing out detail to create an unbearable tension between everyone concerned. For a film that could be part of the Dogme manifesto, it feels like the most well-drawn thriller of the year. In spite of what your feelings may be for any character, whether you side with the harried mother who needs desperately to leave the repressive country she's called home until now, or the father who can't leave because he knows his father won't survive the transition, every new scene provides an upset, a new way to view these people. It's a brilliant script, playing your expectations like a fiddle, constantly making you consider every point of view. Rarely does a film make a case for every single side of a conflict, but as sad as it may be to take one side, Farhadi makes you realize that sometimes you have to face the truth, no matter how terrible an option it seems, no matter who gets hurt. It's one of the most adult treatments of both divorce and of ingrained cultural expectations (that never feel exclusive or foreign) you'll ever see. The cast are all perfect, everyone likable even at their worst (read: most afraid). Appropriately it's an exhausting watch but exhilarating cinema.

12. House of Pleasures

by Bertrand Bonello

There are better made films this year than House of Pleasures (or House of Tolerance, depending on when and where you saw it) but none that I think about as frequently. While watching it I couldn't help thinking I must be one of the only people who'd really love a movie like this, yet once a day I try to recommend it to someone before stopping myself. Very few of my close friends would put up with a two hour drift through a 19th century brothel where the sex is just as distant and colourless as the women who populate the film's elegantly dressed halls. And frankly, this is the sort of film you want for yourself. It drips with the inescapable aura of something you want kept private, something you enjoy in secret. That's not a slight, incidentally, that the women are bored and dispirited; it's just what being surrounded by wealth and power and having no access to it will do to your spirit. Bonello manages to evoke sexiness and sensuality rather than actually conjure it, a pretty stunning accomplishment when your heroine are all whores. The film drifts from scene to scene, encounter to encounter, existing primarily in the room where the men pick the girls they'll be spending their time with, rarely if ever showing sex like it's been shown before. The array of Brecthian angles Bonello finds to shoot his sex scenes (vertigo-inducing high angle, split-screen), not to mention the use of blistering soul music, says everything about his approach to the subject. He isn't interested in sex, just how it can have its meaning erased and replaced. It's done to these women, it's the one thing that binds them, it's their livelihood and you can see them struggling with the idea that it might define them. They are above sex, now. Trust and intimacy lead to cruelty and so they hang in the air never landing on one emotion for fear of what it will do to them. The example of "The One Who Laughs" keeps them dishonest, for their own safety. And so they simply drift, wearing the finest silk and ivory and cosmetics the era could offer. The film follows suit, beautifully, in and out of the most ravishing settings, one of the many films this year redolent of a living oil painting. The word cool means almost nothing these days, but you know you've stumbled upon it when the girl in the back of the class with the heavy eyelids won't talk to you and that's all you want in the world. House of Pleasures is that girl, pure ennui scribbled on celluloid with the abandon of someone who could take you or leave you.

13. Melancholia

by Lars Von Trier

At this point I've said all I can say about Melancholia in my review and in discussion of the film with Fox. Suffice it to say that I still think its depiction of depression is one of the best in cinema, its vision of the apocalypse is one of the most beautiful, its vision of a Zentropa family reunion in the form of Kirsten Dunst's wedding is one of the greatest delights of the year, its performances are amazing, and its director is the closest thing we have to Alfred Hitchcock today. If Antichrist was his Psycho, then Melancholia is his The Birds.

14. War Horse

by Steven Spielberg

Someone, I can't remember who, once told me that they were happy for Steven Spielberg because his interests and passions typically lined up with the mainstream. In other words they didn't believe he made films like Jurassic Park and E.T. because he was sure they would make money, he just genuinely loved big hearted stories with emotional cores that people of all ages and nationalities could find. It doesn't matter what religion you belong to, Schindler's List is a moving film. In one sense he's lucky, because he's second maybe to "Hitchcock" or "Camera" on the list of words people think of when anyone on earth thinks the word "movie." In another, big stories don't tend to sit well with critics. Jurassic Park is not a terribly well reviewed movie, but the spectacle put to rest most complaints people had about the baggy plot. After the tremendous critical blow he received for Indiana Jones 4, I think people started to suspect he couldn't spin a big yarn like he used to; which I have to confess was a huge bummer because the one-two punch of Munich and War of the Worlds count as career highs to me. War Horse put all that to bed. It's a film that has respectable cinephile reference points (John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, Robert Bresson) and though it tells its story in big cathartic scenes, nobody does those better than Steven Spielberg. Let others complain about the film being too obvious; I came here to see a boy in love with a miracle horse; that it was delivered in style that I found not just pleasing but admirable was more than I bargained for. This film probably isn't for modern audiences, but anyone whose ever swooned over the images of John Wayne framed in the many doorways of The Searchers, it's heaven. The compositions and grammar are all classic Ford, the story Au Hazard Balthasar by way of Very Long Engagement. It effortlessly joins the pantheon of great films about World War I and at times evokes the rhythms of David Lean's Noel Coward adaptations (it's tough not to think of Celia Johnson when looking at Emily Watson's beaten-but-not-broken mother; similarly Peter Mullan is playing any or all of Victor McLaglen's characters for Ford, but giving them a depth and sorrow McLaglen never managed). But frankly even if I didn't find so much to place it in film history, I'd still find this story heartbreaking. It's big drama with big emotions but with a dignity that it shares with its characters. Knock them down and they'll get back up.

15. Drive

by Nic Winding Refn

If cinephilia was the defining feature of this year's arthouse heavy hitters (films that conquered art houses to be given a multiplex residence), Drive coolly sections off the dirtier parts of the 70s and 80s for itself. Giving the bug-covered windshields of The Driver, To Live And Die In LA and Sixteen Candles a detailing job (who knew gallons of blood give it that shine?), Nic Winding Refn proved that he could make anything his own, even the well-filmed streets of Los Angeles and the all-too-familiar faces of Ron Perlman, Ryan Goslin and Albert Brooks. Mike D'Angelo introduced the concept of weight classes in his review of Kim Ki-Duk's Arirang at this year's Cannes film festival, something I love. If, as he posits, Kim is a middle weight, Refn's a heavy weight and Drive is the upper cut that ends the 2011 championship bout. It drips with cool, its coated in gold, it uses slow-mo like no other film since Wong Kar-Wai's heyday, and it uses silence and space like a Joy Division record. It hits hardest the first time, so make it count, and even though I like Bronson better, there's no denying that Refn drives through LA unlike any of his predecessors. It tells a story as quietly and efficiently as possible so that it can luxuriate in the luscious moments between its two characters. Whether it's unspeakable violence or passionate kissing, Refn captures the intensity like a virus in a test-tube, examining it from every angle and injecting it into each of his viewers.

16. On Tour

by Mathieu Amalric

If you know Mathieu Amalric, it's because his face is unforgettable. See him play his special brand of flawed fuck-up and you never forget him. He gives face-planting a good name and his characters are always the most interesting thing in whatever movie they find themselves in. So it makes sense that when he fell into the director's chair for the first time, he played it as cool as one of his characters; with a style that seemed both extemporaneous and confident. He seemed like he had been there all his life, a lived-in quality he also approaches his character with. His style is a thing of beauty, a kind of cobbling together of the Dardennes, Desplechin & Dumont. Or more simply John Cassavettes looking at the world of Fellini in the early 60s. On Tour is like Killing of a Chinese Bookie without the mafia ties, Opening Night set in a dying burlesque circuit. It's all heart, documented like Amalric's manager hired a videographer for the length of their circuit and forgot they'd be documenting his failures too. He and the girls who play his burlesque troupe (all of them playing thinly veiled versions of themselves as far as I can tell) all give go-for-broke performances and I have to confess that I loved the movie more for focusing on a group of chubby women who make their living showing off their curves to appreciative audiences. Fuck yes to that, I say. Watching Amalric fail in the name of helping his girl's achieve success on their own terms is much more heartwarming than the detached style might suggest. Out of the broken romances and families, a deeper appreciation for togetherness emerges.

City of Life & Death

by Chuan Lu

In an interview with American Cinematographer, Newton Thomas Sigel said that in making Valkyrie a lot of ideas were tossed around and most of the good ones were dismissed. It's tempting to think what a more discerning and broad minded director than Bryan Singer could have done with the story of a failed attempt of Hitler's life. Sigel tantalizing hinted at what that might have looked at with two words "black" and "white." What I'm getting at is that Chuan Lu's City of Life & Death is the film Valkyrie could have been; in Singer's defense it's a tough watch. In Lu's, it's one of the best films about war ever made and at the risk of sounding alarmist, pretentious and a little condescending, Singer's a coward. Taking the same "You are right fucking there" approach as Kihachi Okamoto's bug-eyed masterpiece Japan's Longest Day, Lu chronicles the Rape of Nanking from the day the Japanese occupied the city to the last Chinese execution. It's a film of unthinkable horror, excruciating sadness and violence designed to kick you in the stomach. Like Schindler's List with all the sentimentality drained out of it, it follows as many characters as it can with the insane death toll, trying to find humanity where history proves there was none. John Rabe tries to save who he can, but his efforts only last so long; a Chinese soldier tries to lead his comrades to their deaths with dignity; a woman tries to save soldiers she barely knows at the cost of her own life; people are killed out of pity and mercy almost as often as because this is war. Lu handles the scope of the story by finding moments of simplicity, be they cruel or kind, and lets them speak about the conditions of the war. The Japanese took no prisoners and neither does Lu.

17. Take Shelter

by Jeff Nichols

Michael Shannon is America's answer to Michael Fassbender, although I'd be prepared to say that though his looks preclude his taking on Mr. Rochester, he has a better range. I've seen him play despicable, I've seen him play damaged, and now I've seen him play heartwarming. Granted there's a lot of darkness surrounding it but Michael Shannon as concerned father might be the best and most lovable guise he's yet put on. He does such a tremendous job as a man with two things separating him from his love for his family. The first is that as a man raised in the midwest, communicating his love, especially to his deaf daughter, doesn't come quite as naturally as he'd like it to (this is never stated openly, this is just in the subtlety of his performance). The second is when he begins having apocalyptic daydreams that he interprets as visions, he begins trying to prevent them from coming true in his own way, which means putting himself at odds with the people he loves most in the world. To admit he has problems would be to frighten them, risk them not understanding. What's most sad is that we in the audience know he's building impractical shelters and giving his dog away because he loves them. Jeff Nichols is a great director, I don't mean to shift focus from the tremendous fucking job he does here, but watching this side of Shannon emerging feels like a revelation. Nichols feels like the second coming of BBS and directors like Bogdanovich and Jaglom, a dusty and dark vision of the American male guiding his work. And if Nichols is Jaglom than Shannon is Jack Nicholson gearing up for the best and most creative period in his life. Maybe it's silly to think that a partnership like this could last (the same could be said of McQueen and Fassbender) but I'm looking forward to seeing their work for years to come. They can make magic, here's the proof.

18. Winnie The Pooh

by Stephen J. Anderson & Don Hall

I'm prepared to admit that not only am I a fan of things that make me remember a time when my life was simpler and was spent watching cartoons under the feet of adults I trusted, I am also a massive Winnie The Pooh fan. I love the books, I love the old films, I even loved the television series (less than the other two, but you know...). So, yes, I was beyond delighted when there was a new Winnie The Pooh movie that was getting such great notices. The rhythm and pace are a little more modern (as befitting the notion that we need to cater to children who are being raised with a shorter attention span [aside: do people not get that an attention span isn't something you're born with? That outside factors shape it?]) but this is unmistakbly the work of people who know and love the denizens of the Hundred Acre Woods. John Cleese's warm narration sets the tone for this tale of friendship and imagination spent in a (largely) lazy day in a place I know like I know my grandparents' first house or the smell of autumn carried on the breeze. I confess with just a little trepidation that all it takes is the sound of Winnie the Pooh's voice to make my eyes threaten to well up. Some things you never forget and thankfully there are some people who want to help you remember. A touching and ambling tribute to the joys of letting your imagination run wild and spending time with some old friends.

19. Silver Bullets/Art History

by Joe Swanberg

My friend Sean Van Deuren and I spent most of our last semester at Emerson College in the cult of Joe Swanberg. We watched his early work, read the advance reviews of Uncle Kent and were shocked to discover that he was the only filmmaker (in quite a few years if I'm not mistaken) to send a double feature to the Berlin Film Festival. Richard Corliss loved him and sang the praises of this new venture and like that we were hooked. Sean, Fox and I got the chance to interview him (along with people who were classmates but now I get to call colleagues) and after spending an hour being charmed by his fascinating approach to filmmaking and humour, he offered to send us that double feature. The next week we sat down in stunned silence (we're usually a pretty talky bunch) and watched the first half. Silver Bullets is not a horror film, but it has moments that will absolutely make your flesh crawl. Taking the production of a horror film as its setting, Swanberg illustrates the danger of letting your art absorb your personal life as his character (a demure, passive-aggressive version of himself) and a much more affable and laidback horror filmmaker (played splendidly by fright film auteur Ti West) compete over the same actress. The notions of freedom within the context of a role and a relationship and becoming a character are manipulated like specimens under a microscope by Swanberg, who ratchets up the tension like a seasoned horror director, introducing hallucinatory meltdowns and his typically great awkward conversations and confrontations between people who know their relationship is toxic to at least one of them. Then we took a breather and watched part 2. Art History is even more painful, even though it seems like the stakes are lower. We follow Swanberg's director in a different chapter in his life, making a film about two people that takes place largely through sex scenes. The conflict is simple but harrowing. Swanberg's director and Kent Osborne's leading man both want the lead actress. As they drift around the house they're using for the set, trying to say everything they need to without words, the conflict quietly and without warning grows to a boil. In the film's best scene (and one of the most chilling and uncomfortable of the year) Swanberg insists on take after take of a sex scene. Osborne, oblivious to Swanberg and the actress's relationship, is only too happy to oblige. Ten minutes later, you'll wish to god they'd been shooting on film so they'd have to take a break. An art house provocation on par with Michael Haneke and last year's Dogtooth, Art History is unsettling in the best way possible.

20. The Skin I Live In

by Pedro Almodóvar

Speaking of arthouse heavyweights, Pedro Almodóvar's reputation has long been as someone who deals in big, broad strokes, sexual misconduct and a distinctly Spanish texture (bright colors, delicious food and fondness for design that one-ups John Waters). But when was the last time he made a film that really made you appreciate how twisted he could be. 2002's Talk To Her and 2004's Bad Education have their fair share, for sure, but I wanted something that really went the distance. The Skin I Live In is that film. Spectacularly crafted (with help from Jean-Paul Gaultier) Skin is almost too beautiful to be a horror film, but its blood runs cold with the tradition of psychological and body horror. I can't prove it, but if I had to guess I'd say Almodóvar was as big a fan of Hammer Horror as I am because I count references to almost every Frankenstein film especially the brightly colored test tubes of The Evil of Frankenstein, the cool brutality of The Revenge of Frankenstein and more than a few plot elements, not to mention a streak of psycho-sexual maliciousness from Frankenstein Created Woman. But this film's personality is entirely its own. Though occasionally it retreats into the dank gothic cellars of the Hammer films, Skin exists in the high gloss world Victor Frankenstein scorned as the protagonist, Robert Ledgard, is much more about keeping up appearances than Victor Frankenstein was. As Ledgard, Antonio Banderas gives his best performance in years (his best work is always for Almodóvar) alternately withholding charm he doesn't seem willing to show, expressing loss that consumes and enrages him, and huffing like a rhinoceros about to charge. I never thought he could evoke anything like fear from years of thinking of him as either a lothario or an animated character, but goddamn if he isn't truly frightening, giving even Peter Cushing a run for his money (heresy, I know). Elena Anaya is equally tremendous as his victim (bringing the same naivete, fear and sweetness that Susan Denberg and Veronica Carlson brought to their time spent at the mercy of Cushing's Frankenstein), whose story we learn through a series of troubling and bewitching flashbacks, learning just how far Ledgard has gone and why. As a fan of both the heights of Almodóvar's stylistic excesses and of those symphonies of repression and explosion, Hammer Horror films, I was beyond pleased.

21. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

by David Fincher

I'll say it: I was no fan of the original Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It was televisual, un-engaging and confusing. I had completely forgotten who the killer was by the time I sat down to watch the new one. The one thing that stuck with me was Noomi Rapace and as evidenced by her recent success in both Hollywood and back home, she's doing just fine. So I didn't have any reservations about David Fincher (the closest thing we have to Stanley Kubrick) retelling the story because I knew he could sort out the tangled web of exposition and make this a proper film. And by god he did; even gave it its own personality while he was at it. After a blistering opening credit sequence that betrays Fincher's background in music videos, though not necessarily in a bad way, we enter the world of the Vanger family and how disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist will cross paths with the girl of the title. The cinematography is beautiful, as always, the pacing is as quick as it needs to be, there's a never useless moment, the performances (especially Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara) are great, the sound design is overpowering, the film is frightening and thrilling in turn, and it felt like a movie. A really fucking good one.

22. We Need To Talk About Kevin

by Lynne Ramsay

I hate to toe an established line of critical thought if only because I feel like I should have more to say but it's tough not to agree with Mike D'Angelo's assessment of We Need To Talk About Kevin. The first half hour is the best film of the year. When it settles down the film loses a bit of its elliptical spell on you, but it's still one of the best films of the year even if it doesn't maintain its initial rhythm. But Lynne Ramsay has an eye like no one else in cinema and Kevin is a continuation of her exploration of silently suffering, unknowable women at the mercy of men who are too invested in themselves to care about anyone else. Tilda Swinton does another typically amazing job as the mother of a child who can only be called evil who grows into a theatrical and soulless murderer. Jonny Greenwood's music blankets the film in eerie waves of fear, placing the film somewhere between horror and claustrophobic suburban satire/nightmare. Ramsay keeps tight control over the endlessly unfurling, grief-fueled reminiscing, trying and failing to find the cause, the moment when her son became the murderer the world knows him as. The film is almost too cruel to watch, especially where Swinton's second child is concerned, but Ramsay's eye keeps you rooted to the spot. Nature or nurture, it was too late.

23. Kosmos

by Reha Erdem

I wish there were more films like Kosmos in a given year. I like movies with inexplicable happenings, things that could be interpreted as supernatural or hallucinogenic or something else entirely. I like films with unexplained booming noise that sound in the deep every few minutes, evidence of some unexplained conflict, the kind of thing that haunts the town of Kosmos like a whole population of ghosts. The living and the dead coexist more or less peacefully because everyone's at the mercy of the military, a kind of authority figure that will always be there to stop whatever hope arises. Kosmos is part christ allegory, part possible tribute to the likes of Teorema or Visitor Q with the rich history of Balkan/Soviet cinema coursing through its veins. Set anything in a bleak third world landscape and my feverish cinephile brain starts drawing connections, part of the fun watching films from that part of the globe. Kosmos is ostensibly about a man who might be a dervish who arrives in a war-torn hamlet to change everyone's lives for the better. Problem is not everyone wants their lives improved, and even fewer understand just what he's doing. The film's best moments are his interaction with the teahouse owner's daughter, a kind of ecstatic flourishing of the wings they were cheated of. The film's surrogate lovemaking is tender and wonderfully realized, unimaginably beautiful. Their performances are beyond committed, two planets passing into each other's orbits, the film they live in a rare and wonderful galaxy.

24. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

by Guy Ritchie

I don't understand for a second how this was not as well reviewed as the first Sherlock Holmes. I don't understand how this wasn't well reviewed period. It's furiously well written, acted and directed. Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr. have the best chemistry of nearly any on screen pair this year, jousting and parrying with words for two hours, trying to cut each other's clothes off with the proper jab, Mask of Zorro style. Oh, and it's a franchise film that beats the shit out of a lot of art films this year and most other major releases. It's a delight; jam-packed with virtuoso filmmaking from someone I never thought capable of it. He just uses his camera and the editing room like a kid who knows how all the toys in the toystore work. The forest chase scene is an absolute marvel, making use of slow-motion, altered frame rates, color correction, sound design and a kind of fixed-camera tracking shot that makes a human running look like a cross between the earliest camera tests of nude figures in motion and Soviet claymation. The film is designed so much that you could spend the whole film looking at the upholstery, truly majestic costumes and art direction if you could take your eyes off the leads for a second. This is what I want when I pay ten dollars to see a film on a big screen.

25. Silent Souls

by Alexsei Federchenko

Silent Souls' only flaw is that its too short, not getting to know its protagonists or spin any more tangential yarns filled with really knockout imagery. The braiding of the young bride's pubic hair ranks as one of the best images of the year. Andrei Karasyov's music recalls Amon Tobin's work for György Pálfi's Taxidermia, and the similarities don't stop there. Like that film, a dying culture's traditions haunt the survivors and grotesque bodies are shown degrading; though unlike Pálfi's film, the figures and forms in this can't help but be erotic even when decomposing. The film owes a debt to Andrei Tarvovsky, from a scene shot from the back of a car (Solaris) to the burning of a lover's body (Mirror/Nostalghia) and the drifting through an alien landscape. The world it dissects is so vivid and strange that it felt like a much longer film, and I certainly wish it was. Federchenko has a real grasp on movement and I cannot wait to see what he does next. The framing of the funeral pyre scene alone is enough to grant him my attention for a lifetime of work.

26. Mildred Pierce

by Todd Haynes

There's a lot to be said about Todd Haynes resplendent reinvention of this noir classic (every detail is perfect; just thinking about the green-heavy colour scheme makes my spine tingle) but I want to take a second to talk about Guy Pearce. Kate Winslet is effervescent as the heroine, but Guy Pearce, simply put, was born to play Monty Beragon. It starts with the hair, that wavy mop, and then it's the glasses he hides behind. His eyes are just as black as the lenses so its not as though they do him any favours; you know he's bad fucking news. And yet he looks you up and down and he's already ten steps ahead dropping you at your house after sleeping with you and making it seem like he cares for you deeply. His voice drips with charm, but it's not real. The pride and the self-confidence (which morph into a sick arrogance over the course of the film's five hour running time) are real, but the charm is surface only. His character is just as needy in his way as Michael Fassbender in Shame, though he's turned it into a source of empowerment. It's how he stays afloat. Together all these elements make everyone love him, yet there's something indefinably off. When he sits in bed, having broken someone's trust for the last time, or using the word rape to describe (in positive terms I might add) what he's about to do to the woman who needs him most in the world. In hindsight the word "Oily" is all I can think to describe him, but while I was living the story the first time around I was totally in love with him. It's career-defining work, the kind of thing he gets right effortlessly (though I'm sure he worked his ass off to get this character right). Haynes deserves credit for choosing and directing him, but this is as much Pearce's film as anyone else's. You won't forget him.

27. The Interrupters

by Steve James

My mother and I watched this and afterwards all she could articulate was that the reality that awaits the mothers of the Chicago community at the center of this film is too horrifying to consider. Not knowing if your kids will come home in a given day? That's not something you should associate with life in an American city, yet that's the situation. Steve James has long been one of our greatest talents, a documentarian who never leaves a story until he has every angle and has let the human beings in front of his camera tell their story through action as well as description. Hearing a man who we met in a state of murderous rage tell one of the interrupters whose job it is to stop conflict that he did his job well and that it's because of him that he has a job and is living the life he's supposed to be living, is just unreal. We saw it happen, we know it's true, yet our eyes tell us to put distance between us and the truth. James' films are so carefully edited that they feel like fiction. The stories are true, we just wish they weren't because then there might be a happy ending.

