There Will Be Blood (2007)

This one deserves its own heading. I was primed to love it and I did, but I was also surprised to find that it was less of a plot-heavy clash over land and oil rights (which the trailer had made it appear) and more of an elliptical character study of Daniel Plainview with emphasis on his personal and family life, in the persons of his son (Dillon Freasier) and half-brother (Kevin J. O'Connor, previously mostly known as the second banana in several Stephen Sommers movies). It's a terrific look at the American self-made millionaire, paranoid and scheming but capable and worthy of respect all the same - what I like to call a 'magnificent bastard' movie. The music by Jonny Greenwood (and assists from Arvo Part and Brahms) is terrific, the cinematography is excellent, and everyone else is saying it so I might as well, too: Daniel Day-Lewis is stunning as Daniel Plainview.

This movie also represents a step forward for Paul Thomas Anderson, too. I recently rewatched Boogie Nights, which I hadn't seen in several years and had always felt some lingering dissatisfaction with. Watching it this time I realized that even though the explicit subject of the movie is the porn industry in the late '70s-early '80s, the implicit subject of the movie is Anderson's own exuberance and joy at being able to make cinema, to play with what Welles called 'the best train set a boy could ever have'. And while I love movies like it, that reflect that Truffautian joy of creation, the problem is that it's a movie that's a little too exuberant for its own good. I love Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love for the same reasons, but they suffer from the same flaw in varying degrees.

In this movie, Anderson has found subject material from a pre-existing source that reflects his own personal thematic interests (the people and history of Southern California, father-son relationships) and also has forced him to hone his abilities like he never has before in the subject of a particular focussed vision, with less flash and frills and more steel underneath). It's a nice step forward and I hope this movie makes a lot of money so we don't have to wait five years for his next movie.

One question: how long did it take people to realize that Paul Dano was actually playing two characters? For me, it wasn't until the dinner scene when Eli jumps at his father. Yes, I know that's 2/3 into the movie. Oh well.
(9/10)

Holiday Review Roundup

I'll probably have more detailed write-ups of some of these but I wanted to end this posting drought with some quick mentions of the last several things I've seen.

Control is well-shot in anamorphic black and white (man, I wish more movies were shot in this format, it looks so good) and very well-acted, especially by Sam Riley as Ian Curtis, but apart from that I wasn't sure what the point of it all was. Perhaps I needed to know more about Joy Division going in and to already have an appreciation of their music and Curtis's talents, but I didn't, and the movie didn't really seem to be designed to educate an outsider like myself (a few years ago, Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People left me completely uninvolved too). Take away the music and it's a simple portrait of a young guy who can't cope with professional success and relationship problems and even though Riley does a good job, the story just sort of rambles on without momentum until the obligatory sad ending. Director Anton Corbijn joins the long list of music video directors who are apparently outmatched by the needs of a feature-length narrative. (6/10)

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story isn't a very good movie but it's sporadically funny and it serves the useful purpose of pointing out that, even though they have their virtues, Ray and Walk the Line and their ilk are all kind of full of crap, with their deterministic story arcs and selective amnesia. Unfortunately, Dewey Cox is a one-note character (John C. Reilly's amiable dumb guys are good in small doses, like in Boogie or Talladega Nights, but can't support a whole movie) and Jake Kasdan's directorial abilities are strained to the limit. (5/10)

I'm a Tim Burton fan and while I liked his version of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, I didn't love it. It feels rather impersonal, like Burton trying his best merely to be faithful to Sondheim rather than to make the material his own. The moments where there is a successful synthesis, like the "A Little Priest" or "By the Sea" numbers, shine in comparison to the ones that don't. Depp is fine but Helena Bonham Carter's voice is too weak for the material. Big fan of the throat-slashings and corpses landing on their heads, though. (8/10)

The first fifteen minutes of Juno are annoying as hell, the screenwriting equivalent of a Michael Bay movie - Diablo Cody is insecurely demanding that you be entertained by any means necessary, whether you like it or not, and so tosses in "shut your freakin' gob" and "homeskillet" and the hamburger phone. Thankfully after that point the movie settles down and becomes a fairly skillful crowd-pleasing comedy, which I liked for the most part. It's not particularly deep and it has some plot holes, but I think I liked it marginally better than Knocked Up, if for no other reason than because it actually had an inkling as to how the female mind works. (7/10)

More to come soon and Happy New Year's.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

One of the things I love about the modern American incarnation of Christmas is that you don't have to be Christian to enjoy it. It's sufficient to travel somewhere to visit with your family, to enjoy some homecooked meals together and give each other gifts. We could go out to a church if we felt like it (none of us wants to) or we could just stay inside with music playing.

