BROWSE
ARCHIVES

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

Gaze up at a bright moon, and then follow a line of moonbeams down from the sky, away from the horizon, across a lake, and into the enraptured blue eyes of Sérephine (Yolande Moreau), who is digging up muck with her bare hands. From this first shot of the film it’s hard to tell whether the plump middle-aged woman has found something or is still looking, if she’s in agony or in ecstasy.  Next, watch the red and orange glistening sunrise on the Gothic cathedral that in the summer of 1914 still towers over the French town of Senlis, but has lost its spiritual power over the citizens—except for Sérephine, who quietly and joyously sings a hymn and burns an offering.  It has been less than two minutes, and you already have peered into Sérephine’s soul.

Sérephine (based on painter Sérephine Louis) keeps a careful guard over her inner life so that she can work as a maid in a boarding house without calling attention to herself.  Her biggest complaint about her job isn’t that it’s strenuous and demeaning, but that it takes up so much of her time.  She wants more time to climb trees, pick flowers, and most of all, to paint frantically late into the night. Wilhelm Ulde (Ulrich Tukur, also based on a real person), who stays in the boarding house, also tries to keep a low profile so that he can have some peace.  Parisian socialites fawn over him because he’s the art dealer who discovered Rousseau and Picasso.  Less sophisticated folks taunt him because he’s German.  Germans won’t accept him for being gay.

Sérephine and Wilhelm can fool everyone but each other. When they first meet, Wilhelm takes a very brief glance at Sérephine’s ankle, almost as if he were aroused by her.  Willhelm tries to get to know Sérephine better and she also seems curious about him, but the social barriers are too strong to overcome.  He tries to make conversation, and she keeps answers as short and obedient as she can.  When he finds out that she’s an artist and sees her work, he thinks that she can become a famous artist in the “naïve” untrained style.  He somehow knows that her paintings of plants have been inspired by past misfortune.  He grows upset with her in a very master of the house kind of way, and sits her down for a lecture.  When he realizes that he is quite literally talking down to her, he bends down, looks up at her, and continuous to talk condescendingly.

Both the boarding house and the woods lack electric light, and there seems to be a clue in every corner, behind every shadow.  As she cleans Wilhelm’s room, Sérephine uncovers the books, papers, and drawings that mark him as at least an intellectual, if not an artist.  While Wilhelm doesn’t hug and sing to trees like Sérephine, he takes a stroll, and finds her bathing in a stream deep in the woods.  These silent moments of discovery, are when the relationship between Wilhelm and Sérephine is at its best.  As a side note, I hate how the word “relationship” has become so heavily associated with romantic relationships.  A romantic relationship ought to be called a “romance”—it sounds much nicer, and it frees up the word “relationship” to describe what there is between Wilhelm and Sérephine, who are very close to each other but are neither friends nor lovers.

Sérephine is a lot of what I wish I could be.  She is simple but wise.  She is a steadfast believer in the God of the Bible.  She is in touch with nature.  And most of all, she is an artistic genius.  As Wilhelm becomes her patron and moves her to Paris, part of me wants her to continue scrubbing floors in obscurity, as if the purpose of her life were to live out my bourgeois fantasy of the starving artist’s life.  This is an unfair expectation.

As A.O. Scott points out in his review, a story about an artist’s response to success runs a huge risk of not saying anything new, but this one does.  Sérephine does have her time in the spotlight, but it’s the type of short stint that makes someone hungry for more attention but only able to get it from oneself.  At first I thought that Sérephine’s newfound self-love was overemphasized.  Her quiet, charming hymns sung to herself become booming off-key oratorios that everyone in the house can hear.  Her thankfulness to God for inspiring her becomes a love of herself for being the inspired one.  She stops making her own paints.  She begins to strike poses, looking the way she thinks an artist should look.  She wants a big house, fancy things, and servants of her own.  Her transformation may seem too extreme to be believable, but this is only because she hasn’t completely lost herself.  When compared with the arrogance expressed by Wilhelm and his protégé/lover Helmut (Nico Rogner), we find that Sérephine’s arrogance lacks nuance because it’s unnatural for her.  No matter how much she changes, she can never get to the point at which she can get lost in it and start spewing nonsense like Wilhelm’s “I sell to collect.  I don’t collect to sell” or Helmut’s “I don’t care about fame—that’s for after I’m dead.”  But neither can she return to her naïveté.  I want to say that she’s been corrupted but I can’t.  Wilhelm may be a bit full of himself, but he treats her very well, providing her with whatever she needs both for her work and for her personal satisfaction.  She may not have been hurt or corrupted, but she has been put into a situation in which there’s nowhere for her to bare her soul with that ambiguous stare.