28. Simon Werner a Disparu...

by Fabrice Gobert

How The Myth of the American Sleepover is being lauded as either perceptive, insightful, or good for anything but a laugh is beyond me. That film plays like the writer never met high school kids but heard an awful lot about them from the TV. It seems especially stilted and dumb with this sexy creature sitting on the sidelines waiting patiently for you to notice it, not that it needs your attention. Simon Werner plays like Elephant with a heavy dose of ennui and the violence cut back significantly enough that this largely stylistic exercise feels perfectly weighted; not too heavy, not too fatuous. The Sonic Youth score is the water these beautiful French kids drift on as they wade through one proper mystery (the disappearance of a classmate) and the infinite mysteries that greet anyone who kisses anyone at their high school. This film perfectly captures the maliciousness of high school, it just adds a little melodramatic angst for good measure; because let's face it, that's how kids see the world, as one big melodrama where everyone else is a side character.

29. Weekend

by Andrew Haigh

The best and most wonderful film that can actually be called a romance this year.

30. Pina

by Wim Wenders

I wish I had seen this in 3D because in 2D its just textured enough to make me think that perhaps the third dimension would buy the film that extra something. I haven't seen Palermo Shooting but I have every reason to think this is Wim Wenders' most affecting film since Wings of Desire. His friendship with Pina Bausch inspired him and every member of her company and that love makes the dancing feel all the more alive. She lives on through them, and this film is a testament to her talent and the lives she touched.

31. Poetry

by Lee Chang-Dong

A beautiful, impressionistic sadness. Be warned, this one will stay with you.

32. Contagion

by Steven Soderbergh

A disaster film as only Steven Soderbergh could imagine. A cast of experts vanish into unassuming roles being both professional and sympathetic. Soderbergh crafts a new nightmare, one that doesn't have the benefit of distance or exploitative style.

33. The Mill & The Cross

by Lech Majewski

Paints landscapes using blue screens and computer imagery. One of the most striking and interestingly told dramas this year had to offer.

34. Archipelago

by Joanna Hogg

I wish I knew just what about Archipelago made me love it so much. I think, in a word, it's that the film is so gentle. The scenery is beautiful, but muted. The performances are great, but invisible. The characters can be mean, but try hard not to be. They're wealthy, but not flashy. And all the while Joanna Hogg's camera keeps its distance, as though she's trying to stay out of their way, to coax the truth out of them by letting them be. It's enough to make you forget that everything they're saying was written beforehand. It's a beautiful way to make a film, like a weekend vacation. Tom Hiddleston leads a fine cast, giving his best performance in a year full of good ones, sweetly and subtly communicating the difference between his character and the family he loves but feels trapped in. I think my favourite aspect of Archipelago is his relationship to Rose, the inhouse cook. Even though I kept mistaking his pleasantness towards her as flirtation and I realized that a less disciplined writer and director would have led the film down that path, but his character is just nice and goes out of his way to show it. It's a lovely trait and his moments with Rose are genuine, sweet and, like the rest of the film they rest in, perfectly drawn.

35. Tomboy

by Céline Sciamma

Céline Sciamma captured the rawness of young love as good as any ever had with Water Lilies, her last film and to my mind she hasn't bested herself here, but her efficacy as a storyteller has improved. The performances by the kids are remarkable, but the film could have been silent and it still would have worked. Her images and rhythms are so evocative and rich that she could tell the story with nothing else.

36. Post Mortem

by Pablo Larraín

One of the most unassuming dictatorial nightmares, a landscape ravaged by warfare. Pablo Larraín continues exploring his fascination with Pinochet to spectacular ends.

37. Anonymous

by Roland Emmerich

If Stratfordians got off their high horse for a fucking second, they might realize that this is one of the most sumptuous epics of the last five years, with great and incendiary performances from its sprawling cast, unforgettable camera work from Anna Foerster, and not only competent but actively terrific direction from Roland Fucking Emerich. Yeah. I know. I was as shocked as anyone, but goddamnit this film is really, really well made and I don't want him to go back to making bad films so I'm going to tell everyone who will listen how good this movie is. Because goddamnit this is a good film. Put aside your prejudices and give this searing giant a chance.

38. Turn Me On, Goddamnit

by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen

A widgety coming-of-age story with a heavier emphasis on coming than almost any other of its kind. Its refreshing sexual honesty is just the first of its strong suits; the great performances and smart script make this one to remember. Sweet, sexy and short, this film may not be as provocative as its title suggests, but it will warm your heart without manipulating you, which counts as dangerous when put next to any American teen film. So fuck you with a hammer, America.

39. Womb

by Benedek Fliegauf

This year's Dogtooth. A Freudian Dystopia that would be terrible if it weren't so touching, and vice versa. Eva Green is the reigning queen of troubled matriarchs.

40. A Screaming Man

by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

A tightly controlled look at what the threat of violence does to a man who has so little to spare.

41. The Descendants

by Alexander Payne

The sweetest and most lovable Payne to date.

42. The Kid With The Bike

by Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne

It will exhaust you, but there was no film that better showed the effects of our actions on those who never stop watching us.

43. Beginners

by Mike Mills

Is there anything more heartbreaking than Goran Visnjic looking at his deceased lover's dog and saying "He remembers me!"

44. Biutiful

by Alejandro González Iñárritu

I've given Iñárritu shit over the years, but when he tells a story this gut-wrenching I can't stay mad at him. It reviews itself, really. Stunning, striking, haunting...

45. Hierro

by Gabe Ibáñez

No other director (except maybe Guy Ritchie) made quite as extensive use of the camera and the editing room this year. Ibáñez pulled out all the stops and I was stunned by his fast and fearless exploration.

46. Meek's Cutoff

by Kelly Reichardt

Like Monte Hellman's The Shooting by way of Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar, this film takes its time, but is unforgettable.

47. The Innkeepers

by Ti West

A horror film with a heart of gold, Ti West shows he can tell a hell of a story when given the tools of his idols. The film is insanely well composed and lit, equal parts The Shining and The Evil Dead. The Innkeepers might not have anything on West's masterpiece, The House of the Devil, but what a great and lovable yarn with a real sense of history and humour. But most importantly there are some moments that made me scream out loud. Mission accomplished.

48. Mysteries of Lisbon

by Raúl Ruiz

Come to hear a story, stay to get lost.

49. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

by Brad Bird

A live action cartoon, like Wile E. Coyote let loose in the Kremlin. The best of the series by far and proof that blockbuster's needn't be empty headed, even if they have the weight of a three-win series on their shoulders. Real directors are taking back the mainstream and I couldn't be happier.

50. Arthur Christmas

by Sarah Smith & Barry Cook

Yeah, this is why Aardman is still the name to beat in animation. Pixar's digimation is more art than the british studio's but they cannot quite top the heart of something like Arthur Christmas.

51. Tabloid

by Errol Morris

It's not the destination, it's the journey. Trust me. A wild ride through lies, lies and more lies with a heroine who lived like she was on screen; in a way she finally made it.

52. Into the Abyss

by Werner Herzog

Don't ever go to Texas. The saga of those touched by the crimes of the two young men whose death penalty and life sentence are the thrust of this documentary is stranger than fiction (as it always is when Werner Herzog comes to town) and too sad for words.

53. We Were Here

by David Weissman & Bill Weber

Stripped down, as it should be. A story this important should have nothing standing between the tale, the teller and the audience.

54. Immortals

by Tarsem Singh

If you don't see this as high art masquerading as kick-ass spectacle, I have no time for you.

55. Moneyball

by Bennett Miller

I don't care about baseball, yet found myself rooted to the spot. Wally Pfister's camera makes boardrooms as cinematic as the fields and Brad Pitt finds a good use for his new found stature and poise. Exciting and moving.

56. Tyrannosaur

by Paddy Considine

I fought against its miserabalist approach and too-obvious musical cues at the time, but this movie has stayed with me. Peter Mullan is just too good.

57. Warrior

by Gavin O'Connor

Admittedly without Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton this film wouldn't work half as well as it does, but its commitment to its grungy mise-en-scene is admirable and the fighting is visceral.

58. Attack the Block

by Joe Cornish

Well, you're never going to see another film like this.

59. Carnage

by Roman Polanski

Hysterically toxic.

60. We Are What We Are

by Jorge Michel Grau

It won't scare you, but it will turn you on.

61. The Princess of Montpensier

by Betrand Tavernier

A rollicking tragedy, a swashbuckling tear-jerker.

62. A Dangerous Method

by David Cronenberg

Like Scorsese's Age of Innocence with a thicker sexual subtext, A Dangerous Method is equal parts touching and sad, and my favourite of Cronenberg's films since his reinvention.

63. Le Havre

by Aki Kaurismaki

My favourite Kaurismaki. Miracles can happen.

64. The Illusionist

by Sylvain Chomet

Yes, it's well-made, but shi-it is it ever tragic. Bring tissues and a protective cynicism.

65. The Turin Horse

by Bela Tarr

I can't really explain why I loved this as much as I did, but in the hypnotic drone, I lost myself and could've watched it for days.

66. Les Amours Imaginaires

by Xavier Dolan

My nemesis. At 22, he's already had two films play Cannes. I'd be mad if I weren't so jealous at his expert use of colour, composition, rhythm and the way he shoots faces. He's a talent and I'm mad as hell he's so good.

67. The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

by Steven Spielberg

A high-flying adventure with one face-shaped flaw. But really a great, great time and it gives me hope that motion capture will soon do what we've been told it can do.

68. Cold Weather

by Aaron Katz

A lovely and poignant genre softening. Aaron Katz can always bring out the tenderness in people who in less capable hands would seem overly precious and self-centered. Props to the effulgent Trieste Kelly Dunn.

69. The Strange Case of Angelica

by Manoel De Oliveira

A gift. Unlike anything ever made. And not just because it was made by the oldest man to ever make a film, who, by the way, has two more in production. He's one good reason I could never be anything but a filmmaker. Je T'aime, Manoel.

70. Chico & Rita

by Tono Errando, Javier Mariscal & Fernando Trueba

A vibrant cultural history lesson told like a great romance. The Illusionist is better made, but if you're looking for a good time with your sadness, this joint is jumping.

71. The Sleeping Beauty

by Catherine Breillat

A feminist bedtime story. In a class all its own.

72. The Whistleblower

by Larysa Kondracki

A well-told left-wing tragedy. That the film received so little fanfare upon its release is a shocking testament to the way this county views international tragedy. We aren't responsible enough to be a global community. It's terrifying to watch in microcosm just how fucking horrible we can be, though it's told so well that you won't want to look away.

73. Incendies

by Denis Villeneuve

Haunting.

74. The Way Back

by Peter Weir

Peter Weir makes whatever kind of film he wants to, and always does a first-rate job.

75. Le Quattro Volte

by Michelangelo Frammartino

Made me nostalgic for last year's crop of wide-angle art films. The best portion of the film involves a truck, a fence and a lot of goats. The film soars during that section, but tires a bit in the denouement.

76. Troll Hunter

by André Øvredal

This is a splendid yarn that does something new and exciting with the found footage trope.

77. Martha Marcy May Marlene

by Sean Durkin

This film is too well-made not to make this list even if I have major issues with it. I won't bore you with them; on a craft and technical level the film is flawless. Look deeper and I have problems.

78. 50/50

by Jonathan Levine

This film's saving grace is that it doesn't take seriously even if the subject matter begs for a sober treatment. As the son of a cancer surviro I appreciated its humour and the shaggy roundabout way of telling the story.

79. Bridesmaids

by Paul Feig

I can't say this is here for any reason beyond making me laugh so hard I pissed myself. Sometimes that's enough.

80. Brighton Rock

by Rowan Joffé

This film is like trying to kiss through a razorblade, it's wonderful when it doesn't make you so nervous your hands start shaking. Sam Riley is a livewire, a treasure.

81. Jane Eyre

by Cary Fukunaga

The idea of basically remaking the end of The New World while co-opting one of the most widely read books in the English language has a kind of subversiveness to it that I like. The film is rich and gorgeous and ignores a lot of the book, but I had a wonderful time just watching these characters live and breathe around the great stacks of prose they have to get through.

82. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

by Rupert Wyatt

There's one word in this movie that earned it its place here, and once you here it, you're either with it forever or you've checked out. After hearing it, I was ready to raise my fist along with the chimps in cages and take this fight to the streets. Rupert Wyatt may never make a film as good as The Escapist but shit is it good to see him breathe life into a potential disaster.

83. Source Code

by Duncan Jones

A sci-fi parable that gets to have its Richard Matheson bleakness cake and eat it, too. I found it charming, quick-witted and engaging. Michelle Monaghan has never been lovelier.

84. The Last Circus

by Álex de la Iglesia

There's quite simply no other film like it this year. I've never cheered for self-inflicted facial mutilation before and I might never again. For fans of the outre.

85. The Sunset Limited

by Tommy Lee Jones

Cormac McCarthy doesn't have a Pulitzer for nothing. This play has a nasty existential streak that makes it irresistible. Tommy Lee Jones does it justice and Samuel Jackson makes for a hell of a sparring partner.

86. The Ward

By John Carpenter

A solid little thriller with some great scare scenes and a terrific performance from Jared Harris; not quite up to his Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, but still excellent. But the real treat is about twenty minutes in. In a rain storm the girls in the titular ward turn on the radio and dance to a rock song before the power goes out. Just imagining Carpenter directing this scene melted my heart. It's one of the most opulent in his filmography, a rare moment of levity worthy of the French New Wave. Goddamn genius.

87. J. Edgar

by Clint Eastwood

This film could be here for visuals alone but I also love the central love affair between Armie Hammer and Leonardo Dicaprio. It is truly touching and it breaks my heart.

88. Rampart

by Oren Moverman

A host of great actors brings this story to life. Worthy of the great 70s crime classics.

89. If A Tree Falls: The Story of the Earth Liberation Front

by Marshall Curry & Sam Cullman

When fervor becomes fire and reality seems unreal. These guys thought they were living in a movie. And looking at what was on tv, I can't blame them. The way the police treated these poor kids, whose only crime was caring about goddamned trees, is unspeakable. Do I think ELF took it too far? Only because they were ill-informed. If they'd hit their targets and stopped what they were supposed to, I don't know if I'd be able to keep the distance I have. Marshall Curry is getting better at this and I was compelled the entire way through (music editor needs a stern talking to, however). This is an important story in an age of extremism.

90. Albert Nobbs

by Rodrigo Garcia

Any film about transvestites trying to please an endlessly unimpressed heterosexual working class has my sympathy, especially when it's so pleasing to the eye.

91. Too Big To Fail

by Curtis Hanson

The film Margin Call should have been. It never pauses to let you catch up. Why should it? The banks didn't.

92. The Ides of March

by George Clooney

Admirably dark and hero-less, even if it lacks a little weight. The reason to see it is because Evan Rachel Wood has never been more warm and alluring than she is here. A total transformation and one that holds this film together.

93. Cave of Forgotten Dreams

by Werner Herzog

Starts with buffalo, ends with alligators. A trifle, but still a must for any Herzog fan.

94. My Joy

by Sergei Loznitsa

This film and its director win the Jesper Ganslandt Award for most pleasing to look at, most troubling to watch film I don't understand this year.

95. Three

by Tom Tykwer

I wish the style stayed as blinding as in its angel-winged fantasy sequences and its hopeful and ecstatic last image, but the high points are enough to carry the film through its few weak moments. Tykwer answers to no one, and that's always a joy to watch.

96. Stake Land / Apollo 18

by Jim Mickle / by Gonzalo López-Gallego

Both of these films stand as testaments to what a great director can do with a simple or bad script. Humbling direction turns them into near-classics.

97. Ne Change Rien

by Pedro Costa

As the title implies there isn't much to see here, but what's there shakes your soul a little if you let it.

98. Senna

by Asif Kapadia

A great example of how a decades old story that we know the outcome to can still be directed to produce suspense.
99. We Have A Pope

by Nanni Moretti

Sometimes, a happy ending is out of the question, even when everything seems to point to one. After an hour and a half of pleasantly ambling comedy, I was just as pleasantly surprised to see that Moretti took the hard road home. God, or whatever, bless him.

100. The Guard

by John Michael McDonagh

If I have one complaint it's that a lot of this ground was covered in Bruges, but frankly the film is too charming and funny for that to matter. From the wonderfully wry chemistry between its two ballsy leads to the truly amazing score by Calexico, this has everything you'd ever want from an old school western...except the west.

Best Songs of 2011

2011-12-28T18:40:00.000-08:00

The Rules: The songs need to have been released this year and not be on any album that makes my best of the year list.

Final Fantasy - Hard to Explain

The internet has become great at facilitating bizarre cover songs. Thanks to blogs trying on Magazine-size scope and ambition, compilations of strange and marginal bands covering the hits they were influenced by has become something of a reliably pleasant surprise every few months. Several of those covers made have the sort of unrelenting pleasantness that make them unforgettable, a kind of pocket of urgency because the band needs to not only justify his inclusion in a Nirvana tribute record, but also justify the whole endeavor. Owen Pallett taking on The Strokes' "Hard to Explain" sounds utterly mad until you listen to it and indeed your glad Stereogum bothered paying tribute to a record that has amounted to a promise delivered broken regarding one of Rock's great unrealized debuts. But between those furiously sawing violins and Pallett's beautiful whine, this song is, to me, even more essential than the original.

Telekinesis - On A Plain

Except knowing that the AV Club adored them I'd no idea who Telekinesis was or why they were deemed important enough to cover one of the most highly regarded modern albums. Now, I don't go around singing the gospel of Nirvana. I'm a casual fan at best and I can only listen to them in waves. Yet something about Telekinesis' straight forward take on one of the band's lesser hits grabbed me in just right the way. It's simplicity is its saving grace, delivering the hook with a little of the band's personality as a filter, and passing it's running time quickly and with a kick.

Dum Dum Girls - September Gurls

It wouldn't be a best songs list around here without something from AV Undercover, the AV Club's great idea-turned-phenomena where they invite bands into their round room to play something from an ever-dwindling list of songs. The highlight this year (narrowly beating out Of Montreal doing "Fell In Love With A Girl," Sloan doing "Cars," The Fruit Bats doing "The Other Woman" and The Decemberists playing "If I Can't Change Your Mind") was definitely the sunglass-clad Dum Dum Girls doing a better job on Big Star's "September Gurls" than Big Star. The icy reverb that the girls seem to keep in massive store serves them splendidly as they harmonize their way through the easy rocker.

The Kills - Future Starts Slow

I wanted to like The Kills' new album more than I did because I'm sick to death of The Dead Weather and want everyone to go back to where they came froml; respectively The Greenhornes, The White Stripes and The Kills. I like those bands better than the sludgy side project they've become mired in. The White Stripes are no more and the Hornes are erratic at best, so I was definitely looking forward to the new Kills album. And I do really like it, but just not enough that it made my top twenty. Some of the group's best material is hidden throughout, including the growling opening number, which "Howls, screams and wails" in just the right way. This is what I want from Allison Mosshart.

The Chemical Brothers - Container Park

The Chemical Brothers joined Daft Punk in that odd section of purgatory labeled Bands Whose Soundtrack Work Kicks The Shit Out Of The Film It Was Composed For when they delivered a vibrant and angry electronic album to support the horrendous actioner Hanna. The film was a mess, a rash of embarassing stylistic choices, horribly earnest performances and cringe-inducing dialogue, but the score came this close to redeeming it. Take the film's unbearably pleased-with-itself action set pieces. In what should have been a thrilling, high-stakes fight scene Hanna and some thugs have it out in a Spanish shipping yard. Instead it barely registers because you everyone can't stop letting us know that they're making a film. The blistering song beneath the fight scene almost saves it. Almost.

Austra - The Beat & The Pulse

Austra's Feel It Break was almost compelling enough to make it on the list and I still love it dearly, for when the former Opera hopeful gets it right, it's a thing of beauty. "The Beat & The Pulse" is a dark wave wet dream, a latex-coated fantasia both old and thrillingly new. And when Katie Stelmanis goes for the full-throated chorus, my spine melts.

Susanne Sundfør - Black Widow

I didn't know anything about Sundfør when Cooper McKim handed me her album The Brothel. After hearing it, I chose not to do any research because the majestic otherness of songs like "Black Widow" might not have the same edge to them. I want to keep a blindspot up in front of her face so that I can continue to be confounded and tempted by her gorgeously warped voice and compositions.

My Morning Jacket - Circuital

After Evil Urges I'm just thankful that Circuital wasn't a goddamn tragedy. Better still, there are great songs on this new record, most notably the rollicking title track which starts as smoke wafting through mirrored halls until it explodes into the kind of rocker I'd come to expect from the hairy southerners captaining the ship known as My Morning Jacket. It's good to have them back, even if it's only for seven awesome minutes.

Radiohead - Staircase/Little By Little [Shed Remix]

As it wouldn't exactly be fair to give two spots to songs by band whose album made my best of the year list, I've decided to split it halfway between their b-sides and gargantuan remix album. There was enough Radiohead to fill a cruise ship this year and though it wasn't all gold...a lot of it was. "Staircase" is my favourite of the non-album tracks and never more entrancing than when they performed it on SNL. And from the Remix album, I like Shed's remix of "Little By Little", maybe the least genius song on the album. To see it given a make-over that me appreciate its original context better was rather exciting.

Feist - Undiscovered First

Feist came this close to nailing the album form this time around, but someone keeps telling her to put those watery jazz numbers in between her soul-scorching rock songs. There are great songs on Metals ("The Bad in Each Other," "Graveyard," "How Come You Never Go There," "A Commotion") and then there's "Undiscovered First," which I'm prepared to say is her best song. Primal, loud, boisterous and catchy, it's everything she's good at, cranked up loud enough to kill someone.

Sondre Lerche - Private Caller

Yes, it's a wafer-thin little pop song, but sometimes that's all I need from Sondre Lerche. He's already given me an album that is a fusion of his best instincts in Phantom Punch, so I can't ask him for another masterpiece and am just thankful for every little gem like "Private Caller". God speed you beautiful Norwegian boy. Your pop songs make me smile.

We Avalanche - Ornette

Admittedly I don't know when this song was actually written, but I'm including it because I heard it for the first time this year and the band's only got one album, so I'm calling it kosher. The three folk shredders of We Avalanche are never more fleet fingered than on this song and Brady Custis' voice soars over the weaving and winding string playing, all deft, brazen and warm.

Devotchka - All The Sand In All The Sea

It's a hundred miles from what their known for, but the echoing, screaming, galloping "All The Sand," the song that properly kickstarts DeVotchka's little loved but pretty great 100 Lovers, is just as heartsick and loveable as their best early material.

The Decemberists - Calamity Song

For the record, no I don't hate or even dislike The King Is Dead, it's just a massive comedown from the nerdgiastic heights of The Hazards of Love. Hazards was a career-defining epic that outdid and expanded on everything they'd ever done. It's probably their best album to date. So no it's that there's anything wrong with The King Is Dead, per se, it just isn't nearly enough after The Hazards of Love. The case in microcosm is "Calamity Song". It's a great little pop song with its guitar sound borrowed from early R.E.M. albums (indeed they even borrowed early R.E.M.'s guitar player to do it) and it's impossible not to hum after you've heard it, but it sounds like it could have been written and recorded at any stage of the band's career. It sounds like it could have been a Tarkio song. Which, when you consider how massive a step The Hazards of Love was after The Crane Wife, is as good as a step backwards. They can do better than this, even if they don't have to. They sound good when they tread water, I just wish they'd tackle giant waves again

Dan Mangan - Post-War Blues

I don't know what you'd call the production on this song, it's definitely its own thing and dozens of artists have adopted the sound before, but I don't know what to call it. Anyway, Mangan's "Post-War Blues" is like a classic Dylan tune supercharged and shot through space. I love its momentum, I love Mangan's voice and how it builds on top of itself.

Coldplay - Hurts like Heaven

I'm not the biggest fan in the world of Coldplay's latest album, but shit can they write a pop song when they care to. "Hurts Like Heaven" is what I've taken away from Mylo Xyloto and if it was the only song on the album, it'd still be an achievement. I love how sweet Jonny Buckland's guitar sounds when he plays the lead-melody thing after the first chorus. And there is a hugeness that these guys just get right everytime. That pre-chorus instrumental build-up is unbeatable. The chorus itself ain't bad either.