This is why I think that, even though Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July are uniquely American holidays, that Christmas represents something purely American at the same time: the synthesis of disparate traditions into something that can be religious, or secular, spiritual or commercial, all at the same time, presided over by the secular patron saint of the season, Santa Claus, and his archangels Rudolph and Frosty. No other country in the world could have made such great non-religious Christmas movies as It's a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, or Bad Santa.

So in that spirit, whether you're just sitting around the house or going out to the Chinese restaurant that's open or hanging in church, here's my best to everyone and merry Christmas to all.

The Indiewire Critics Poll

This is one of my favorite year-end lists of the year, the compilation survey that used to appear in the Village Voice but nowadays is handled by Indiewire.com. This is the only critics' circle that matters, as far as I'm concerned: these are some of the smartest writers on film, bunched together with multiple ranked lists, comments, and it's all sponsored by The Bucket List (for your consideration) so they have a sense of humor, too. My favorite bits and pieces that I've noticed so far: crazy Armond White putting I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry and The Brave One on his top ten list; Jonathan Rosenbaum choosing Black Book (yay!) and In the Valley of Elah (he should have known better); Southland Tales making it to #3 on Jim Hoberman's list; and the perverse presence on the list of such titles as Norbit, Zoo, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters.

On Bloggers and Blogging

Warning: this post contains cathartic rants. I've spent a lot of time online for the last few years and as will happen, friction has resulted. I'm no saint - I'm terribly stubborn and have a perverse tendency to insist on contact with some of the worst people online. After a perfect storm this week of online clashes, it felt like a good time to have my own personal say about certain personalities. What's interesting to me are the different personas that people choose to display online, which may or may not be accurate depictions of themselves.

First up is David Poland of Moviecitynews.com. Ever since becoming independent several years ago on his own site, Poland has developed a specific online persona: the uncorruptible White Knight of the entertainment blogosphere. While he serves a useful purpose (certainly the world of journalism can use some self-policing), he has an unfortunate tendency to ride an incredibly high horse, which wouldn't be a big deal if he wasn't also an occasional hypocrite. Today's example: this post, which I would sum up as "I know a secret, but I'm too good to tell you what it is. Have I mentioned how high my ethical standards are lately?" Dude, when you know a secret that you aren't comfortable spreading around, the appropriate thing to do is to just keep your big fat mouth shut, not advertise your self-proclaimed virtue.

Next, Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere. Wells knows that in most respects he's kind of a slug, but he does cling to an aesthetic superiority complex, which combines with a certain low-grade fascism to produce a thuggish critical viewpoint. Wells has a number of irrational hatreds for various filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, which he shamelessly exploits for site traffic on posts like this one. Mostly, though, the strangest thing about Wells is the archaic, affected lingo he likes to use, things like "ayem", "boyo", "hubba-hubba" and so on. He's a living Damon Runyon character.

Poland and Wells both fancy themselves as crusaders for moral and artistic standards in a debased world; fair enough, most of us do. Fighting this crusade like a modern-day Travis Bickle is Daniel Zelter, who trolls Wells's site with a never-ending series of snide posts targeted at those he disagrees with on political and movie-related subjects. It's a rare post from him that isn't about something that he hates, be it Quentin Tarantino, Harvey Weinstein, the Republican Party, the Arclight, living in Los Angeles, or the people who pretend to be his friends (his words, not mine). Zelter is especially frustrating to deal with because of his total lack of any sense of humor or irony. I have to assume that he has some form of Asperger's Syndrome because that's the only way to make sense of his rigid facade of obsessiveness and his total disinterest in social engagement. He also reminds me of my younger brother, except that I knew that, ultimately, my brother was just screwing with me. Zelter, I think, honestly believes all of his crap.

