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Screengrab Review: "The Brothers Bloom"

Nick Schager — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

The Brothers Bloom, Rian Johnson’s follow-up to his kiddie-noir Brick, prances about with a virtual “WWWAD?” – What Would Wes Anderson Do? – emblazoned on its every frame. Taking his debut’s affectations to their ultimate extreme, Johnson’s film is a con man saga in which every symmetrical composition, whip pan, folksy song, hand-written title card, and bubbly, droll caricature seems meticulously modeled after those found in Anderson’s oeuvre, a connection furthered by the focus here on close but at-odds siblings. The duo in question are Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and his younger bro Bloom (Adrien Brody), a couple of grifters who, as an intro sequence elucidates, moved about from one foster home to another as kids, their transience the result of their preference for causing mischief such as an early ruse in which they swindled local classmates with a yarn about secret caves, hidden treasure, and fantastical creatures. Decked out in matching black suits and bowler hats that reflect their precociousness, they’re an adorable pair who grow into wannabe David Mamet protagonists, with Stephen the cocky author of their convoluted schemes, and Bloom the morose antihero who yearns for a life unscripted by his brother.

Their adventure revolves around Stephen’s plan to con a wealthy shut-in eccentric named Penelope (Rachel Weisz), the type of kook who habitually crashes her canary-yellow Ferrari and then orders a new one, and whom Stephen has chosen as a mark in order to provide Bloom with a shot at true love. Or has he? Working from his own script, Johnson immediately establishes by-now hackneyed circumstances in which nothing is as it seems, and thus nothing can be trusted, a situation meant to keep viewers on their toes but instead reduces the proceedings to a shallow, uninvolving whirligig. The Brothers Bloom wants to fool us narratively as well as trick us into caring about Bloom’s budding relationship with Penelope. Yet it fails to realize that it’s nigh impossible to invest oneself in the plight of characters who only register as fast-talking, quirkily dressed cartoons with weird hobbies, with Penelope’s raft of random, self-taught leisurely pursuits – she plays a range of musical instruments, does gymnastics, juggles chainsaws, and break-dances and DJs – conveyed via such a blatantly Anderson-esque montage that the Rushmore director could just about file a lawsuit on grounds of plagiarism.

According to Bloom, Stephen concocts cons “like dead Russians write novels,” a bit of braggadocio that isn’t confirmed by an ensuing tale that primarily amounts to a formulaic series of rug-pulling scenarios. Yet more than the particulars of the central con, which comes to include the participation of Robbie Coltrane as a buffoonish Danish accomplice and Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi as a mute animé-ish sidekick, The Brothers Bloom falters in its conception, since by forcing us to view every moment with a skeptical eye, it frustrates any opportunity to emotionally care about the madcap shenanigans engulfing the screen. Asked to embody superficially strange ciphers defined by idiosyncrasies, the cast predictably plays down to their material, the charming Weisz and soulful Brody’s performances reduced by the twee atmosphere into merely broad gestures and exaggerated expressions. From their costume-y clothes to their inflated mannerisms and dialogue, everyone involved acts like a child playing dress-up. And while Kikuchi’s too-cool-for-school mime is the story’s most gratingly cute character, it’s Johnson’s equally self-satisfied stewardship that ultimately shoulders the lion’s share of the blame. “I want an unwritten life,” may be Bloom’s recurring plea, but it’s one Johnson thoroughly rejects, his film infinitely pleased with its derivative, fanciful writerly convolutions.

Whatever Happened to Kenneth Lonergan's "Margaret"?

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:30:00 GMT

When Kenneth Lonergan, already a successful playwright (This Is Our Youth) and screenwriter (Analyze This) made his directing debut with You Can Count on Me (2000), an acclaimed small film that did big things for the careers of its stars, Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo, it seemed like the beginning of a promising career. Since then, Lonergan has had a script credit on Gangs of New York (directed by Martin Scorsese, who had an executive producer credit on You Can Count on Me); meanwhile, the years have gone by while his second film asa a director, Margaret has remained unreleased and possibly, depending on who you ask, unfinished. As John Horn reports, the movie, which was funded by Fox Searchlight Pictures and producer Gary Gilbert, was shot in 2005, and has now inspired a pair of lawsuits, one of which alleges that the movie remains unreleased because Lonergan, who has the power of final cut, has never been able to shape the material into a finished state that's to his satisfaction.