Lykke Li - Silent My Song

Lykke Li's Wounded Rhythms was 21 on my list. It's very good. My only issue was that all the songs weren't as good as "Silent My Song". And frankly my issue with that song is that it doesn't sound as good on the record as it does live. I've listened to her performance on the Late Show at least a dozen times since I ripped it from a youtube clip. Her well-deep voice carries you ever downward as the brilliantly minimalist arrangement clangs in the deep, half-whale song, half-bell from hell.

The Dears - Thrones

I feel for The Dears. They make consistently great albums that are constantly compared to their first album, as if somehow they've been tarnishing their own legacy. Fuck that. Every album since No Cities Left has been achingly human and heartbreaking and stays with me for a long, long time. "Thrones" has a huge chorus that's not even as good as it's paranoid verse. A fine song in a career full of them, as always under-appreciated.

Cults - Abducted

Cults are occasionally too saccharine for me, but "Abducted" has enough sneer to cut through the sweetness. This is hands down my favourite song from their self-titled debut, a will-they-won't-they tale of hearts stolen and lost again.

Bonus:
Ok Sweetheart - Before You Go

Ok Sweetheart are a little out of my area of expertise and if it weren't for tragic news I'd never have heard of them. TCM's touching In Memorium segment was scored by the Tulsa, OK band's sweetly melancholic "Before You Go" this year and something about it stuck with me as I was watching the faces of actors I'd never work with, craftsman I'd taken for granted and directors who I'd never be able to tell how much they meant to me.

Honors, 2011

2011-12-26T19:01:00.000-08:00

Before the Oscars go and fuck it up, I thought I'd offer my own version of who deserves what and for which.

VIP - Joe Swanberg

Joe has done more to inspire me than anyone else this year. He's released some five odd films, acted in and produced a few others besides and done so for next to no money. He's never at rest and even when his films are less than entirely successful, they are constantly evolving, exploring and unraveling the world as he knows it. He gave us two masterpieces this year about the artistic condition, revolutionized self-distribution with the help of Factory 25 and shows no signs of stopping. To me and my friends, he's the spirit of independent film embodied and he's the person who's done the most this year for modern film and made it seem like our dreams of becoming filmmakers is attainable.

Script
- Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil
- Submarine
- 13 Assassins
- Neds
- Super 8
- Princess of Montpensier
- Contagion
- Hugo
- Arthur Christmas
- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
- Margaret
- A Separation
- Carnage

- Too Big To Fail

Music
- Jonny Greenwood, Norwegian Wood, We Need To Talk About Kevin
- Alexandre Desplat, The Tree Of Life
- Michael Giacchino, Super 8
- Chico & Rita
- Cliff Martinez, Contagion/Drive
- Jeff Grace, Meek's Cutoff
- John Williams, The Adventures of Tintin/War Hors
- Mychael Danna, Moneyball
- Hans Zimmer, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
- Sonic Youth, Simon Werner A Disparu

Actor
- Brad Pitt, The Tree of Life
- Conor McCarron, NEDS
- Mathieu Amalric, On Tour
- Javier Bardem, Biutiful
- Joel Courtney, Super 8
- Samuel L. Jackson, The Sunset Limited
- Sermet Yesil, Kosmos
- Sam Riley, Brighton Rock
- Ryan Gosling, Drive
- Michael Shannon, Take Shelter
- Peter Mullan, Tyrannosaur
- Woody Harrelson, Rampart
- Michael Fassbender, Shame
- Andy Serkis, Rise of the Planet of the Apes

- Antonio Banderas, The Skin I Live In

- Chris Hemsworth, Thor (he's just so dreamy)

Actress
- Rinko Kikuchi, Norwegian Wood
- Pollyanna Mcintosh, The Woman
- Kate Lyn Sheil, Silver Bullets
- Kate Winslet, Mildred Pierece
- Yoon Jeong-hee, Poetry
- Melanie Thierry, Princess of Montpensier
- Michelle Williams, Meek's Cutoff, My Week With Marilyn
- Kirsten Dunst, Melancholia
- Olivia Colman, Tyrannosaur
- Carrie Mulligan, Shame
- Anna Paquin, Margaret
- Zoé Héran, Tomboy
- Yun Jung-hee, Poetry

- Tilda Swinton, We Need To Talk About Kevin

- Elle Fanning, Super 8

- Elena Anaya, The Skin I Live In/Hierro

- Rooney Mara, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

And were it not totally immoral, I'd give a slot to Alexandra Maiorino for her role in my film I Need You. She's brilliant all by herself in that film, so I don't feel like I'm being too ridiculous.

Ensemble
- House of Pleasures
- Super 8
- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
- 13 Assassins
- NEDS
- Margaret
- A Separation
- Melancholia
- Drive
- War Horse
- Bridesmaids
- The Way Back
- Le Havre
- Carnage
- Albert Nobbs

- Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

- Simon Werner A Disparu...

- Contagion

Note: The titular Three Musketeers are wasted by their moron director, but in Luke Evans, Matthew MacFadyen and Ray Stevenson we had the most virile and entertaining actors to take the roles in years. It's just a shame they were so let down by their fool director who forgot the movie was about them and not their unwatchable co-stars.

Director
- Tomas Alfredson, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

- Trần Anh Hùng, Norwegian Wood
- Terence Malick, The Tree of Life
- Jim Mickle, Stake Land
- Sylvain Chomet, The Illusionist
- Takashi Miike, 13 Assassins
- Richard Ayoade, Submarine
- Peter Mullan, NEDS
- Reha Erdem, Kosmos
- Stephen Soderbergh, Contagion
- Nic Winding Refn, Drive
- Lech Majewski, The Mill & The Cross
- Roland Emerich, Anonymous
- Martin Scorsese, Hugo
- Steve McQueen, Shame
- Lynne Ramsay, We Need To Talk About Kevin
- Bertrand Bonello, House of Pleasures
- Pedro Almodovar, The Skin I Live In
- Fabrice Gobert, Simon Werner a Disparu...
- Guy Ritchie, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
- Gabe Ibáñez, Hierro

- Joe Swanberg, Silver Bullets/Art History

- Tarsem Singh, Immortals

- Steven Spielberg, War Horse

- David Fincher, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Cinematography
- Norwegian Wood
- The Tree of Life
- Submarine
- Les Amours Imaginaires
- Meek's Cutoff
- 13 Assassins
- Beginners
- Biutiful
- Stake Land
- The Strange Case of Angelica
- Miral
- Jane Eyre
- Brighton Rock
- Kosmos
- Contagion
- Melancholia
- Marcy Marcy May Marlene
- Anonymous
- Immortals
- J. Edgar
- Hugo
- Shame
- Hierro

- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

- The Conspirator

- The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Editing
- Norwegian Wood
- Super 8
- Tree of Life
- 13 Assassins
- Beginners
- Contagion
- Hugo
- Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

- Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

- Attack the Block

- Immortals

- The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Costume
- The Princess of Montpensier
- Mysteries of Lisbon
- 13 Assassins
- Les Amours Imaginaires
- Captain America
- Stake Land
- Anonymous
- Hugo
- Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
- The Mill & The Cross

- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

- Immortals

Supporting Actor
- Guy Pierce, Mildred Pierece
- Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn
- Paddy Considine, Submarine
- Ti West, Silver Bullets
- Kyle Chandler, Super 8
- Colin Farrell, The Way Back
- Lambert Wilson, The Princess of Montpensier

- Christopher Plummer, Beginners,
- Will Patton, Meek's Cutoff
- Jared Harris, The Ward, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
- Geoffrey Wright, Source Code
- Adrian Brody, Midnight in Paris
- Sean Bridgers, The Woman
- James McAvoy, X:Men: First Class
- Edward Hogg, Anonymous
- Ben Kingsley, Hugo
- Jean-Pierre Leaud, Le Havre
- Mark Strong, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
- Peter Mullan, War Horse
- Viggo Mortensen, A Dangerous Method

- Sacha Baron Cohen, Hugo

- Tom Hardy, Warrior/Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Supporting Actress
- Lesley Manville, Another Year
- Paulina Gaitan, We Are What We Are
- Hiam Abbas, Miral
- Trieste Kelly Dunn, Cold Weather
- Vanessa Redgrave, Anonymous
- Imelda Staunton/Ashley Jensen, Arthur Christmas
- Yasmin Paige, Submarine
- Lea Seydoux, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
- Keira Knightley, A Dangerous Method
- Evan Rachel Wood, Mildred Pierce/The Ides of March

- Jennifer Ehle, Contagion

I'd give this to Rae Mathias for Tron Wayne Gacy, but I must recuse myself. She is something marvelous.

Production Design
- Norwegian Wood
- Jane Eyre
- Stake Land
- Mysteries of Lisbon
- Mildred Pierce
- Super 8
- Beginners
- NEDs
- 13 Assassins
- Tree of Life
- Anonymous
- Immortals
- J. Edgar
- Hugo
- Le Havre
- Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
- House of Pleasures
- The Mill & The Cross
- The Turin Horse

- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Art Direction
- Mildred Pierce
- Rango
- Jane Eyre
- Captain America
- Chico & Rita
- The Illusionist
- Les Amours Imaginaires
- Meek's Cutoff
- On Tour
- Submarine
- Anonymous
- Immortals
- Le Havre
- House of Pleasures
- We Need To Talk About Kevin
- The Mill & The Cross

- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

- Miral

- Attack The Block

- The Skin I Live In

- The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Visual Effects
- The Troll Hunter
- X-Men
- Harry Potter
- Cowboys & Aliens
- Super 8
- Tree of Life
- Immortals
- Hugo
- Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
- Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Ostracod bioluminescence

2011-12-20T18:02:00.000-08:00

The sky is pink and orange and looks like a postcard. I'm swimming out into the ocean just as the sun is setting. I can feel myself shivering. I can barely see a thing. All I hear are our flippers splashing against the water. This seems like a truly insane thing to do. Anything could happen to us, but we trust that it won't- that we're safe. It's getting darker by the minute. This really starts to feel crazy now. I know that I will remember this forever, that I will retell it over and over.

Darkness- completely soaking wet and waiting. I look down and see unsure shapes in the darkness beneath the water. We go on forever like this. I hold tight the hand of someone I can't see. I don't dare make a sound. The time has passed to change my mind. I'm here in the ocean with nothing to protect me but my wetsuit, and it's full of holes. Suddenly, I think I see a spark, like a firefly.

Why can't all types of love be this beautiful? This secret? I am frozen with my whole face submerged, when the water starts to light up around us. Trails of blue light travel upwards, like fairy lights. It's everywhere at once. I'm floating in-between a coral reef, and a sky that goes on forever (there's no ignoring that anymore) and these tiny creatures are reflecting the velvet, endless sky with its many stars.

We have to name this phenomenon; we have to categorize and understand these creatures, otherwise how can we stay sane? How can we pretend to know anything at all?

No one turns their flashlights on. We are all aware of each other and of ourselves, and the display is only becoming more joyous, more impossible. Patterns emerge, flashes lengthen and join together. It's nature's fourth of July sky. Light spreads out horizontally from a single point. None of this seems real, yet it's impossible to deny, shut your eyes and find your way to solid ground. How can we pretend to understand anything? No wonder I can't sleep.

Luck Leaves Nothing to Chance

2011-12-14T09:33:00.001-08:00

So the other night HBO decided to do a bit of a sneak preview by airing the pilot for Luck a new series coming in January from the creator of Deadwood David Milch. Being an ENORMOUS Deadwood fan I've been waiting for this show to premiere for months now and after watching the pilot I must say I'm even more excited. Normally I wouldn't write up a post about one episode of a show that isn't even on TV yet but the other name that was thrown into the mix was Michael Mann who came on to executive produce and more importantly, direct the pilot. Here we go.

The show centers on a number of intersecting lives at a horse race track. Going into the series I saw a lot of potential for crime and gambling themes in this setting but the horse racing itself sort of left me wondering if I would enjoy it. This is where I'll start talking about Michael Mann.

Mann hasn't been doing much lately. He made Public Enemies a few years ago now and that film was far from perfect. Though I'm madly in love with a number of the action sequences. So I'm trying to treat the hour long Luck pilot like a true Michael Mann film. The nice thing is, I think Mike did the same. This thing reeks of Michael Mann....liness. Mann has great switches from handheld to stable photography throughout the film and his music cues are fucking perfect. As good as they ever were in Heat or Collateral. He utilizes these great distorted guitar riffs that simply bleed cool and really help to build an awesome atmosphere to have all of these characters walk around in.

The real power of Michael Mann's involvement though is the horse race photography. Keeping cameras right up in the faces of horses running as fast as they can is no easy feat and the fact that he does this with razor sharp accuracy is something that should be lauded and applauded. That isn't to say that the cinematographers shouldn't be because in this case they hold just as much sway. The episode actually had two. Stuart Dryburgh and Lukas Strebel. My guess is that one was resposible for the race photography though I can't actually find that information. Let's just say that the crew on this shoot deserve plenty of praise.

David Milch was the head writer throughout Deadwood's production and I actually saw a lot of him in this first episode. He's got a town's worth of intersecting lives at this tiny race track and after seeing the snippet at the end of the pilot forecasting that's to come in the series I see even more of him. The promise of crime, corruption and pretty edgy intrigue surrounding the owners, gamblers, jockeys, and pretty much every possible character to fill every possible position at this race track only reminds me of the best moments in Deadwood. With any luck at all, the show will get a longer life than Deadwood and HBO will actually appreciate the revenue and fans it brings to the table.

Season in Review: Boardwalk Empire

2011-12-13T20:17:00.000-08:00

Boardwalk Empire went into its second season utilizing the standard three act structure. The second season being the second act where quite literally everything goes to shit. Every relationship that was developed in the first season is put to the test either through murder, infidelity or in one case incest. The writers of the HBO series set up a number of dominoes that fans expected to fall in the sophomore season and even though Boardwalk never did miss any of its connections this season, it took way too long to get to some of them.

Sitting here writing this while watching the season finale, I'm subject to all the story lines coming to at least temporary closes. The most prevalent actually being a story line that began twelve episodes ago. Chalky White plays the leader of the black community in Atlantic City. Many of whom were gunned down in the season's premiere. The problem is they've had about three scenes throughout the season to tide this storyline over so that they could save it for the finale. HBO is the king of the slow burn series but this is simply bad writing. There needs to be a reason why story lines take so long to be resolved other than the fact that the writers didn't feel like it. The other trouble that this season ran into is that the series' main character Nucky Thompson (Buscemi) is so goddamn boring it hurts. His storyline is turned into a brilliant Shakespearean drama at the end of the first season as we watch the King of Atlantic City see everything he's taken for granted suddenly put up for sale. Viewers expected to see Nucky wheeling and dealing his way through twelve episodes and ultimately getting back his throne. Instead Nucky whines a bunch, drinks even more, makes a quick trip to Ireland, and finally just sort of tries to have a nice talk with the man who robbed him of his throne to begin with.

Kelly McDonald is joined to Nucky at the hip but her storyline is even less interesting then it was in season one. She plays the wife to a mobster and and a mother to a polio stricken daughter. Though the scenes with the ill little girl are beautiful and tragic they end up ultimately just slowing down whatever momentum that episode has already built itself.

The only real compelling storyline is Jimmy Darmody (Michael Pitt). He very rapidly becomes the Prince of Atlantic city and is forced to take the stand as a leader rather than a hired gun. His responsibilities overtake him and we have to watch him keep his wits about him as he negotiates with killers of every kind. But even Jimmy's storyline stumbles a little bit. The show even with this incredibly slow burn manages to gain a hell of a lot of momentum over the course of ten episodes. At the conclusion of the tenth an enormous bomb is dropped but instead of directly carrying everything over, the eleventh episode is almost entirely told in flashback and it focuses on material that really has no bearing on the season's current plot line.

One of the cute little moments of the show though is that late in the finale, Nucky Thompson finally get the appropriated funds he's been looking for so that he can build a highway from New York City to Atlantic City. HBO may burn slowly but they've got nothing on the government.

While all this goes on, one of my favorite characters, Arnold Rothstein, played by the brilliant Michael Stuhlbarg, is pushed into a corner. This treatment is not different from the first season. Rothstein is a genius of sorts who directs his efforts into organized crime. He spends the season off screen unless he's needed. It doesn't really negatively effect the show's storyline but I just love his performance so much that I want him to get more screen time.

Although I've been ranting and raving this whole time I do really love this show and the last ten minutes of this episode are a work of art. Good going Tim Van Patten. Good going writers. Good going HBO.

Glass Half Empty: Movies that Almost Worked

2011-12-08T07:30:00.000-08:00

I like to think of myself as an optimist, in my more lucid moments. At least culturally. My friend and indiscriminate grouch Dan Khan told me that he was having a hard time coming up with his ten best films of the year. When I met him earlier this year Aaron Katz seemed stunned that I was able to list 100 films I really enjoyed in 2010. I'm going to go ahead and admit that I watch more movies than are made in a given year, so perhaps I have a bit of an edge on everyone else, but I will give naysayers credit enough to say that there are as many missteps as successes in a calendar year. And that's a medium spanning defeat. Just look at this year's albums. I've spent hours now agonizingha over the records to include in my top 20 because so many of them are jam-packed with great moments, but so few of them are the kind of perfect record that I can listen to all the way through without skipping tracks. Look at Feist's Metals. She has found a beautiful new edge for her sound and two songs in, I was certain we were given a complete reinvention, full of jagged singalongs and stomping percussion, a more feral, alive sound. Then the watery keyboards, upright bass and noodling bells came in and I felt like we were right back where we started. The songs that weigh down her new album sound identical to those that kept her last two albums anchored. What's so infuriating is that one half of Metals is one of the best albums of the year and it's almost good enough to make up for the fact that the other half does positively nothing for me. Can I in good conscience include an album that only works half the time? Frankly I'd almost give it a spot for the song "Undiscovered First" alone. But that wouldn't be fair to Strange Mercy by St. Vincent, a record with ten times the risks taken and twice as much payoff. So I've decided to set aside a few films that, like the lovely Canadian chanteuse's latest opus of almost, kinda sorta worked and then, as Charlie Wilson put it, fucked up the end game. And I've asked the others to join in as well.

Scout

My Week With Marilyn: I don't care what anyone says, Michelle Williams is fan-fucking-tastic as Marilyn Monroe and Kenneth Branagh even better as Olivier. Other than that this film is entirely worthless and I hate it because it wastes those command performances. In my head I dreamt of a Lynchian detachment applied to a velvety look at the corrosive effects of fame. I got a bullshit nostalghia piece. So fuck the producers of this movie. Nic Winding Refn should have directed it. Then it would have been perfect. As it stands I have absolutely no idea why they made this movie or bothered getting all of the combined power of performances if they're going to hang the film on a gawky charisma vacuum who does nothing but stare and lie the whole film. I fucking hate this movie.

The Woman: If I had to pick one sequence that stood out as among the best of the year, I'd pick the wordless introduction to Lucky Mckee's bloody satire The Woman. We see images of the feral girl who'll make up the film' s backbone, killing wild animals, living in darkness, knowing only how to kill to live. For those moments, watching Polyanna McIntosh communicating a lifetime of conditioning without ever uttering a word, I was convinced I was watching one of the best horror films ever made. Then the terrible soundtrack kicks in and ruins the film. The Woman admittedly has more problems than that, but it's the biggest one of the lot by quite a fair margin. I was so devastated when the endless overbearing cock rock sucks the life out of scene after scene and turns this movie into a tonally confused mess. Sean Bridgers and McIntosh deliver some of the finest performances of the year but McKee keeps shooting himself in the foot by underplaying monstrousness and overplaying scenes that mean nothing at all. The too-strange editing of the ending scenes put the final nail in the film's coffin, and so rather than sharing company with the likes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Exorcist, it's one of the most maddening fiascos this year.

Vanishing on 7th Street: This year was not what I'd call a champagne year for horror, to once again give a shout out to St. Vincent. There were many I rather enjoyed despite a lack of ambition (at least where America's concerned) but some that just missed the mark. Vanishing on 7th Street promised a return of the mighty Brad Anderson, whose time spent working on TV (directing episodes of Fear Itself and Masters of Horror) had erased some of the sharpness he brought to The Machinist, Session 9 and Transsiberian. And alas, my fears were validated when Vanishing on 7th Street turned into a well-mounted episode of The Twilight Zone with none of Rod Serling's rug-pulling moralization. There's not much beyond a competence that's frankly outdone by each new episode of The Walking Dead. And frankly I want more from someone as talented as Anderson. Hayden Christensen as the film's ostensible hero didn't help much either.

A Horrible Way To Die: Adam Wingard troubles me. He seems hellbent on taking up Joe Swanberg's time on projects that are beneath him. Their directorial collaboration, Autoerotic, felt like a Mad Magazine pastiche of Swanberg's best work and the fact that Swanberg acts more and more for Wingard makes me concerned that he won't keep making films at the alarming pace I've grown accustomed to. I'm already in a dry spell, for heaven's sakes. So I had hope that A Horrible Way To Die would be a revelation, but alas, moody lighting and a pervasive calm is not enough to set this apart from most serial killer films. Wingard's lighting initially seems different, but when he keeps shooting his bedroom scenes from behind christmas lights, I realized he hadn't put quite as much thought into it as I thought. But there's was one thing that saved it from being a total buzzkill. The ending. Now, in order to not spoil it for those who might seek out it's company on a lonely night, I'll say skip to Bellflower. For those who will never see it, I'll spell it out in bold. The whole movie we're lead to believe that the serial killer we keep seeing as he flees from prison to make his way back to his girlfriend is doing the opposite of what it initially seems he's up to. It's not much but it put a sliver of decency into a movie about creeps and killers and I walked away feeling happy enough.

Bellflower: Now, this one's on me, but I took my friend Lina to see this film only knowing the general outline of what it was about. And in the end it meant having an enlightening and pleasant discussion about gender roles, so I can't say it was a total wash, but it certainly felt that way as we were walking out. The first half of the movie is sort of like a pug in your lap, dumb, cute, lovable and beautifully ugly (I give director Evan Glodell and his crew credit for devising that wonderful camera). Watching two chubby dreamers with go-nowhere existences fall in love in a kind of dopey, sexy fashion in the front seat of a whiskey-poruing muscle car was, as Glodell's protagonist puts it, "nice". And then it devolves into a misogynistic slog. Whether or not Glodell believes in the horseshit his characters spout in the final orgy of blood and violence and misanthropy is irrelevant because I can't say I ever want to sit through it again and it left rather a bad taste in my mouth. I initially thought having a girl with an atypical body type and look was a ballsy choice on Glodell's part, but then he makes her a villain, outright, no shading, no glimmer of humanity. All of a sudden I felt like I was watching The Room. I wanted very badly to leave.

