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This past decade (and this past year in particular) have been rather dismal for motion pictures, but every year has its gems and they are worth noting. So I present the ten best films of the year followed by those of the decade. If there are any complaints we can schedule an appointment and discuss these picks in fifty years and see who is right.

Note: Number ten under decade refers to Werner Herzog’s 2001 film, not the Mark Whalberg football movie.

Best films of the year:

1. 1. Antichrist
2. 2. A Serious Man
3. 3. Ponyo
4. 4. Two Lovers
5. 5. Up in the Air
6. 6. Sugar
7. 7. Tulpan
8. 8. Still Walking
9. 9. My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done
10. 10. Fantastic Mr. Fox

Best Films of the Decade:

1. 1. Synecdoche, New York
2. 2. There Will Be Blood
3. 3. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
4. 4. Finding Nemo
5. 5. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
6. 6. City of God
7. 7. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
8. 8. The New World
9. 9. Antichrist
10. 10. Invincible

-Jason Bardin

In Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, the flighty American girl Patricia reads William Faulkner’s anti-nihilist statement from The Wild Palms that, “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” Michel, the happy-go-lucky gangster, responds, “I will take nothing–grief is a compromise.” Lars von Trier’s latest controversial drama, Antichrist, is like a response to Michel, as if to say: grief is hardly a compromise and nothing is not even an option. In von Trier’s film grief is the subject at hand, along with pain and despair, collectively referred to as the three beggars. Von Trier has crafted a reinterpretation of the beginning of Genesis. He continues where Ingmar Bergman left off in dealing with humankind’s relations with both God and the opposite sex. While Bergman dealt with the silence of God in films like Winter Light and The Silence, von Trier suggests that in our moments of greatest pain and agony not only is God silent, but Satan is very present and joyfully active.

In the film, this theme of suffering is expressed through the only two characters: a man (Willem Defoe) and his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg); they are nameless in the film, but appropriately referred to as He and She in the credits. In the beginning, they are having sex, which brings about their son, as this act often does. They are still fornicating passionately well after he is born. They do this in super slow motion, black and white, where the cascading droplets in the shower are indistinguishable from the falling snow outside. While the lovers swoon, their son Nic, a toddler, falls out of the window, crashing, along with his teddy bear, to an immediate death. The parents will grieve, the mother in particular, who has a mental collapse at the funeral, blaming herself for her son’s death. But perhaps it wasn’t her fault. Nic sees his parents in coitus; the same two people, performing the same action that led to his own birth and life, and perhaps actively decides to leave this world. He climbs a table, knocking down statues of the three beggars as if to pronounce his escape from a world run by cruelty and misery where even an act of creation seems unnecessarily violent, and triumphantly takes his life, escaping the pain of misfortune that will soon overcome his lusty parents.

He is a therapist and at odds with his wife’s medical doctor’s insistence on pills to cure her depression. Instead he asks her to reveal what she fears the most, and she says the forest where they have a cottage. In his least wise decision, he forces her to return to the cottage. The forest is named Eden and it is here where Satan rules, where the trees produce not fruit but hailing acorns. Von Trier begins to distort reality almost immediately upon their arrival. Standard, well-balanced, medium shots are intercut with distant, shaky, hand held shots as if to suggest they are being watched. The frame distorts from time to time, suggesting a hallucinatory state; depression has taken over and paranoia has been firmly established. In the biblical Eden, God gives to man and woman dominance over the animals and plants. In von Trier’s Eden those animals and plants retaliate against their lords. The ground burns her feet and she fears the tall grass and a stream. While he is trying to sooth her at the hospital, the camera looms slowly over a plant in a water vase, which seems to encapsulate a world of terror and madness, foreshadowing everything to come. He has surreal interactions with animals; they seem to be both in cahoots and at war with each other. In one shot an army of militant ants devour a dead bird, yet in another it is revealed that a talking fox, a deer carrying a half delivered still born, and a violent raven all seem to be working together against the man, standing by each other staring menacingly at him. This talking fox says precisely two words: “Chaos reigns.” It’s not unusual in parabolic fiction for a fox to talk. Foxes appear throughout Aesop’s Fables and later in Medieval literature, most notable in the tales of Reynard the fox, who makes his most famous appearance as a character in Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” Friedrich Nietzsche, in Twilight of the Idols, refers Reynard as a dialectician, in his discussion on Socrates. It is therefore appropriate that a fox should pronounce the mantra of life’s pain.

