A smart, funny passage on the relevance of film criticism from Anthony Lane's collection of essays, Nobody's Perfect:
The primary task of the critic, (and nobody has surpassed the late Ms. Kael in this regard), is the recreation of texture — not telling movie-goers what they should see, which is entirely their prerogative, but filing a sensory report on the kind of experience into which they will be wading, or plunging, should they decide to risk a ticket. You may object to the films of Krzysztof Kieślowski, but, with their heavy filtration and cloud-bursts of sudden music, not to mention the wounded emotions that drift across the faces of their heroines, they could have been made by nobody else.
All of which is a way of saying that movies deserve journalism. This may sound obtuse, not to say indefensible, in the light of those unusual thinkers whose most fervid desire is to have their words reproduced on billboards across the land. Broadcasting from radio stations so local that the presenters might just as well ditch the microphones, stand on the roof, and shout, these superbly untroubled beings scorch the earth with indiscriminate goodwill. However hellish that Adam Sandler fiasco you just saw, don't worry; there'll be somebody in Delaware who is prepared to stand and tell the world, "Hands up for the flat-out funniest comedy since Father of the Bride! Adam Sandler is a laugh riot, hands down!" And there will be people at Universal who will plaster it on a wall; by an appealing coincidence, they will be the same people who flew the guy from Delaware to a junket in Atlantic City and then inquired gently for his assessment of Mr. Sandler as the new Jim Carrey. I once went to a junket and heard the assembled hacks complaining to each other about the water pressure in their hotel jacuzzis. I am as corrupt as the next man, but, I must admit, the notion that you could trim your critical opinions to accord with the fizzy water in which you recently dipped your ass had, until then, never occured to me, and it still strikes me as impractical today.
Nevertheless, I repeat: movies deserve journalism. Both involve a quick turnover, an addiction to the sensational, and a potent, if easily exhausted, form of communal intensity; books written about film are often devout and scholarly, but, unlike journalism, they bear almost no stamp of what it actually feels like to go to the movies. A review should give off the authentic reek of the concession stand; it should become as handy as that finest of nocturnal inventions, the armrest-mounted soda holder. This holds especially true for readers who have every intention of staying in, cooking dinner, and skipping the film altogether. When people tell me, as they frequently do, that they can't be bothered to see a subtitled picture (because it's too much work) or the latest and loudest blockbuster (because they know in their bones that it will be junk), what happens to the role of the movie critic? It should by rights be diminished; in practice, the reading of reviews, like a careful tracking of the weekend's grosses, seems to be growing into a perverse substitute for the act of moviegoing itself. The sheer, overhanging mass of cultural offerings is now so forbidding that the essay — literally, the attempt, like the attempt that a climber makes on the north face of the Eiger — has, if anything, reasserted its claim to be the sanest and most proportionate response. I know that sanity is not the first quality that one associates with film critics — one thinks more readily of of our Styrofoam complexions and, as for our hairstyle, Fie, 'tis an unweeded garden — but the fact remains that a reviewer who does his or her job, and who steers you away from bad art, is sane enough to save you eight bucks.
Watching the important movies of the past year has been a depressing experience. From those I've seen in the last three days alone, the characters have included an alcoholic country singer, a suicidal professor grieving for his dead lover, a homeless high-schooler, and a teenage girl twice impregnated by her rapist father. Pretty soon Fandango will start selling Xanax along with your tickets.
My only general observation of this year's class is that no fewer than six of the best movies---A Serious Man, Crazy Heart, Up in the Air, A Single Man, Up, and Anvil---are about aging and decline, or have it as one of their main themes.
Anyway, let's get started. This is how I would rank the nominees for Best Picture, with embedded links to each flick's Rotten Tomatoes page:
1. A Serious Man is my favorite movie of the year, on or off this list. I'm also well aware that opinions about it are highly polarized, with many people wondering just what the hell was the point. But I'm sticking with it, and you can click here to read my longer comments about it earlier this week.
2. Up was sad and sweet, and the opening montage about an aging couple's marriage was as romantic as anything I've come across lately. Another win for Pixar.
3. The Hurt Locker is a war movie that doesn't get preachy. It simply lets us watch Jeremy Renner's character do his job as his disturbed nature reveals itself to us. Of the five nominees, Katheryn Bigelow would be my choice for Best Director.
4. Precious had two of the best acting performances of the year, and Mo'Nique would be my pick for Supporting Actress. Best Actress is a tougher call, but Gabourney Sidibe is a justifiable choice.
5. District 9 is an efficiently executed movie with powerful sociological lessons. These lessons are obvious enough (maybe too obvious) that I don't need to say more about them here, so I'll just add that Neill Blomkamp deserved a nod for Best Director, certainly ahead of Jason Reitman (of Up in the Air).