Road to Nowhere: Earlier this year I got the chance of a lifetime, something that many cinephiles might have killed for. I got to interview Monte Hellman. I love his westerns, his b-movies, I even love his shaggy late-period work. And he had a new film out that I got to ask him about firsthand. It was amazing and I'll never forget being able to talk to a legend, a man who was artistic soulmates with Warren Oates, a man who turned genres on their head. And as I'd already been excited for his latest, Road to Nowhere, this just lit a match in my soul. You know where this is going. I finally chased the fucking thing down, at a lovely little place called Indiescreen in Brooklyn, who always seem to have the films I'm looking for when no one else will play them for more than a week. Admittedly I missed a pretty crucial opening minute, but the problems with the film stem from its cinematography, not necessarily the narrative. Hellman shot the whole thing on the Canon 5D, which made it pretty, to be sure, but not like a proper feature. My issue is that I'd just come from Emerson College, where everything is shot on a 5D or 7D and Road to Nowhere doesn't look different enough from a student film. And worse still his lead actors weren't good enough to set themselves apart from the students I'd seen in films shot on the 5D (except Fabio Testi, who is cool as shit). In fact, on its face, the only things setting Road To Nowhere apart from some of the most awful student films I've ever seen were feature length and better-than-average production values. I couldn't help thinking that taking a twenty year break from directing actors was the kiss of death for this film, but then I watched Trapped Ashes. Hellman directed a beautiful short film as part of the omnibus film Trapped Ashes in 2006 that ranks among his best work. So I guess casting's pretty crucial, then. But there was one thing that I fucking love about it. There's a crucial scene, it's towards the end and it involves a lot of dead people. If, based on my glowing recommendation, you decide to see it, stop reading here, because I'm really going to spoil the shit out of this one. I've been made fun of before for filming everything I see (I filmed our arrival the Las Vegas Film Festival as we were being filmed) and so this had particular relevance for me. The director of the film within the film has just seen his girlfriend shot and killed. He's in shock and heartbroken and in ruin. What does he do? He picks up his camera and just films the room and all the bodies in it. That was a bit of a funhouse mirror moment. Christ I could so see myself in that scene it was frightening. That Hellman could still pull of a moment of true cinematic power like that means that waiting as long as I did and getting excited as I did wasn't entirely in vain and that maybe he still has another masterpiece up his sleeve.

Tim

Action movies in general this year have been mostly fumbled (with one obvious scorpion-jacket-clad exception). Not train-wrecks but certainly not the crisp, intelligent stomp fests we’ve been spoiled by over the years. Ever since The Bourne Identity we’ve begun expecting a little more of our action movies. Slowly, over time this expectation has turned into a trend leading us to a decade of really solid dramas for the thinking man who also wants to see people’s limbs get wrenched in awful ways. With Casino Royale breathing new and frightening life into the Bond series, Iron Man making the theater safe for nerds and laymen alike, and Taken just kicking all the ass ever, action movies have really turned over a new blood-speckled leaf. So here we are in 2011 and I was pumped for a whole host of action movies that looked brilliant. And at the end of the day most of them just barely missed the mark.

Source Code: This one’s easy. Everything that is wrong with this movie happened all at once right at the end, leaving a really nasty taste in my mouth when it was over. See, this movie had a really killer premise. Time travel and consciousness were called into question, Jake Gyllenhaal did that thing he does where he gets all wide eyed and manic, and at the end it turned into one man’s very honest, very touching quest to be allowed to die with dignity. I really loved this movie’s way of adjusting time to generate emotion and they pulled this off so perfectly… and then ruined it by having him live. I’m not one of those guys who think that happy endings are for sellouts, it’s just that you have to earn your happy ending. If all your character wants to do is live and be happy, then sure give that to your audience, they’ll love you for it. But the point of this movie was that he wanted to die. He didn’t want his body to be used as a tool for someone else’s well being…so he took someone else’s body and used it for his well being.

Thor: Thor had so many good ideas and frankly, not enough time. But that didn’t bug me the most. My buddy Kenny B managed to get so much mileage from the little scenes he got that in the end I felt all the emotional beats I was supposed to and everything was OK. Where this movie really dropped the ball was the actual action scenes. Say what you will about Captain America (and I will, shortly) it had killer fight scenes. Fast, creative, brutal, sometimes funny. Rag-dolling Nazi’s that gave the Combine from Half Life 2 a run for their money. But Thor’s action was slow and awkward. It wasn’t over the top comic book fun, but neither was it fast paced shaky cam brutality. It was just uninspired. I wasn’t really surprised, I mean, Branagh isn’t an action guru, and his great work with Hemsworth and Skarsgård made up for it, for the most part. I just really wish I’d been more pumped about Thor punching people than I was.

Captain America: I can’t help but lump Thor and Captain America together in my mind. Not only did they come out so close together, but they were so obviously aware of all the ways the other film didn’t work, and seemed to try to counter balance each other. Which was nice, and not nice. Like I’ve already stated, this movie was a ton of fun to just watch. I loved all the Nazi tossing and explosion jumping. But the ball that was this films strongest emotional beat was not only dropped, it then landed in a worm hole where it would drop forever (yeah, so my metaphors are getting a little loose, it’s late). The movie ends with a nice scene where Rogers talks on the phone with his British girl friend about a date they will have as he is plummeting towards certain doom. Then he wakes up seventy years later and when asked if he’s ok. He says “I had a date.” The girl looked about thirty when he saw her last so seventy years later, odds are she’s crazy dead now. Thus, this is a totally crushing last line. But the moment doesn’t feel crushing. Nothing about the framing or setting implies a sense of loss or regret. And the moment is given mere seconds before being stamped out by bold patriotic music over WW2 propaganda images. If you think this is a relatively minor complaint, given that it’s only the last 3 or so seconds of a two hour film, you misunderstand. This is a HUGE fucking complaint. Not only did it ruin the ending but when I thought back it all sort of unraveled like a ball of smelly yarn. Every profound emotional beat dealing with loss and death was rushed and trampled on a by a sea of explosions and pie eating (there was no actual pie eating). And it wasn’t as though the downer moments were badly acted or badly written. I just felt as though the director was standing around checking his watch on the days they shot those scenes wondering when he could get back to flinging more Nazis out of airplanes.

X-Men: First Class: There’s a special place in my heart for Patrick Stewart so I was skeptical of a non-Stewart X-Men. That’s not so say that I don’t have a place in my heart for Macavoy. I do. It’s just smaller and not as well furnished as Stewart's place. But McAvoy did not disappoint! He didn’t shine like Fassbender or flounder like that blue kid, but he did not disappoint. The problem was in the story. Or stories. There were too many of them, and they didn’t seem to notice all the other stories that were also happening. One thing Thor and Captain America had to their advantage was they had one, possibly two plots going on that they had to work with. X-Men had, let’s see, crazy holocaust survivor revenge quest (best plot, by the way), CIA working with new mutant division, coming of age/accepting who you are story, Cuban missile crisis, various personal arcs of people learning to control their power, and then the staple plot line of persecution and the paths to peace. This myriad plot lines combined with the dozens of characters and drop-of-the-hat allegiance switches made for a convoluted-as-fuck ending. And while I didn’t really dislike any of the plot lines I just felt that none of them were done a favor by having to get squeezed in with all the others. Also, that blonde girl from Mad Men cannot act to save her life.

Mr. Danvers
Jane Eyre is a successful adaptation, but the film missed some subtle (and not-so-subtle) moments from Charlotte Brontë's novel that I was excited for. For the record, I believe adaptations of books should stand on their own and not be chastised for making changes or cutting from the source. Different mediums have different styles. However, I'd hope that when someone has the chance to film a classic scary scene in literature (i.e. The one where the protagonist wakes up to find a crazy lady dressed in her wedding gown watching her sleep) they would use it. At times, I felt the film was afraid of allowing the source to speak for fear of camp. Personally, I think a woman in a house with cackling coming from an indeterminate source is screaming for screentime. Also, Mr. Rochester has very clear deformations at the end of the book. He doesn't look like a hipster in the country. Again, I understand artistic choices. But, he's missing a part of his arm and one of his eyes. That's right: A hook and an eyepatch and Mr. Rochester looks like a pirate. I wanted a sexy pirate! And, making his deformations less severe lessens the beauty of Jane's acceptance and understanding. But, on the whole, I LOVE THIS MOVIE!!

Fox Johnson
Sarah's Key came from the novel of the same title. The problem is that it seems to have been adapted too faithfully. The "A" story of the film is incredibly engaging. Kristin Scott Thomas plays a journalist who is investigating the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup where French police in German-occupied Paris in 1942 rounded up thirteen thousand Jewish emigres to be sent to Auschwitz. The film often switches to the perspective of Sarah, a girl who was rounded up but managed to escape and her journey back to Paris to find her forgotten little brother. The scenes following Sarah are incredibly powerful and truly succeed at illustrating the power of the human spirit.
The problem is very little of the information provided about Sarah's past is actually earned by Scott-Thomas' character Julia. All of Sarah's story just sort of spills itself all over the screen and luckily for the audience it comes at all the right times. Julia's plot is actually incredibly boring but I get the feeling it wouldn't be as bad if I were reading it rather than watching it. She deals with a husband and children from his previous marriage. She herself is having difficulty bearing children and the film seems to think that Julia's complication is more interesting and important than the mystery of Sarah and her titular key. It works in a story thats allowed to be three to five hundred pages long but for a two hour film it just becomes needless fluff.
In accordance with the theme of these articles Sarah's Key quite literally is broken in half by quality. The first half of the film, though occasionally meandering, flows very well. The audience learns Sarah's story and it's all accomplished very well. The problem is that the main mystery of Sarah's story (the location of her brother) is solved at almost exactly the halfway point of the film. Then the audience is forced to sit through another hour of more or less useless extrapolation. Sure a little more is told about where Sarah went after finding her brother but it all seems sort of needless since the point of Julia's intended article was to find out what happened to these two people and SPOILER ALERT by the time she actually comes upon her answer the two Jewish siblings are both dead.

Sarah's Key was definitely one of those films that I rewrote on my ride home from the theater. It sets up a ton of great looking plot arcs in the first half but fails to deliver on more or less all of them. The real shame is that it's far from a lost cause. There's quality and beauty in the filmmaking and Kristin Scott-Thomas is brilliant as always.

Sean Van Deuren

The Ides of March fits this description perfectly for me. Dropped. The. Fucking. Ball. With the whole intern plot. . .

Also, Incendies. Didn't really drop the ball, but also was really close to being great in a lot of different ways that it didn't fulfill completely.

Television's Overachievers for 2011

2011-12-02T10:19:00.000-08:00

The year is coming to an end so we at Film Punk decided to talk about what we think is the best television of 2011. We decided that rating Comedies and Dramas in the same basket was completely daft so we each made two separate lists.

Scout

Comedy.

I'll say now that I'm not a TV person, which is strange because the fucking thing is never off in my house. The deal is I've got my broken computer hooked up to the television to constantly watch films, I'm addicted to TCM and haven't totally lost faith in TV being as good as film. I'm one of the last few who doesn't think that TV has surpassed film in writing or direction. It just hasn't. Look around you. Everytime someone makes the argument that TV is where good ideas are coming from, I'd like to ask them the last time they watched a film from West Africa, Romania, Iceland or Argentina. I would then wait about ten seconds and then say "yeah, that's what I thought." But, all the same I do enjoy my stories when they come on. Every week, usually via Skype, Dizzy and I watch Parks & Recreations because it's the funniest show currently on television. Beyond that is the emotional chutzpah to back up even the tiniest throw-away gag. These guys have it down in a way they never quite got out of The Office. Children's Hospital gave it stiff competition, but as the show is only 9 minutes of absurdity, it can't quite compete with reigning heavyweight Parks, though goddamn if they don't come close. NTSF:SD:SUV was nearly as good as Children's but I wanted more from bit players like Peter Serafinowicz and Rebecca Romijn. The Heart, She Holler came and went amicably enough but has nothing of Delocated's immediacy or charming charmlessness. And as ever I remain a loyal and loving fan of the degenerates on It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, who continue to outdo themselves even as I keep thinking they can't possibly. Up All Night is lightweight, to be sure, but it feels lived in and gentle and I greatly enjoy spending time with the three tame nutjobs at its center.

Drama.

My drama choices remain limited by my family being dirt poor and my not having the drive to download whole seasons of television. So yeah I missed Game of Thrones. I watched Mildred Pierce, but let's face it, that was a fucking movie and so it'll show up in my year-end movie round-up. Anyway, I enjoyed Pan Am because I'm a gentleman and the chance to watch four adorable women dressed as Pan Am stewardesses in a blue-screen version of the 60s is not something I can pass up. Or as I told Andrew Nigrosh, it's like a 60s Toy Store and everyone's on a shopping spree. I'm watching Hell on Wheels because I recognize it as a Western and it's trying to win me over and I'm letting it because I like watching people in the costumes trying out the accents while the creators attempt to combine every fifth western ever made into a cohesive unit and unsurprisingly can't quite do it. It's better than Bonanza, anyway, right? And I like The Walking Dead even though no one else but me and Jonathan Maberry seems to. It's a touch like a 70s road movie with zombies, which is all I could ask for from this show. And it got me to like Jon Bernthal and Norman Reedus, who I was definitely not a fan of in Season 1. But the series many directors have let them fill out their characters and this has become as kind of lovely and pastoral as a zombie serial can be, so I have a great time every sunday with those three. I always save Pan Am for last as a kind of pick-me-up. And of course The Closer, another show which has much in common with movies I like, namely a cast filled with fantastic character actors who never got nearly enough to do in movies. Watching the team work together/bicker is the reason I keep coming back and I will be ever so sad to see it go.

Fox

Comedy

1. Parks and Recreation has achieved a status in my mind that only 30 Rock has ever had (and it lost it last season). When an episode of Parks and Rec starts I know it will be good. I know it. I don't have to worry one bit. It's got an amazing cast of incredibly talented funny people who manage not only all the right comedic timing but also manage to play each character with real heart. The writing team only adds to this great recipe with just the right balance of serious storyline and absolute absurdity. Literally every one liner, every fake tv ad, every accepted fact in the world they created is funnier than anything on almost any other network and most of them are treated as throwaway jokes.

2. When they weren't busy kicking the Tony's asses, Matt and Trey were creating another kickass season of South Park. The show definitely has its ups and downs but when the duo are at the top of their game, their satire is both razor sharp and incredibly funny. And when they don't feel like getting political they'll spend 22 minutes on some of the most obscene fart jokes to every be heard, and its still brilliant. This season they actually went for a pretty serious turn by having Stan's parents get divorced and ending their half season with a downer. A lot of people were confused but the message the boys were sending was clear. If you take life too seriously, your whole world will be shitty. After 15 seasons they're still damn near perfect.

3. Curb Your Enthusiasm sent Larry back to his homeland of New York City this season. Most of the humor was fairly similar to what the show has done in the past but they brought in a number of great actors to help add to the improv storyline including Ricky Gervais and Ana Gasteyer. The new environment invigorates Larry a bit and his jokes and humor are a lot more fresh than previous seasons.

4. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia........is perfect. Always.

5. Workaholics was a recommendation from a bunch of people I would never trust. That said this show is incredibly stupid but just so damn funny. It definitely borders on stoner humor but the self awareness of the writer/actors puts it just over the bar that Family Guy and modern Simpsons seems to have fallen under.

Drama.

1. Since Breaking Bad has made its way onto Netflix I've got every Tom Dick and Harry coming up to me and asking me if I watch the show. I politely tell them to go fuck themselves. I discovered it. It's mine. You can all go die. In truth I have been watching the show from the beginning and even though I've been madly in love with it since day 1 I can definitely point out flaws (Particularly in season 2). But luckily for the television community, season 3 came along and really showed off what the show had to work with. What's nice is this year in it's fourth season, Breaking Bad built on all the greatness it had already made for itself. Though getting off to a slow start, the amount of amazingly tense moments they create on the show leaves your hair gray. Not to mention creating a villain so terrifying that you see him at night when you close your eyes. I agree with Tim that it's a tad stagnant in the middle but I think all of the seasons suffer from that. I think more than anything though, this season left me really wondering how the show is going to conclude in its fifth and final season.

2. What can I say about Game of Thrones that hasn't already been said? Its shot beautifully. It's resurrected brilliant actors that I thought would never see the light of day again. And it's got CGI that should make most filmmakers shoot their own dicks off. Now I've read all the novels and I've never seen a screenplay so closely adhere to it's source material. They sold the show to HBO not just because its good, but its because it's got a built in audience of probably millions. It's got minor flaws like everything else but I'm happy to say that I really don't think the show could have gotten off to a better and more complete start.

3. Boardwalk Empire was the definition of the HBO slow burn last season and their style hasn't changed much. What they did come into the second season with though, was an established cast of great characters. Steve Buscemi's Nucky Thompson fell flat with almost everyone that watched the show but not to the fault of the actor. The writers just accidentally made all the tertiary characters far more interesting. This season has followed Nucky, the king of Atlantic City, lose control of his town to his son figure Jimmy Darmody. The 2nd season has set up what I hope will be a Breaking Bad-esque 3rd act and by that I mean a shit show. An all out war for control of the titular Boardwalk Empire. It may seem unfair to list the show before its season actually concludes but the 9 or so episodes that have already aired have proven the show worthy of a best of list. It's acting is beyond flawless and its less is more style of photography just helps viewers to pay attention to the story and characters which are both pretty damn complicated.

4. I've never been more at odds with a television show then I was with Walking Dead this season. AMC knows its their cash cow at present so watching it on tv is all but insufferable. They put in far too many commercials that aren't even scheduled to be part of the episode but I guess that shouldn't fault the show itself. The writers gave me enough to talk about. The show had 7 episodes that really centered on two plot points. One being the rescue of Sofia, a little girl who disappears in the first episode. The problem is that the show was incredibly stagnant this season. They found a farm house and didn't leave it. They're still there in fact. I can't even really decide why I've put it on this list. I yelled at the tv all for seven weeks but at the end of the day I kept coming back to the show for some reason. I hate all but 3 characters and was furious at the story line the entire time. But the midseason break did end well and I'll be happy to return to it when it comes back on tv next year.

5. Now Mad Men would have been on this list but all that contractual bullshit kept it from entering it's 5th season in 2011 so there that is. I'm only 3 episodes into Hell on Wheels and its far from a perfect show but its got the makings of something wonderful once it actually finds its groove. I won't call it one of the best of the year but I will call it promising enough to keep your eyes on it.

Tim

Unlike Scout, I watch a ton of TV. I subjected myself to watching every pilot this fall, and religiously keep up with my old standards. This year was a really great year for television. I am in the camp that firmly believes that TV gets better every year and is quickly catching up with films. My camp regards Scout's camp like that strange Mennonite commune across the river from our dock. We sometimes watch them toiling in the sun, cutting wood and such, while we sip our martinis and blast Cee-lo from our party boat. Anyway, I digress. Here are my picks.

Comedy.

5. Community, in my opinion, sort of lost its way in season 2. I started feeling like the writers were too smart for their own good and their quest for constant self awareness had started to seem more like a gimmick and less like something that naturally came from the characters. It still had some great high points, and was at times funnier than it’s ever been, it just wasn’t very consistent. This season still has all the meta story telling tropes from last season but now I feel like their being used to really tell us about the characters. With the strongest ensemble on television, I’m glad to be back with them.

Best Episode: Remedial Chaos Theory

4. South Park started to get on my nerves a couple of years ago. It’s not that it had gotten worse, really. South Park never really deviates far from the norm. It was that I had changed. I vividly remember the awful sinking feeling the first time I didn’t laugh at a South Park episode. But this season in what almost looked like an attempt to sabotage their own show, Matt and Trey did something really unusual: they let their characters grow. They allowed Stan to get depressed and lose faith in what is basically the show’s premise. In his own way, even Cartman began growing up. In the twelve or so years I’ve been watching this show, the one thing I never expected is for it to become an earnest tale of children growing up. But have no fear, the tasteless Penn State jokes are still included.

Best Episode: Ass Burgers

3. Parks and Recreation is amazing. I didn’t start watching it until recently actually, because the first season just seemed like a terrible The Office rip off. Since then the show has grown so much, becoming one of the most consistently funny shows on television, with a more grounded personal arch that 30 Rock, but a more straightforward approach to humor than The Office or Modern Family.

Best Episode: I'm Leslie Knope

2. Archer really impresses me with its ability to generate effortless humor. So often when watching sit coms I get that nagging feeling that everyone is trying too hard. Archer manages to crack me up but at the same time I get the feeling that the writers really don’t care if I laugh or not. If a joke sinks, there’ll be another one in about half a second.

Best Episode: Swiss Miss

1. Adventure Time is, I kid you not, the best comedy on television in my opinion. It is pure uninhibited imagination. All the best moments of iconic kid’s shows like Invader Zim and Spongebob Squarepants paired with the dark undertones from Ren and Stimpy make for probably the most effective kids show I’ve ever seen. There’s one scene in particular that really sums up why this show is brilliant. Finn lands by his treehouse being carried by a flock of smiling balloons. He thanks them for the ride and then promptly released them from their blood oath. They respond by squealing with delight and shouting, “finally we can go to the stratosphere to die!” The show is filled with childlike adventure but underneath it you can’t help noticing the dark truth behind the stories. Like, why is Finn the last human on the earth? The show sometimes hints at the fact their used to be many humans. In fact they used to rule the world. But now in this strange trippy kingdom populated by talking fruits and dogs that can enlarge their livers at will, the humans are gone. All but Finn. I’m not sure if Adventure Time will ever explain these questions, but even posing them strikes me as remarkable in a show meant for 11 year olds.

Best Episode: As another testament to this show's integrity, I can't pick a best episode. They all impress me equally.

Drama.

5. Last year Justified was probably the best cop drama on television. It should be noted that the cop drama genre has become a really small pond these days, filled with those three eyed fish from The Simpsons that I call NCIS, so Justified wasn’t really that big a fish. But it had everything I wanted from a good cop drama: Cops and robbers each with fun character flaws, having at each other in manageable one hour blocks, usually culminating in someone getting shot in the face. It was a simple show that gave me exactly what I wanted, and nothing more. This year, though, Justified managed to completely transcend its cop drama roots and tell a story about family, and loyalty, so deeply human and tragic that I found myself riffling through my Shakespeare collection, trying to find which play it was ripping off. The focus of the show was still on the rather rigid Timothy Olyphant, but decided to use him to tell other people’s stories instead of telling his own. The show became about a place, so much more than about a person, and in the end I found myself enjoying even the episodes that didn’t end in someone being shot in the face.

Best Episode: Bloody Harlan

4. Doctor Who had a terrific season last year. Stephen Moffat finally took over as head writer and suddenly the show was jumping into seriously uncharted territory with some of England’s cleverest writers. This season, the old crew is back, same every place, same every time, but a little bit of that freshness that kick started season five is lacking. A part of me thinks I’m getting sick of Amy Pond, another thinks that maybe the writers have gotten a little too hung up on trying to confuse their audience. Either way they took a slight step down this year. Regardless, it’s still one of the best shows on television. The writing is sharp and the plot twists while sort of torrential in their delivery, are still well thought out and very very clever.

Best Episode: The Doctor's Wife

3. Breaking Bad, like Doctor Who, found itself coming off an exquisite previous season. And much like Doc Who, it couldn’t keep the momentum it built last year. We ended season three in somewhat of a pickle. We began season four with this pickle being resolved, in as much as a pickle is ever resolved on AMC. But then for about five episodes, I kept feeling like the writers were saying “now what?” Jessie got his opportunity to shine, but Walter just sort of stagnated. He became pathetic, much like season two Walter. I felt like the show had taken one giant step backward, and I was frustrated. Now, it should be noted that the last four episodes of the season are brilliant, but a part of me felt like they weren’t really earned. I wanted Walter to be a badass the whole season and when he finally was (and boy was he) I had a hard time figuring out why it took him this long.

Best Episode: Face Off (Also, best pun)

2. Homeland has completely reformed my ideas about what television is. Usually a show is only as strong as its premise. Star Trek TNG worked so well because its premise allowed for infinite variation. Seinfeld worked because its premise was the anti-premise, a sort of Sartre-esque limbo with a laugh track. Homeland on the other hand is like an exercise in rejecting its own premise. I spent the first few episodes ready for a show about vicarious living, a show where the characters reflect the vicarious nature of television by spying on each other’s personal dramas. But soon that was abandoned and suddenly the show was about the relationship between the hunter and the prey. A sort of cat and mouse game between the two main characters, but soon the game was suddenly over and I was presented another new premise. And while it would seem like this should confuse and enrage a TV viewer, it didn’t. It was fitting, in fact it was inevitable. I couldn’t imagine a show about the CIA that ever let anything be as it appears.