You'd think Hollywood megaproducer Don Murphy would have better things to do than troll movie web sites, and sometimes he does, but sometimes he doesn't. Murphy posted for a long time under the nom de blog "Spam Dooley" and picked a lot of consequence-free fights with pretty much everyone. For reasons unknown to me earlier this year he decided to attack me viciously under his own name, which was curiously honest of him. I did tell him that he was a bad producer who had only made one movie that I thought wasn't essentially garbage (Natural Born Killers, where I suspect he had little control over the final shape of the film), and I'd tell him the same to his face. Murphy's online persona is of a coked-up rageaholic, but I have to assume this is a joke on his end - I find it difficult to believe that someone as full of bile as he appears to be could have any kind of sustainable career in Hollywood. I see Murphy as the human equivalent of a bighorn sheep, ramming head-on into other people in a weird kind of alpha-male struggle for respect.

Last but not least is Hunter Tremayne, who has thankfully vanished for the last several weeks after posing as 'Ian Sinclair', a character from a clearly-horrible play that he wrote. Tremayne's persona is that of an asshole for sport. He delights in bullying people for his own enjoyment, which made it uniquely ironic that he initially went after me for my enjoyment of the Hostel movies. He's probably the single worst person out of this little group, because he has never produced anything of value to anyone else in any of his online conversations. Daniel Zelter is obtuse and ignorant but to his credit he actually thinks of himself as a good, productive person. Tremayne has never had any goal beyond his own giddy enjoyment.

So: my little rant. And now, a shoutout to those online folk who actually are genuinely interested in talking about movies in a productive and ego-free manner: Noah Forrest, Craig Kennedy, Sasha Stone, Christian Divine, Kris Tapley, Luke Y. Thompson, Matt Zoller Seitz and his teammates, "Actionman", "Wrecktum", and more. Even Josh Massey and "Mgmax", whose real name I don't know, are to be commended for their intelligence, taste, and intellectual honesty even though they're Conservatives.

So to you folks: Happy Holidays and thanks for not being assholes and sorry that this post had to exist in the first place (but I feel better).

Sincerely, Jeff McMahon

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)

First of all, apologies for the lack of posts lately. I'm trying to cram a lot of work into this week before I go traveling for the holidays and I've hardly seen any new movies. It's annoying.

I enjoyed Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, it's a highly diverting film and well-acted all the way around. It's a good reminder that yes, Marisa Tomei actually deserved her Academy Award for My Cousin Vinny, that Philip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney are acting legends, and a good sign that Ethan Hawke might have finally outgrown the callowness of his youth and turned into a decent character actor. Add in some fun narrative twists and it's a good night at the movies.

The thing is, I can't really join in on the 'one of the best movies of the year' train that the movie's riding to some extent right now, because I found it good but not great.

(SPOILERS) It's your standard noir outline - losers who are brothers (Hoffman and Hawke) try to score a heist but in the process muck it up - with a domestic twist, that the jewelry store they target for a hold-up is owned by their own parents and in the process Mom gets a bullet in the belly and Dad, distraught, tries to figure out who's to blame, only to discover that the culprits are closer than he thinks. Great concept, okay execution. The basic problem is that the premise is crying out for Shakespeare-level dialogue and character development but ultimately we don't really ever find out that much about what Philip Seymour Hoffman's problems are or why he hates his father so much or how it happened that Tomei would be sleeping with Hawks, so that the drama winds up underdeveloped from the get-go. On top of that, while I don't agree with Armond White that Sidney Lumet is a terrible director, I do have to agree with him that the visuals of this movie are fairly undernourished - considering that we're working with such tragic subject matter, a little more chiaroscuro would have helped, I think.

I don't want to give the idea that I disliked the movie, because I did find it entertaining and well-made, but all in all I'd say that I prefer Lumet's last film, the Brechtian courtroom drama Find Me Guilty, as a richer and weirder cinematic journey.

