Pot Luck
The Murials, Sherlock Holmes, A Perfect Getaway, Food, Inc., The Cove, Away We Go, Tokyo Sonata, Lorna's Silence (2009)
As the new badge on the right signifies (or will signify), Paul C. and the gang have invited me back to participate in the Muriels, their online celebration of the prior year of movies; a party that includes other friends and luminaries such as Craig Kennedy, Daniel Getahun, Dennis Cozzalio, and Jim Emerson. The Muriels are a delight and I look forward to participating each year, honored to jump into the mad dash of “catching up” that is familiar to any essentially unpaid blogger.
I generally don’t care for or approve of one or two sentence “quickie” reviews that glibly sum up half a dozen movies in a hundred or so words, but, as I have no intention of devoting several more thousand + word posts to ’09 (time to move on), I figured I’d make a hypocrite of myself. The movies of ‘09 will inspire one, maybe two, more proper longish posts (certainly on This is It, Bright Star and Crazy Heart) and we shall then move on to our current year, which has already offered Fish Tank and a number of promisingly gory revenge thrillers to get to.
One more thing before the bullets that you’ve probably already skipped down to: I find that the month-long sprint rarely significantly changes my reaction to the movie year, though there’s always one picture, one masterpiece worth ten forgettable or mindlessly over-praised movies. In 2008, that exception for me was Mike Leigh’s glorious Happy-Go-Lucky, which would’ve been sung to infinitely annoying hyperbole on BC had I gotten to it in time. Last year, the picture was Jane Campion’s beautiful, bracingly intelligent Bright Star, which I saw in time to celebrate on the Muriels ballot as well as ponder in my next post.
As always, I enjoy this more than I should admit. And here we go:
Sherlock Holmes: not bad, not really much of anything. It’s a post-modern variation of the Butch and Sundance routine: we watch two charming, good looking men flirt, only this time the homosexual subtext is intentional, toyed with. Not really intentional enough though, Sherlock, despite the stars (Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law) and the director (Guy Ritchie) and the big sets and dirtier-than-usual period London detail, is primarily just the same-o. A good idea – linking Sherlock’s street brawling to his feats of deduction – goes nowhere, and the picture has a weird similarity in plot (cults, is-or-isn’t-he-for-real magician) to the not usually well-liked Spielberg production Young Sherlock Holmes.
A Perfect Getaway: fits right in with writer-director David Twohy’s series of sturdy, better than you expect, still somewhat unremarkable productions (Pitch Black, Below). This is another endangered tourists-somewhere-they-shouldn’t-be picture, though it has the nice novelty (and unrealized potential black joke) of featuring Americans in a strange land still stalked by Americans. The further you go, the more it’s the same. There’s a good twist here, something that points to a more interesting movie: a dirtier/messier prodding of the resentments between white-collar and blue-collar men. As the nerd with hot wife, Steve Zahn does his best work; he brings to the surface the wiry discontentment that has always given him potential. As the hunk with hot girlfriend and mad survival skills, the usually underrated Timothy Olyphant is just as good: coiled passive-aggressive, bitter. These performances are wasted though, A Perfect Getaway could’ve been a nasty pulp cover of A Knife in the Water, but the last fifteen minutes are terribly rote, leaving it a well-made time killer I still enjoyed.
Food, Inc.: I’ve read Fast Food Nation and parts of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, so I was familiar with most of the concerns of Food, Inc. going in. The picture offers two surprises: a. that visual evidence, particularly when it concerns the corn paste and shit-bathed meat that comprises the majority of most American’s diets, is far more persuasive than the written; and, b. the calm, focused, completely condescension-free tone. Food, Inc. could’ve been another exclusionary picture designed for foodies to congratulate themselves, but it instead looks you square in the eye and asks you to understand. This picture is designed to be understood by the masses, designed to affect real, measurable coherent change. That it most likely won’t only contributes to its poignancy. (I say this as someone who drinks enough diet soda per month to fill several swimming pools.)