6. Inglorious Basterds was fun, but to be honest I haven't been able to shake these thoughts from Tyler Cowen, who might be reading too much into it but also might be right. I also agree with The Horror Chick that Eli Roth is out of place in front of the camera.
7. An Education was on its way to being the best film of the year for the first 30-40 minutes, then stepped badly wrong in the crucial scene where Jenny confronts David about his thieving. He gives a feeble and poorly worded speech that (we are meant to believe) instantly sways this brilliant and spunky young girl to stay with him. Bullshit. There were other problems that I won't get into now, and the ending was also royally botched. That said, Carey Mulligan is magnificent in this movie and would be a solid Best Actress. Click here to read about the true story of Lynn Barber, on whom Jenny is based.
! We pause to announce a sharp break in quality between the above seven movies and the following three. Thank you.
8. Up in the Air is the most overrated movie of the year. Here are two general rules to follow when making a movie about the dangers of thinking that relationships hold people back: 1) Don't cast the glamorous George Clooney as your supposedly hapless itinerant, and 2) don't have the non-Clooney meet the curvaceous Vera Farmiga in a dark airport bar, like something out of a wet dream, and then proceed to have sporadic sex romps with her while flying first class around the country. Also, I pretty much agreed with the entire "What's in your backpack?" speech, and I'm fairly certain the movie intended to convince me of the opposite. It failed.
9. Avatar was a once in a lifetime experience, and I mean that literally: there is no need to ever see this movie again. The story sucked, but yes: all props to James Cameron for again breaking through the previous limits of what special effects can accomplish. It should sweep the visual categories, though nobody gives a shit about those.
546. The Blind Side doesn't belong anywhere near a Best Picture list, so I'm just pretending it wasn't on this one. Sure, I understand why parts of it were affecting, but mostly it was a predictable bore. And my friend Salil just reminded me that the movie included this exchange: "You've changed that boy's life." "No, he's changed mine." Get the fuck outtahere.
MOVIES NOMINATED IN OTHER CATEGORIES
A Single Man is the only movie discussed here that I knew nothing about when I walked into the theater, and I loved it. Colin Firth, in a difficult and complicated role, hits just the right notes as a suicidal man with an intelligent and likable, even magnetic, personality. His students recognize his willingness to test the boundaries of what is acceptable to say in class, and they sense that he has daring and perceptive ideas to offer in a fearful time. Three different people in the movie find themselves drawn to him; they appreciate his wisdom and also see the pain he is trying to hide. The movie also makes fantastic use of atmospheric music.
Crazy Heart is pretty good despite some really jarring elements. To begin with, the Jeff Bridges character looks exactly like Jeffrey Lebowski in a cowboy hat. And where do we see him in the movie's first scene? That's right, in a bowling alley, and within the first ten minutes he's having a conversation about "leads" of some sort or another. Then we're supposed to believe that Colin Farrell is a country singer; Farrell is about as country as his morning bowl of Lucky Charms. And at one point Robert Duvall shows up for ten minutes of screen time as a friendly neighborhood bartender whose entire role could have been cut without any loss to the movie. I mean, Robert Duvall---Tom Hagan, The Great Santini, Bill Fucking Kilgore! Was he so nostalgic for his turn as a hillbilly in Days of Thunder that he would take this shitty bit role? Despite these distractions, I actually did enjoy it, and that probably owes everything to the truly fine performances of Jeff Bridges, who is a decent choice for Best Actor, and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
THE SNUBS (MOVIES THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOMINATED FOR SOMETHING, BUT WERE NOT)
Anvil! the story of Anvil is a documentary I loved. It's about many things: disappointment, marriage, friendship, failure, and even leadership. But maybe the most interesting theme in the movie is about the power of self-delusion. We know it's unlikely that the band will ever make it big. But without the irrational hopes of the lead singer, Lips, they never would have done the European tour, or played the concert in Tokyo, or cut another album. They probably wouldn't even be playing music anymore. But is it necessarily a good thing that they still play? It's not obvious one way or the other. The band is constantly frustrated and angry, and we see the financial consequences of Anvil's persistence and the hardship on the band's families. It's sad to see that the obsessive drive responsible for the band's mild successes also prevents the band from enjoying them.
Broken Embraces was a movie that made me think a lot about movies, and also one of the few I plan to see again. To be fair, I haven't seen the other foreign-language nominations, which I've heard are great this year, but I simply can't believe this one didn't make the cut. Is there an Almodovar backlash going on? By the way, Broken Embraces is also this year's Annual Spanish Movie That Displays Penelope Cruz's Naked Bosom Just Because The Director Felt Like It. Previous editions include Abre los Ojos and La Nina de tus Ojos, and those are just the ones I'm aware of.