-Robert Henderson

Inglourious Basterds is without a doubt, one of the most beautifully composed films ever made.  The camera swoops unpredictably around sets, subtlety emphasizing the tone of every confrontation.  Every set is convincingly historically accurate, but complete control over color is maintained in every shot.  Tarantino demonstrates a masterful command of every aspect of filmmaking; every sight and sound presented on his screen is calculated to make the viewer feel absolute exhilaration, absolute drama, and most impressively, absolute empathy with his characters.

In essence, Inglourious Basterds is a film about persecution and revenge; each subplot follows this arc.  The first scene is a confrontation between Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and a dairy farmer, Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet).  A perfect scene in every sense, the audience gets to witness both the civility and degeneracy of Waltz’s expertly crafted “Jew Hunter.”  Next we are introduced to Lieutenant Aldo Raine’s guerilla band of Jewish Nazi hunters.  Together, the Basterds represent an entire race’s rage, and viewers quickly identify with the ruthless avengers.  Lastly, we meet Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a French theater owner seeking her own revenge on the ruling party.  The rest of the plot is simple: everyone tries to kill the Nazis before the Nazis kill them.

Seemingly in tribute to the diversity apparent within the Basterds, Tarantino has assembled a huge variety of actors coming from a whole slew of international filmmaking backgrounds.  Each and every one of them is perfectly effective within their roles.  Every character is so believable, that even the tiniest throw away lines seem to steal the scene, and go on to compose some of the movies most memorable moments.  A particularly mundane moment that stuck with me occurred as the Basterds are disguised as Nazi officers in a French bar; a local Nazi officer sits down with them and proposes a game of twenty questions.  Quickly realizing that he only has one pen, he asks the bartender for more pens, who then proceeds to hand him several pens.  This small touch of realism amid a moment of the utmost dramatic tension serves the realism of each scene.  Even in the most unrelatable of circumstances, we still see characters acting completely human.  Fueling this incredible sense of vitality is Tarantino’s completely familiar, yet wholly unique sense of dialogue.  Gone are the days when his best developed characters were the quick talking, street smart thirty-somethings of his early works.  Each member of the incredible diverse ensemble consumes the audience.  Even Sosanna Dreyfus’ seldom seen love interest, Marcel (Jacky Ido) succeeds in carving out a residence within the viewer’s gut.  Each shot of him simply existing fuels a need to know more about his character.  Considering each of the dozens of characters was able to accomplish just as much, this movie could have been hours longer, and each minute would have still been a joy to experience.

To my knowledge, the action sequences in Inglourious Basterds are simply the best action sequences ever to grace the screen.  It’s not hard to understand why this might be, though; great directors seldom touch true “action” scenes, with few exceptions (i.e. Scorsese).  When a story they wish to tell requires moments of action in order to move along the plot, it is typically done with a concentration on the perspective of one or two characters, so their feelings and motivations can be observed throughout.  By forcing the audience to concentrate on what characters are feeling, instead of the specifics of the situation, a director can emphasize the dramatic implications of any excitement, rather than the spectacle.  This approach is partly the reason why every exciting moment in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction was so engrossing.  In Death Proof, Tarantino attempted to ignore this convention, focusing on the spectacle over all else.  In Inglourious Basterds however, Tarantino has managed to find an optimized medium between focusing on the characters versus the spectacle of an event.  The oft forgotten key is contained entirely within the minutes preceding said action.  There’s a great scene where Sergeant Werner Rachtman (Richard Sammel) has been captured by the Basterds and is awaiting his execution at the hands of Sergeant Donny Donowitz, a.k.a. “the Bear Jew” (Eli Roth).  For what feels like an eternity, we experience Rachtman’s perturbation as Donowitz clanks his baseball bat against a wall off-screen, then proceeds to slowly stroll towards his victim.  In this way, when action is planned or anticipated, the audience experiences the contemplation and anxiety with the characters beforehand.  In this case, the audience connects so much with Rachtman they can begin to forget that his punishment is deserved.  Once this point is reached, whether or not the action actually follows this is inconsequential.  Conversely, when an action is a surprise to those involved, it must surprise the audience as it does the characters involved.  Only by catching both off guard, can true empathy be established and maintained.  Keeping in line with this, if those involved are confused by their surroundings, then the audience must also be confused.  The scene in the French bar contains a shootout that couldn’t last more than ten seconds, but it all happens in such real time, that no sense can be made of it until after the fact.  No gimmicks are needed at this point.  A dead body should speak for itself.  After the smoke has cleared, then there can be breath: a chance for all involved to process everything that has just happened.