Most critics have casually dismissed Antichrist. They call the talking fox ridiculous and the sexual violence of the movie unpleasant and unnecessary. It seems that once a year the major critics band together to take down one challenging, prestigious film. This mode of action seems to be a way of proving to the general public that they have a common bond, that they too don’t like artsy films like Antichrist, which are about the meaning of life, and instead sell the public on easily digestible, but vapid and manipulating films like Slumdog Millionaire or this year’s Precious. Last year they cruelly took down Charlie Kaufman’s magnum opus Synecdoche, New York. This year they have their targets set on von Trier. A.O. Scott writes in the New York Times, “The scandal of ‘Antichrist’ is not that it is grisly or upsetting but that it is so ponderous, so conceptually thin and so dull.” Dull? Appreciate the film or despise it, it is anything but dull. Here we have a film that deals with the problem of biblical interpretations of woman, violent sexual mutilation, wild passionate sex, all of which are playing off themes concerning life in depression, in grief, in a state of nothing, where life has no meaning. Scott is using a common ploy. By calling a film that one does not like as thin and dull is an attempt to strip it of its power. This can often be embarrassing. In his review for the release of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote, “This one is so thoroughly mystifying that we wonder whether Mr. Bergman himself knew what he was trying to say.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov that, “If God does not exist everything would be possible,” which is proven by the mass circulation of A.O. Scott’s premature review. However, von Trier objects to Dostoevsky’s theory and instead marks that in the absence of God there is depression, desperation, and insanity, and without a guiding force outside that of the knowledge of men, of a therapist’s Freudian logic, there is not nothing; we are left to grieve.

-Jason Bardin

I’m not sure what happens in A Serious Man. This is not to say that the film fails as a logical, progressive narrative. After all this is a film by the Coen brothers, who, editing their own films under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes, provide scenes of sharp, crisp clarity, with journalistic precision. Since they also write their scripts and have just about the most creative minds in Los Angeles, every one of their scenes are both fascinatingly unique on their own merit and essential to the larger narrative as a whole. The reason why I’m not sure what happens is because I’m not supposed to.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish physics professor, awaiting tenure at a Midwestern college in the late nineteen sixties, is having a bit of an existential crisis. His job is threatened and his wife (Sari Lennik) is asking for a divorce to marry their obnoxiously tender friend, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed). Larry teaches Schrodinger’s paradox of the cat, which must be assumed to be both dead and alive. He teaches with zeal, a feeling unreciprocated by his students. He confesses to a failing South Korean student that he does not understand the paradox, but uses it like a fable to emphasize the concepts and theories. The prologue of the film is a Yiddish fable of a self-proclaimed rational man who invites an old man home for dinner. His skeptical wife claims that the old man is a dybbbuk, the Jewish equivalent of a zombie. Both fables, in science and folklore, allude to the idea of false perception. Larry’s fault is that he has no perception. Behind his thick glasses he can only observe the world in terms of facts like the mathematics he teaches, which attempts to explain the world in a logical manner. He stands on his roof to fix the antennae, and triumphantly surveys his neighborhood. His gaze is equally confused when he sees his redneck neighbors, father and son, playing catch, as when he sees his other neighbor, considerably more attractive, sunbathing nude. Not only are there fables, but dream sequences, and characters under the influence of narcotics. The Coen brothers are playing with the concept of reality to the point that we can hardly distinguish what is real and make believe. This makes the film akin to the bible, which proclaims to be fact, but mixes unfathomable fairy tale elements. The Midwest certainly is not Eden, but its not Sodom either.

 A Serious Man is a comedy of sorts. We laugh if only not to cry. Larry is an innocent man, trapped in a world he doesn’t understand, tormented by forces out of his control. He seeks spiritual advice from three rabbis, one more useless than the last. In fact, the only person who seems reasonable and honest is Larry’s divorce attorney. The score by Carter Burwell is of a deep and melancholic sadness, placing strong emphasis on the hopelessness of human existence. Yes, the film is a comedy, but that’s not a limitation. We never laugh at Larry, but only his surrounding world. When Larry’s brother cries out at night, wondering why God has given him nothing, there is not a hint of irony. When the film ends we leave battered and bruised. The film lingers as a tragedy, not a comedy. We recognize Larry Gopnik as ourselves, a useless, little cog in a world that doesn’t need us or want us. Amen.

-Jason Bardin

To adapt a work of classical literature is just about the most unnecessary burden to which writers and directors force themselves to succumb. One can only wonder what John Huston was thinking when he tackled Moby-Dick. In his decision to simply ignore the encyclopedic chapters concerning the anatomy of the whale, he focused solely on the bare structure of the novel, which obscured Melville’s themes and vision. It became a story about a bunch of lunatics on a boat. Poets, in general, have been absolved from this bastardization. Every once in a while Homer receives a disservice or a director throws a poem up on the screen as an epitaph, but overall the works of the great poets are safe from the murky waters of film adaptation. So when Jane Campion became attracted to doomed Romantic poet John Keats, her only choice was to tell the story of his life. Unfortunately, Bright Star is not about Keats (Ben Whishaw), but instead focus on his love interest, Fanny Brawne.