The Cove: an ideal double-bill with last year’s Man on Wire, both are slick and entertaining at the expense of anything else. The Cove is a now familiar breed of heist documentary where, in this case, we follow several activists’ attempts to end and expose a Japanese island’s corrupt dolphin fishing expeditions. It packs a wallop in a pure emotional sense disconnected from reason or fact – the death of a dolphin, which the camera lingers on in a moment that could be called exploitive (it’s the equivalent of a prosecutor showing you messy murder photos whether they apply or not), is heart-wrenching. The remorse of Richard O’Barry, the lead protestor who feels personal responsibility for having corralled dolphins for the TV-show Flipper, is commanding. But the picture offers no real proof of its two significant points: 1. that we shouldn’t eat dolphins because they are a species of higher consciousness than previously believed; and 2. that we shouldn’t eat them because they are poisonous to eat and will deform and kill us. Point 2 is landed somewhat more convincingly than Point 1 which, going on this movie, is based on about as much hard fact as John Carpenter’s Starman. As Craig and others have also written, The Cove, beneath the smoke and mirrors, is basically arguing that we shouldn’t eat dolphins because they are cute.
Away We Go: Director Sam Mendes’ acclaim springs from two wells: 1. the belief that “art” must be laborious, obvious and unpleasant, and 2. that anything anti-American is profound. The anti-American thing particularly serves Mendes, who, as a Brit, serves us picture after picture of pretend peaks under the consumerist shell at the resentment and hypocrisy underneath. Of his pictures – American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road (a waste of a brilliant novel), and now Away We Go – I can only (kinda) recommend Perdition, which is deadly slow and apologetic of its B-movie tropes, but is at least generally well-acted. Think of it this way: if an American filmmaker were as obsessed with another country, and just as routinely stereotyped and just plain-out missed its culture, would they be celebrated?
I digress: Away We Go is potentially Mendes’ worst picture; written by the super-glib Dave Eggers and wife, it lacks even Mendes’ surface talents of mise en scene, as he is trying to ape an American indie style of pointedly little polish for the sake of integrity. But the Mendes method pushes through: this is polished non-polish, which is to say that Away We Go has the embarrassing hip-courting fashionably ugly look of an elderly man wearing tight, intentionally faded torn jeans. The performances, excluding Maya Rudolph, Jeff Daniels and Jim Gaffigan, are ridiculously over-the-top and self-congratulatory (Allison Janney, whom I normally like, is particularly dreadful): this is another group of rich performers reveling in their superiority of the middle class, who are, once again, generally characterized as confused cowards with little or no variation. One of the worst of ’09.
For an idea of what Mendes always misses, check out Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s artful, funny, occasionally devastating Tokyo Sonata, which plays as a sort of Japanese answer to Laurent Cantet’s also fabulous Time Out. Which means that Sonata is another financial anxiety picture, and Kurosawa keeps the tension simmering by omitting the wish-fulfilling catharsis that an American Beauty or Fight Club revels in: the lead character loses his job, and we cut away before we’re expressively informed of either the firing or the lead’s reaction. A boy yearns for piano lessons, misuses money to purchase them, and we cut away before we can hear him play, in a dispute between father and son, we see the mother frozen in the background – literally stunned – calculating the move that will keep her family from completely disintegrating. We don’t need the fireworks; as the father, Teruyuki Kagawa has this wonderfully expressive corkscrew face that tells us everything: he’s (unintentionally) splintering his family to maintain some desperate absurd understandable sense of pride in the face of being a Director-of-something-or-another-turned-janitor. The picture takes a risky, interesting on paper, left turn into thriller territory at the end that it doesn’t quite pull off, but Tokyo Sonata is mostly amazing, especially because everyone’s pain is treated with respect, and equally.
Lorna’s Silence, the latest from the internationally adored Belgium siblings The Dardennes, isn’t on the level of their Son or Child, but those pictures manage the awesome feat of actually being as good as everyone claims. At their best, The Dardennes manage a challenging, original empathy without resorting to showy hand-standing to ensure we get the universality of their movies. Lorna’s Silence, essentially a thriller with their delicate, minute touch, doesn’t walk as fine a line. The Dardennes lose perspective on their Lorna, we’re invited to sympathize with a fairly tedious creature who (convincingly) shim-shams back and forth, trying to hold on to a bit of morality in a scam that hinges on at least one murder. The performances are, as usual with the Dardennes, wonderful; and there is a great scene between Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) and her prospective mark (Jérémie Renier), a heroine addict, who she sleeps with to keep from relapsing. That moment has the surprise of The Son and The Child. The rest is a well-staged delay of the inevitable, and it is somewhat sentimental.