Margaret was never going to be an easy sell commercially. Based on a shooting script that ran more than 160 pages--a length that's liable to result in a two and a half hour movie--it was intended as a timely, post-9/11 parable about the nature of guilt and responsibility. Set in New York City, it stars Anna Paquin as a seventeen-year-old girl who witnesses a bus accident and becomes involved in a subsequent legal action against the driver, played by Mark Ruffalo. The cast also includes Matt Damon, as a teacher towards whom Paquin's character makes advances, and J. Smith-Cameron, who is married to Lonergan, as the girl's mother. (As if all this weren't involved enough, "Margaret" isn't the name of the Paquin character or anyone else in the movie: the title refers to a Gerald Manley Hopkins poem, “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child”, which comes up in the course of one of the classroom scenes. The list of high-powered prestige talents who worked on the movie include not one but two already-deceased producers, Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack, as well as cast members Alison Janney, Jean Reno, Kieran Culkin, Rosemarie DeWitt, Olivia Thirlby, and Matthew Broderick; Broderick, who also appeared in You Can Count on Me, is said to have loaned Lonergan a million dollars to help him complete the editing. (According to John Horn, "A Broderick spokesman said the loan was a private matter and disputed the dollar amount but did not provide another figure.") For his part, Scorsese is said to have sent in his "legendary editor" Thelma Schoonmaker to pitch in, but to no avail.

The lawsuits started flying last summer when Fox Seacrhlight "sued Gilbert and his production company, claiming he failed to pay the studio half of the film's production costs. Two months later, Gilbert's Camelot Pictures sued Fox Searchlight and Lonergan, alleging that the studio and Lonergan thwarted Gilbert's many attempts to finish the movie, forcing Camelot to pay for 'a clearly inferior and unmarketable film' that Lonergan, several people say, will not support." The $12 million that got spent on Margaret doesn't exactly make for a Heaven's Gate-style fiasco, but the situation is a source of embarrassment for all involved, not least the studio if it's true that they gave Lonergan carte blanche to make a movie that he couldn't make work--at least, not within the framework of certain conditions to which he'd agreed. (Lonergan's final-cut guarantee was contingent on his delivering a movie that was no longer than 150 minutes.) Whether Lonergan could only deliver an ambitious, sometimes brilliant failure, or if he simply turned obsessive perfectionist and couldn't let go of his baby, the studio seemed to have come to the conclusion that it was better for them to forget the movie existed rather than take it away from him and finish it for him, which would have been them look like crude buttinskys and alienated other "prestige" filmmakers they might have wanted to court in the future. Martin Scorsese reportedly declared that one version of Margaret that he saw back in 2006 was "brilliant, a materpiece." I hope he took notes.

DVD Digest for April 28, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, Hollywood January-doldrums releases start finding their way to DVD, while the studios continue to flood the market with tie-ins to their upcoming summer blockbusters.

Hey, remember three months ago when Bride Wars (Fox, also Blu-Ray), Hotel for Dogs (Disney, also Blu-Ray), and The Uninvited (Paramount, also Blu-Ray) all got released in theatres? If not, they’ll all be hitting DVD today to remind you of their existence. Other recent releases hitting stores this week: Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke in What Doesn’t Kill You (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Van Damme goes arthouse in JCVD (Peace Arch); Rod Lurie’s Valerie Plame-inspired drama Nothing But the Truth (Sony); and the documentary Stranded: I’ve come from a plane that crashed in the mountains (Zeitgeist), about the same plane crash that inspired the book and movie Alive.

This week’s biggest classics release is a pair of films from the great, controversial Japanese director Nagisa Oshima, In the Realm of the Senses (Criterion, also Blu-Ray) and Empire of Passion (Criterion). Both films, originally released during Oshima’s fertile mid-1970s period, will be released with plenty of extras, including documentaries, interviews, and even cut (sorry) scenes on the Realm disc. Also today, Criterion will be releasing a new edition of Stephen Frears’ British gangster drama The Hit, and Jim McBride’s semi-forgotten cult classic Glen and Randa (VCI) will hit stores as well.

New TV on DVD releases hitting stores today include: Seth McFarlane’s American Dad vol. 4 (Fox), and the animated series Marvel X-Men vol. 1 and vol. 2 (both Disney).

And just in time for their new big-screen counterparts to arrive in theatres, Star Trek: The Original Series vol. 1 (Paramount) and The Da Vinci Code (Sony) will arrive today in Blu-Ray only releases.

