Good ol’ Bahstuhn Cahtholick Ben Affleck is an all grown-up, big-boy director now, and lookit, he made himself a pretty decent movie. That said, Gone Baby Gone is a big plate of grim, with side order of depressing.
Affleck makes excellent use of location footage and local color. And not surprising for a movie directed by an actor (recently, Julie Delpy’s 2 Days in Paris and George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck), Affleck privileges the characters and performances over the plot. We also see plenty of B-roll footage of the faces and voices of Bostoners on the streets, in the bars, and on local TV screens.
How many times I gotta tell you, bro? I pahked the cahr down on the yahds.
Gone Baby Gone is one of the first movies to poach some of the excellent acting talent premiered in HBO’s superb series The Wire. Doubtless by accident, Michael Kenneth Williams and Amy Ryan both play characters diametrically opposed to their TV counterparts; Williams is a sardonic po-lice resolved to the corruption around him (compare and contrast with The Wire‘s Omar, a parasite that feeds on the drug trade), and Ryan plays a coked-out winner of bad-mother-of-the-year, the exact opposite in every way (including accent) of her salt-of-the-earth B’more Port Authority po-lice on The Wire.
Pay no attention to my rug.
The few bad points to mention (other than the aforementioned pervasive grim tone), are Ed Harris’ inconsistent rug and a middle section papered over almost entirely by voiceover narration.
As I was compiling the best and worst movies I saw in 2007, I found I still had enough for a special category: movies that absolutely don’t deserve to be called bad, even when it’s just me here talking to myself on my stupid blog. But for one reason or another, here are the movies of 2007 from which I expected something a bit more:
28 WEEKS LATER A disappointingly conventional follow-up to the truly scary original.
AMERICAN GANGSTER I was hoping for a bit more from Ridley Scott and the two fine actors, perhaps another crime epic on the level of Heat. But American Gangster is essentially a biopic, a genre in which good narrative storytelling is often forsaken in favor of a string of illustrated events from history. Yes, it’s interesting that these people actually lived and (more or less) did these things, but a story this does not make.
BECOMING JANE I loved the recent film version of Pride & Prejudice, and Becoming Jane sure sounded like a good idea: play fast & loose with the real Jane Austen’s biography to create a frothy romance in her own style. But the end result fell oddly flat, with little of the real woman’s spark. The direction and performances were fine; I think the fault lay in the script.
CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR Probably the finest-pedigreed film of the year, with Mike Nichols directing, Aaron Sorkin writing, and Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Philip Seymore Hoffman starring. So why doesn’t the movie take off?
I AM LEGEND The superb trailer all but had me waiting in line at the theater weeks before this movie came out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it couldn’t live up to the promise; it’s full of preposterous implausibilities and plot holes (and that’s if you even accept the basic premise). The best zombie movie I’ve seen is still 28 Days Later.
KNOCKED UP I was a big lover of Judd Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but I don’t think Knocked Up quite measures up to its predecessor’s painful hilarity. Additionally, I could just barely swallow the premise that the two characters might hook up in an alcohol-fueled bonding moment, but not at all that they might stay together.
THE LIVES OF OTHERS A complex character study that would have made my personal-best list had it not undone itself in the end by hailing its complicated protagonist a “good man.”
A MIGHTY HEART Michael Winterbottom is one of my favorite filmmakers of all time, and this movie held tremendous promise for me as it was done in a similar faux-documentary style as Road to Guantanamo. But whereas I wanted to tell everyone I met that Road to Guantanamo is essential viewing for every citizen of the world, I just can’t say the same for A Mighty Heart.
STARDUST All apologies to Saint Neil Gaiman, for whom nearly all he touches turns to gold, but Stardust just didn’t do anything for me. Gaiman’s and Roget Avery’s script for Beowulf was brilliant, but this adaptation of his illustrated novel by another screenwriter had no pixie dust.
ZODIAC I know Zodiac has been praised to the high heavens, for both its special effects (didn’t notice that it even had special effects? Exactly!) and for its storytelling, but I just didn’t feel it.
Coming up next: the 11 Best Movies I’m Most Embarrassed I didn’t see in 2007!
Just like Elizabeth: The Golden Age and Before Sunset, it’s the sequel that no one asked for! After the warm fuzzies of yesterday’s list of the Best Movies I Saw in 2007, it’s time for a little meanspirited snark.
I might be committing professional suicide for publishing this list, for five out of nine of these movies may or may not have something in common (a something which could lead to the aforementioned professional suicide if revealed). So with a little judicious self-censorship, onward!