Brawne (Abby Cornish) is an early nineteenth century socialite. She dances with all the men and makes her own clothes, which are of a colorful, if not flattering, austerity. In talking about Brawne, the word ‘bright’ can only be used to refer to luminosity, not intelligence. She can’t even properly lie about her literary pursuits. When talking to Keats’s boorish friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), Brawne claims to have read all of The Canterbury Tales, The Odyssey, and Paradise Lost over the previous week. Falling in love with a Romantic poet is perhaps her most ill conceived notion of all. The lifespan of the Romantic poet was considerably short and they are not the most desired lovers. On one end of the spectrum you have Lord Byron, whose principle character, Don Juan, parallels his own lecherous sexual conquests. On the other end is John Keats, who is alluded to as a possible virgin. Keats confides to Brawne that women, including his mother, confuse him. By the time of his death at twenty-five, despite being engaged to Brawne, their relationship never progresses past a kiss. But what a kiss! The first kiss between Brawne and Keats is a moment of high erotic tension and power. They’re lying on the grass, Brawne is elevated above Keats, and their lips just connect. While not quite matching the moment in Campion’s The Piano when Harvey Kietel fingers a hole in Holly Hunter’s stocking, this bit of eroticism in Bright Star is still enough to shame most other films in their gratuitous, un-erotic use of nudity, which desensitizes our perception and appreciation for true pleasure and beauty.

The film succeeds the most during the limited portion of when the two are happily in love. Campion provides her boldest images in this sequence. Keats lying on top of a tree bathing in sunlight; a room full of butterflies that creates a poetic sense of elation. However, most of the film deals with Brawne in despair and Keats dying. Individual moments of story evaporate and the second half of the film becomes an exercise in tone, creating an indistinguishable narrative of utter despondency. The film, which promises to be an authentic recreation of love, becomes one of dread and loss, which is fine, and in doing so more or less succeeds, but it sacrifices narrative. Nothing notable happens in the second half of the film outside of some minor character development of Charles Brown. Keats is absent from the second half too, so we’re stuck with Cornish, who’s emotional range is limited to sad eyes and hysterics. Cornish needs Whishaw’s Keats to stabilize the film. Whishaw plays Keats not as any person or individual, but as the human embodiment of Keats’s poetry. He longingly looks into the sky, fails to express himself in simple emotions, and has the countenance of a dying puppy. In one scene, Keats, because of his lack of funds and resources, explains to Brawne that they cannot marry. Cornish’s crying reaches levels of histrionics, but the scene works because of the amount of thought behind Whishaw’s heartbroken eyes. Later, after Keats dies off-screen and Brawne is informed of her lover’s demise, she screams, and King Kong is nowhere to be found.

-Jason Bardin

With The Cove, the liberal agenda documentary has officially become a subgenre. It can often be overbearing to watch film after film that documents what’s wrong with the world, while telling me that I need to help fix it. Al Gore said I need to save the planet and Food, Inc. advised me to be more cautious in the supermarket. Meanwhile, Michael Moore keeps yelling in my face. Louie Psihoyos, the director and star of The Cove, separates the world into two kinds of people: activists and inactivists. That’s a rather strong and controversial distinction, but Psihoyos has earned the right to be obstinate. His film documents how he organized a group of specialists to film the mass slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, which is an annual occurrence.

The film’s main protgonist is Ric O’Barry. When we first meet him he appears a little paranoid: a man not to be trusted. He’s wearing a doctor’s mask on his face so as not to be detected by the local authorities in Taiji. From this initial impression, I developed an immediate cynical response to O’Barry as just another crazy left-wing lunatic. Later, when Taiji’s chief of police is tailing O’Barry’s van, my cynicism dissipated. As the film progresses, and we learn who O’Barry is and what he stands for, it becomes evident that O’Barry is brave for even being near Taiji and that his paranoia is justified, and perhaps too mild for his own safety. The trouble is that we don’t get enough of O’Barry. Here is a truly fascinating man. He trained the dolphins for the original Flipper, including his favorite, Cathy. However, he came to realize that it is cruel to harvest dolphins for entertainment, by manipulating them as slaves. He feels deep regret for having taken part in popularizing this form of punishment. He also keeps mentioning, in some sort of disgusting, ironic glee, that if he weren’t an activist out to save Dolphins, he could easily be making millions of dollars by capturing them.

What Psihoyos does get from O’Barry is a direct challenge to Aristotle. O’Barry insists that Cathy willingly committed suicide. He claims that dolphins are cursed with the appearance of always smiling so that we cannot detect their inner pain. The film makes a case that dolphins are potentially smarter than humans. They actively engage in fun and entertainment, understand sign language, and communicate with each other. This depiction of dolphins as being self-aware provides a significant level of empathy that contributes to the overall impact of the entire film.