Margot at the Wedding (2007)

Back in 2005, Stephen King named The Squid and the Whale his favorite movie of the year and in the process called Jeff Daniels' character "an ego-driven monster who demonizes and nearly breaks his children's hearts and minds." So now Noah Baumbach gives us Nicole Kidman as the bride of the monster in his funny, abrasive new movie.

Like all great screen monsters, the brilliant thing about Kidman's Margot is that she doesn't think she's a bad person; travelling to her estranged sister's wedding to a cuddly slacker, she does what she does out of a misguided combination of well-meaning affection, obliviousness, and well-educated condescension. It's an excellent performance and a good reminder of why Kidman is such a good actress after so many clunkers. Kidman has always been too much in her own head to be a Hollywood sweetheart, like Julia Roberts or Reese Witherspoon, but as her career proceeds she might still be a colder Vanessa Redgrave.

Watching Margot at the Wedding is like watching a slow-motion car wreck, with Margot at the wheel (a metaphor that gets literalized towards the end of the movie) Of course, everyone that Margot comes in contact with is teetering on the verge of neurotic collapse to begin with, needing only a brief comment or two to topple. Watching a group of flawed upper-middle-class people bicker and destroy each others' lives might sound like worse torture porn than the Saw movies, but it works because of the strong performances (especially Kidman, Leigh, and Zane Pais as Kidman's son), but more importantly because Baumbach infuses the demolition derby with the kind of wry humor that you can only get from having been in these situations, realizing how awful and absurd it all is to begin with, the knowledge that ties that bind one to their family can just as easily be anchor chains dragging a person down. There's bitter truth in this movie, leavened by the comedy of experience. I liked it a lot.

Southland Tales (2007)

First things first: this movie is a colossal mess, no doubt about it. Performances are uneven, storylines are muddled, and even while paying firm attention, it feels like you've nodded off and missed a reel's worth of exposition and character development. I think it's fair to say that Richard Kelly came down with a big case of beliving-his-own-hypeitis, which has afflicted such filmmakers as the Wachowskis and Shyamalan in recent years.

That said, I enjoyed this as a sort of time capsule for where we are in AD 2007 (or 2005, when the movie was shot) and as a better Philip K. Dick movie than, say, A Scanner Darkly, which I liked but which didn't really capture Dick's trippy, radically destabilized worldview as well as this movie. My vision of cinema is one in which narrative and normal Hollywood production values are less important than ideas and cinematic virtues. I'm fine with a sloppy, crazy movie as long as it delivers emotions and sustains interesting ideas in a visual sense. In other words, I'll take this movie over a sterile mediocrity like Beowulf any time.

So what the hell is going on here? It's basically an apocalyptic vision of American life in our times: paranoid, obsessed with celebrity, skeptical of authority, ravenous for something meaningful and authentic amidst our current postmodern hall of mirrors. Ironically for Conservatives who can't get beyond the Bush-bashing in this movie, it's a movie with a heartfelt Messianic yearning, with a magical tattoo of the weeping Christ that appears on Dwayne "Don't call me The Rock" Johnson's back at the climax, a character played by Sarah Michelle Gellar named "Krysta Now", and an ending that seems to leave the future of the world in a transfigured, apocalyptic state.

All of this is to say that, whenever you can, it's a must-see. It's a movie in which a lonely Homeland Security worker demands to give a blowjob at gunpoint to the movie star played by Johnson; in which a car commercial shows SVUs fucking like beasts; in which Justin Timberlake delivers the ultimate music video performance of The Killers' "All These Things That I've Done"; in which Amy Poehler is hilarious as always as a pretentious Marxist terrorist wannabe; in which Rebekah Del Rio sings the national anthem in a reference to Mulholland Drive; and in which Nora Dunn tells John Larroquette, "No one rocks the cock like Cyndi Pinziki" after tasering him. How can you not want to see this movie?

No Country for Old Men (2007)

As requested, here's an entry for the critics' darling that seems like the current front-runner for Best Picture. I've seen it once, a few weeks ago, and liked it quite a bit - it's just about perfect in terms of suspense, performances, cinematography, the dialogue is sharp without being too self-conscious as the Coens have done from time to time, etc.