Finally, with this week’s Plot Synopsis of the Week, I’ve decided to spotlight something other than a Japanimation title this time. There are plenty of movies like Fox’s new direct-to-DVD feature Legally Blondes dumped into the market every week, but this one caught my attention mostly because it hits all the expected marks for a movie of this kind. It almost sounds like a parody. Don’t believe me? Check it out:

Elle Woods may have moved upward and onward through law school, but her pink and frilly spirit lives on in her young, adorable cousins Annabelle and Isabelle (Camilla and Rebecca Rosso). Fresh from England, the blond twosome assume their fashion savviness will help them make friends at their new California prep academy in no time flat. One can imagine their frizz-inducing horror, then, when they discover that their new place of learning is run by uniform-loving, junior-capitalist snobs! After the most influential students at school frame Anna and Izzy for a crime they didn’t commit, it’s up to the girls to prove not only their innocence but their capabilities. Reese Witherspoon presents this spin-off of the beloved franchise that helped make her a superstar. LEGALLY BLONDES is helmed by Savage Steve Holland, the quirky director of BETTER OFF DEAD and ONE CRAZY SUMMER.

Translation: Reese Witherspoon got sick of playing Elle Woods after installment #2, but she was still contracted for one more movie. So instead of shelling out to make her happy, we’ll have her “present” a cheapo version to polish off the trilogy, thereby allowing us to plaster her name in big letters above the title in order to fool those who don’t look too hard at the DVD boxes. No mention of siblings in the original films, but we can always do the “cousin” connection, since it worked for the American Pie spinoffs, right? The twist this time is that there are two of them- twins, even! No name twins, but what can you do? From there, the plot practically writes itself. Fish-out-of-water comedy, snobbish baddies, little dogs, and blonde jokes out the derriere! How could it miss? Oh, and why not get a comedy director from the eighties who needs the work?

See what I mean?

Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Films Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

BUFFALO 66 (1998)

At some point in the recent past, we here at the Screengrab compiled a list of our guiltiest pleasures, and one of mine was The Brown Bunny, which I pretty much only wanted to see because of the notorious...uh...love scene between director/star Vincent Gallo and his co-star (and former paramour) Chloe Sevigny. Such a prurient interest is sad on two levels: first, that a grown, married man would rent a movie just to watch a quasi-famous actress get busy with an allegedly prosthetic schwanzstucker...but secondly that Gallo’s sophomore directorial effort would have so little else going for it after the flat-out brilliance of Buffalo 66. Starring as an ex-con loser who kidnaps a bored teen (Christina Ricci) in hopes of passing her off as his wife in a doomed effort to impress his hateful parents (Ben Gazzara and Anjelica Huston), Gallo's Billy Brown is all jittery desperation and hostile self-loathing...yet somehow, by the end of the movie, you’re rooting for both the character and the director, while the grim, hellish landscape of upstate New York in winter (a perfect reflection of the protagonist’s stunted isolation) has somehow blossomed with unexpected hope.

YOU CAN COUNT ON ME (2000)

Sundance, like most film festivals, has never lacked for sensitive dramatic films about dysfunctional families. This entry, which marked the film directing debut of playwright Kenneth Lonergan, stood out enough to count as a redemption of the genre. It also upped the profile of its star, Laura Linney, and all but launched the career, after some ten mostly uneventful years in movies, of Mark Ruffalo. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 festival, and Lonergan (who himself picked up the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award) finally follows it up later this year when his second feature, Margaret, starring Anna Pacquin and Ruffalo, arrives in theaters.

AMERICAN PSYCHO (2001)

In the wake of The Blair Witch Project, Sundance slowly fell victim to that most dreaded of industry catchwords: “Buzz.” And as the fest’s spotty post-1999 reputation confirms, the most troublesome thing about encouraging and promoting buzz is that, when the buzzed-about don’t live up to their advanced billing, it’s the festival itself that suffers. Few films have ever arrived at Sundance with more early-bird hype than did Mary Harron’s American Psycho in 2001, given that, as an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ infamous serial killer tome, its mixture of tongue-in-cheek ‘80s details and brutal violence, all wrapped up in a Kubrickian chill, seemed to make it, in the minds of many prognosticators, an “edgy” film with Fight Club-ish cult-fave potential. Such similarities, it turned out, were superficial at best. Still, American Psycho remains, eight years on, one of the few to match its lofty Sundance expectations, thanks to Christian Bale’s pitch-perfect personification of yuppiedom as a lethal mental affliction, Harron’s eerily composed, sterile direction, and a superlative murder scene set to the ominous sound of Huey Lewis and the News.