Unfortunately, Psihoyos is not interested in a deep exploration of O’Barry’s inner psyche and life philosophy. He merely skims the surface of a complex human life. I believe that an opportunity has been missed. In the hands of a great documentarian like Errol Morris, O’Barry would become a film subject to rival the likes of Robert Crumb and Robert S. McNamara, providing a deep meditation on the human experience. Instead Psihoyos makes the same error as This Film Is Not Yet Rated. He centers the film on how their information was obtained. Just as This Film Is Not Yet Rated became more of a private detective procedural than an examination of the MPAA, The Cove settles for being a nighttime, espionage thriller. It’s a well done thriller, but it dilutes the purpose and distracts from important, and frankly more interesting, issues involving mercury content and Japan’s bribing of third world countries. To compliment the tone of a thriller, Psiyohos provides a standard, manipulative score, which both hypes the moments of suspense, and attempts to create tears out of the quiet, gentle passages. Ideally, the film doesn’t need a score at all. The images speak for themselves and what we lose are the sounds of nature. Using the theme song to Flipper proves to be an exquisite musical choice, as the more we hear it, the more grotesque and soulless that little melody becomes. But then Psihoyos uses “Smile” in a similar way. It’s not appropriate to potentially link Chaplin’s life affirming tune with the image of slaughtered dolphins. On the other hand, the use of David Bowie’s “Heroes” serves as the perfect note to end the film.

What makes The Cove special, transcending past the likes of An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 451 is the image of the slaughter. It’s a shocking, despairing scene: the fulfillment of God’s first plague on Egypt. A bold and striking depiction of the carnality of man. An almost unbearable spectacle, only made palatable by Ric O’Barry’s following coup, which represents hope, triumph and personal reassurance in the civility of the human race.

-Jason Bardin

Many films end with two very definitive words: The End. At least they once did. “The End” is no longer in vogue and a good thing too. Such dramatic closure is often unfit for most movies, and corrupts our notion of the characters’ lives continuing and developing well past the closing credits. Even Casablanca finishes with those two closing words; I was under the impression that it was supposed to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Ponyo, the new film by the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, does not contain the word “end.” Instead, at the start of the film, Miyazaki gives us the caption: The Beginning. At first I thought this was a subtle joke by Miyazaki, considering that this is the man who has announced his retirement after his last three films, but soon realized that the film is about new beginnings, and the experience of watching it is akin to a rebirth. Miyazaki has crafted a piece of art that is so pure and innocent that while I was watching Ponyo every malevolent thought and action in my life was evaporated and all that remained was the pure optimism and hope of a beginning.

The eponymous character is a humanoid fish, I suppose. One of the wonderful delights in the mythology that Miyazaki has created in this film is that hardly anything is explained. Ponyo’s father, Fujimoto (the voice of Liam Neeson), used to be human but now lives in the sea, guarding and using the magical elixirs that balance the forces of nature. Ponyo’s mother, Gran Mamare (Cate Blanchett), is a beautiful, mystical giantess who glides through the waters. Ponyo (Noah Cyrus) appears to be their eldest daughter and after her there are hundreds of tinier humanoid fish, who look like Ponyo, except with underdeveloped faces. That’s about all of the explanation we get concerning the undersea world. The images are so vibrant and the tone is so lilting that tidy explanations seem perfunctory. After all, background mythology really only obscures the material and condescends. Take Tolkien’s The Silmarillion or all of the excess material revolving around the Star Wars franchise, including the prequels. Those works are supposed to enhance one’s appreciation of the main work, being the original Star Wars films or The Lord of the Rings, but instead lessens one’s appreciation for those works because the universe in which the characters resides becomes more important and complicated than the characters’ emotional and psychical journeys, which appear more simple as their surrounding universe expands. Detailed descriptions of undersea mysticism are less important to Miyazaki than the deeply emotional and subtly profound relationship between Ponyo and Sosuke.

Sosuke (Frankie Jonas) is a five-year old human boy who lives with his mother in a house on a hill. He finds Ponyo, as a goldfish, trapped in a jar. He immediately has a connection with this strange looking fish, and vows to care for her. He protects her and feeds her ham, which begins an insatiable addiction to pork, and truly loves her. Ponyo, as a goldfish, provides instant karma both to a vain little girl and a cynical old woman. She squirts water in both of their faces, causing physical and psychological damage, respectively.  Those two incidents map out the course of a human life. The obnoxiously intrusive little girl who bothers Sosuke at school will one day become, more or less, like the cynical old woman, Toki (Lily Tomlin), who lives at the geriatric home where Sosuke’s mother, Lisa (Tiny Fey), works.

Lisa is an incredible woman. She’s smart, attractive and attentive. In most films about young children the parents are often portrayed as cynical and stupid because they are not as naïve or innocent as their child, including Miyazaki’s own Spirited Away, where the oblivious, gluttonous parents are literally transformed into pigs. Lisa is fearless and open-minded. Bravely, she drives her car through a tsunami-like storm, and when she discovers that Ponyo the goldfish has transformed into a human girl she bypasses the standard routine of denial and immediately explains to Ponyo and Sosuke that, “life is mysterious and amazing.” Fujimoto is the antithesis of Lisa. Ponyo alludes to her father as an evil wizard who hates humans. Fujimoto is not shy about his hatred toward humans, referring to them as “empty, black souls.” He also curses the humans for their lack of environmental consideration (the relationship between mankind and nature is not the main theme of this film as it was in Princess Mononoke, but is prevalent in subtle ways as it was in My Neighbor Totoro). As far as being an evil wizard, Fujimoto is possibly the most inept magician since Mickey donned the sorcerer’s hat in Fantasia. He’s easily insulted and distracted as when Lisa accuses him of using weed killer, and he begins to defend himself instead of rescuing Ponyo. His own daughters routinely thwart his plans to take Ponyo back from Sosuke. Underwater he needs the protection of an air bubble, but on land he has to spray himself with water. The door protecting his elixirs that maintains the balance of nature is broken, and he keeps forgetting to fix it. He can barely get the attention of a group of elderly woman, but then again, his colorful pinstriped suits don’t exactly make a threatening statement. He even wants a return to the Cambrian age. What a human would do during the Cambrian age is beyond my knowledge. His wife is a bit more sensible, relishing the unbalanced state of nature as a return to the Devonian age, the age of fish. Fujimoto an evil wizard? He’s more like a classically trained vaudevillian.