I don't know what I really think about the ending - I need to see it a second time to make sure. Thematically it certainly makes sense that the movie is bookended by Tommy Lee Jones talking about how he perceives law and order in his corner of the world and how people have changed over time. That said, the abruptness of the climax (or anticlimax if you prefer) is indeed a speed bump, a major seam that may work better in theory and in intellectual terms than in emotional, movie-watching terms. I guess what I'm saying is that it's one thing for the ending to 'make sense' but in addition it's best if the ending also feels proportional and organic to what has come before, integrated seamlessly in Aristotelian terms to the movie as a whole. A truly great film shouldn't need elaborate intellectual justifications to make sense, and I need to verify if No Country for Old Men is a truly great movie or only a very good one.

The other thing I want to talk about is one of my favorite sections of the movie, and one which also serves as the movie in a microcosm - the scene in which Josh Brolin outruns and outswims the dog. I like this a lot because it's suspenseful and it's funny at the same time - a lesser movie would have had the chasing dog be some kind of hellhound, an evil doberman or something that we're meant to be afraid of. The Coens, instead, chose a pit bull, and a pretty friendly-looking one at that - it's a good dog that just happens to have the job of chasing down those people its master deems in need of chasing. The incongruity and the dog's single-minded pursuit gives the chase an extra dimension, and the dog is just doing what it's supposed to do the same way that Anton Chigurh or Llewelyn Moss find themselves programmed into a collision course after their initial actions.

The Canterbury Tales (1972)

I haven't actually watched this Pasolini movie but I really want to after seeing this clip from its conclusion - it's insane! I'm pretty sure Pasolini himself appears at the very end as the guy closing the book. (Not safe for work.)

UPDATE 7:25 pm: Well, it was nice while it lasted but Youtube took the clip down, not surprising since it involved a demon literally pooping out bishops and friars in close-up.


Courtesy of New York Magazine's Vulture blog about "The Ten Most Anti-Christian Movies of All Time", for this year's War on Christmas I guess.

Saw IV (2007)

This is very much after-the-fact, but the lateness of this review reflects that I simply had no desire to see this movie and only did so because I could as part of, shall we say, a 2-for-1 situation (a review of Southland Tales will be up soon). Nonetheless, I saw this out of a sense of duty to have an informed opinion about the most lucrative horror franchise right now, and also to have an excuse to rant about how much I hate these movies.

The original Saw was okay, a decent locked-room dramatic situation for the most part. It was mildly enjoyable except for some obnoxiously trendy music video-style editing and Cary Elwes' terrible performance. But when the baton was passed to first-time director Darren Bousman with Saw II, everything went downhill fast. The first movie had established the character of Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), an engineering genius and victim of terminal cancer on a mission to teach the world something about the value of life. Fine and good as a gimmick in the first movie, but Bousman's direction was to foreground Jigsaw and make him the center of his movies as a sort of world-weary antihero. Interesting concept, but Bousman lacked the imagination, moral compass, and directorial chops to pull it off.

Jigsaw is obviously an extension of both Hannibal Lecter from Silence of the Lambs (the serial killer-as-guru, smarter than everyone else and with no qualms about playing by his own rules) and John Smith in Seven (on a mission to punish those he deems in need of moral rectitude via gruesome torture). Jonathan Rosenbaum has written about how much he hates the serial-killer-as-moral-authority trend specifically as it appears in both Silence of the Lambs and No Country for Old Men; I don't think he's right about either of those movies but I think his argument applies well to Bousman's Jigsaw. The point of Seven was to watch how Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman are changed via their confrontation with a sociopath; it's a film about characters under stress with the 'seven deadly sins' gimmick merely the macguffin for the rest of the plot. The point of Saw II-IV, on the other hand, is to watch characters jump through Jigsaw's hoops, only to discover at the end that nobody is capable of living up to his 'moral standards'. Where Fincher and the Coens are interesting in asking questions about morality and our place in the world, Bousman has the balls to speak, via Jigsaw, as a patronizing and childish moral authority. The characters and their moral issues have become the macguffins, and the sullen, insistent gore has become the point.