Viscerally, the movie is completely engrossing.  There were long expanses of time in which it was truly impossible to blink, and eventually all I could do was shake.  By the time the credits rolled, I felt an orgiastic release as I thanked God for this piece of beauty that doth exist in the world.  To all this, only one reasonable conclusion could I reach: Quentin Tarantino has undoubtedly created a masterpiece that will seal his place as one of the greatest auters of all time.

-Paul Brinnel

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

In a world like today’s (albeit with aliens) how will the media oversimplify complex class struggles?  The answer: District 9.  News footage and interviews tell of the day twenty years ago when an alien mother ship came to a halt right over Johannesburg, South Africa.  A human recovery crew enters the ship and discovers an ill-kept alien race, clearly abandoned without any hope of survival.  These supposed millions of aliens (although at most a dozen are ever shown on-screen at one time) are relocated to an internment camp in Johannesburg, and segregated from mainstream society.  The story picks up in the present day, when multinational company peon, Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) is appointed head of relocating said alien threat to a new camp a few miles outside of the city.  The bumbling Wikus talks of his job with pride and fulfills his duties with a comically misguided zeal.  After exposure to an alien contaminant, Wikus becomes an invaluable asset in alien research, and is subjected to a battery of increasingly inhuman tests by his corporation.  A good while after it has become obvious to the viewer, Wikus suddenly realizes that those strapping him to a table and preparing to dissect him are evil.  How does the decidedly timid Wikus respond?  He spontaneously transforms into Rambo.  From this moment on he exhibits a warrior spirit that completely defeats the purpose of establishing him as an antihero in the first place.  He might not have the best aim, but regardless he throws himself into battles with a fearlessness completely uncharacteristic of his previously established character.  Every massive character change in the movie is completely based around a turning point that might last all of two seconds.  There is never any sense of building motivations or mounting change.  This gives Wikus’ character a bipolar quality that makes his motivations too convoluted to relate to.

District 9 starts with an incredible original documentary feel.  Exposition is revealed via interviews and shown in clips compiled from fake news footage.  Eventually, the movie takes on a Cops feel, as a cameraman trails the characters as they explore the alien camp.  Unfortunately, as the movie progresses, this documentary footage is replaced by very standard action cinematography on regular film.  Whereas the presence of the news crews or surveillance cameras fit into the narrative style, the sudden apparition of an omnipotent camera simply doesn’t fit.  Whenever interviews suddenly come back on the screen, it becomes terribly ambiguous what the film is trying to be.  Cutting between surveillance footage and regular camera work similarly makes no sense.  Within the first half hour, the Cops vibe is gone, and the presence of a film crew ceases to be justified or explainable.

Redemption seems to be a central theme of District 9.  The lead character is essentially an oppressor, then because of situations beyond his control he must ally with the oppressed against the oppressors he previously belonged to.  This device has been used countless times.  Unfortunately, this time it is completely missing any contemplation, and therefore any potential pathos.  At the beginning of the movie is a scene where Wikus happily destroys an entire nest of alien larvae.  After he has “seen the light,” there is never again any mention of his past sins.  He fights with the aliens out of necessity, and it’s very obvious that he hates doing it.  There really isn’t any redemption for Wikus.  There is only convenience and Sun Tzu’s principle: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Any film about internment camps is obviously going to have some type of political message.  I believe the entirety of District 9’s political message is summed up by a quick comment from an interview early on: “If [the aliens] were from another country, we’d understand.”  I get it.  They’re aliens.  But they’re people too.  There’s no statement really here to make, aside from the obvious, “discrimination is bad.”  Ideally, writer-director Neill Blomkamp could have extrapolated and gone on to explore such complex ideas as the necessity of repression for the effective policing of certain groups, or even shown more (or any) of the alien backlash, or even actually show their “dehumanizing.”  At most, there were a few “no aliens allowed” signs, but no real interactions between mainstream humanity and the aliens were shown.  A few testimonials at most were meant to convey any possible message the film had.  (Unsubstantial as it might have been.)