Best Episode: The Weekend

1. Game of Thrones has a truly expansive universe. In a way that no other show I’ve ever seen has ever had. When Catelyn Stark took Tyrion Lannister to see her sister at that crazy cliff castle place I didn’t feel like the writer had invented a new place for his readers to go. I felt like this crazy castle had been there the whole time only in the periphery, not yet in focus. When Robert Baratheon and Eddard Stark recount old battles they fought together it seemed impossible that these pasts were invented by the writer but instead that these back stories were always inside them, just waiting for the moment to come out where we, the audience, could see them. This immersive sort of world coupled with some truly complex and engaging character relationships (my favorite being between Robert Baratheon and his bat shit crazy evil wife) made for my favorite show of the year and probably the best fantasy series ever made.

Best Episode: A Golden Crown

Nick and Noel

2011-11-27T23:06:00.000-08:00

Blood, Babes, and magic Bows

2011-11-23T22:52:00.001-08:00

From the producers of 300 comes....well....300...Two? 301? What comes next? Whatever. It's better. And I don't say that lightly.

I saw 300 in theaters about 6 times. Granted I had plenty of ins at my local cinemaplex so I didn't have to pay for most of my viewings but my point is, I was REALLY into 300. And it's been ousted. Immortals comes on the scene boasting an R rating but not much else. At least to the untrained eye. The trailers showed off a lot of the film's visual beauty (a trademark of helmer Tarsem) but very little violence is promised in the previews. That was the first mistake the marketing folks decided to make.

This movie is violent. Really violent. Granted most of it is digital blood and guts but since 95% of the flick is digital anyway, it doesn't ever stand out or seem wrong. In fact, Tarsem has managed to make a very digital film and still manages to fit in a ton of the incredible art direction that make his films worth watching. There's plenty of crazy set pieces and insane costumes to beat the band. The Gods' outfits in particular would make fashionistas around the world drop to their knees in anguish. Not because they're bad but because Tarsem fuckin pulled it off. He pulled off solid gold costumes.

The Gods are responsible for most of the over the top wardrobe. But thats okay. Their overdramatic demeanor and fuckin ridiculous combat skills allow them to dress a tad nutty. It ends up just making them even cooler once you reach the point in the film where you see what they can do.

Now I threw babes in the title which is a little misleading. This isn't a Zak Snyder film we're talking about. But come on. If you're going to cast an oracle in a movie like this it'd better be Freida Pinto. She's easily one of the most beautiful human beings walking the Earth and so Tarsem shows off that he knows his audience. When everybody (and by that I mean men) watches this movie they're fairly swept up in the action. And when thats not happening, what should they be paying attention to? The story? Yeah okay. No. You pay attention to Freida. And you're fine with the fact that she isn't stabbing people or even running around topless. It doesn't matter. Her friggin face is quite enough. Anymore and men watching might overload from her angelic presence.

At the end of the day this movie wouldn't be a movie without 300 coming first. Much of the styles are incredibly similar. That said, I really do believe Tarsem took what 300 did well and copied it. And what it didn't do well, he improved. It's not a perfect movie. It's got plenty of dumb things happening for that kind of label. But it is incredibly enjoyable. And with all the ways to spend 12 dollars these days, why not spend it on something that'll leave you grinning all the way home?

Melancholia and the Infinite Sadness

2011-11-20T19:02:00.000-08:00

Fox: Every time I finish a Von Trier film I can't even talk about it for at least a few hours. I need to give it time to stop bouncing around in my head. I need it to stop smashing every cerebral wall I've ever built in my brain's "expectations for a film" section.

I had the opportunity to see the first hour of this one and then have to wait about a week to see the rest. What that really ended up doing to me was forcing me to think about the film before I'd seen the entire thing. That's a no no for me when it comes to Von Trier.

As far as the film itself goes, I really loved it. Probably more than I've enjoyed any of the other VT flicks that I've seen. The reason for this is that I find it to be the most mature thing he's every produced. In addition to that it’s also fully realized. There's no jump the shark moment in it and I could probably list specific instances of Lars jumping said shark in every other one of his films that I've seen.

As for maturity, Lars seems to have finally found a truly adult way of expressing his problems with the world. Antichrist at least seems to have appeared after Lars had a bad breakup. We've been saying that as a joke about the film since we all saw it but the truth of the matter is Antichrist seems to reek of embitterment. Melancholia instead approaches an incredibly serious topic, that of severe depression, with a sage-like calm. Kirsten Dunst's character Justine never really flies off the handle. She acts erratic at times for sure but most of the film shows that depression can be awful. It can be debilitating. It can be mean. And the instances that Lars has chosen to depict prove above all else that he has most surely experienced this horrible condition. The first conclusion I really came to after viewing the film was that Lars wanted to tell a story about depression but he almost wanted to apologize for those who were close to him during his own depressed period. Kirsten Dunst somehow remains a sympathetic character throughout the movie even though she is such a handful to everyone around her. And most of the people around her really are doing their best to make her or keep her happy. It seems to me that Lars really wished to show that in retrospect he is fully aware of how troublesome he was to other people during his dark times and Melancholia's basic story seems to be his expression of that awareness.

Scout: Well, I'd leap in to argue some point, but I agree with all of this. I think this is, if not his most mature, then certainly the film that contains nothing of his "Fuck you, audience" attitude, beyond, of course, the conceit, nothing of what I'd call his purposefully trying to be called an Enfant Terrible (though Bruce LaBruce would have a problem with that, at his age), and there's nothing here to upstage the action; no visual tricks, no winking at the camera, no talking fox. In other words, this is his 13 Assassins. In my review I got to roughly the same points, and I think the most important point is that this is the first character he's written that is entirely him. Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist is too over-the-top to be anything like a convincing facsimile, though I think he wanted us to believe they were equal. Justine is him though, and in an eerie coincidence, the two of them fucked up a big ceremony with their behavior - how no one at Cannes caught onto this is fucking ridiculous. It's as simple as this: no one gets raped (unless you count Brady Corbett, and I don't) or maimed, so he was making sure that the audience wasn't entirely safe. Alfred Hitchcock used to do his own previews where he wanders around the set, trying to blend fact and fiction before presenting his work of art, putting you on unsteady ground. Von Trier was doing the exact same thing when he gave that press conference. If he couldn't fuck with you in the film, he was going to do it before you walked in. And then it gave him further opportunity to bow out of public in disgrace, vowing to "never give another interview." In other words, making himself out to be even more like Justine. If you think I'm bullshitting you, look up every single Cannes press conference the man has given. There's a little bit of nonsense like that in everyone, if the film's don't have enough in their already. I'm pretty sure Mark Kermode has my back on this one.

But regardless I have nothing to argue with in your reaction. It's my favourite Von Trier and though the establishment would pick Dogville or Dancer in the Dark as his objective best, I say fuck them. This is it. This is his Vertigo, or The Birds (both get shout-outs), or whatever people agree is Hitchcock's best (I’d go Notorious, they share a velvety texture, a blonde in trouble with the ultimate, unthinkable, unfeeling evil and insanely high stakes). Even the Wagner prelude he uses sounds like one of Bernard Herrmann's perfect scores (I realize I've got that backwards, but you get my meaning). I have very few complaints about Melancholia. It's very near the top of my list of best films of the year and I can't wait to own it.

Fox: I guess if I have an argument it isn't with the film but instead it’s with the Cannes judges. Not that Kirsten isn't wonderful in this film but Charlotte Gainsbourg ultimately gets more screen time to herself. At least it seems that way. I guess Cannes giving Kirsten the award isn't a point of contention with me as much as it is a false advertiser for the story itself. I went into Melancholia expecting a lot more Kirsten then I got. And Charlotte is absolutely lovely in her half of the film. I'm not even upset I was surprised I'm just really taken aback by Lars' choice to split the perspective like he did. Especially since Kirsten's half focuses so heavily on her depression while Charlotte's storyline is all about the planet. Each half of the film takes on one half of what the story is about. These aren't complaints or arguments. In fact now that I look back I'm just puking all over this post but there you are. Whatever you can make of my comments I'd love to hear your take.

Lars actually does play it smart by splitting the film seemingly in two. Part one is horror masked by pure joy. Part two is horror unmasked. Like the kind of depression that Justine is dealing with, the end of the world in imminent and entirely out of control. It was be incredibly ineffective to tell the latter half of Melancholia from Justine's point of view. The calm nature that springs from her depression would be truly difficult to relate to. The audience needs to be Claire. We need to want to fucking destroy Justine just as Claire admits she wants to. We like Claire fear this destruction. Even though he shows it to us in the opening of the film we still, like Claire, have some sort of hope in the furthest reaches of our minds that Melancholia will simply pass us by. So every time Claire picks up the homemade planet detector we're on the edge of our seat.

Meanwhile, Justine is a goddamn robot. She moon-bathes. She barely eats, speaks, or rides Abraham. But even after we detest every moment we have to spend with this depressed person we are so happy she is with us at the end of the world. She's there right next to us, holding our hand and comforting our son who we can't even bring ourselves to do because we are so scared. The more I think about this film the more I realize it’s so much bigger than it lets on.

Although I really would like to know about the bridge. Abraham won't cross it. The golf cart dies on it. What is that bridge?

Scout: To pick just one thing to go with here, to start, I think the bridge is normalcy. The bridge is the "happy" life that Claire has for herself. Justine has chance after chance to get happy (or at the very least pretend) and everytime she fails, Claire's response is to get her out of bed, most of the time to ride the horse (who at first looks like a counterpart to her ex-husband-to-be) but the bridge means accepting the life. She bucks the happiness her family assumes she wants/has, just as the horse won't cross the bridge. The dynamics are maybe a little hard to pin down, but I do think that her refusing to get over the bridge is her not wanting or willing to accept normalcy. She's ill and needs to be cured, and her beating the horse is the same thing as her pretending to get married and being punished by everyone around her. Think about every passive aggressive thing that they say to her on her wedding night, I'd bet money that for every comment, there's a crack of the crop on poor Abraham's back.

I agree entirely about needing her next to us because what seems at first a total downer (as the film itself might if you're explaining it's bullet points to anyone), is all the comfort you could possibly have in that situation. "Shut the fuck up and enjoy the spectacle/that you're with the only people you love in the world when it happens." Melancholia is just death, and while Claire tries to run from it, she can't and though Justine may not have a Healthy attitude, at least she isn't in hysterics when it drives up the block and crushes her. It's not much consolation, but on the purest level, Von Trier found the one upshot to depression and I know that I've long thought that myself. Think about death enough and you've got to be slightly more prepared for it than everyone else. This is of course nonsense, but Justine and I seem to have the same outlook on things. Which is why the film is so goddamned compelling to me. Every Single Thing she does makes perfect sense to me, so there's a sublime sense of warmth watching her actions. She's right, for once, and she knows exactly what she's doing.

As for Cannes, my only explanation is that Charlotte got it last year.

Judgment at Cannes

2011-11-18T22:12:00.000-08:00

Submitting to film festivals for the first time in my life, I've come to see that there's no rhyme or reason to why something is chosen over anything else. I know that sounds like the testimony of a jaded loser, but I don't mean to say that because my films didn't get accepted as often as I'd like I've decided to rail against the system. No, that's absurd, I'm not even 22, I have quite a bit left to learn; my point is that Drive is still being shown at film festivals in the southern United States despite having had a massive theatrical run, winning best director at Cannes and having a publicity-drawing lawsuit leveled against it. What could you possibly stand to gain by including it over say...Tomboy, the brilliant new Céline Sciamma film? Something that could truly stand the publicity. I'm not saying that Drive doesn't deserve every accolade it's been given, but it's entered the culture's diction. Ryan Gosling is a household name and anyone who was going to see it, has. Earlier this year I was invited to the Las Vegas Film Festival where eight or ten feature films were screened out of some three or four hundred being awarded. Here's the bitch, everything screened was given an additional prize and no one was able to see, in any form, the hundreds of other films being awarded. And most maddening is that more time was given over to panels with the people who were the inspiration for the characters from Goodfellas than any of the films my peers had submitted. So on the closing night ceremony we sat and listened to each other speak blindly about films we would never see. After watching grossly undeserving movies like the one paid for by The Ski Channel or Behind Your Eyes, which is the worst film I've seen this year, I was a little miffed that I would never understand why my film was given the prize. I'm hugely grateful for the award, the attention and the opportunity, to be sure. My self-esteem still hasn't sunk since I got the email saying I'd won. But why bring us out there if we couldn't share our work and learn from each other? What message does that send if we only see six movies that they deemed worthy of the top prize?

I bring this up because I've seen every single film from the main competition at the 2010 Cannes film festival and can say without question that they were all on an even keel. No one had a bigger budget or mise-en-scene too far removed from anyone else. From Kiarostami to Kitano, everyone's film was a sober, clinical look at family and/or deep (often metaphorical) relationships. And I agree entirely with their decision to award Uncle Boonmee, for despite it's pace and style being similar to its opponents, it was the most sublimely unique and unforced of all of the,. This past year's competition makes much less sense. To a certain point I get it. We Need To Talk About Kevin, Melancholia, The Tree of Life, The Skin I Live In, Drive and The Artist all take ideas or conventions the public is familiar with and runs with them in daringly audacious directions with boisterous, explosive style. And then there's Kid With A Bike, which does neither of those things. It's a film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne about a kid with separation issues learning to overcome his behavioral problems and be a good son to a mother figure who only wants the best for him. The style is identical to the other films by the Dardennes, which is to say beautiful in its understatement. I liked it a lot; Not as much as Lorna's Silence, but it's a beautiful little movie. What I'm having a little trouble understanding is why Cannes put it next to Drive or Melancholia. How in christ could anybody possibly compare them with meaningful results? They have less than nothing in common. I've enjoyed most of the films I've seen so far (exception: Sleeping Beauty) but I find the notion that The Tree of Life gets the Palme d'Or and Kid With A Bike gets second prize. The Dardennes are royalty on the Coisette and so inviting them back makes sense. Pitting them against movies about the creation of and destruction of the earth, respectively, doesn't. And other than favouritism, I can't see any reason it demonstrably deserved the Grand Prix over Drive, Skin or Kevin. Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre sounds exactly in the style of his other works, which means it has absolutely nothing you could use to reasonably compare it to Lars Von Trier's apocalyptic Melancholia. I haven't even seen half of the films in competition, but with each new work I take in, the slate makes less and less sense all the time. How do you compare the featherweight papal comedy We Have A Pope (which I have seen), whose style is much more in keeping with last year's slate than the apparent majority of this year's with Takashi Miike's 3D samurai epic Hara-Kiri (which I have not)? How do you compare Tree of Life to We Have A Pope? The style and aesthetics seem to come from alternate universes and their goals are entirely distinct. I've been racking my brains trying to come up with something that ties together the films from the main competition that I've seen. Everyone's human? Good luck keeping that attitude during Sleeping Beauty. Drive does what it can to humanize it's villains, but that isn't because Nic Refn was going way out of his way to get you to sympathize with them, but because Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks are fantastic actors. Melancholia doesn't exactly encourage you to think that about the characters played by Stellan Skarsgård and Charlotte Rampling.

So, I guess my question is what exactly the jury saw as the connective tissue between these disparate films. Is it fair to extend an invitation to the Dardennes, whose film is in every respect a country cottage among mansions and skyscrapers, and then give them second prize for evidently getting more right than films with much crazier subjects and unchained stylistic ambition? I enjoyed Kid With A Bike, I just don't think it sends the right message to reward it over a 3D samurai movie by the director of Zebraman. And furthermore what message does it send to (superficially) ban Lars Von Trier, perhaps the festival's most inventive and doggedly challenging honor student the year he releases his best film and does exactly what he does everytime he sits in front of a microphone? I don't think anyone would argue with Tree getting top prize because I doubt any of the other films are as bold, daring or sweeping in their scope and execution. The problem is that zanier choices then seem like novelties. What chance did The Skin I Live In stand next to the two sober winners even if, to me, between it and Kid with a Bike it's the more entertaining and well-designed film and as a cinephile with a lifelong love of horror, I liked the many reference points in Skin over those in Tree. Skin gambles bigger and so perhaps doesn't win everytime (judging from its mixed reviews - I give it about an A-) but Kid With A Bike takes almost no risks. So why then does it warrant the Grand Prize? I still need to see 12 more films to get the full picture, but from where I'm standing, something's off.

Anonymous keeps the mystery going by misleading audiences from the getgo

2011-11-12T12:51:00.001-08:00

Penned by Fox Johnson

My attraction to Special FX auteur Roland Emmerich's latest had very little to do with the man's name. In fact it had little to do with any names at all. Rol Rol made sure, like many of his films, to cast a troupe of actors who though brilliant, won't be pinned under one name. The problem in America at least, is that audiences here need a recognizable face. Without it the movie seemingly carries no value. Emmerich managed to quell that by instead filling his movies with such a frenzy of special effects that audiences didn't need a familiar face. Explosions would do.

But there are no explosions in Anonymous. Instead theres genuine acting, plot twists and enough period costumes to make your head spin. But there's also a pretty solid premise. The trouble with this "solid" premise is that the trailer told you absolutely nothing about it. The film appears to be a story about the theory that Shakespeare as we know him never existed. But that's only half the story and it's the lesser half if that makes any sense. The much larger story arch revolves around the British aristocracy. Characters lie, cheat and backstab their way to positions of power. It all ends up being a pretty engrossing political thriller where most people thought they'd be having to deal with iambic pentameter and brilliant but difficult language.

The film does dwell in the over dramatic from time to time but luckily its populated by a number of brilliant English actors who can handle this sort of demanded overacting. The result of it all is a film that though written in simpler language isn't unlike a Shakespearean play. The themes are universal and ever present, the drama is over the top and always earth shattering and the limelit royal family is used for target practice.

Its not a perfect movie but there's enough fun twists and wonderful actors to keep it going. Emmerich forced himself to downplay and the result is surprisingly enjoyable. I won't give it a rating because I'd like to develop some ludicrous system before I do so. 8 out of 17 dirtbikes. Lets try that on for now.

-FJ

So, let's first say hello to Fox Johnson (and Tim, too, but you've seen a few of his pieces by proxy by now, so he's less special) who'll be writing about music, TV, graphic novel and film from time to time with the rest of the staff (if he thinks he's writing about video games he's got another fucking thing coming). And let's second add to this, at his behest.

Roland Emerich and Anonymous are funny cases. It's worth noting that this movie comes at the end of a year where dependable filmmakers latest historical epics were given something less than the time of day, but just more than kick in the taint. Roland Joffe's There Be Dragons, by all accounts a return to form from the director of The Mission who'd languished in the youth market, losing control of the likes of Captivity and doing christ-knows-what on the set of Undressed, was a day late and a dollar short to everyone but me. Robert Redford's The Conspirator was treated like a middle school textbook-to-be and Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar is currently being yawned at across this great nation of ours. I enjoyed all three. Have my tastes become more populist or am I seeing something other critics don't? Often I find myself in a screening room with nothing but men and women easily 50 years my senior, so perhaps it's me. All the same, "craft" has become synonymous with boring in most reviews, so I feel like someone has to step in and offer Emerich a life preserver.

The negative reviews I've encountered seem to stop at "what an insulting idea!" And yeah, admittedly, if I thought Emerich cared about the thesis, I might be slightly outraged that a man as rich as he is would make a film positing that an uneducated pauper could become the world's most celebrated playwright. But, Emerich, like myself, doesn't seem to give a tinker's damn about Shakespeare. I spent most of Elementary school and high school being told what brilliant work he did. And I believed that he did write beautifully until I was subjected to his best works over and over and fucking over and over again until not only did they lose what beauty they once possessed, they were fucking boring. To date my favourite Shakespeare adaptation is My Own Private Idaho, so that ought to tell you my level of admiration these days. So bring on the revisionist history I say. I count myself among Buñuel's biggest fans, think The Savages is one of Merchant Ivory's best films, and worship Peter O'Toole in The Ruling Class. Why wouldn't I want to watch a movie where Shakespeare is either an incestuous, snobbish prat or a drunken illiterate murderer? Tell me beautiful lies about this beloved figure. And while you're at it, show me Vanessa Redgrave having the time of her life as a scene-devouring Queen Elizabeth, second only to Quentin Crisp in Orlando. Show me anything that proves that a centuries old monarchy is populated by the grotesques who wound up in the man's greatest plays.

Emerich admittedly has an edge over an academic elite who might make a film about Shakespeare the man, rather than this, a beautifully played, conspiracy-fueled hatchet job, in that he has trillions of dollars to spend on some of the most lavish costumes and sets I've ever seen in my life. Anna Foerster, using the Arri Alexa for the first time on a feature film (advantage Emerich), manages to combine the filth and darkness of your typical period film with the wooziness of Terry Gilliam. The effect is engrossing and absolutely fucking gorgeous. It rakes over the costumed bastards running around John Orloff's vision of England, which takes the reverence we reserve for royalty and Shakespeare and throws it face first in the mud outside the Globe. And for the first time in a long time I was interested in the bard's words again. Sure, it could be read as anti-intellectualism (and in case you think that I agree, ask anyone who's spent ten minutes with me. They know I'm the biggest fucking snob in this part of the world), but unless you're a shakespearian actor (and frankly Derek Jacobi's here, so I doubt they care), I think slavish worship of the man over the works represents an .08 percent of them anyway. And you know what? John Milius and I would probably shoot each other if we talked politics over dinner (the fact that I made vegan food might incense him enough to pull a gun. Why did I cook? He's a guest here, I'm not gonna make him cook) but the man knows his way around a camera. I hesitate to use the word craft again but watch the orgy scene in Conan The Barbarian again. It's fucking amazing and no one says a word. Absolutely top-notch filmmaking. Shit, people still study Leni Riefenstahl. So, let's stop hiding behind the argument that content = style because suggesting Shakespeare might have had a different name and background than we know is a lot less evil than Nazi propaganda. Nazi Propaganda, I hasten to add, that I was shown clips from not four years ago in a film class. And it's not like the whole thing is oppressive class warfare, either. The most sympathetic character in the film is Ben Johnson, far from the filthy rich Earl of Oxford, who dies penniless anyway (again, all in this film's universe), the words he writes more important than power or even knowing his own legacy would be carried on. The money-hungry Cecils are unquestionably the film's enemy and the greedy, lustful Shakespeare is no angel himself. So I don't get how this fairy tale could possibly enrage people (as it did Keith Phipps, whose D+ betrays his feelings about the plot's implications. I'd also point out that he gave Margaret a C and Paul W.S. Anderson's execrable retelling of The Three Musketeers a C fucking minus. One shade should not separate one of the year's best movies and a goddamn Matrix-ripoff in a corset. I'd also direct you to the F he gave to Apollo 18, proof he has zero respect for craft and really no fucking clue what he wants out of modern cinema) to the extent it has. Just fucking look at it! And if design does nothing for you, how about Joely Richardson's ravishing young Queen (and a bonus for devotees, she grows into her mother, something I was beside myself to discover when they revealed both actresses), Rafe Spall's hungry ambition morphing into murderous pride, David Thewlis' take on Professor Snape-style string-pulling, or Edward Hogg, one of the best living actors, turning in one of the year's best performances as the eel-like Robert Cecil and nearly walking off with the whole film, managing to be the embodiment of evil on one hand and still capable of peeling back layer after layer to get my sympathy in his most important scene. To get me to like someone I hated the minute I saw him (granted the script doesn't give him a ton of nuance) is no small feat, especially in a movie by the guy who made 2012. Even Sebastian Armesto, who has a little troubling as a convincing shouter when paired with the effortless disgust of Rhys Ifans or Spall's cunning bastard, is a distinct and beautiful enough presence that he wound up the most likable character in the film. I was consistently surprised by how much I loved this film and until this point I was ready to give up on Emerich. So, let's not pretend we're above this sort of thing because goddamnit we cannot ignore talent when it finally, blessedly makes itself known. And I will not have Emerich go back to making empty spectacle when I know he's capable of brilliance.