Now, gore for gore's sake isn't necessarily a deal-breaker as far as I'm concerned - it's one of the primary reasons to watch a movie like Dead Alive or Dawn of the Dead. The problem with Bousman's filmmaking is twofold: his insistence on making his movies so humorless, so utterly intent on 'scaring' his audience in a drab, grim manner that I can only call pretentious and hollow; and his utter incompetence at filmmaking. All three of his Saw movies feature terrible acting and annoying cinematography and editing. Craft matters, and it's bizarre that Bousman apparently considers himself to be a horror movie fan, because you wouldn't know it from looking at his work - his movies appear to be made by an aging hack intent on trying to appeal to a youth audience through camera and editing gimmicks.

So that's the deal with the franchise in general; Saw IV in particular stands as the worst of the series so far, thanks to a bizarre insistence on trying to cram in plotlines and characters from all four movies and a bewildering narrative that I couldn't make heads or tails of by the end - I suppose patient attention and multiple viewings of the previous movies would clear some of this up, but I just didn't care why Angus Macfadyen from Saw III was suddenly reappearing or how the multiple flashbacks pieced together.

So what makes the difference between Bousman's movies and Eli Roth's movies, which I'm a fan of? The basic answer would have to be mastery of tone and, believe it or not, restraint. Bousman's movies are thudding, obvious, and deadly serious, while Roth knows how to shoft moods from terror to comedy to absurdity. The most chilling moment in Hostel Part II is a scene involving the kids in the woods and how they turn on each other ; it's simple, quiet, Hitchcockian, and has no counterpart in the Saw sequels. You can tell just by watching Bousman's movies that he doesn't know what he's doing, and more importantly, he doesn't really care.

The Worst of the Worst

There was a discussion over at Hollywood Elsewhere from Jeff Wells (who has admitted previously that when he watches a bad movie he falls into a regressive fugue state, moaning and curling into a fetal ball to the discomfort of those seated around him) on the subject of really bad movies, and it led me to think about really bad movies. We're all familiar with 'so bad they're good' movies, the films of Chuck Norris in the '80s or Ed Wood in the '50s where the absurdities are so intense as make the experience fun and enjoyable, just not necessarily as the filmmakers intended.

On the other hand are movies so bad they're bad - movies that are so badly made that there's no response from the audience but bored dejection, depression, and annoyance, movies worse than even the worst studio-produced piece of garbage, which at least can be guaranteed to be semi-competent. I've encountered many of these while seeking out the next Gymkata or Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, so maybe it's time to share.

The worst movie I've seen this year was Severe Visibility, a dire political film in the mold of JFK from director-actor Paul Cross, who I knew from an '80s figure skating movie called Ice Pawn. Obviously troubled by 9/11 conspiracy theories and 'documentaries' like Loose Change (I'm not a fan), Mr. Cross directed a talky, disheartening thriller about an Army officer who was in the Pentagon on 9/11 who begins to suspect there's more to the official story. Imagine your favorite disjointed internet conspiracy blog, then stick bad actors into it and sit there quietly for 90 minutes.

I'm a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but there were some movies even they couldn't salvage. The nadir of those was probably Red Zone Cuba, a ramshackle mid-'60s anti-Castro adventure movie from the mind of Coleman Francis, who mysteriously was able to make three cheap movies. Of course 'adventure' is misleading because nothing really happens in this movie - we're given a bunch of blurry images of men wandering through California scrubland standing in for Cuba, there's a brief glimpse of someone who may or may not be an actor playing Castro, and I think someone gets shot. I've watched this one three times and I really couldn't tell you what happens in it. To its credit, it does feature John Carradine singing the title song.

The worst of the worst, for me these days, is something called Psyched by the 4-D Witch, from the early '70s, when you could book a movie into theaters as long as you had a semblance of a story and some naked boobs. Barely even categorizable as a movie, Psyched features a voiceover telling the story of a young woman's sexual awakening thanks to the intervention of the ghost of an ancestor, the titular witch. This accompanies a string of random images of young women and trippy LSD colors and probably some stock footage and leader and whatever would get the film long enough to be called a 'feature'. It's pretty much the least watchable movie I've ever seen. When you're the bottom half of a double feature with Monster A-Go Go, you're in bad shape.

Anybody else?