2007 Film Notes

Tomorrow New York Film Critics Online (NYFCO) convenes to vote on best movie, actor, etc. for 2007. NYFCO currently has 27 members, including Rex Reed who writes for the New York Observer and who was a frequent guest on the Tonight Show when Johnny Carson was the host. In the past few years, NYFCO awards have been getting a fair amount of press coverage since movie reviews on the Internet are becoming more and more of a factor in ticket sales.

Roger Ebert may be endangered, Entertainment Weekly on its way to extinction. Have you noticed how many no-name critics are suddenly serving up pithy opinions about movies, books, music, and video games on the Net?

Amazon.com may have been one of the first sites, in the mid-1990s, to allow its users to share their thoughts about a book, just below the venerable Publishers Weekly or Booklist write-up. Now, such sites as Blogcritics.org collect reviews written by bloggers, and Apple’s iTunes Music Store allows users to share their iMixes lists of favorite songs on a particular theme, like “NJ Best,” a selection from Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, and other musicians with roots in the Garden State.

“The cultural influencers are changing,” says Brian Kalinowski, chief operating officer of Lycos, the Waltham Internet portal. “Expert opinion in the media used to drive culture. Now, it’s peer recommendations.”

Already, consumers can sample a broader range of critical opinion on the Internet some of it relevant and thoughtful, covering products that wouldn’t ordinarily be reviewed by the mainstream media, and some of it biased or one-dimensional. (“This game rocks!” ) And marketers, such as movie studios and book publishers, are trying to figure out how Internet tastemakers figure into their relationship with their customers.

–The Boston Globe, April 30, 2006

Although most of my reviews are about obscure documentaries and independent fictional films, particularly those made in Asia, I try to keep up with what’s coming out of Hollywood, especially as the NYFCO awards meeting draws near. Over the past couple of months, I have received over 50 DVD’s from the publicity department of major studios for review. I have not been able to get to all of them, but here is a brief review of those that I have seen–including those that I already saw in the theater. Most of the films are not currently being show in theaters today, but I expect that they will be available from Netflix before long. At the end of this post, I will show you my ballot for the NYFCO 2007 awards–for what it is worth.

Best of the pack:

1. Into the Wild–reviewed here.

2. Before the Devil Knows You are Dead
This is a crime story involving two brothers deeply in debt who decide to rob their parents’ jewelry store. It has some elements of “Fargo”, but is not played for laughs. The script is by Kelly Masterson, who was a theology student before becoming a screenwriter. The fact that he had to knock on doors for seven years before the film was produced might tell you something about how awful Hollywood has become. Thank god that Sidney Lumet, the 83 year old veteran director, decided to work on it. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the older and more ruthless brother and Ethan Hawke the younger and weaker one. They are simply terrific, as is the story.

3. Gone, Baby, Gone
Although Ben Affleck has gotten terrible press (and deservedly so) for his acting jobs in recent years, he did an excellent job directing this film based on a novel by Dennis Lehane that Affleck adapted. Lehane also wrote the novel that Clint Eastwood’s “Mystic River” was based on. As you might know, Lehane’s novels use the gritty, Irish-Catholic, crime-ridden world of Dorchester and South Boston as a backdrop. In this film, Casey Affleck, Ben’s younger brother, plays a private eye who will supplement the police investigation of a kidnapping. The kidnapped child is the daughter of a junkie who stole money from a dealer. The film is both highly effective as a conventional crime story and as an exploration of deeper moral issues, especially one that involves the near impossibility of doing the right thing in a situation that defies easy black-and-white resolution.

4. Michael Clayton–reviewed here

5. The Namesake
Based on a popular novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, it is a family chronicle involving Indian immigrants trying to adapt to American society. The son is named Gogol Ganguli after his father’s favorite author–hence the film’s title. Gogol is caught between two worlds, especially when it comes to choosing between American and Indian women. “The Namesake” proceeds at a leisurely pace and does not have any kind of histrionics–in keeping with the customary restraint of the Indian family at the core of the film. It takes a while to build momentum but pays off in the end.

6. A Mighty Heart–reviewed here

7. The Hoax–reviewed here

8. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
I plan to write about this and a number of Jesse James movies after finishing T.J. Stiles’s excellent debunking of the Jesse James legend, but can report now that this is a reasonably entertaining affair. Robert Ford is played by Casey Affleck, who I nominated as “breakthrough” artist in my NYFCO poll. Brad Pitt does an excellent job bringing out the psychopathic character of Jesse James in the same fashion as he did in “Kalifornia,” another movie in which he played a serial killer.