-Scout

And the winner is…

2011-11-09T09:48:00.000-08:00

Pilot season’s winners and losers (mostly losers)

by Tim Earle

PAN AM – Best New Show about the 1960s (In other words, it was better than The Playboy Club.)

What interests me most about shows about the “good old days” is when they show us what sucked about those time periods. Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire even Game Of Thrones which isn’t set in an actual historical time period, each show us a world we think we know from movies and books but shown to us in the light of complete disclosure, and of course, hindsight. Then we have Pan Am, a show that’s frank Sinatra scored, glossy exterior is really all you get. Underneath it all is just more Sinatra and more gloss. This to me seems like the wrong direction for media to take, revising the past as it goes. But at the same time, swimming in a pool of gloom and social inequality it’s a nice break to see the someone saying “Yeah, but the 60s were so NEAT!”

TERRA NOVA – Biggest Disappointment
You know what my favorite part of Jurassic Park was? All of it. Every part of the movie was awesome. Every silly caricature. The fat hacker, the smoking Sam Jackson, the gruff paleontologist who’s uncomfortable with kids, Jeff Mother Fucking Goldbloom. It was simple and campy and fun. So why does Terra Nova suck so much? I think the simple reason is that the characters are all boring and stupid. I would describe them all but just describing them in snarky ways would still bore you. So I’ll just do the dumb ass son with stupid hair cut. He goes out drinking by the river outside of the compound even though there is a high chance of being murdered by dinosaurs. Because he’s a teenager and teenagers like drinking, right? This is all played totally straight faced by the way. Speaking as someone who was only a few years ago a teenager, this is fucking stupid. Kids usually drink because they are bored. If there had been dinosaurs when I was 16, I would have been sober as fuck. It’s like showing up in a world populated by pink elephants and purple trees and thinking, “Man, I could do with some acid right now.”

HART OF DIXIE – Worst Cliché
I wish people who wrote TV did their research sometimes. We begin with a med school student who wants to be a heart surgeon. She does really well but her superior says that she isn’t connected enough to the patients to be a doctor, which is funny because training to become a surgeon begins with thinking of a body not as a person. So then little med school bimbo moves to the south where some old dude really wanted her to take over his practice. And in the south they don’t have any “new fangled” coffee places so med school bimbo is lost and out of place. The show steadily lost more and more credibility, convincing me the writer had never lived in New York or the south. By the end I was having a hard time believing the writer had ever even talked to another person before.

SUBURGATORY – Most Surprising Success
There are certain things that everyone loves to hate. So much so that you just sort of get sick of hearing about them. Like Nazis, or the suburbs. Ever since Edward Scissorhands it’s become really hip to diss the suburbs. So while this show certainly began on that obvious note, I really like the direction it decided to take. Instead of turning it into a Juno-fest of sarcastic remarks and loathing, the show took what worked from Edward Scissorhands, the surrealism. There were a couple moments that had me dying of laughter such as the pink clad soccer mom singing along to gangsta rap or the woman grilling a pair of children’s sneakers on the Bar-b. But then in the end the show managed to turn round an unexpected corner. It decided not to hate the suburbs. Or at least not to hate the Cheryl Hines, who sort of represents the suburbs in this show. In the end they made a point to show us that while she is creepy and weird, she really means well. And maybe she’s something that a teenage girl needs in her life.

HOW TO BE A GENTLEMAN – Worst Gender (part 1)
I’ll admit I was curious about this show. I thought the dissection of the male gender by deconstructing its two counter parts, gentlemanliness and brute oafishness, would be rather interesting. But at the end of the day this is just a show about Johnny Drama and a pansy. It reinforces every stupid male stereotype without a hint of self irony.

HOMELAND – Best Pilot
I initially wanted this to be another list about how every show this pilot season sucks, but then I saw this show. And, putting my huge crush on Claire Danes aside, this was a great pilot. With as ambitious a premise as this show has I was really surprised that it was so even paced and consistently toned, even with the gratuitous sex scenes that every Showtime show feels it’s obliged to insert. The thing I like the most was how it played with the audience, making us watch with Danes through the hidden cameras searching for any clue that this Marine is secretly a terrorist. And while doing this I found myself thinking some awful thoughts, like “Oh, that means he’s a terrorist. He’s totally a terrorist. Wait, why am I thinking this? I do that. Oh god. I’m turning into the patriot act!”

AMERICAN HORROR STORY – Worst Acid Trip

In a lot of ways this show was successful. It had some really superb acting from Connie Britton and Dylan McDermott. It was well directed, and certainly peculiar. But the problem was that at the end of the day, it wasn’t scary. Like, not at all. It was weird, yes, creepy, a little, sexy in a really ugly way, sure, but not even a little scary.

ENLIGHTENED – Worst Marketing
I thought this was going to be a comedy. I think so did everyone else. It wasn’t. But that’s OK. I enjoyed it regardless, but as an honest portrayal of someone trying to recover from a nervous breakdown. This isn’t to say that the show didn’t have its funny moments. Just, none of them were really "Haha" funny.

LAST MAN STANDING – Worst Gender (part 2)
I think this show is about a Psychopath. A man so uncomfortable with the gay guys running his grandchild’s day care that he decides to bring his grandchild to work with him, at a hunting store. But unlike shows like Better Off Ted or South Park, the show is completely without irony. At the end of the day all he gets is a mild slap on the wrist or some eye rolling. It all reminded me of a great scene in Louie where he flips out on the set of a sit com because when his character does something awful his wife says “I love you.” And when asked, “What do you think she should say” he says, “We should get a divorce.” I’m not suggesting that every show have a totally downer ending. I’m just saying that you have to earn a loving supportive family. You must prove to the audience that there is a perfectly good reason this family loves the dopey dad. And just being Tim Allen isn’t enough of a reason.

MAN UP! – Worst Gender (part 3)
Yes, another show about a bunch of middle aged guys figuring out how their gender works. And thankfully it was not as morally repugnant as Last Man Standing. Honestly, if it weren't for all the other gender questioning/affirming bullshit this season I would have called it solidly middling. But I'm just so fucking sick of what TV shows seem to think manliness is (and I know, every woman reading this has been dealing with this for their entire life). It's being uncomfortable with gays or having proclivity towards violence. It’s not crying, singing, caring about how you smell or other people’s feelings. Why can't being a man just mean being a reasonable, decent guy who doesn't constantly try to prove how manly he is?

BOSS – Silliest Show
I always wondered what The West Wing would have been with a darker, less romantic view of American politics. Unfortunately Boss loses not only the romantic notions but basically all semblance of realism. Kesley Grammer spends this pilot beating up people in his office, drugging people, buying drugs, putting someone’s ears in a garbage disposal. Nothing in this show seemed even remotely believable. So in the end it becomes ineffectual at displaying the inherent corruption of power and just reads like a farce.

ONCE UPON A TIME – Worst use of those creepy growing violin sounds they always used in Lost
“Rumpelstiltskin knows your daughter’s name!”
DUN DUN DUN DUN!

GRIMM – Worst Premise
Despite David Greenwalt’s nice use of camp and humor, this show has the dumbest fucking premise. I guy can see people for what they really are… fairytale characters. Honestly, if it was deemed that American audiences really needed more Grimm fairytales, then why not just make a show about the actual fairytales instead of all this hodgepodge shit.

ALLEN GREGORY – Most Disturbing
The final scene of this pilot shows us Allen Gregory hitting on his sixty year old principle in a rather sinister way. It’s obvious she wants out but is somehow trapped with this creepy seven-year-old. This is after the superintendent basically told the principle that she was supposed to date him. Nothing about this is funny. The main character is beyond annoying. He’s despicable. And him being seven doesn’t really make up for this. In fact, it just makes it worse because I spent the whole episode wishing someone would just fucking smack him. So then, in the end he walks into the sunset while the principle looks down in shame. Are we supposed to find this funny?

HELL ON WHEELS – Least Informed View of the 1860s

This show was created by a guy whose last film’s tag line was “Slow Justice is No Justice.” That’s all you need to know, really, but I’ll go on. I imagine the writer’s room for this show went something like this.

“What’s awesome about the wild west?”
“Indians, gun slingers, trains, drinking, fighting, whores, open frontiers.”
“Okay. I wrote down all the things you just said. I’m now going to put those things in our show.”
“Good. Let’s get paid now.”
The problem is if you just show us one “Western” image after another without the proper frame work, it winds up seeming jumbled and a little racist. So, while my eyes kept saying “This is a western” my brain kept saying “No, this isn’t even a plot.”

So that’s it. No more pilots. I could make some broad sweeping statements about how this season represents the cultural standing of our country. About how feminism is dying or how we’ve entered a state of self destructive nostalgia. I could talk about how our political frustration has grown to the point where we need to completely deface authority figures on TV, or how all the good comedians already got TV shows so now we’re stuck with Whitney. Instead I’m just going to pretend I Hate My Teenage Daughter doesn’t exist because I only have so much hair left to pull out and I want to get back to watching The Walking Dead.

The State of Noir

2011-09-29T17:24:00.001-07:00

With luck Tim'll be a regular contributor around here. Frankly if anyone's got something to say, let me know.

The State of Noir
by Tim Earle

“What could be more Noir than hot pink cursive?”

In a stark apartment under dim lights, a figure in a white jacket with a scorpion on the back stands in his window arranging some dubious undertakings for the night. Harsh shadows dress Gosling’s indeterminable expression as he chews his tooth-pick, driving though LA’s shadowy underbelly. Every little detail just screams Noir at me. So why are the opening credits hot pink and cursive? And why does it work so well?

The fact is that not one detail in this film is accidental, each costume decision, each sound queue. Bryan Cranston’s tucked in Harley Davidson T shirt, Carrey Mulligan’s long flowing skirts, Christina Hendricks’ unfortunate spike heels, Gosling’s skinny jeans and previously mentioned Scorpion jacket, each a carefully placed stylistic choice on the way to making one of the most distinct Noirs of the decade.

So why hot pink? When I saw the credits font I couldn’t help but think of Pretty in Pink, and the whole John Hughes compendium. It seems that Refn really likes the 80s. The purely synth pop score and nearly anachronistic costumes strongly support this fact. And I can imagine, as a director, saying “I love X, so I’m going to put it in my movie,” the effect here is a film that is far superior to the sum of its X’s. Refn is surely not the only guy who madly loves ‘80s pop music out there. Even I felt a strange twinge of nostalgia when the credits came up. I wasn’t even alive for most of the ‘80s. But that nostalgia really brought this movie home for me. Let me explain.

See, Noir has always been a product of afterthought. It’s the side effect of being defined, as a genre, years after it surfaced. By the time these dark and shockingly violent (for the times) tales had a name, they pretty much vanished. Now, 80 or so years later, Noir is a thing of profound nostalgia. The Tommy Guns, downturned hats, smoking everywhere. So when the Neo noir movement came around, they had two choices: Update or time travel. Either you brought the brutal cynical world of noir to the modern times or you took the audience back to the 1940s (ish). It’s been this way for decades. Rarely were their cases outside these two choices (Batman: The Animated Series comes to mind for being simply without a coherent time period). And now here’s Drive, a film that proves that the nostalgia of the Neo-Noir doesn’t have to be for the glory days of Bogart and black and white, but in fact any nostalgia at all.

There’s a great scene in Drive where Gosling, Mulligan and an unnamed assassin all ride in an elevator. The scene features both, a spot lit, slow motion, make out sesh, complete with anthemic synth pop, and a brutal, excruciatingly long face smashing. Once the scene ended and the elevator doors shut it occurred to me, “This is Neo-Noir!” Deep ingrained nostalgia + Brutality. I thought back to every Neo-Noir I’ve loved. Sin City: check (black and white + cannibalism), Brick: check (high school + murder). Memento: check (a man incapable of any memory besides nostalgia + rapemurder). It’s almost too obvious now. The veil has lifted and now I walk around, head high, eyes open, shouting at strangers “It HAD to be hot pink cursive!”

Art History in the making

2011-09-25T16:03:00.000-07:00

Joe Swanberg is a brilliant filmmaker and is pretty much exclusively the reason I decided to make Tron Wayne Gacy. This year I've seen the debut of four of his new films (and there are still more to come if you can believe that) this year and no other filmmaker is taking the risks he is, no one else exploring his pet subjects with the same fearlessness and naked honesty. They are terrifying, they are real, they are mesmerizing. So when I heard that he had teamed up with Factory 25, a terrific label based in Brooklyn for a special deal, I read on, intrigued. Turns out it's even more interesting that I initially thought. Me and the FFM guys have been patiently awaiting a Silver Bullets/Art History DVD release (still the only double feature/among the best films of the year) but Joe one-upped our expectations by releasing a quarterly DVD box set of his new films, including one exclusive to the set and bonus content that would shame the Criterion Collection. Swanberg's attempting to beat out not only outmoded distribution models but to stay ahead of the constantly shifting landscape of streaming/home video. He's taken ahold of his artistic works in a unique and brave way. The package is amazing, and on its way to becoming a collector's item. There are only 1,000 being made. I asked Swanberg to talk a little about this unconventional choice of release:

"It's great that the Internet makes everything instantly available, but I'm suffering from instant availability fatigue. I want to make something that arrives in the mail every three months, feels cool in your hands, is fun to show off to your friends and has super limited edition tangible stuff that nobody will ever be able to have ever again. This is it. One time only. 1,000 available. Get it or forever kick yourself for not getting it."

-Joe

I've got mine. How about you?

Pilots, twins, bunnies and Van Gogh

2011-09-25T10:20:00.000-07:00

Tim Earle watched all of the pilots this season, so you don't have to. This is what he found.

A deeply bitter look at 2011’s fall pilot season so far

So, as a heads up, they’re all bad. Yup. If that’s all you wanted to know, you can stop reading, go back to watching Archer and check in next fall. But, if you’d like an in depth review of all the ways they suck, a rating of how much each one sucks compared to the others, then go on. But, remember, you’re better off just watching Breaking Bad and ignoring the lot of them.

RINGER
How much it sucked: 10
I’m glad we started the fall season with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s scrunchy little face, her inability to form a cohesive unique character, her sad attempts at expressing complex emotions, her cringe-worthy line delivery. I’m glad we started off with some of the least convincing special effects I’ve seen on TV (and simple ones too, like being on a boat). I’m actually happy this premiered first because it managed to set the bar so low that the rest of the pilots this season actually seemed decent by comparison. Honestly, I wish it were just Gellar’s horrid acting that ruined this perfectly solid concept. But alas, it was actually every single aspect of the show AND Gellar’s horrid acting.

UP ALL NIGHT
How much it sucked: 4
There isn’t a whole lot wrong with UP ALL NIGHT, to be honest. Maya Rudolph’s deeply inflated role treads water sometimes. Arnett sometimes seems to provide all the energy for a scene while Appelgate just follows him around. But these are just minor bumps that will surely be worked out as the show goes on. But the problem is that there isn’t a lot right with the show. There were very few jokes, way too much karaoke, and the actual relationship with the baby was maybe a grand total of two minutes of screen time. They managed to avoid the usual sit com pilot pit falls but unfortunately they missed the memo about being funny while doing so.

FREE AGENTS
How much it sucked: 2
I imagine it must be awkward to be asked to write a pilot for a TV show when you wrote the pilot for the British version two years ago. The result being that I kept thinking the writer was trying to fix something he'd already gotten perfectly the first time. But as soon as the show starts to sprout its own legs and is no longer a line for line remake it becomes delightful. I'd say the British version is better, only because the American version seems to be wearing the British version's shirt, and it doesn't fit.

THE SECRET CIRCLE
Hot much it sucked: 4
The CW certainly doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to impressing me. So, it was a little painful for me to write that 4. But if I’m going to be honest with myself, the pilot wasn’t really that bad. It was well paced and even decently acted (especially by the older cast members). The show’s mystery was established efficiently. The bad guy was certainly the most interesting character in the mix but we all know, sometimes that’s a good thing. The problem was that beneath the passable acting and directing was a deeply stupid concept. Pretty young people use magic. If that sounds like something you’d care about, go ahead and watch the pilot. If that sounds really dumb then you’re lucky because I’m never going get those 45 minutes of my life back.

TWO BROKE GIRLS
How much it sucked: 2

I was expecting way more suck from this show. And sure, on paper it had its problems. But regardless of all the contrived plot points and flat acting the show had something that not a single other sit com provided this season: Laughter. The jokes were funny. In the way that you want to be funny when you imagine yourself making fun of people you hate. Sure, a sit com needs to be more than just funny, but that can come later. In the mean time I’m just so thrilled I actually got the chance to laugh.

THE PLAYBOY CLUB

How much it sucked: 5
The comparison is inevitable. So let’s get this out of the way. It sucked a lot more than MAD MEN. Why? Because Don Draper is a carefully constructed, deeply relatable yet ethereal main character. Eddie Cibrian’s character is a suit with a smile. Beyond that, the show had some good lines and a sort of fun plot involving murder and hot women dressed as bunnies. But, at the very end they ruined everything by trying to make some sort of social statement about how they were ahead of their time or socially progressive or whatever. The problem is that as soon as I was invited to see this work as a social statement I had to ask “so what is your statement?” which was answered by cricket sounds and “Hey, did you notice that Sean Maher was gay?”

THE NEW GIRL
How much it sucked: 4
There is no amount of awkward/uncomfortable things you can make Zooey Deschanel do/wear to make her even a little unattractive. It’s a simple fact. Any guy can tell you this. Sure, I have to accept I’m in a TV world where everyone looks like a model and fat people look like Toni Collete, but there are disbelieves I just can’t suspend. That aside, the show failed on other fronts as well. The chemistry between the roommates was strikingly absent. The laughs were mostly just attempts at feeling less awkward. The only thing I was impressed by was Lamorne Morris’s performance.

UNFORGETTABLE
How much it sucked: 7

You’d think a show about a cop with eidetic memory would be more, well, memorable. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how solid your concept is, you’ve got to make your characters shine. Just look at the Mentalist. That show’s concept is paper thin, yet it’s starting its fourth season. You want a fourth season, Unforgettable? Hire Simon Baker, or anyone with character.

REVENGE

How much it sucked: 4
When I heard this show’s premise I got really excited. A procedural where every episode the main character ruins the life of some other person we hate. Not a cop or a vigilante, just some biddy with tons of money and hate. Awesome. Unfortunately I was given more pretty young people arguing with their parents. And that life ruining I was talking about, amounted to, “You can leave, and take your Van Gogh with you!” Yeah, you gave that bitch what was coming.

PERSON OF INTEREST
How much it sucked: 3
Despite how much I enjoy seeing Caviezel run around smacking the shit out of everyone (and there is a whole lot of that) I will be the first to admit that this pilot has little else going for it. When Caviezel isn’t hulking out he looks barely awake, the bad guys are all grimacing stereotypes, and the concept, while intriguing, makes very little sense. I hope they eventually present some reasonable explanation but if J.J.’s previous work is any indication, they likely won’t.

WHITNEY
How much it sucked: 5
We all needed another show about pretty white girls getting bored with their relationships. Look at her! She’s single so she’s drunk all the time. Look at him! He’s pussy whipped, so he has a pink tie. There was one funny scene where a couple engage in sexy role playing and the sexy nurse gives her boyfriend a bunch of paper work to fill out, but besides that and a few sporadic funny lines the show suffers from having an ensemble of cardboard characters.

PRIME SUSPECT
How much it sucked: 3
Most cop shows suck. I admit this, even though I watch them. But there is one cop show that doesn’t. THE CLOSER. I love THE CLOSER, which means I’ve just recently sunken into a deep depression. For one brief moment, I was lifted out of my deep trench of sadness by watching this show. Here we have a tough, savvy leading lady played by an actress of serious caliber, backed by a terrific ensemble of character actors including Kirk Acevedo, whom I love. Maybe this will be my new cop show that doesn’t suck. But, much like THE PLAYBOY CLUB, after a great first few scenes, the show jumps ship in an attempt to find some sort of social relevance. Yes, it’s tough to be a girl cop, but having all your man cops grumble and call her a bitch doesn’t teach me anything. As far as feminist statements go, I would say that this show failed in the precise way THE CLOSER succeeded. In an attempt to make Bello seem strong, they simply made her more masculine. The stupid hat, the scarf, the whole get up just screams sexual ambiguity. So while the show is saying “woman can be just as good as men” it’s showing us that women have to transform into men. Meanwhile THE CLOSER gave us a woman who was feminine as hell, and maybe human, maybe imperfect, never weak. I’m going to miss you Sedgwick, because with your departure so departs the last semblance of popular feminist television. Now, all I have is women trying to be men or women enjoying the lot as dumb girls. For more examples, see below.

CHARLIE’S ANGELS
How much it sucked: 8

The reason that CHARLIE’S ANGELS was successful back in ’76 is because, back then, people didn’t expect much from their TV. A bunch of hot babes fight crime and obey their charming yet faceless lord. Awesome. It was all steeped in Freudian logic, bringing forth the voyeuristic nature of television. It was a distinctly “empire” (to use an Ellis term) frame of thinking that made it possible. Even CHARLIE’S ANGELS, the movie, managed to make a pretty big splash when it came out less than ten years ago. But a lot has changed in the last ten years, let alone the last forty. Only, no one told these guys. Everything about this pilot just screams “we found this script in a warehouse that’s been locked since 1982, blew off the dust, threw in some cell phones and made it.” But, when it comes down to it, exploitation films and television of the 70s are only cool because of the clothes and the lingo. Take out the afros and the bell bottoms and suddenly it’s just backwards and offensive. Sort of an ouroboros of sexism where men don’t have to put women down, they’ll stand tall in their six inch heels and do it for us.

A GIFTED MAN

How much it sucked: 1
Not a whole lot of suck to be found in this pilot. I found myself really enjoying it. It was well acted, fun, detailed, accurate, well paced, and brilliantly directed by Jonathan Demme. But then I tried to explain the pilot to someone else and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t manage to explain it without sounding sort of dumb. It was the part where the goofy, hippy shaman opened Patrick Wilson’s chakra that did it, really. Then I realized that while I liked the pilot a lot, I really didn’t like show.

My Brother's Ears/My Sister's Eyes

2011-09-20T13:13:00.001-07:00

On facebook I saw some friends talking about a film they'd seen the day before. One said he was still thinking about it. That took me a little off guard. Of course you're still thinking about it. Do you ever stop? The best art doesn't just happen near you like a traffic accident, something you tell your coworkers about in passing if you remember to. The best art lives with you and comforts you and keeps you awake. The best art is what you turn to when the rest of the world doesn't make sense. You need to think about it at least the day afterwards or you won't understand it as fully as it deserves. To not give it the full breadth of your consideration is to say that it isn't worthy of it, too shallow to be able to make a dent. All this is my way of saying I kept trying to write about the Psychic Babble record but everytime I sat down to do it, I'd turn it on and get lost. I'd start thinking about influences and points of reference, but just enjoy the record and get distracted.