District 9 is actually based on a six and a half minute short film from 2005 written and directed by Blomkamp.  Alive in Joburg has a nearly identical setup, but uses its limited time to interpolate on a modern apartheid that is revealed by the narrative completely in medias res.  Incorporating these themes into a sci-fi movie is an incredibly original idea, and provides a new take on a story that’s been around since H.G. Wells first published The War Of The Worlds, 111 years ago.  It’s a tragedy that District 9 just devolves into yet another overblown action cliché.  Each chase scene alternates with a firefight, and they seem to occur on such a smoothly planned rail.  In a tight spot, a character glances over to a table, grabs a conveniently placed bomb, and blows out a wall that happens to lead to a parking garage.  Endless climaxes make way for increasingly comical escalation.  By the movie’s end, our once lovely dimwit is in a conveniently found mechanical exoskeleton, fighting off a dozen bald tan men with machine guns.  A nice, entirely human antihero was established, only to be lost amid an orgy of blood and brain remnants splattering onto the camera lens.

-Paul Brinnel

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

Given how some critics have compared this satire of the lead-up to the Iraq war with Dr. Strangelove, perhaps it should have been subtitled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the F-Bomb.”  In the post-Soviet world, State Department officials have to deal with a new kind of munitions gap—the British are winning the four-letter arms race.  Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the other powers that be lurk far off-screen pulling the strings, already having decided that America and Britain would march to war.  The task of legitimizing this decision on both sides of the pond is left to incompetent bureaucrats and their baby-faced overachieving twenty-something assistants.  The rules of the game are simple: advance your career as much as possible by speaking the party line in the right time, the right place, and the right way.  If you have difficulty doing this, blame other people and barrage them with witty arrangements of expletives.

The camera work must have been entrusted to a hyperactive child, and, at least for the first few minutes (which feel much longer), the audience is treated like one.  Mommy, is this the zoom button?  Wow!  I can zoom in, and out, and back in again, and really fast!  Gee, that man (British minister of international development Simon Foster, played by Tom Hollander) sure looks angry.  I’ll follow him back to his office!  It’s so boring holding the camera in one place.  I can look from this side, and that side, and that other side too!  This other man in the office (civil servant Malcom Tucker, played by Peter Capaldi) says a lot of naughty things that make me laugh really loud!  In a sense it’s a gift to be able to laugh loudly whenever any combination of a certain set of seven words is said.  Like other natural gifts, it’s much more considerate to enjoy it at home than in the movie theater.

The lingua franca between the two countries divided by a common language seems to be the one-liner.  Some are clever, some are mediocre, and many are threats of sexual violence delivered in a Scottish accent.  Delivering the one-liners is a small army of one-dimensional characters.  Unfortunately, none of them is played by Peter Sellers.  Simon was born with his foot in his mouth, and his young press secretary Toby (Chris Addison) is charged with fixing his reputation during their trip to Washington.  But Toby’s American old flame Liza (Anna Chlumsky) lives in Washington, and he’s under the delusion that “what happens in Washington stays in Washington.”  Liza seems to be the only person in the State Department who thinks the war’s a bad idea, who convinces her helpless boss Karen Clark (Mimi Kennedy) to advocate for peace, along with a fat, sensitive general (James Gandolfini) whose war-mongering rival is Linton Barwick (David Rasche), whose aide is—enough already, if you want to know who he is, go to IMDB.  And there’s a prim and proper Oxbridge man (Chris Langham) and an attractive woman (Gina Mckee) thrown into bit roles just for kicks.