The most beautiful, lyrical, and humorous passages of Ponyo occur when Ponyo is discovering the human world, and when Ponyo and Sosuke travel to look for Sosuke’s mother. Sosuke maintains his bond to protect Ponyo even when his own life appears to be falling apart. He is a wise, perceptible and mature child, which is dutifully acknowledged by his mother. The love between Sosuke and Ponyo is pure and innocent. The first words we hear Ponyo say are “Ponyo loves Sosuke!”

There is a visual grandeur that appropriately matches the emotional landscape of the characters. In his last three films, Miyazaki used the assistance of computers, which was appropriate in creating a sharper-edged look and sense of speed for those more action oriented films. Miyazaki has abandoned all technology and it suits the film fine. There is a rustic, genuine quality to the film. The pastel colors of the film, which are truly magnificent, are able to blend into one another. There is a painterly quality to the animation that is a wonder to behold. The combinations of pinks and blues open new passageways into the mind’s imagination. Miyazaki has crafted yet another masterpiece that is both visually beautiful and emotionally profound, and all I can think to say is…Jason loves Ponyo!

-Jason Bardin

The world of Harry Potter has become a dark and gloomy existence, and it’s most evident through the deeply textured color palette of cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel. Gone are the bright colors of magic and wonder. In Half-Blood prince, the sixth installment of the Harry Potter franchise the only colors remaining are grey, orange, brown, and green. There is hardly a trace of the blues that dominated the previous chapter, Order of the Phoenix. Director David Yates helmed both Phoenix and Prince. For every misstep Yates took in that previous effort he gets right here, except for the opening, which is an unforgivable decision to open with a jolt of terror and anarchy. A bridge is destroyed by black wisps. This act of terror is performed by Voldemort’s henchmen not to make a statement to the wizard community, but to remind the casual viewer that these are dark times. This prologue is almost nonsensical. Harry Potter films tend to build toward a grand finale. This opening is not only disorienting, but will further confuse those casual viewers it’s intended to assist. Yates then has to start building suspense and momentum all over again. He does this by employing classic horror techniques. Blinking lights in the subway, blood dripping from the ceiling, a chase scene in a wheat field. These common elements foreshadow a finale that is grand and terrifying, beautiful and heroic. However, the true moments of beauty in the film don’t come at the loud moments in the beginning or the end, but in the day-to-day drollness of the middle.

By this point in the series, right before the final installment, Rowling doesn’t have much for the characters to do, so there is a general aimlessness and lack of plot that translates exquisitely to film. At last, after five years of mishaps and plot contrivances we finally get to see one normal school year at Hogwarts, give or take a few incidents. Naturally we follow Harry Potter, played by Daniel Radcliffe who, with his boxy face and horn-rimmed glasses is a dead ringer for Harold Lloyd. I’m not sure when, but at some point Harry Potter stopped being the “boy who lived” and is now called “the chosen one.” This new title requires Harry to join the union of chosen persons, which includes Frodo Baggins, Neo, Luke Skywalker, and it’s founding member, Freder from Metropolis. When Harry is not busy fulfilling obligations as a savior, which primarily involves attempts at attaining a memory from his potions professor, Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), he’s trying to get a kiss from his best friend’s sister, Ginny (Bonnie Wright). They don’t have a whole lot of chemistry, but then again, Harry is cheating in his Potions class, using the notes and formulas of the Half-Blood Prince, who has committed his life’s work in the margins of Harry’s textbook.

The class that the film is primarily involved with is Slughorn’s. He teaches a class on potions, which seems to be more of a course on black-market pharmacy than alchemy. They’re making drugs. A love potion turns Harry’s best friend Ron (Rupert Grint) into a loony drunk, while a luck potion seems to have the same effect as a joint. Slughorn seems to be on some sort of uppers. He’s equally excited when he’s doting on a favorite student as when he’s gathering a giant arachnid’s venom in a vial. On the other hand, resident bully Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) appears to be taking downers. He’s often seen furious and stone-faced during public galas, or alone in a secret attic, concealed by one of those unicorn tapestries from The Cloisters, which if nothing else at least explains those tapestries. Meanwhile, headmaster Albus Dumbledore is becoming a bit too inquisitive into Harry’s social life. The lunacy and joy of the school year is so zany and carefree that you don’t want it to end. Everyone seems to have a touch of madness, which complements the wondrousness of the magical environment in ways that havn’t been prevalent in this series since Alfonso Cuaron’s Prisoner of Azkaban. There’s even a fight between Harry and Draco in a bathroom, contributing to yet another major incident that happens in a bathroom, along with the conflict with the troll from the first year and the entrance to the chamber of secrets from the second.