The first thing to note is that for a solo record, nothing feels convenient. Typically experiments like Psychic Babble, the first record from Circa Survive guitarist Colin Frangicetto (the two projects could hardly be more different), are done on a single guitar with a drum machine. They may sound as professional as this, but hardly as well-realized Every beat, every percussive blow feels deliberate and practiced. This is a record heavy on reverb, but the negative space is hardly its greatest feature. Listen to the opening of "Nothing Familiar," what makes this sound different than most reverb-and-delay records, and admittedly it's small, is that cabasa-like cranking sound. It's an unconventional choice for the sort of song it starts. Then there's the plucking of what sounds like it might be mandolin as it draws to a close. It last a fraction of a second, but it's there and it's beautiful. Either he utilized his free hand to simply follow every urge that seized him or he knew precisely what he wanted for even the smallest moments. Either answer is heart-warming. My Brother's Eyes/My Sister's Ears drips with the fervor of an archeologist setting foot in a cave he's read about his whole life and now has all the time and equipment he could ever want to scrutinize every ancient painting and natural formation. The songs are pretty enough on their own but it's the embellishment that Frangicetto gives himself that's the real draw. He's a one-man Cocteau Twins; tambourine, keys, treated acoustic guitar and of course, his excalibur, the electric guitar. Here and there, "Radio Songs" springs to mind, his sublime and assured electric sounds more the lead instrument than even his voice. Which isn't to say his voice doesn't suit the songs. You can't quite place what it reminds you of, which is perfect, it is as uniquely soft as the production.

His songs are redolent of the best minimal mid-80s post-punk, but whereas most disciples of that era are more concerned with the feel of the rhythm section (Joy Division's tone, Gang of Four's groove) Frangicetto's background as a painter serve him better than his record collection. Like the best of the era, each song seems to take place in a warehouse. Instead of embracing the dead space, the peeling walls and hollow feeling (like Iceage or Cults, for instance. Nothing against them, they just dig minimalism), he paints the walls with synth, melodica and percussion until you hardly recognize the place anymore, as on "Crocodile Tears." And even more remarkably he stops just shy of cluttering up the place. "Tears" many elements snap around each other like fireworks thrown by many different hands, but there's just enough space to pick out each sound. It's never too busy. Nor is he afraid to change horses. "Boulevard" initially bounces like mid-period Gang of Four, though much softer and then recedes quietly to make room for a verse that sounds lifted from Heaven or Las Vegas. And then goes even quieter before bursting into the ether like something from UNKLE's latest record. And all this referencing really gets you nowhere because the sound is far less abrasive than anything mentioned here and never seems to date itself. I could go on and on but the best compliment I can think to pay it is that when I go driving at night, this is the album I play. I'm hesitant to publish this because I still feel like I have some listening to do before I truly know it. I'm still thinking about it, still trying to figure it out.

Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall

2011-09-15T17:01:00.001-07:00

I was given a small gift just now, four posters for a horror/thriller called The Year After Infection about living after the end of the world. Here are the four posters representing the four seasons that the film takes place over. I don't quite know what else to do with them, but I'm definitely going to see this film if I get the chance. It sounds interesting!

The Seventh Moth

2011-09-11T21:47:00.000-07:00

Inspired by my wonderful Dizzy, I thought I'd put up some work I've done at Emerson so I can clear my hard-drive. Here's a bit about Ingmar Bergman and Virginia Woolf. Thanks Christina Carlson!

Film and literature are blessed with different methods of attacking the reader’s unconscious. Be it through film’s ability to represent in purely visual terms the sensation of dreaming, birth and death, or through literature’s ability to directly address in the strictest and most poetic language imaginable those same phenomena; words are the most direct line to the brain when engrossed in a novel you read the words: “"I'll give it you!" he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs. Filmer's area railings”. The immediacy of one vs. the other is not in question, but what is most remarkable is that death was of central importance in both the twentieth century novel and what could be thought of as the twentieth century art film, personified in this case by two of each form’s most talented poets, Ingmar Bergman & Virginia Woolf. Because while both told very different stories, the styles they chose to tell them in were incredibly similar. Death lurks behind the most-loved works of both which brings out in their works a fascination with life’s little mysteries. Woolf let her pen wander from the conversation of her two main characters to the comings-and-goings of those they shared a park with, be they perfect strangers or even insects. Bergman’s highly disciplined writing and incredibly focused direction stayed fixed on the psyche of only a few characters but his fleeting departures from their narrative help illustrate the fullness of life. In Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, a single day is used to show the intricacies of life, the presence of death and while it doesn’t immediately seem so how beautiful life can be.

There may be better examples of a confrontation with death in both artists’ canon. There’s a reason, after all, that both To The Lighthouse & The Seventh Seal are thought of as representative of their respective authors’ body of work and I would venture that it’s that their not inconsiderable talent is put in service of a sprawling tale with a disparate cast of characters and a very direct attitude toward death. In each work there is a moment of clarity, a passage that lets the audience know exactly what’s on the mind of the creator. In each case it’s that death unites us all. In The Seventh Seal death is a man who follows the characters throughout the movie. In the final scene day breaks on the last surviving characters, the actor and his wife and he sees that Death has finally taken his companions for good. He looks on the ridge above them, sees his deceased friends dancing in a line and says to his bride:
I see them, Mia! I see them! Over there against the stormy sky. They are all there.…And the strict master Death bids them dance. He wants them to hold hands and to tread the dance in a long line. At the head goes the strict master with the scythe and hourglass. But the Fool brings up the rear with his lute. They move away from the dawn in a solemn dance away towards the dark lands while the rain cleanses their cheeks of the salt from their bitter tears.

This monologue and the phantasmagorical shot that accompanies it of the dance of the dead are unforgettable, but they don’t erase the sense that we were cheated of the characters that death has claimed. We were so certain that the cunning Antonius Block and his squire have made safe all those who have fallen under their protection during their journey. In To The Lighthouse, death similarly leaps from the woodworks in one of Woolf’s most remarkably unpoetic and memorable passages from any of her novels, the section entitled Time Passes. Woolf’s electric prose is rarely as captivating as it is here, and yet she undercuts her gift for crafting sentences by simply announcing death’s presence as if he had walked into the room as he does in The Seventh Seal:
So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted; solitary like a pool at evening, far distant, seen from a train window, vanishing so quickly that the pool, pale in the evening, is scarcely robbed of its solitude, though once seen. Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions—"Will you fade? Will you perish?"—scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain. (106)

As haunting and gorgeous as this is, we find this: “A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous (110).” It’s so shockingly forward it comes as a disappointment. Here was a character we’d gotten to know so well in the first part of the novel, dispatched with no romance or backwards looking or even a decent sentence; the thing’s in parenthesis for crying out loud. And they pop up all over Time Passes. To quote the film critic Mike D’Angelo’s reaction to an unprovoked murder in Badlands “…you know what, it seems disrespectful. That’s what it is.” Or in the parlance of college kids, it’s lame. It’s like death walking out of nowhere to claim the victims we thought had outsmarted him in Seal. And for that reason, both novels are both more honest than their contemporaries who grant meaning and glory to the deaths of their heroes. Woolf and Bergman have no qualms about death, they just let it happen. But what they did have was a chance to examine all the little things that do give a life, and thus a death, meaning. And they did so no more beautifully and lovingly than in Wild Strawberries & Mrs. Dalloway.
Both texts are about memory, death and about trying like hell to appreciate what you have even if circumstance tells you you got dealt a bad hand. Mrs. Dalloway’s twin narratives follow socialite and parliament member Clarissa Dalloway as she throws a party for her associates at which her two best friends who she hasn’t seen in a number of years show up. Meanwhile the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith tries to get through a day marked by visits to his doctor, flashbacks to a fallen friend and pervasive thoughts of the grave. Wild Strawberries follows Dr. Isak Borg on a car trip with his daughter-in-law Marianne to receive an honorary degree. The day starts with a dream foretelling his own death, is specked with shocking revelations about his son from Marianne, flashbacks and daydreams that seem to tell him he’s wasted his life or at the very least, he’s had a better one stolen from him by circumstance. But to say that Mrs. Dalloway is about a party and a veteran and Wild Strawberries is about a road trip would be to sell short the joie de vivre with which Bergman and Woolf pass the time before the conclusion.

As Wild Strawberries opens, the sweater clad Borg sits writing in his diary in the middle of an ornate and dusty study. He is quite alone and the ominous chiming of a clock before the action can only signal one thing: his time is short. “In our relations with other people we mainly discuss and evaluate their character and behavior. That is why I have withdrawn from nearly all so-called relations. This has made my old age rather lonely.” Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s heroine, has also been shut off, but it wasn’t by her choosing. “She had the Oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them… this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway (8).” Clarissa’s life has been reduced to social functions, just as Isak’s has been one of isolation. One can picture their “narrow” beds being all too similar (22). Their routines are fixed, only changed by “larks” like buying flowers on their own for a change or driving themselves to the ceremony instead of letting the maid drive (1). It is only real changes, the ones they can’t predict that bring about any kind of real shifts in their perception, fleeting though those might be.

Isak is shaken awake the morning he is to receive his degree by a “weird” dream ("weird sisters" weird) where he is confronted with a lot of bizarre imagery, all of it spelling his death, the chiming clock chief among them. When he wakes, he has decided that today is going to be different. When his daughter-in-law decides to drive with him, he is sidetracked in his reevaluation when she reminds him that his son, her husband, hates him because of the ways he’s become set in. “You’re a selfish old man, Uncle Isak.” He even misremembers the invitation he extended to Marianne a month ago when she first came to stay with him away from her husband. Her relationship with her husband, the brute Evald, is not unlike Clarissa and Richard’s, in that neither seems to understand the other, but Isak’s telling Marianne she ought to see a shrink smacks of Rezia’s cluelessness about Septimus’ condition. She and every doctor he meets thinks he just needs a little more help; he so tires of it that he throws himself out a window. Clarissa’s “dream” that awakens her comes in the form of Septimus’ death announced at her party. Her life, she realizes, is not something she herself evaluates: “Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living…(132)” She doesn’t think of life because she’s too busy living it. And yet she seems ambivalent at best about whether death is something she herself wants herself. She seems torn for the first time realizing what it might mean. “She somehow felt very like him–the man who killed himself…he made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.” It is only with death in her mind that she sees that she must make the most of herself, something both she and Isak Borg had forgotten.

It wasn’t always so, of course, as both texts lovely flashbacks tell us. Clarissa goes back to the party to be with Peter Walsh and Sally Seton, two people whom she’s had striking and powerful relationships with in the past, but who she understands she has to remain separate from. What’s past is past. And what’s past for Clarissa is an all-too-brief love affair with Sally. She remembers being kissed by Sally (“the whole world might turned upside down”) and a time when the thought of Sally walking down a hallway naked was the most exciting thing in the world. “Sally's power was amazing, her gift, her personality (24).” And yet when she meets Sally again, time has changed her. A mother of five, no longer the spirit she once was. Clarissa doesn’t come out and say it, but she understands that those things are in the past. She must live beautifully and that’s all there is for it. Borg’s flashback is given to him in the same form as his dream of death.

In a profoundly beautiful scene, Isak revisits his childhood home and as an old man relives a time from his youth in a dream. He sees the girl he once loved, pursued in secret by his older brother Sigfrid. Embarrassed by the whole family for her secret tryst with Sigfrid she runs off and through tears confesses to her sister and an invisible Isak: “Isak is so fine and good, so moral and sensitive...And he talks about sin. He’s on such a terribly high level and I feel so worthless...And Sigfrid is so bold and exciting.” Isak realizes that he has tried and failed to be the man he wanted to be. “I was overwhelmed by feelings of emptiness and sadness…” But seeing this makes him put on a much more positive attitude that extends to flirting with a passing girl, Sara and even offering a lift to her and her friends to the town where he’s receiving his degree. They also pick up a bickering couple who nearly crash the car in a heated argument; a potent reminder for both Marianne and Isak that life is simply too short to be mean-spirited or do things you regret (apologies for the semi-colon).

Clarissa realizes that her life is among party guests and that she has an all-too crucial role to play in the lives of those she hosts. Her art is being herself and even though she sees the things she’s left behind in her journey to her current self, she also sees that life is simply too wonderful to let slip by and fill with regrets and worries. Even those she leaves in her wake, Peter and Sally, see that she is right where she belongs. “What is this terror? What is this ecstasy? He thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was (139).” Just as Clarissa is captivated by life anew after Septimus’ death, Isak may not have long left and precious few people to share his life with but he’s going to live what little there is to the fullest. He makes up with his maid though she rebukes his attempts at being overly familiar, just as Clarissa does with Peter and Sally, though just as he goes to sleep, Sara and her friends sing a song for him beneath his windowsill. As they part, their triangular relation reminding him of his own with Sigfrid and his one-time love. Before going Sara leans in close and says to him “It’s you I really love, you know. Today, tomorrow, always.” “I’ll remember.” He says, a look of resignation on his face. He will never hear from them again and he knows it, but he’s happy to have touched one more life before it was time. He is himself, no more, no less, and like Clarissa Dalloway, the world would be far less rich without him, now that they know what they are meant to do.

Woolf, Virginia. To The Lighthouse. Feed. Web.
Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Feed. Web.

100 Albums Beyond The Canon

2011-09-10T17:45:00.000-07:00

Seeing my friend and colleague Tucker Johnson take on the arrogant listmaking over at Rolling Stone has come to make me see that populism and crowd-pleasing have ruled the "last word" in criticism for far too long. Who gives a shit how many staff writers like The Beatles? Is that any excuse for shutting down your exploration of what must be nearly a billion albums made in the last hundred years at one band and its followers. I'd rather listen to Wilco and Elliott Smith adapting their love of those records than the genuine article anyday. So, taking a cue from Cinematical, I thought I'd share 100 albums that no major publication would ever champion despite their largely being better than what the mainstream accepts as a classic. You embrace context, nostalgia and personal taste; Yes, Exile on Main Street was important, but it's fucking boring and sounds like every other post-68 stones album. And worse still you put like two dozen greatest hits and live records which can't be judged together. An album is by a band in a studio, not assembled by money hungry suits. A live performance is also too different to be judged alongside a studio recording. You haven't been right in decades and you put reality tv stars on your magazine covers. So here are 100 fantastic albums Rolling Stone would never tell you to listen to, that I love so much more than anything in their top 20 best albums of all time. And no I'm not going to rank them. Limit one per band.

1. Echo & The Bunnymen - Porcupine
2. John Cale - Paris 1919
3. Living Sisters - Love To Live
4. Regina Spektor - Soviet Kitsch
5. Kings of Convenience - Quiet Is The New Loud
6. Kitchens of Distinction - Strange Free World
7. Stars - In Our Bedroom After The War
8. The Decemberists - Picaresque
9. Chavez - Ride The Fader
10. The Futureheads - News & Tributes
11. Grizzly Bear - Yellow House
12. Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene
13. Talking Heads - Speaking In Tongues
14. Wolf Parade - Apologies To The Queen Mary
15. Apostle of Hustle - National Anthem of Nowhere
16. Holy Fuck - Latin
17. Belle & Sebastian - The Boy With The Arab Strap
18. Nick Cave - Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus
19. Do Make Say Think - & Yet & Yet
20. A Place To Bury Strangers - Exploding Head
21. Julie Doiron - I Can Wonder What You Did With Your Day
22. Years - Years
23. Astor Piazzolla - Lo Que Vendra
24. Supergrass - Life on Other Planets
25. Doves - Some Cities
26. Gordon Bok - Clear Away In The Morning
27. Wilco - A Ghost Is Born
28. Yo La Tengo - Painful
29. Air - Talkie Walkie
30. John Frusciante & Josh Klinghoffer - A Sphere In The Heart of Silence
31. The A Frames - Black Forest
32. Witchcraft - Witchcraft
33. Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones
34. Bauhaus - The Sky's Gone Out
35. Amy Millan - Masters of the Burial
36. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
37. World Leader Pretend - Punches
38. The Chills - Kaleidoscope World
39. Loose Fur - Born Again In The USA
40. Roy Orbison - Crying
41. Dungen - Tio Bitar
42. Iron & Wine - The Shepherd's Dog
43. Red Lorry Yellow Lorry - Paint Your Wagon
44. Rufus Wainwright - Want One/Want Two
45. Emitt Rhodes - The American Dream
46. Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible
47. Feu Thérèse - Feu Thérèse
48. Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
49. Sondre Lerche - Phantom Punch
50. Sunset Rubdown - Random Spirit Lover
51. The Helio Sequence - Keep Your Eyes Ahead
52. Portishead - Third
53. British Sea Power - Man of Aran
54. Bundy K. Brown - Directions in Music
55. Handsome Furs - Face Control
56. The Horrors - Primary Colours
57. Patrick Watson - Wooden Arms
58. Sparta - Porcelain
59. Ali Farka Toure - Niafunke
60. The Ronettes - Presenting The Fabulous Ronettes
61. Sparklehorse - It's A Wonderful Life
62. Grandaddy - Sumday
63. The Dipers - How To Plan Succesfful Parties
64. Death From Above 1979 - You're A Woman I'm A Machine
65. Madvillain - Madvillainy
66. Fela Kuti - Zombie
67. The Von Bondies - Pawn Shoppe Heart
68. The Walkmen - Bows & Arrows
69. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm
70. Tom Vek - We Have Sound
71. Sam Roberts - Love At The End Of The World
72. J. Tillman - Vacilando Territory Blues
73. Julie Fader - Outside In
74. Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstandt, Dolly Parton - Trio
75. The Besnard Lakes Are The Roaring Night
76. Nancy Sinatra - How Does That Grab You?
77. Amon Düül II - Yeti
78. Nino Nardini - Jungle Obsession
79. Nico - Desert Shore
80. David Bowie - Lodger
81. Wire - 154
82. Richard Thompson - You? Me? Us.
83. The Chameleons - What Does Anything Mean, Basically?
84. Cocteau Twins - Head Over Heels
85. Ride - Nowhere
86. French Kicks - Two Thousand
87. Chapterhouse - Whirlpool
88. Eric's Trip - Forever Again
89. Chad VanGaalen - Skelliconnection
90. Final Fantasy - Heartland
91. The Fever - Red Bedroom
92. Fly Pan Am - Sédatif En Fréquences Et Sillons
93. Fairport Convention - Liege & Lief
94. The Feelies - The Good Earth
95. Manos Xatzidakis - Sweet Movie
96. The Mars Volta - De-Loused In The Comatorium
97. Basia Bulat - Heart of My Own
98. Women - Public Strain
99. Rolling Stones - Their Satanic Majesties Request
100. Orchestra Baobab - Specialists In All Styles

Best Films of 2011, so far

2011-08-13T20:19:00.000-07:00

What's the name of that disorder where you see someone doing something and immediately do it. That's what happened here. I've been noticing critics already beginning their year-end listology by telling everyone what their favourite films of the year are...so far. It's only July, after all. So I thought I'd do the same with my film-going friends and contributors here. So, without further ado, here's our late-midyear round-up.

Dizzy:

Beginners

Super 8

Water for Elephants

Cowboys and Aliens

Harry Potter & Deathly Hallows, part 2

Mr. Danvers:

Certified Copy

13 Assassins

The Trip

Midnight In Paris

Nick:

Odcházení
Black Death
Super 8

Laura Jorgensen:

Bibliotheque Pascal

Kosmos

Tucker Johnson:

13 Assassins
I think I'm a lot more a fan of Takashi Miike's technical skill and personal demeanor than I am of his films. Audition and Ichi the Killer are a little too...juicy for my taste and Sukiyaki Western Django is fun but its best feature is creating Bloody Benton who only gets a little bit of screen time. But luckily 2011 allowed the world to get a glimpse of Miike's newest obsession. Samurai films. Good ones. 13 Assassins is one of those flicks that I actually take pride in recommending to people. I treat it like I made it myself (and openly wish I did). This movie does everything correctly. The serious scenes are as sharp as the swords that are fated to appear later on. The over the top villain is built up on some truly horrifying pedestals which allows the film's audience to feel as much blood lust as the villain himself. The action is as good as any film can boast and even though there are 13 main characters to remember and care about, the film is executed in such a way that you'll love then all and truly feel for them in their moments of triumph and torment alike. This film is simply a triumph.

Submarine
Wes Anderson's visual style had a baby with Robert Downey Jr's frenetic speech pattern. The result is one of the coolest flicks to hop the pond. Driven by some of the best narration in film, the story of an English teen's first crush is so funny you have to treat it like your best friend. But with ups come downs. Not in quality though. The downs come in the form of the main character's parents imminent divorce but even in a film that features heavy humor, the divorce is treated with true gravity and if you've ever experienced such a thing, you'll know that Richard Ayoade, the director must have too. He captures the mood perfectly and even though you come out of the theater quoting line after line, what really sticks is how well they treat the more serious and tender moments.

Super 8
If America had to be famous for a certain kind of film, Super 8 is the prime example for what I'd vote for. Its action packed, has kids, pets, monsters, and you don't really have to think to enjoy it. But even though this one is easy on the cerebrum, JJ Abrams definitely busted ass creating a film that nails being a kid just as well as it nails being an amateur filmmaker. The child acting is great, the special effects are explosive to use a pun, and the lens flares are rampant. I instantly fell in love with JJ's amazingly well written characters and his fast paced but never rushed story telling. Its an Amblin Entertainment Ode but I think its just as good if not better as anything that house ever put out.

Tree of Life
Long before it was polarizing audiences at Cannes, I really wanted to see this one. Terrence Malick is famous for creating overly thought out films about everything from murder and war to love and farming. Based on subject matter alone Tree of Life pales in comparison to the others. Its just about a family run by a strong willed, angry and jealous man. But because Malick disguised this pretty normal story in a near 3 hour film that also features the dawn of civilization portrayed in beautiful imagery and whispered narration audiences became outraged for some reason. We aren't talking about Un Chien Andalou or Meshes of the Afternoon here. All I know is that if I trapped these same people in a theater with a dvd of Stan Brakhage material, they'd be clamouring for Malick's “impenetrable” film. The whole reason this movie exists for me however because of Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography. With his camera work and Malick's unparalleled ability to capture the most pure and life like moments, this film stops being about the story its trying to tell and instead becomes a kind of visual poem. An entity that taunts you into relishing its craft rather than the message its trying to sell you. It's the most beautiful film I've ever seen. Period.

Tournee (On Tour)
Mathieu Amalric plays actor/director in this documentary style film about a burlesque tour of France. At first fairly straight forward, it soon steps away from the traditional narrative in the way that only European films can do. This isn't a problem but I figured I'd mention it. All of the performers in the film are actually who they say they are and their acting is so naturalistic that at times you forget its a narrative film. The entire cast hops in and out of English and French like its nothing and to anyone else but Americans, this is pretty much the case with being bilingual. Christophe Beaucarne's cinematography is definitely worth mentioning. There's no unorthodox camera moves or angles. Instead, he makes sure to consistently fill the frame with things to look at. Every frame is splendidly colorful and there is always someone moving, talking, or both. Each frame becomes a strange work of art and its definitely something that should be emulated. And though the film doesn't rely on it, the soundtrack is perfect and definitely helps to empower many scenes and characters. I had to fight with myself to pick this one over Beginners by Mike Mills which is definitely deserving of such a list so I'll give it an honorable mention here.

Films I'm Most Looking Forward To:
Drive
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Muppets

Sean Van Deuren:

5. The Trip
There’s more beneath the surface of The Trip than just hilarious impersonations and witty, improvised banter – it is a Michael Winterbottom film, after all. What really makes the The Trip exciting, just as with all of Winterbottom’s work, is the way it explores the psychology of its characters. Under examination is the semi-fictionalized friendship between Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, who just so happen to be two of the funniest people alive today. There are no heavy plot mechanics in The Trip, instead the film relies on capturing the subtle status interactions at work within male friendships, and from beginning to end it’s a delight to watch.

4. Meek’s Cutoff
Not only is Meeks Cutoff the best existential/feminist western ever made, it’s . . . well, probably the only existential/feminist western ever made. With only her third feature, Kelly Reichardt has proven she’s one of the most exciting auteurs working today. Meeks Cutoff, her most meticulously made film yet, is slow burning and tense throughout. It is also one of the most riveting, beautiful, and surprisingly political films of the year – with an ending that’s as startling as it is inevitable, and above all wholly satisfying in it’s stark view of life.