The movie tries as hard as it can to be zany with its quirky characters, speed-talking, quick takes, and calm, classical score that brings these features into relief.  Alas, fast-talking alone does not zaniness make.  The dialogue between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night is both razor-sharp and hilarious, but it wouldn’t work without images like the hitchhiking and the destruction of the walls of Jericho.  In The Loop gives us far too few memorable images, but they’re fairly well done.  The fat general calculating troop concentrations in a little girl’s room using her oversized pink talking calculator.  The Capitol Hill staffers burning off steam in a mosh pit.  The dissatisfied constituents in an ancient gym and a collapsing brick wall which, of all possible things, brings about Simon’s political ruin.

This movie falls short even in its strong suit of one-liners.  Dr. Strangelove gives us the timeless exclamation of, “You can’t fight in here! This is the war room!”  When the Meditation Room at U.N. Headquarters is overtaken by profanity warfare, the British ambassador briefly spoils the fun by reminding the belligerents of the room’s intended purpose.  But then Malcom’s filthy mouth opens yet again.

-Robert Henderson

After 2007’s Knocked Up, I was at least a bit excited for writer/director Judd Apatow’s future.  I thought he might have finally learned how to mold his power to pen raunchy comedies into the ability to integrate edgy humor with character driven stories.  Unfortunately, his latest movie, Funny People, seems to have pushed that threshold a bit too far.

Plunged into the incredibly convincing fallout of a commercially successful comedian’s career, we meet George Simmons (Adam Sandler), the rich bastard who just found out he’s dying.  Realizing that he’s driven away every human being in his life, he finds a rather pathetic standup comic, Ira Wright (Seth Rogen), and for whatever reason, invites him to write for him, and to hopefully also become his friend.  Maybe this would be heartwarming were it in minimalist Kurosawa film from 1952, but unfortunately we’re stuck with the writer/director of The 40 Year Old Virgin.

Judd Apatow has attempted to make a meta-comedy.  This movie is not about laughing at raunchy witticisms; it is about what fuels people to make said quips.  While watching this movie, I couldn’t help but think of the 1981 Woody Allen movie, Stardust Memories.  Both movies take what could be comically lucrative situations and ruin with them with lofty self-actualized humor.  Of course I’m not saying that comedians don’t deserve to be broken down, but the movies that do it best manage to maintain relatability within the lead character regardless of the humor or tragedy of any given situation.  Three superior films that play off similar themes are Lenny, Man on the Moon, and The Comic.  Where Dustin Hoffman, Jim Carrey, and Dick Van Dyke respectively succeed is in just how much they connected to the viewer.  You felt good when they felt good, and bad when they felt bad.  A simple moviemaking device, but nonetheless important to maintaining weight and investment in the story.  I’m well aware that where Funny People differs from these three movies in that the main character of the movie, Wright, isn’t said tragic comedian, but merely an impartial observer telling the story of the comic.  Regardless, in order to instead connect with this observer, motivations need to be clear.  In this movie a pathetic idiot befriends a despondent jerk, and then puts up with a lot of endless grief pursuing a lifestyle he is drawn to for no explainable reason.  Everything Wright envies about Simmons seems to be either completely superficial or completely vain.  This part of the story feels like a dumbed down, modernized version of La Dolce Vita, minus any carried out attempt at substance.

Eventually the movie stumbles into a more upbeat second act, where Simmons is meant to use all of the lessons he learned in his previous screen time.  Oddly enough though, he hasn’t learned a thing.  If anything, he has regressed to just the same old bastard he was, except now without any of the ridiculous moroseness.  What’s left is a poorly staged domestic drama where a tragic love triangle turns into a completely unmemorable exchange of by the book conflicted romance dialogue.  This whole sequence is so slight that I found myself beginning to doze at times fueled wholly by the ennui of this plodding and overplayed cliché.  Not until this second act does it really strike you just how bad Apatow is at writing/developing any women characters.  With the emergence of Laura (Leslie Mann) as Simmons’ love interest, it becomes even more obvious that you’re watching a movie with a predestined outcome.  Believability and fluidity of romance are destroyed when the audience can’t understand why a female character is considered at all desirable.  In this case, the fault belongs to both Apatow for inherently not understanding women, and Mann for playing her character with such convincing objectivity.

Over the course of this nearly 2 and a half hour movie, I witnessed at least a dozen people in the audience leaving.  Despite a plethora of shlong shtick, Funny People certainly doesn’t appeal to anyone looking for this year’s frat boy, gross-out comedy.  Unfortunately, Funny People also fails to be insightful enough to strike a chord with higher brow viewers, too.  When everything is said and done, all that’s really left is a pile of peters that failed at self-actualization.