Some critics have expressed dissent toward some of the darker tone and general brooding in these later episodes of the series. Personally, I never felt that the world of witchcraft and wizardry was all that welcoming an environment. After all, Rowling has created a universe with not only a forbidden forest, but also a restricted section in the library.

-Jason Bardin

Nora Ephron apparently wanted to sabotage her own film during the opening credits. First it’s the title. My mind can barely comprehend it and I fear of saying it out loud lest I choke on my own tongue. Then there is the discrepancy of the writer and the director. I’m pretty certain that Julie & Julia was written and directed by one Nora Ephron. However, the penultimate opening credit states “screenplay by Nora Ephron,” which then appropriately fades out only to be replaced with the credit: “directed by Nora Ephron.” I can understand if the credit for My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud’homme and the eponymous book by Julie Powell, the two books from which the film has been adapted, was inserted between the writer and director credit, but it comes well before Ephron’s name.  At first I was annoyed by Ephron’s ego, then I was worried that the theater going public had been duped. Considering the difficulty of the title and dual credits, perhaps Ephron had deceived us all and instead of providing a light summer comedy, had tricked us into the theater to watch a complex, metaphysical film depicting the duality of women; in the style of Bergman’s Persona. My anxiety faded at the sight of Meryl Streep as Julia Child, wearing an infectious smile.

What Ephron does wrong in terms of title cards she does right in what John Huston considered the most important aspect of directing: casting. Has there ever been a less controversial choice of an actor to portray an iconic figure on film than Meryl Streep? She approaches the role of Child wisely, not as an important figure, aware of who she is and what she will become, but as a normal person, whose spirit, not to mention height, is higher than average. We first meet Julia Child in France, 1949. Her husband Paul (Stanley Tucci) is a foreign-service officer, temporarily assigned in Paris; Julia is not about to become a blasé, domesticated housewife. She decides to pursue her interests. Not finding the worlds of weaving hats and playing bridge exciting enough, she settles on cooking. Initially Julia is tormented in the all-male kitchen, humiliated even by her instructor. Later, when she becomes a teacher of French cooking to Americans in Paris, she makes an effort to always be supportive toward her students, even congratulating them on their mistakes in a sincere and joyful manner.  This effervescence could become irritating, but Streep handles her character in a delicate way, similar to Sally Hawkin’s portrayal of the even more cheerful Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky.  Streep’s Child shows a determination and sense of hard work that justifies her cockiness and bravado. Her high-octane personality is accentuated by the church bell hymn of Child’s voice. Just like last year in Doubt, when Streep pounced at the opportunity of transforming a serious, overwritten character into a hammy, comedic goldmine, here she takes Julia Child’s unique vocal cords, and transforms words like “do” and “oh” into melodic symphonies.

Preventing the story of Julia Child from becoming a standard biopic is the counterpoint story of Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a twenty-nine year old would-be writer, living above a pizza shop in post 9/11 Queens. Out of desperation and in search of meaning, Powell decides to start a blog in which she’ll cook Julia Child’s entire cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in one year. Powell is a wreck, which doesn’t help since her scenes are contrasted with the self-proclaimed fearless Child. Ephron has Powell crying in two separate scenes within the first five minutes.  Adams’ casting is essential. She is able to provide compassion to Powell, who is insecure and emotionally fragile.  We immediately empathize with her after we see her have lunch with her three friends. This scene is Ephron’s critique of the Sex and the City culture. That series and its subsequent film depicted women in New York as sex craved, vapid, vain, and ultimately boring, without any original thoughts, and a complete lack of understanding not only about men, but what it’s like to be a normal, functioning human being. Powell’s friends are depicted as rude and self-centered. Powell, on the other hand, is sweet and earnest, and in a highly compatible marriage.

The counterpoint between Julie and Julia provides a rare look into legacy. We often see great persons depicted in lavish and heavy-handed film biographies, where the director wants the audience to believe that this person was a vital part in the course of human history. In cases like Ghandi and Malcolm X that thesis can be justified. But does someone like Jim Braddock really need to be portrayed as if he cured the great depression?  Ephron portrays the life of Julia Child in a light, breezy tone; acceptable for the life she led. The Julie Powell segments allow us to better appreciate Child because we can see that she not only lived an extraordinary life, but that her legacy indeed affected others.