3. Certified Copy
Rare is the art film that manages to simultaneously challenge and invite its audience in. Certified Copy – with its impenetrable relationship between a man and a woman who may or may not be married, or may or may not be complete strangers pretending to be married, or may or may not be anywhere in between – is that just kind of gem. What matters is not the specific details of the relationship anyway, but instead the examination of the universal qualities in all intimate relationships. In his first feature made outside of Iran, Abbas Kiarostami has created one of the most playful, puzzling, and emotionally honest films of the year.

2. Silver Bullets/Art History
With the wonderfully self-conscious double feature of Silver Bullets/Art History, Joe Swanberg has pushed his filmmaking to the next level. Both thematically and in terms of craftsmanship, these films display an impressive artistic growth for Swanberg, whose accomplishment may go under the radar of the uninitiated. However, for those familiar with the polarizing director’s work – and the negative reaction from his harsher critics – they prove nothing short of astonishing in their ambition and quest for honesty. In both films, we see Swanberg toying with and openly questioning his own persona as a filmmaker. These are two of the most direct and personal feeling films I’ve ever seen about the process of making movies. Silver Bullets/Art History are dark, uncomfortable films made by a filmmaker dealing with the ramifications of his obsession for capturing moments of honesty.

1. Tree of Life
Despite all the hype and curiosity surrounding Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s long gestating film stands on its own as the most ambitious and beautiful of the year so far. Though Tree of Life is not nearly as experimental as the film’s naysayers state, what it does accomplish is so stunning because of the delicate balance between how breathtaking and yet completely familiar feeling it is. Malick is the master of threading moments together to recreate the sensation of life, and with Tree of Life he has captured a boy’s childhood. The real power of the film, though, lies in its universal quality. It’s not just one boy’s childhood, it’s everyone’s childhood; and it is awe-inspiring.

Scout (these are excerpts from what will be year-end review):

Submarine

I'm not sure whether to give credit to Joe Dunthorne's novel or Richard Ayoade's script/direction for totally understanding the things that happen inside the head of a troubled, obsessive teenage boy, but I'll go ahead and give it to Ayoade because his visual representation of these events is what hits me the most. Take for instance his decision to give Yasmin Paige's Jordana the Louise Brooks/Anna Karina/Melanie Griffith hair cut. In an instant we know everything about her we need to. She's no good, but she's the one he has to have. Zoe Preece deserves the nicest version of Oliver, but he's too damaged to be that for her. He wants Jordana and more importantly he deserves Jordana because they need to mature together. They'll never age and be better people if they don't get all the horrid out of their system at once. And that's what Submarine attempts to do: get all of the dysfunction out in the open.

13 Assassins

And then Kôji Yakusho smiles. Not only is he happy to hear that a gang has come together to overthrow the shogun, he is fucking thrilled that they've chosen him to be the one to kill him. He's been living idly, fishing, getting by, resigned to the idea that he'll die for nothing. And now this. His twisted happiness is also ours because we then spend the rest of the movie just fucking itching to watch him tear the shogun a new asshole. It's a movie that is approximately half build-up and half delivery, a near perfect treatment of the Jidai-Geki.

Tree of Life

In order to get the 'why' of Tree of Life, you don't need to get Tree of Life. Picture this if you will. It's opening day in New York in a theatre literally underground. It's the only theatre in town playing this movie so far as my search concluded, which means that it was the only screen in the north east playing it (it wouldn't open in Boston for another week and nowhere else had it yet). So naturally the theatre is full, me and my dad had to sit separately as it was too full and the movie was still twenty minutes from opening. Everyone seems to be biting their nails in anticipation. The people in front of me couldn't stop talking, but there was a nervousness to it, like they were afraid to sit in silence in anticipation. I for one couldn't keep my legs from shaking. One of the theatre employees came out at about five minutes to show time basically to remind us that we could buy food at the counter we'd all past on our way down here. Even the staff was nervous. Why? The movie had just won the Palme d'Or for christ's sakes, what did anyone have to be nervous about. I can't speak for everyone else there, but I knew this movie meant something.

NEDs

Just when you have the film pegged and you can play out his nightmare descent into drugs, Jesus steps off the cross. First to dance with him, then stab him. And then there's the knives taped to his hands and the trip to the zoo. It's entirely unpredictable and boy christ is that something I was grateful for. As wily and foolhardy as its protagonist, Peter Mullan's style and incendiary take on English life is reminiscent of the best of Lindsay Anderson in its cool viciousness and black humour. Mullan's voice tears through convention like a tornado through a trailer.

Norwegian Wood

Seeing a boy go from spending what looked like carefree time with his girlfriend to filling a car with exhaust and slowly dying from it and then seeing a spider on the forest floor did it. The spider has nothing to do with what goes on around its inclusion, but having the narrator talk about moving on after his friend's suicide while watching an image so beautiful and disorienting drew me in immediately. A few scenes later Watanabe walks through his college surrounded by a rampaging Vietnam protest, the period detail spot on, but relegated to set dressing, even less pronounced than the graffiti in Children of Men. Trần Anh Hùng had gotten every detail right and his camera was so assured, his gaze so intensely focused, yet he chose not to show off the work that they had done. All the signifiers that the film's 1969 setting had been done justice are hidden away from our view thanks to The swift editing and piercing camera work. Trần rightly sees that there is far more importance in damaged beauty Rinko Kikuchi's face as she meets with Watanabe after long absences. She's heartbreak itself and though the film moves at an unstoppable pace, throwing out one totally flooring image after another, it slows down enough to capture what infatuation and frustration feel like when mixed.

Films I'm Most Looking Forward To:
Ici-Bas

Tomboy

Melancholia

Ten Forgotten Albums of the Decade

2011-08-09T00:29:00.001-07:00

I always feel a twinge of regret when I buy an album that's a year or two old and it becomes a favourite. I'm thrilled, obviously, but part of me wishes I had been able to rave about it at the time. Seeing that the Horrors excellent new album will be released today reminds me that I missed their sophomore release and thus missed celebrating it on time. I love doing year-end reviews because I like putting artists on pedestals. I like heaping praise at their feet. I hope that they find these words and know that they have fans eagerly awaiting what they do next, each new direction, each change of instrument. So I feel silly showing up late to the party, but I guess late is better than never. So, here are ten albums that would handily have made my best of 2000-2009 if I'd thought to include them/heard them in time. I try to explain why they didn't make the cut (I know, excuses, excuses) and celebrate what makes them so amazing. Please, please, please go out and buy these albums if you don't have them.

Nick Cave - Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus

⁃ This album(s?) has some of Cave's best songs and some of the Bad Seeds greatest arrangements. I've long had a weak spot for Cave's black lyricism, his tales of murder and sin, but his compositions don't always present the greatest accompaniment. There's such a thing as too weird and bleak, after all. But Orpheus delivers compositions that tow the line between creepy and unforgettably catchy. There's "Fable of the Brown Ape" as the standout of the former and the awesome "Spell," "Supernaturally," and "There She Goes My Beautiful World" in the latter. There are love songs, rock songs and fittingly a few murder ballads that spell out the best of Cave's many sides. And then there are the soaring rockers which make this a record I can't help but spin every now and again.

Portishead - Third

⁃ I chalk this, like so many of these, up to just not having heard it yet. Because if I had, it definitely would have made the list. There's a lot to praise here, but to keep it fairly concise, I'll just say that loneliness and paranoia are tough to reproduce using musical instruments and a voice, especially when they seem to be effortlessly producing the best album of their career and aiming more at aloof and mysterious. They achieve all four and that's a testament to the harmony the members of Portishead work in. One of those albums that builds up phantasmagoria in your mind's eye after just a few seconds of any given song.

The Horrors - Primary Colours

⁃ Doing a stylistic 180 can be tricky. You risk alienating your fans and never getting back to the foothold you'd managed with whatever you'd become known for. The Horrors did such a tremendous job convertng themselves into potential one-hit wonders into the most vital band in England that I often forget they were once a swamp-blues band staffed by kids who dressed like The Cure. And apparently, on their latest, they've done it again. What a difference an album makes. Primary Colours proved they weren't a fluke but indeed one of the most powerful new bands on earth. Fusing elements of My Bloody Valentine and The Stone Roses with 60s Brit Pop, The Horrors have a sound that will trip a lot of wires in your brain that tell you you're listening to a classic and long after you've thought of the things it maybe reminds you of, what will linger is the astonishing production that's essentially the sonic equivalent of Christopher Doyle's cinematography, the haunting songcraft, and the overwhelming feeling that The Horrors are the coolest band alive.

J. Tillman - Vacilando Territory Blues

⁃ Some artists need less than a minute to capture your heart. Coldplay managed it on the title track of their first album. Thanks to those 46 seconds, I'll listen to everything they put out even they start to match the pomposity of their heroes, U2. The same can be said of "All You See," the 48 second opener of Vacilando, the first of two great albums the multi-instrumentalist put out in 2009. In those few seconds he demonstrates his knack for melody, his ability to nearly force you to tears just by harmonizing with himself, and his command of production. The four-track scratch of the opener doesn't ever return, but it so fits the first yawn of the piece, like a breeze carrying over waves into the porch of a beachfront cabin where sleeping lovers awake. That the song that follows is "No Occasion" is almost unfair. How could anyone write songs this good and have the audacity to put them NEXT to each other? Anyone who knows anything about my films knows that Tillman's music is beyond important to me. If you want to know why, here's where you dive in.

Guillemots - Through The Windowpane

⁃ I...ok, the reason I didn't consider this at the time is because a few of the songs are too aimless and feel more like jubilation given aural form. The sort of thing that you could see ewoks dancing too. Those things aside, I really should have just put this on here because it has a few of the best pop choruses ever written. "Made Up Love Song #43" is just the kind of thing lovers embarrass themselves saying to each other, it's first love, it's wonderful. I love its earnestness, I love the creeping happiness that overtakes you as it goes on. I love the bouncing bass, skittering drums and jangling guitar that support Fyfe Dangerfield's voice. How has the man not been called out for how fucking beautiful his voice is? Nevermind that he's written "Trains to Brazil," which ought to go in the national registry. It ought to be played in town squares. It ought to replace the bible. "Trains To Brazil" is all anyone needs and I'm convinced that it's powers fall no shorter than ending famine and world hunger if applied liberally to any crisis. The song is amazing. It's unbelievable. And then there's the album closer. While it's half the kind of nervous thing that Dangerfield usually pens, it shifts midstream and becomes the biggest, cutest, most lovable chorus in the world. "Sao Paolo" might be my favourite song if "Trains to Brazil" weren't already it. (note: I say this about a lot of songs, but these two are very near the top). Listening to the banging around of percussion that accompanies the shift, it's a little like hearing a closet full of toys come to life. The whole album is like a child's dream of first love, so why not? Leave your cynicism behind and let the record rock you to blissful sleep.

LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver

⁃ I have no excuse for not including this in my best of the decade. It does everything I love; it bounces and clicks like post-punk, wails like Bowie, beeps like dark wave, clangs like a kitchen come to life, and it's catchy as all fucking get out). You don't need me to tell you why this is brilliant, but I'll just say it's the one dance record that people too awkward and terrified to dance actually own. I'd wager that James Murphy has inspired more people to get a keyboard and a drum machine than all of the 80s combined. Getting sucked into one of LCD's grooves is one of the best ways to kill six minutes. Seeing this band live is something I will never forget. Hearing their albums is thankfully something I will always be able to do.

Loose Fur - Born Again In The USA

⁃ I don't know how this slipped by me. I've been listening to this album since a week before it came out (record store clerk). It's got the chewiest rock riffs of the decade, a spirit of inventiveness and improvisation and the shitkicker attitude of the best 70s cockrockers, but delivered through everyman Jeff Tweedy's beautifully wounded whisper. You might not buy him as the dick at the bar sitting hitting on your sister, but his guitar sells it well enough. He and Jim O'Rourke are a couple of goddamned phoenixes on this album. Glenn Kotche's drumming is unflashy, monochromatic even; or more precisely that muted grey/green that shows up in early 70s movies. But he's so assured and proficient that he never wastes a measure. He gets a bunch of those noise breaks that Wilco does so well in the middle of "Wreckroom" and then falls right back in line. O'Rourke's singing is pretty stunning. His few songs are well taken. His "Answers to your Questions" smacks of the late 60s California folk scene, but has something timeless in its woe. Those songs were all hope and sunshine. Those things are here by virtue of the arrangement and the beautiful lapsteel solo, but O'Rourke doesn't let them escape without clouds overhead. He does sombre well. But he also leads a rocker with the best of them. "Stupid as the Sun" is fucking boss. One of the most fun aspects of this record is trying to figure out which of the two six string dynamos is playing which lick. The game and the record never get old.

Sparklehorse - It's A Wonderful Life

⁃ Death fascinates me more than it should. Case in point, everytime a well-known artist dies, I tend to dig deep into their catalog and try to figure them out. It happened when Clarence Clemons died. Though looking back on my first flirtation with the E-Street Band, there was already something legendary about the man. He was bigger than life and so when he died, I changed very little about the way I perceived him. Mark Linkous is someone I can't quite accept as being dead even though his entire body of work seemed to come from beyond the grave. He was singing on borrowed time. Indeed without watching Guy Maddin's expressionist music video, it's tough not to picture Linkous singing the title track of his magnum opus standing in his own grave. Many singers whisper better than they sing; Linkous split the difference and held the world captive in doing so. "Gold Day" is almost a taunt in its simplicity and beauty. The optimistic flute that opens it gives way to the mournful strings and definitive drums. He'd like to be with us, but the world is full of walls and limits and the man responsible for these arrangements was too beautiful for us. His last project was held up by red tape. All he wanted was to make music but his depression and an unfair establishment kept him from doing it. I've been obsessed with It's A Wonderful Life since his death because it feels so much like a confession and a eulogy in one aching statement, a musical Morvern Callar. I never knew him but I miss him.

Lily Allen - Alright Still/It's Not Me, It's You

⁃ I have to confess that were it not for a spread in Q magazine in which Lily Allen appeared scantily clad with a pair of leopards in late 2009, I wouldn't have bothered with her music. Thank christ for leopards. Chris Blasucci had tried to get me into her but I wasn't having any of it. She was popular, thus she was meritless. But then I read into her. She had issues, she was a tabloid mess, she had had several abortions, she'd had a shit childhood. How much of that was true I have no clue, but it painted a picture of a fighter. Her lyrics confirmed as much. Taking on shithead ex-boyfriends and chronic one-night-stand artists, drugs, religious fanatics and retarded presidents, ungrateful lovers and trashy overnight sensations. She rebelled both against the people taking pictures of her and god himself. She wasn't afraid of anything and she wasn't taking any of your shit. Does it help that this scrappy warrior delivers this message from behind one of the cutest noses on earth and swathed in hooky Madchester hooks? Yes it does. But it's her pragmatism and realist lyrics. She doesn't deal in absolutes or rhetoric. She never repeats the words of her peers and forebears. I'd like to hear Madonna or Britney Spears say "I've spent ages giving head," or all but namecheck the US president and then call him a racist and an idiot. She had a song called "Fuck You" long before Cee-Lo. Lily Allen's looks/hooks are probably a hindrance for many people as they were for me initially, but the music speaks for itself. There are songs I like better than others, and my ideal album draws from both her debut and her sophomore effort, but she has a voice. And I anxiously await the next thing it says.

Feu Thérèse - Feu Thérèse

⁃ Going to Canada was the best thing to my musical sensibility since getting a job at a record store. Making Superconnected led me to follow connections I hadn't been aware of, discover new voices like Andre Ethier and Julie Fader, and to always keep an open mind when a side project emerged. On a total whim I bought several records by Constellation band Fly Pan Am and their artier side project Feu Thérèse. Good choice. I like Fly Pan Am, a lot, and while I enjoy delving into their soundscapes when I have the time, when I want sneering rock music that seems furiously yet coolly played at a concrete wall, Feu Thérèse is my drug of choice. With a remarkable beat that recalls a more experimental Steve Shelley, keyboards soar overtop of what could be guitar and bass and the odd smoky vocal. I don't like to pick it apart because I enjoy the mystery. It's quintessential art rock and the less you understand the easier it is to nod your head to the beat. I love this record because it simultaneously tears the roof off the image of gallery openings and manages to remain as elusive and wretchedly beautiful as a modern art masterpiece. It also rocks pretty hard.

Punishment Cookie

2011-08-03T10:25:00.000-07:00

Hey, remember Chris Blasucci? Well, for those who don't, he's the handsome fellow who taught guitar, drums and trumpet at Solebury School for many years. In 2007, he wrote a song that he and I played on a CD I produced. It's one of the only ones that I can still listen to. Anyway, I think he knew that the song was too good to just play once, so he saved it, and when he formed a new band called Hair Rocket, he rearranged it for his killer new four piece. They released an EP and then started prepping a full length, which after some serious crowd funding, is done. And now, you can buy it here. Chris is, to quote the late Jim Rowland, a font of creativity and I'd be grateful to you if you bought this record to make sure he can keep expressing himself and playing music, which is his true love. Watching Chris play is watching someone in the throes of passion, you can tell by looking at him that he wouldn't trade places with anyone. I can't tell you how happy I am for him that he's released this album and seems to be teetering on the brink of being able to do this comfortably for a long time. Please, please, please support Hair Rocket!

The record is a brash, bluesy, lo-fi rock jolt that's loaded with hooks and seething guitar. To pick but three of my favourite songs, "Hair Rocket" sounds like Wire playing The Feelies, "Ok Alright" is a paranoid barnburner with an unforgettable wordless chorus, "Imagining" is sweet but persistent. It has the intensity and immediacy of other Philadelphia bands like Laguardia or Pepper's Ghost, but Blasucci has a confident enough voice that he'll outlast them and make a lasting impression. His debut record has a sound simultaneously solid and loose and I've been listening almost non-stop since I got it.

...flying thirty-six inches above the earth

2011-07-18T00:23:00.000-07:00

Somewhere on I-285 between Roswell and Santa Fe is Vaughn, NM. It is part of the 100-mile desert nether surrounding Roswell.

Outside of Roswell, NM. There are a number of abandoned towns and structures on the route with random inhabitants.

Vaughn is the biggest ghost town on that span of highway with a population of under 500. Most of my photos taken there were exposed, not sure how.

Of particular interest was Pintada Kid Recording. These were on a separate roll, fortunately. The signs read,

The lights were off but you found me easy.

2011-07-17T02:57:00.000-07:00

Midwest City, OK

Britten Truck Stop, TX. Apparently this has some lore about it.

While I was pulled onto the shoulder taking this, a police officer pulled up behind me, questioned me, had me empty my pockets, searched my car.

Factory Farm on I-40 in TX.

Buddha says most folks are lost and that's birthright. I'll never pull myself together and that's liberation.

2011-07-13T21:47:00.000-07:00

Interstate 40, between Red Rock Canyon, TN, and Oklahoma City, OK

Williamsport, TN

At least it is me who is always falling apart and coming together.

2011-07-12T23:40:00.000-07:00

Holland, NY

Niagra River, Buffalo, NY

Niagra Falls, ON

Will Review Films For Food

2011-06-28T11:14:00.000-07:00

A little girl interacting with a deer would make all the sense in the world on a calendar or a hallmark card, which is why the image is used ironically in two new cinematic fairy tales. They're short hand to let you know that things aren't as they should be. In Hanna, a disorienting and wholly unsuccessful actioner from England's Oscar-bait king Joe Wright (Atonement, The Soloist), it's meant to establish the fable's heroine and her unconventional relationship to the world. In The Sleeping Beauty, the latest bedtime story from unflinching arthouse provocateur Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl, Sex is Comedy) it's meant to illustrate the strange powers and journey of the princess at the heart of the story. The image not only works as shorthand for the kind of stories being told but also for the hand of each director. Wright bludgeons the viewer with assaultive and embarrassingly earnest images, taking the deer as his first victim; Breillat deftly blends it into the texture of the dream world she's created, a world in which you've already either become absorbed or remain outside by the time the princess mounts the creature and rides it across the tundra in search of her next task. The movies are both hit or miss propositions, worlds so totally and esoterically designed that there is no mistaking them for reality, but only one of them intended to be pure fantasy.

The title character in Wright's spy film is 14 year old girl (Soairse Ronan) raised to be the ultimate killing machine by her father, an American ex-pat who speaks in an inexplicable German accent. Living alone in the woods with her dad since her shadowy birth and the equally shadowy death of her mother, she has learned how to detect villains even while asleep, kill, clean and skin animals, and use firearms. She's Jason Bourne in the body of an "adorable" moppet, but the only thing Ronan makes us believe about the character is that she's trying really hard to seem foreign. We're told that her father has trained her for every possible situation that might confront her back in the real world, but he's apparently left out electricity, television, running water and how annoying English tourists can be because she's bowled over by each of these things and more while evading capture by a glowering Cate Blanchett who wishes to reclaim Hanna for the American Government. Her clumsy integration into modern life is deeply at odds with her killer instinct; you don't believe her as being capable of sneaking in and out of maximum security underground bunkers because she goes out of her way to engage in Jerry Lewis-esque clumsiness, reacting to the world like a baboon confronted with its own image. I suspect Wright was far too busy spinning his camera and planning arrogant virtuoso tracking shots to notice that the script made no sense. So thanks to his screaming technique and his wish to make every character, situation and object seem as alien as possible, the film makes pointedly no sense and there is no continuity within the context of the story or even within a given scene. The only thing that does work is the score by the Chemical Brothers, who join Daft Punk in the ranks of musicians who best the films they score.

Meanwhile in a pocket of tiny theatres, another bedtime story plays to smaller crowds. The Sleeping Beauty is the latest from Catherine Breillat who, after taking her brand of harsh emotional exploration to its logical end in 2004's Anatomy of Hell and then suffering a stroke shortly after, reinvented herself as a teller of beautiful, historical bedtime stories. 2007's near-perfect The Last Mistress led to 2009's cute-and-twisted Bluebeard and finally to The Sleeping Beauty, a movie equal parts dream and road movie. Those familiar with the Charles Perrault story or the Disney movie know the outline but can't predict the form it takes in Breillat's modernist mold. After being cursed to die a premature death but having her sentence commuted to a long and deep sleep, princess Anastasia enters a dream world full of trolls and gypsies that leads ultimately to reality and fantasy mixing in service of discovering what it means to be worshipped and then forgotten. What starts as a parable about about what it means for a girl to come of age becomes a very real examination of teenage relations. The layers of fantasy are slowly peeled away until we find ourselves looking at two kids in 21st century France trying to figure out how they can learn from an age-old story. The same problem applies to Hanna; fairy tales don't work when you bring them into the real world, no matter how much style you employ. Breillat uses costumes and natural wonders to craft a place you can recognize but not something you can confuse for Anastasia's waking life. Wright wants to blend them and fails because he has nothing to say, and even with ten times the budget can't find anything as striking or haunting as Anastasia riding her doe under the Aurora Borealis. It's a timeless image and like the tale it reinterprets, isn't something easily interpreted. In Wright's movie, our heroine learns a lesson that can't be taught in good conscious: kill everyone or be killed. To ask "why" is anathema to the film. To ask the same in Breillat's film yields endless possibilities. It's a rich text that I'm pleased to say I don't fully understand. I hope Breillat never stops making films but this film would make for a fitting end to her career as it starts in the world of her late period films and wraps around to the subjects of her early work. "I don't want to kill you, but I'm itching to" says the gypsy princess to Anastasia in The Sleeping Beauty. At no point does anyone ask why Hanna must kill everyone. I'd take quizzical restraint over flashy id and generic convention any day and frankly a deer is more beautiful alive than dead.

Daylight trailer

2011-06-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

People of earth, have a gander at the electrifying trailer for Cinema Purgatorio's latest release: Daylight. I can't tell what it's about, which today in trailer cutting, is a rarity. I'm fucking psyched and unnaturally terrified.

sorry but I had to get out

2011-05-26T11:07:00.000-07:00

Something I made

2011-05-05T12:08:00.000-07:00