-Paul Brinnel

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

With no explanation The Hurt Locker starts off amidst a moment of extraordinary anxiety.  A U.S. bomb-squad task force is in the midst of weighing their options.  Just a few hundred yards ahead of them on an abandoned Iraqi street lies potential instantaneous death.  It is their job to approach it, disarm it, and return to base unscathed.  This fear of death looms over the scene.  Little noise is heard aside from light dialogue.  Although the set is simple, the visuals are a complex blend of real and imagined anxiety.  The camera, to great effect, is tremendously shaky.  It helps to transport us inside these men’s minds.  The barren landscapes all appear to be minefields, ridden with a million ways to die, and no expectation of forewarning.  Visually, this is without a doubt one of the most immersive war films ever made.

After this first scene we get to meet the characters.  After being made to feel each and every nuance of perturbation from their perspective, you’d think that there would be something equally engaging going on under the hood.  Unfortunately, with lines of dialogue like, “Every time we go out it’s life or death; we roll the dice,” the characters we are made to care so much about quickly devolve into shallow stereotypes.

In between every action scene is one of lockdown dialogue.  Character development is delivered this way in a form best expressed as loutish exposition.  Each of the half a dozen characters has a single dimension developed.  Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) is a seasoned bomb diffuser with his own reckless, yet no nonsense approach to his work.  Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) is a sniveling coward who, after years in active combat, still winces at the thought of actual confrontation.  Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) is a by-the-book ruffian who is frustrated by his new CO.  As the movie progressed, these soldiers made startling, yet entirely predictable changes for no particular reason.  The dramatic turning points play out like they were written for the original outline, unrelated to any other moments in the film.  Such are entire subplots within the movie.  James makes the occasional reference to his own mixed feelings on fatherhood.  He then has three encounters with a young boy, which are meant to affect his feelings on his own son.  This is the point where a change is supposed to be observable and a commentary on said change is supposed to be made.  Any attempts at having the characters develop over the course of the film were inconsequentially trite.

As I watched The Hurt Locker, certain patterns began to make themselves painfully obvious.  When two men are gathered together, they talk; when more then two men gather together, they are either fighting, about to fight, or about to blow up.  It’s a pity that each incredible action scene was so easy to anticipate.

At some point even the incredible action turns into clichés, as well.  In order to keep the tension climbing in an already adrenaline filled movie, extra elements needed to be added to later action scenes to make them even more intense than their preceding bomb diffusions.  It becomes harder and harder to connect with the characters as their dealings become more and more overblown.  Case in point: at some point Will James gets sucked into a revenge side plot.  He pulls a sweatshirt on, and then proceeds to chase down run after his invisible enemies in the night.  This action simply feels like it’s meant for a different movie entirely (perhaps one starring Daniel Craig).  Later on there’s a moment where James’ squad approaches a fresh detonation.  As chaos reigns around them, James tells his squad that through pure intuition, he knows that those parties responsible are still in the vicinity.  Like a bad episode of Law & Order, James leads his men through grainy, poorly lit darkness, only to emerge at a fork in the road with three alleyways, a perfect number for three men to explore to ideal dramatic effect.  These moments where James does something reckless and it turns out to be prophetic seem to ruin the entire point of the movie.  One of it’s major theses, “war is a drug,” seems at odds when every time the supposed “junkie” tries to get his adrenaline fix, he ends up having some type of lucky success.  Now multiply that times the hundreds of bombs our protagonist has allegedly diffused.  Every time, William James, the reckless prophet comes out on top.  That’s realism, folks.

Amid these terribly flawed scenes there is one that breaks from the format, and stands out as one of the most brilliant combat moments ever filmed.  Ralph Fiennes shows up as a British contractor for a single scene in which one of the perfect paradoxes of war is on display.  Although vigilant to the point of paranoia, James’ team is completely caught off guard by an enemy sniper.  The scene plays out with the same suspense that is present in the opening scene, and is truly incredible to experience.

In the end, The Hurt Locker falls into the same trap as movies like Requiem For A Dream.  Incredible technique alone might allow an audience to see through a character’s eyes, but if there’s little or nothing behind said eyes, then there’s not really a lot to connect to, is there?

-Paul Brinnel