-Jason Bardin

After Tom Hansen (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) loses his girlfriend Summer Finn (Zooey Deschanel), his buddy and coworker McKenzie (Geoffrey Arend), whose main role in life seems to be to support his friend, quotes Henry Miller, advising Tom that they way to get over a woman is to turn her into literature. The film opens with an author’s note alluding to one Jenny Beckman, who is apparently a bitch, as the one person who serves as possible inspiration for a character in 500 Days of Summer. It’s probable that director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber have adapted Miller’s dictation and applied it to film, although it really doesn’t matter. That opening author’s note is a poorly executed and rather banal gimmick, surprisingly ineffective in a film that thrives off wonderful, risky, surrealistic touches: some of which are funny and others which are profoundly sad.

500 Days of Summer is a romantic comedy with a fractured time sequence. It is wisely less concerned about how Tom and Summer get together as it is with their time spent as a couple and the aftermath of their break-up. This separates it from the majority of romantic comedies, which mostly take about ninety minutes getting two people together through the most convoluted situations imaginable. Here we have a film that knows that it’s easy for two young, good looking individuals to start dating each other. Tom and Summer work together. He writes greeting cards, she’s the assistant to his boss. One night the whole office goes out to karaoke, she falls in love with him, watching him perform, the next day they kiss by the copy machines. Boom, bang, done.

The film that 500 Days of Summer is comparable to is Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, another film showing the development and fall of an interesting relationship, from the point of view of a male protagonist. It too uses surrealistic touches. However, in Annie Hall those moments are used to portray Alvy Singer’s desires. He’s either romancing the queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, discovering what his former classmates have become, or pulling out Marshall McLuhan from behind a poster to prove a point to a total stranger. These moments compliment Alvy’s self-centered persona. The use of surrealism in 500 Days of Summer is to portray heightened visuals of Tom’s inner emotions. When he is feeling elated and confident, it appears as if everyone on the street is smiling at him right before they transform into Broadway showmen and break out into a choreographed dance number. When Tom is feeling anxiety over an upcoming interaction with Summer, a split screen parallels Tom’s expectations for his evening with the actual encounter. This technique simultaneously reflects his hopes and dreams while showing the façade he must present amidst tragic disappointment.

When Tom isn’t in fantasyland he’s at his job, writing greeting cards. He wears sweater-vest and tie combinations or t-shirts that promote bands like The Clash, who haven’t needed promotion since they broke up in the mid eighties. That’s the problem with Tom, who like most hipsters, is living in a time warp. Upset by modern culture, he constantly pontificates about how horrible it is that women don’t dress like they did in England in nineteen sixty-four or how he hates to live in a world where no one has heard of an alternative, indie rock band that he happens to like. This hipster mentality borders on fascism as Tom, the failed architect, confides to Summer that if he were in charge he would make people notice the beauty in Los Angeles. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Tom with equal amounts confidence and nervousness. We like him despite his trendy, social attires and worldviews. He’s funny and spontaneous, but fragile too. And in all fairness, when he does don a suit he looks totally out of place. After all, how bad can anybody be when their heartbroken dreams transport them into Ingmar Bergman films?

Summer is not as easy to understand. She could have used the guidance of a female writer on her side. When the often annoying narrator isn’t condescendingly telling us how we are supposed to feel about the characters, what the characters are thinking, or just blatantly stating the themes of the film, it serves a purpose in relaying Summer’s back-story. The narrator informs us that Summer has some sort of inherent knack that makes every man attracted to her, and she knows it. She’s like Christine in The Rules of the Game: every man wants her; we’re not exactly sure why. At least Christine had a famous composer father, which justified Octave’s fascination. Summer just has long, black hair, and beautiful blue eyes. Well, I guess that’s enough. Summer, too is a hipster, which explains Tom and Summer’s mutual fascination with each other. When she proclaims her favorite Beatle is Ringo, I was just surprised that it wasn’t Pete Best.

After these two get together the movie really starts cooking. Despite the jumbled chronology, the film is more or less in order. Harold Pinter would probably just call this a straight forward narrative. Anyway, the relationship between the two expresses the joy of early love. They play house in a department store; he draws the skyline on her arm. The conversations never run too deep. Their break-up comes along at the moment when they would begin to confide more to each other. After they break up, the film hits a perfect note. They’re still friends. Tom’s still madly in love with Summer, but she’s moved on. We move deeper and deeper into Tom’s head, as we share his sadness and longing in a way that we couldn’t really share his desires or happiness. He’s with Summer, but not with Summer. Their moments together become painful as they get on each other’s nerves, and gradually separate. This all leads up to a moment when they go see The Graduate together. Never has that last shot felt so sad and empty; Elaine and Ben Braddock, sitting next to each other on the bus, with their future ahead of them. But what future? How far can love take two lost souls? This open-ended ending will continue to haunt generations of alienated teens. 500 Days of Summer, should have paid a bit more attention to Mike Nichols’ film, and ditched it’s cutesy epilogue segment, which is not in tune with the rest of the film, providing closure for these characters. I don’t need or want closure, I want these characters to be suspended in space and time, immortal.