[Name of Latin Pop Star Biopic Withheld]
A new low in probably my most-hated film genre: the musical biopic. Once again, the life story of an important musician is told by filmmakers who obviously don’t care about the music and would much rather tell a story about drug addiction (and not only that, the same drug story every time: q.v. Bird, Ray, Walk the Line, etc.). Bladder-bustingly long, amateurishly over-edited, and the ostensible lead [name of hollow-cheeked latin pop star withheld] is shoved aside by [name of latina pop star famous for magnificent gluteus maximus withheld] as she tries to make it her story.
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Fantastic Four 2 somehow manages to be better than the original in many ways, and yet less funny (the original at least had humor on its side). Who cast Mr. Whitebread as Dr. Victor Von Doom, the Eastern European dictator of Latveria?
[Name of First-Installment-in-Projected-Fantasy-Franchise Withheld]
The fantasy genre leaves me cold, so it was a minor miracle that Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens made three Lord of the Rings movies that could turn genre grumps like me into fans of elves, dwarves, and wizards. [name of movie company withheld] tried to recapture the magic with [name of first-installment-in-projected-fantasy-franchise withheld], but forgot the magic. Humorless, self-serious, and wastefully expensive, [name of first-installment-in-projected-fantasy-franchise withheld] is full of awkward shifts in tone (for a more kid-friendly movie than Lord of the Rings, it turns shockingly violent at one point) and spurious plot twists (the most annoying instance being when the king of all [name of large white arctic mammal withheld] pledges his life to a [name of annoying little girl withheld] with no evidence that she’s anything special).
[Name of Woeful Time-Travelling Ecological Parable / Ostensible Children’s Film Withheld]
I pity the children for whom this will be one of their earliest moviegoing experiences. My generation had E.T. and Time Bandits. This one gets… lame Department of Homeland Security critiques and Intel-Inside bunnies? Oh, and let’s not forget the horrific song by [name of psychedelic rock dinosaur withheld]… could this be the man that cowrote [name of fifth best selling album of all time withheld]?
[Name of Numerology-Themed Thriller Withheld]
A premise that could have been fun if not treated with such grim self-seriousness. Wannabe thriller directors would do well to remember that even Se7en and Memento had a little wit. Memo to [name of rubber-faced & formerly overpaid actor withheld]: you proved you could branch out into dramatic roles that still played to your comedy skills in [name of underrated movie directed by Peter Weir withheld] and [name of masterpiece directed by Michel Gondry withheld]. How about some more of that, please?
Resident Evil: Extinction
Not much I can say about this one. It’s on this list because I saw it and it’s bad, but I didn’t really get worked up over its badness as much as these others. The setup is actually not that bad, at least until the zombies attack… and attack… and attack.
[Name of Mean-Spirited Action Flick Apparently Written by Committee Of 12-Year-Old-Boys Withheld]
Porn for NRA-joining latent psychos who applaud when movie heroes shoot people. What on earth were [name of actor that reportedly turned down [name of famous fictional British spy franchise withheld] withheld] and [name of rightly revered character actor withheld] thinking when they signed on for this? Hot Fuzz is everything that this piece of shit is not.
Spider-Man 3
It pains me to list this movie here more than any other. Spider-Man 2 was one of my favorite movies in recent years, and I frequently rant to friends about how it’s a paragon of what Hollywood ought to be doing: like Lord of the Rings, it’s a mass-market genre entertainment that thrills, entertains, and moves. So this mess of a sequel depressed me all out of proportion to its only mere badness.
Transformers
Funny enough, it’s a pretty entertaining movie until the eponymous robots show up and start speaking, and shortly thereafter, fighting. Then it somehow becomes punishingly stupid, and considerably less fun.
Followers of this blog (a statistic which I believe can be plotted on an arc approaching zero) may have noticed an accumulation of digital dust this past year. Indeed, I watched my own blog drop off the first page of Google results for my own name. Who’s feeling lucky?
A new year, another birthday (good gravy I’m getting old), and my somewhat strong personal reaction to the movie Cloverfield recently moved me to quietly re-inaugurate this poor old blog. I’m in the early stages of hammering the basic baked-in blog template into a new design direction, which I ask readers to please overlook for the time being.
I still saw a lot of movies over the past year that I’d have liked to talk about in these pages. So coming up next are a series of posts that no one asked for and are almost certainly too late anyway: a review of the best (in my opinion) & worst (also, alas, in my opinion) films of 2007 (that I’ve seen, mind you).