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Middle of the Pack (These are films that I managed to watch until their conclusion–mostly out of morbid curiosity. Since my standards are so exacting, this does amount to a kind of recommendation, like damning with faint praise.)

1. The Brave One
Jodie Foster as a combination of Bernhard Goetz and the character that Charles Bronson played in the “Death Wish” movies. After Foster and her boy friend are attacked–him fatally–in Central Park, she gets a gun and becomes a vigilante, inadvertently at first. Since this New York City appears worse than Baghdad today, it is hard to take seriously. I only stuck with it because Foster can make any movie interesting.

2. Atonement
An overblown mess based on Ian McEwan’s 2002 novel. A young man from the lower class falls in love with a woman from the gentry before WWII. For reasons not worth going into here, the woman’s younger sister, an aspiring writer with an overheated imagination, falsely accuses him of being a rapist and he is forced to enlist in the army. The middle section of the film is set in Dunkirk with the dregs of the British army being forced to retreat back across the channel. This is somewhat ironic since McEwan, a diffident supporter of the war on terror, got the opportunity to see something analogous in Basra just 5 years after writing “Atonement”.

3. Eastern Promises
I actually wasted 7 dollars (senior admission price!) on this nonsense. As a big fan of David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen, who combined to make the reasonably entertaining “A History of Violence”, I had high hopes for this. Mortensen plays a Russian gangster living in London who becomes friends with the nurse caring for an infant delivered from an unconscious and hemorrhaging fourteen-year-old mother who had been raped by a fellow gangster. None of the actors playing the gangsters are native Russians so their delivery reminds me a bit of Boris and Natasha in “The Bullwinkle” cartoon shows of yore. Leaving aside the delivery, the drama is a second-rate version of “The Godfather”.

4. There will be Blood
This is based on an Upton Sinclair novel about evil oilmen in California at the turn of the century. It opens in theaters during Christmas week. The director is a 37 year old named Paul Thomas Anderson whose best known credits are “Magnolia” and “Boogie Nights,” a movie based on a porn star. He seems totally uninterested in politics and based his screenplay on the first 150 pages of Sinclair’s novel. In the novel, the father is estranged from his son who has become a radical and sides with striking oilworkers. In the movie, the son hates his father because an accident at an oil rig has left him deaf. Well, that’s what we are led to believe in the absence of any other plot elements. The movie is mostly about the oilman Daniel Plainview, who is played by Daniel Day-Lewis. He has captured Anderson’s attention in the way that William Randolph Hearst captured Orson Welles’s attention in “Citizen Kane”. However, Anderson is no Welles, to put it mildly. Daniel Day-Lewis looks like and sounds like the evil water works magnate that John Huston played in “Chinatown”, another movie about rotten millionaires in California. If Anderson is no Orson Welles, neither is he a Roman Polanski. He should stick to subjects that he is more familiar with, like the comedy “Punch Drunk Love” that he did with Adam Sandler. Apparently, Anderson is a huge fan of Adam Sandler. Poor Upton Sinclair. He deserved better.

5. La Vie En Rose
Biopic about Edith Piaf. In keeping with the convention, the movie is one long series of scenes showing the great singer as a selfish, drug-addled, mean-spirited creep. Critics fell over themselves in praise of the star Marion Cotillard, who basically did an Edith Piaf imitation rather than convey the inner spirit of the singer. That is obviously the fault of Olivier Dahan, who wrote and directed it. Dahan pays no attention to Piaf’s role in helping young artists like Yves Montand since that would have interfered with his aim in turning Piaf into a kind of pathetic gargoyle. Like Upton Sinclair, she deserved better.

6. Zodiac
Despite lavish praise from the critics, this movie based on the unsolved San Francisco serial killings from the 1960s left me cold. Directed by David Fincher, it is less about detective work than it is about obsession. Jake Gyllenhall plays an illustrator at the SF Chronicle who becomes consumed with trying to identify the killer. I became consumed with trying to stay awake during this 158 minute movie. It was like watching paint dry.