-Jason Bardin

The opening title card informs us that Public Enemies takes place in 1933, which is apparently the golden age of bank robbery. After reading this note we know what we’re in for. Michael Mann is bringing us back to the Great Depression. Not to a time when hardworking families suffered and the honest man couldn’t get a break, but when bandits ruled America, robbing banks in style, wanting to rule the world. And if it wasn’t for the annoying antics of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we might still be privileged to live in a world with great men like John Dillinger. As played by Johnny Depp, Dillinger is the essence of cool. He wears pinstriped suits, perfectly shaped fedoras, and rose tinted glasses. Behind those glasses is a pair of eyes that views the world as his for the taking. They fail to see the boundaries of right and wrong. Behind his eyes is a brain. Maybe. I’m never quite sure what Dillinger is thinking. I know he likes movies, fast cars, whisky, and the dopey hat check girl Billie Frechette. He states these pleasures to Billie in a spurt of dialogue that is delivered with confidence and fluidity. In fact, all of the dialogue is spoken this way. What are meant to be scenes of conversational dialogue, even intimate scenes between Dillinger and Frechette, come across as historical figures in a high school debate. It’s not that Dillinger isn’t thinking, it’s that he was written not to have or need a brain. He’s like the scarecrow without the admirable ambition. When he meets with his associate Frank Nitti (Bill Camp) who used to help him hide from those men with badges who keep chasing him for some reason or another, he finds that Nitti is now running a lucrative bookmaking organization. Nitti attempts to explain that what Dillinger makes from an entire bank heist, Nitti makes every day. Dillinger looks angry and confused. He doesn’t get it. He would realize that he doesn’t need to stick up bank tellers to steal money, if he only had a brain.

I’m not quite sure what director Michael Mann wants me to take away from this version of Dillinger’s story. There are various allusions to Dillinger as a folk hero. He robs from the bank, but makes sure that the civilians receive their money. Is Dillinger making some social statement against the corrupt powers of the government? Well if he is, he never admits as much. Perhaps he just likes being a celebrity and realizes that if he treats civilians with respect he’ll be better liked. He blatantly tells Billie, “I rob banks.” However, Dillinger is lacking the motivation or general purpose of that line as it was proclaimed twice in Bonnie and Clyde. The eponymous gangsters of that film declared that statement as if it were an honor. They were counter-revolutionary figures, living off youthful exuberance, fetching nervousness, and a distinctly proclaimed social conscience. Dillinger, instead, echoes a different gangster in his proclamation to want to be, “top of the world,” conjuring up the image of James Cagney screaming his lungs out, and about to be burnt to a crisp in White Heat. Mann is just referencing other gangster movies, bringing with him nothing new, besides the fact that this film is shot in a high definition video, and what we’re left with is a protagonist without any ambitions or purpose for existence.

Being a Michael Mann film, showing the gangsters in not enough, we also need a grotesque portrait of the FBI. Mann is obsessed by opposition, whether it be cops and robbers (Heat), Colonial and Native American (Last of the Mohicans), or professional boxers (Ali). Unfortunately, Mann doesn’t spend the time developing both stories as he did in Heat. Instead, we’re left with a portrayal of J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) as a neurotic mess. A man in a tight-fitted suit, with greasy hair, filled with nothing but rage. His star pupil is Melvin Purvis, who focuses all his efforts on capturing public enemy number one, John Dillinger. Christian Bale plays Melvin Purvis, or more appropriately delivers his lines forcefully. Bale, as previously shown in The Dark Knight, possesses the uncanny ability to diminish a co-leading role into a marginal supporting one. Little is revealed about Purvis besides that he wants to get Dillinger. Dillinger and Purvis first meet after Purvis initially catches Dillinger, who escapes from two prisons in this film, although Mann never shows him coordinating these plans. They say a few words; Dillinger gets the last laugh, end of story. The next time they meet is in the film’s centerpiece, an elaborate ambush on Dillinger and his associates in the woods. Among Dillinger’s associates include Baby Face Nelson (Stephen Graham), presented to justify the plurality of the title. Nelson is less developed here than he was in the Coen Brothers surrealistic musical, O Brother, Where Art Thou? At least in that feature Nelson was allowed to indulge his inner killer by shooting cows on the side of the road.  In this film he’s barely a presence; more talked about than seen. Overall, the shootout in the woods doesn’t work. The exterior scenes are too chaotic to follow, and the interior scenes in the cabin are just poorly photographed. Mann uses source lighting, allowing the room to be coated in orange, which makes these fearless gangsters look like oompa loompas.

One character, very drunk, makes just about the worst James Cagney impression I’ve ever heard. That’s what this movie is. It’s a Universal film pretending to be a revisionist rendition of the Warner Bros. Gangster films. It’s a bad impression of William Wellman’s film The Public Enemy, starring Cagney. If only it had been more homage than revision. This film could have used the other’s gritty realism, instead of the fantasy world in which Public Enemies comfortably resides. I also wouldn’t have minded if someone had shoved a grapefruit in Billie Frechette’s face when she began to cry.

-Jason Bardin