Why only 8 best? Because I’m a philistine and haven’t yet seen many of 2007’s most acclaimed films (look for a post on that subject later). So here they are, in alphabetical order, and isn’t it a happy coincidence Blade Runner starts with a “B”:
BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT
It may be a bit of a stretch to include Blade Runner here, but a new cut released in theaters during 2007 ought to count, and hey, it’s my damn list. The classic has been eye-poppingly restored and is now finally definitive after a long history of compromised releases. But with Ridley Scott slinging spoilers around in interviews, and some new plot clarifications made to the film itself, it’s a pity to lose some of the wonderfully maddening ambiguity fans have cherished for decades. “Deckard might be and probably is a replicant” is a lot more intriguing than “Deckard is definitely a replicant and always has been.” But Blade Runner is still one of the most timeless, gorgeous, and influential movies ever made.
THE DARJEELING LIMITED Not just my new favorite Wes Anderson film, but also a new favorite overall. I understand that Anderson’s mannered style is not everyone’s cup of darjeeling (sorry), and that he may seem to be simply repeating himself in both style and content. But I found The Darjeeling Limited hilarious and genuinely moving, even though I’m an only child and often can’t really sympathize with sibling stories.
HOT FUZZ
A hysterically funny mashup of all the best & worst action movies ever made (but mostly The Wild Bunch and, why not, The Wicker Man), that also somehow manages to be charming and even a little heartwarming. OK, you might ask, but why does this deserve a spot on a “Best Of” list? One of the entries on my forthcoming “Worst Of” list will illustrate how badly this project could have gone off the rails.
JUNO
It’s got it all, homeskillet: cracking good dialogue, casting perfection, and a good heart. All the social conservatives that cried victory when “Hollywood” released a movie in which a young woman does not have an abortion missed the greater miracle: here’s a movie with believably rich characters of all ages, incomes, and genders, and it’s not even about abortion in the first place.
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
The Coen Brothers toss narrative convention out the window — no, wrong cliche. How about: The Coen Brothers drag narrative convention out into the desert, gut-shoot it, and leave it for dead. Even though I haven’t read the original novel, this is perhaps one of the most novelistic movies I’ve ever seen.
EL ORFANATO (THE ORPHANAGE)
A modern ghost story with dignity and class, The Orphanage nearly scared me into a coronary. And it does it all without gore and CG. OK, yes, there is a little of each, but still. (full disclosure: I work for the distribution company, and designed the official movie site)
RATATOUILLE
It’ll be hard to write this paragraph without hyperbole, but Ratatouille is one of the more perfect movies I’ve ever seen, period. I’m hard-pressed to remember any other movie that literally squeezed tears of pure delight out of me, and director Brad Bird is a genius. That’s all I have to say.
THERE WILL BE BLOOD
Commandingly confident direction, powerfully staged action, political relevance at once clear and unspoken, stunningly intense acting, and a hair-raising score. And if all that isn’t enough, it’s also blessed with the best movie title… maybe ever?
Honorable mentions:
Apocalypto (yes, really!)
Atonement
Beowulf (for Neil Gaiman’s and Roger Avery’s ballsy script, not the flawed animation)
Breach (for Chris Cooper’s performance)
The Host (comparable to Jaws, and way better than Cloverfield)
I’ll have to gang up with the general critical consensus around Elizabeth: The Golden Age, best summed up as: Cate Blanchett is astounding, as usual (yawn – the Academy Award nomination was virtually assured before the cameras rolled), but the movie is a disappointing sequel to a powerful original.
Oh, and did I mention that Cate is great? Oh yeah, you don’t need me to say that again.
The cinematography is lovely but the editing a little choppy for a timeline that spans so much time. The staging is somewhat less than epic; even large CG set pieces like the Pirates of the Caribbean-style sea battle between the English and Spanish armadas seem under-staffed by background actors. A typical line of dialog, quoting from memory, is the dashing Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) killing two cliches with one stone with a humdinger like “We’re only human; we do what we can.”
Erm, that’s about it. I’ll try to think of something smarter to say about the next one.
I believe I’m in the minority opinion here, but I really liked Across the Universe. Already loving the songs of the Beatles and the films of Julie Taymor, perhaps I’m predisposed. Taymor rounds up all the usual suspects from the Lennon & McCartney oeuvre: Lucy, Jude, Maxwell (as in “Silver Hammer”), Jo Jo (from “Get Back”), Sadie, Prudence… even the Blue Meanies from Yellow Submarine kick up their heels as Mr. Kite’s Rockettes. But unless I missed them in the crush, Rocky and Rita didn’t make the cut.