Me and Orson Welles is somewhere on my personal top ten list, and in a just world Christian McKay would be a serious contender for Best Actor. He portrays Welles as an artist so impressed with himself, so enthralled by his own talent, that he seemed to always be in character. Welles believed that if such a great man as he could be so fully subservient to his art, then he could rightly expect others to be fully subservient to him, or at least to his artistic vision.
RANDOM COMMENTS ON OTHER MOVIES
500 Days of Summer made me crazy for Zooey Deschanel, and reminded me of this line from Anthony Lane's review of Before Sunset:
Then, there is the matter of Julie Delpy, a stern reminder that the first duty of a film critic---the sole qualification, to be honest---is to fall regularly, and pointlessly, in love with the people onscreen.
I interpreted Deschanel in 500 Days as the opposite of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a concept you can read about here.
The Time Traveler's Wifeis a movie I'll never see, but my buddy Salil had this funny comment about it:
Let me get this straight. A guy travels back in time, shows up naked, and tells the 9-year-old version of his future wife that someday she'll marry him. How was her response anything other than, Sir, you seem nice, but I'm calling the cops??
Zombieland is the only zombie movie I'm aware of that could aptly be described as "cute". Improbably, it succeeds in communicating a message about what defines a family in a world where the traditional version makes little sense and it seems everybody has lost their fucking mind. Not bad.
Drag Me to Hell had tense, terrific horror scenes and uninspired everything-else scenes.
Jennifer's Body was roundly panned by the critics, but I liked it. No, I'm not saying that because I was hypnotized by the occasional semi-nudity of Megan Fox. It really was much better than people said, and I'd compare it favorably with Mean Girls as an exploration of high school friendship and status games. The biggest problem with Jennifer's Body is that it was supposed to be a horror movie, but isn't remotely scary.
The Invention of Lying had the year's most unexpectedly touching moment, when Ricky Gervais fights through tears to comfort his dying mother with lies about the afterlife. Some fascinating commentary on this movie, courtesy of Robin Hanson, is here.
I had planned on writing this for an upcoming post I'll have this weekend about the Oscar's, but it ran long and I'm giving it a space of its own. Warning: spoilers follow, and the review will only make sense to people who saw the movie.
***
A Serious Man has no discernible plot, beats down its protagonist with an endless series of unlucky events, and ends without answering any of the questions it raises or resolving any of the problems it presents.
That’s deliberate, because the movie is about the inadequacy of religious faith, both as a source of comfort and as a guide for how to act.Sometimes faith even makes things worse by adding to our bewilderment at precisely those moments when we need clarity and purpose.
In the movie's best scene, Larry asks the Second Rabbi to explain the meaning behind his suffering.The Rabbi is vague and unhelpful, and clearly has nothing to offer.Larry asks in frustration, "Why does Hashem make us field the questions if He doesn't provide us the answers?"
But of course, nobody is making him field anything: Larry, like a lot of us, asks these questions about meaning because he wants to understand the overt disorder in his life by finding the hidden order beneath it.
It’s no surprise that he finds none, for the Coen brothers are challenging the assumptions underlying the questions themselves. What makes you think there will be order on the other side of the chaos, solace after the tragedy, relief after the struggle, justice after the iniquity?Your faith tells you there will be, but it can’t back up the claim, much less serve as a compass to get you home when you're lost.
Like Larry’s quest for meaning, I searched in vain for a hopeful message beneath the relentless nihilism of the movie.But just because my search came up empty doesn’t mean it isn’t there somewhere.Thematic ambiguity is a Coen staple.
And just like every other Coen movie, this one explores simultaneity and chance events: the two car crashes, the phone ringing with bad news at the very moment he changes the exam grade, etc..I don't know what to read into it, but I thought I'd mention it.
Anyway, the movie is brilliantly done and punctuated by moments of hilarity, but it’s also tough to stomach.An unscientific survey of my friends reveals that opinions about A Serious Man are highly polarized.Some thought it was too much of a downer, or found it pointless.
Well, I loved it.I loved especially that the Coen brothers didn’t cheat, didn’t take the easy way out, didn’t conclude with a cute scene that resolves everything or that trivializes the unrelenting agony experienced by the characters.It’s the best movie I’ve seen in the past year.
***
Here is Ebert's favorable review, here is Denby's unfavorable review. Here is a review I really liked from Ryland Walker Knight, who writes that the movie is "the Book of Job by way of Kafka’s The Trial with a dash of Jefferson Airplane’s 'Somebody To Love' to lighten things up."