7. 3:10 to Zuma
Russell Crowe plays a bandit that a deputy (Christian Bale) is escorting to a train destined for prison. He has to fight off members of Crowe’s gang. That’s about it. It is lovely to look at (lots of sunsets, mesas and cactuses) but completely boring. The director James Mangold also directed the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line”, for what that’s worth. I didn’t hate either movie but felt utterly disappointed.

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Losers. These are films that I could not find the inner resources to watch for more than 10 or 15 minutes.

1. Knocked Up–reviewed here

2. Things We Lost in the Fire
Stars Halle Berry as the widow of the character played by David Duchovny, whose best friend–a junky loser–moves in with her after his death. I found the situation totally unbelievable and the characters precious in a sort of second-rate version of an Ang Lee movie. The always canny Slant Magazine described it thusly: “With all the characters busily turning their lemons into lemonade, this film risks little and demands nothing from the viewer save tears of empathy.” I once told Ed Gonzalez, my NYFCO colleague at Slant Magazine, that he should receive combat pay for being forced to sit through such dreadful messes until the closing credits. No amount of money could persuade me to do so.

3. Talk to Me
Biopic about a Black radio DJ from the 1960s named Petey Greene, an ex-con who is played by Don Cheadle. The film is really quite bizarre, using implausible situations to move the plot forward. The movie, at least the 15 minutes that I could bear, has a musty quality as if you have stumbled into one of those 1930s Mickey Rooney movies in which Andy Hardy overcomes all adversity to stage a hit musical in his home town.

4. Redacted
DePalma has made a faux documentary that is obviously inspired by “The War Tapes”, which was the result of putting video cameras in the hands of actual GI’s in Iraq. As is with the case with just about all DePalma movies, there is a Grand Guignol quality that makes you feel that his GI’s stepped out of the final moments of “The Shining”. This sort of bent aptitude can come in handy when it comes to movies about Al Capone, but hardly does justice to the true conditions of GI’s in Iraq, who are inspired more by the prospects of a college loan than torture and murder. For that kind of documentary to succeed, it would require putting video cameras in the hands of the architects of the occupation–not the hapless souls who carry it out.

 

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New York Film Critics Online 2007 Awards Nomination Ballot

NAME: Louis Proyect

Breakthrough Performance (name actor/film)

1. Casey Affleck (Jesse James; Gone, Baby, Gone)

2. Emile Hirsch (Into the Wild)

3. Kal Penn (The Namesake)

Supporting Actress (name actor/film)

1. Sarah Silverman (I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With)

2. Amy Ryan (Gone, Baby, Gone)

3. Zuleikha Robinson (The Namesake)

Supporting Actor (name actor/film)

1. Tom Wilkinson (Michael Clayton)

2. Casey Affleck (Jesse James)

3. Ethan Hawke (Before the Devil Knows You are Dead)

Screenplay (name film)

1. Into the Wild

2. Before the Devil Knows You are Dead

3. Amu

Cinematography (name film)

1. Into the Wild

2. No Country for Old Men

3. There Will be Blood

Film Score/Music (name film)

1. There Will be Blood

2. Into the Wild

3. Eastern Promises

Debut Director (name directors/film)

1. Shonali Bose (Amu)

2. Molly Bingham, Steve Connors (Meeting Resistance)

3. Henriette Mantel, Steve Skrovan (An Unreasonable Man)

Director (name directors/film)

1. Sean Penn (Into the Wild)

2. Ben Affleck (Gone, Baby, Gone)

3. Sidney Lumet (Before the Devil Knows You are Dead)

Actress (name actor/film)

1. Angela Jolie (A Mighty Heart)

2. Tabu (The Namesake)

3. Konkona Sen Sharma (Amu)

Actor (name actor/film)

1. George Clooney (Michael Clayton)

2. Brad Pitt (Jesse James)

3. Philip Seymour Hoffman (Before the Devil Knows You are Dead)

Ensemble Cast (name film)

1. I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With

2. The Namesake

3. Amu

Picture (name film)

1. Into the Wild

2. Before the Devil Knows You are Dead

3. Gone, Baby, Gone

Foreign Language (name film)

1. The Host

2. Zebraman

3. Illuminated by Fire

Documentary (name film)

1. Sicko

2. Meeting Resistance

3. An Unreasonable Man

Animated Feature (name film)

1. Ratatouille

2.

3.