At two plus hours, Across the Universe may in fact be too much of a good thing. The Beatles wrote a great many wonderful love songs, but even these canonical classics can seem a little redundant when strung together in a series, illustrated by Jena Malone & Jim Sturgess swooning over each other over and over.
Chris Cunningham & Portishead called & asked for their fish tank back
The best sequences are the weirdest, especially the “She’s So Heavy” number which resembles something out of Alan Parker’s cracked Pink Floyd The Wall. But sometimes the interpretations are ruined by being a little too literal; the “Revolution” sequence starts out great with Jude trying to sway a radical revolutionary group away from violent protest (“But when you talk about destruction / Brother you know that you can count me out”), but he predictably points at a portrait of Chairman Mao right on cue.
She’s so heavy, indeed
Topped off with cameos by Salma Hayak (times five) and Bono in a rare dramatic role as a sort of Timothy Leary figure (sporting an entertainingly loony American accent modeled, at least to my ears, after Dennis Hoppper), this rumored-to-be-troubled production can be a little overwhelming and redundant, but it’s really something to see.
U23D is actually a fairly traditional concert movie, a mostly straight-up filmed record of a representative show of a single tour. U2 had already produced one theatrical feature film about themselves (1988’s Rattle and Hum), and released numerous productions on video and DVD before and since. So what could have been just another video of the world’s most overexposed band needed to differentiate itself somehow. Turns out the latest 3D technology filling a 40-foot screen consuming your peripheral vision is more than enough to justify its existence.
3D has come a long way from what I remember as a kid, watching Creature of the Black Lagoon on TV with red-and-blue cardboard glasses. At first, the degree of depth is disorienting and headache-inducing, but before too long the brain and eyes adjust. Your perspective is not that of the audience but as if you were standing right on stage with the lads. Sometimes I felt as if I should have been holding a tambourine!
In a state called vertigo
The old songs I’ve memorized from thousands of plays on LP, tape, CD and now iPod are still great. The martial drumbeat to “Sunday Bloody Sunday” still sends chills down my spine, and I have to admit I even choked up a little during “Pride (In the Name of Love).” I was disappointed by the relative lack of songs from the band’s 90s “postmodern irony” trilogy Achtung Baby / Zooropa / Pop, but Zoo TV Live in Sydney is a good document of that era. I now have a new appreciation for “Love and Peace or Else,” a new song from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb that hadn’t quite made an impression on me yet.
One blind Bono sez: Coexist or else
I’m a longtime fan that has never seen U2 live. There was a frustration at every opportunity; if they weren’t sold out, I was too broke, sans car, or all of the above. So U23D made a kind of stopgap pilgrimage for me. U2 must be one of the only rock bands to ever preserve the original personnel for so long; here’s hoping they stick together long enough for another tour so I can see them for real.
I get that Cloverfield is meant to be a modern day analogue of Godzilla. I get that postwar Japanese moviegoers witnessed an enraged giant lizard borne of nuclear technology stomp Tokyo flat in an unstoppable pique, and I get that Godzilla became a classic for that very reason. I get that we Westerners were long due to be attacked on film by own very own allegorical creature as pop therapy for our terrorism anxieties.
Perhaps we need that movie some time. But significantly more advanced than Godzilla in terms of visual style and special effects, I don’t think Cloverfield is that movie.
As a longtime fan of J.J. Abrams from Alias and Lost, and made a helpless sucker by the film’s clever marketing, I very much wanted to love Cloverfield. However, I found it extremely difficult to watch and to like, for two basic reasons both related to my being a New Yorker for a decade & change: I. unlikeable and unrealistic characters, and II. what can only be described as 9/11-ploitation.
I. The Characters
We know the backgrounds of only two characters, Rob and Beth. Rob has recently been promoted to Vice President of an unspecified type of company at an improbably young age, and is about to leave for a long business trip to Japan. In my understanding of lifestyles of the rich & beautiful in New York City, such young execs were more commonly found in the dot-com 90s economy, but even now still exist in scrappy new media companies like CollegeHumor.com. But let’s assume Rob helped invent the next Facebook and move on.
Yowza howza! Yes, it’s true, all New Yorkers go to parties like this all the time.
We don’t know what Beth, his one true love, does for a living, if anything. She lives with her family high up in the northern tower of the Time Warner Center (more on that later). Her stunning looks and wardrobe might peg her as model, but she appears to be a socialite born of privilege. But far from the slow trainwrecks that are Paris and Nicky, Beth appears to be a sweet, sober girl. In fact, she leaves a party not unconscious in the back of a limo, but out of propriety, to go home to bed, alone.
Us regular joes are supposed to identify with and care about these people? For all its faults, Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (another monster-attack film touching uncomfortably upon domestic disaster in a post 9/11 world) featured an everyman type character in auto repairman Tom Cruise. To be fair, Godzilla was full of white-coated scientists and teeth-gritted soldier-types, so the genre doesn’t exactly call for comparatively boring lower wage-earners that don’t live in luxury condos and party in downtown lofts.
II. 9/11-sploitation
Godzilla was utterly frank in linking the monster with the horrors of the nuclear age. So if the Cloverfield beast is a personification of terrorism, how does the metaphor fit? Did US military adventurism in Afghanistan and Iraq unearth the monster? Is the beast a heretofore undiscovered subterranean oil-feeder, angered by our draining the earth’s supply of fossil fuel?
Without a clear metaphor, Cloverfield just seems to enjoy alluding to the superficial events and imagery of 9/11 without any depth: skyscrapers “pancaking” themselves flat, streets filling with clouds of debris, ash-coated survivors struck numb. I’m not against popular fiction using metaphor to touch upon raw nerves that maybe need to be tweaked now and then… but is Cloverfield it?
Don’t worry, New Yorkers, it’s only a movie.
One of the film’s key set pieces is set atop the twin towers of the Time Warner Center. The allusion is clear, but it’s a stretch factually. Are there residential apartments in the TW Center? As both a New Yorker and Time Warner employee, this is news to me. I should also add that the geography of Manhattan as seen in the film is just this side of realistic. In a space of about 6 hours, it’s plausible the characters could make it from lower Manhattan to the roof of the Time Warner Center at the southern foot of Central Park (assuming, that is, that their young thighs are capable of the trek).
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers is one example of a sci-fi thriller that has worked well enough to illuminate concerns of the times to warrant multiple remakes. Just to name three: the original took on McCarthyism, the Abel Ferrara 90’s version looked at obedience and conformity in the military, and Robert Rodriguez’s The Faculty found the story useful as a satirical critique of high school peer pressure. But none of the various Bodysnatchers films presented us with recreations of cities pressed flat; were contemporary Japanese made sick by the sight of their horrors anthropomorphized in a giant lizard? Seeing my home city’s skyline smoking and collapsing was not something I would call cathartic.
I saw the film early evening on opening day, with an audience full of kids just out of school. The movie went over like a lead balloon; the conclusion was loudly heckled and booed. I suspect the kids mostly objected to the unconventional structure and ending. Which is, for what it’s worth, what I found best about the film: it provides a very movingly unexpected happy ending.
Kids-in-Mind is my new favorite site, boldly making no distinction between parents (looking for information about the latest piece of crap their kids are begging to see) and right-wing cultural warriors (looking for something else upon which to blame society). According to my non-scientific survey of the site contents, Scary Movie is possibly the most offensive, child-warping movie ever made, out-raunching even Borat. Honorable mention: a surprisingly strong showing by Pride & Prejudice with a Sex/Nudity score of 3 out of a possible 10. Excerpt: “A woman kisses a man’s hand and they hug. A man and a woman argue, and then they come close to kissing each other but do not.” (featuring guest reporting by Andrea)
A fascinating scrap of Hollywood history is uncovered by the New York Post: learn not only that Hitchcock snubbed Speilberg, but more interestingly, why! (guest submission from Andrea)
Horning in on our spottily-updated territory, Mean Teacher gets her Dork on and pens a proper concert review (but not before paying the price). That said, no, you’re never too old. Although it’s probably best The Peppers don’t rock out with their socks out anymore… do they?
This came out of nowhere… at least to me! Microsoft enters the web design & production market with Expression, analogous to Adobe Creative Suite in every area except Flash. Poor Adobe didn’t have a chance to properly enjoy themselves after buying their only competitor. (spotted on Daring Fireball)
Videos of the 20 Greatest Guitar Solos of All Time (no longer online: cityrag.blogs.com/main/2007/01/100_greatest_gu.html) (according to Guitar World, that is, leading to an extreme “classic rock” prejudice). In other words, 20 ugly men posturing and grimacing before thousands of sycophants. (spotted on Boing Boing)
Do you have Design Disease? Is it wrong that I’m jealous I have only a mild case compared to this laundry list of advanced symptoms? (spotted on Kottke.org)