DONNIE DARKO (2001)

Every once in a blue moon, Sundance provides a platform for a truly exciting new voice, and in 2001, that was Richard Kelly, whose Donnie Darko received enthusiastic critical and audience response upon its premiere. Kelly hailed from a film-geek background but, with his debut, refused to simply indulge in name-check homages and cheesy nostalgia, instead creating an authentic sense of his ‘80s time period and suburban milieu (and the discomfort liberals felt during Michael Dukakis’ failed ’88 presidential bid), all while offering up one giant head-scratcher of a sci-fi saga involving time travel, Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” and a menacing, knife-wielding giant rabbit who foretells news of the coming apocalypse to Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal). As assured as it is beguiling, Donnie Darko, like Christopher Nolan’s Memento (which preceded it by a year), is a genre piece that rewards and, in certain respects, requires repeat viewings to unlock its twisted chronological mysteries, something that can’t, unfortunately, be said of Kelly’s follow-up Southland Tales. Me, I say come for the mystery, stay for the entrancing atmosphere of doomed-teen-romanticism.

SUPER TROOPERS (2001)

Broken Lizard, the comedy troupe behind Super Troopers, Club Dread (2004) and Beerfest (2006), is a decidedly hit-or-miss outfit, inspired one moment and flat the next. That description certainly applies to their debut about a group of misfit-slacker state troopers, which first screened at Sundance 2001 and amounts to a series of gags that range from the brilliant to the dreary. If the latter slightly outnumber the former, however, they don’t overshadow them, thanks in part to some inspired casting – how Broken Lizard convinced serious thesp Brian Cox to participate in such inanity remains baffling – that energizes the film’s humor. But moreover, Super Troopers thrives thanks to its pièce-de-résistance involving a couple of troopers pulling over a speeding car in which the backseat teenage passenger, in an effort to avoid arrest and prosecution, has engulfed a giant bag of marijuana. The bizarre incident that follows is dim-witted goofiness of a virtuosic variety, delivering a hilarious high so powerful that it carries one through quite a bit of ensuing patchiness.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager

Morning Deal Report: Polanski and Belushi, Together at Last

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Apparently some sort of awards nominations were announced this morning. I think you can find the details elsewhere at the Screengrab.

Scorsese and De Niro. Hitchcock and Stewart. Polanski and…Belushi? JIM Belushi? Yes, it’s true, according to The Hollywood Reporter: "Tom Wilkinson and Jim Belushi have joined the cast of Roman Polanski's The Ghost, which begins filming in Berlin on Feb. 4. The movie stars Pierce Brosnan as a former British prime minister and Ewan McGregor as his ghostwriter.”

Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer) will direct “The Spectacular Now, a coming-of-age dramedy based on Tim Tharp's book,” per Variety. "It's somewhere between Sideways, Catcher in the Rye and Ferris Bueller's Day Off," said producer Tom McNulty. Well, that narrows it down.

Mark Ruffalo’s directorial debut, Sympathy for Delicious, is back on track following the shooting death of Ruffalo’s brother. “The story, written by Christopher Thornton, follows a paralyzed DJ, struggling to survive on the streets of L.A., who turns to faith healing and mysteriously develops the ability to cure the sick -- although not himself. The DJ then decides to cash in on his gift in exchange for his rock 'n' roll dreams,” per THR.

Related:
Roman Polanski Sees a Ghost
Movies We Missed: My Life Without Me (2003)

Morning Deal Report: Golden Globe Nominees Announced, NY Critics Sound Off

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Frost/Nixon and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button lead the way with five nominations each, as the Golden Globe nominees were announced this morning. Both were nominated for Best Drama, along with The Reader, Revolutionary Road and Slumdog Millionaire. Meryl Streep is nominated for both Doubt and Mamma Mia, matched by Kate Winslet for The Reader and Revolutionary Road. Other acting nominees include Sean Penn for Milk, Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler and Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight – the sole Bat-nomination. Check out the full roster here.

The New York Film Critics Circle drank up Milk, naming it the best movie of the year and honoring Penn and Josh Brolin for their performances. Happy-Go-Lucky earned kudos for director Mike Leigh and star Sally Hawkins. Penelope Cruz took Supporting Actress honors for Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Here's the full list.

“Ben Stiller is set to replace Mark Ruffalo in Greenburg, a comedy-drama Noah Baumbach is writing and directing,” per The Hollywood Reporter. Ruffalo dropped out after the shooting death of his brother last week. Greenburg “is expected to center on the intimacies of relationships in the manner of Baumbach's other films,” if that helps.

Related:
Globes Without Glitter
Auto-Baumbach-graphies

Oh Say Can You See: The "Blindness" Controversy

Phil Nugent — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Hot on the heels of the great Tropic Thunder/"retard" controversy come reports that groups for the unsighted are angry about the new movie Blindness, with the National Federation for the Blind planning protests when the film opens in theaters tomorrow. The movie, which was directed by Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian whiz kid responsible for City of God and The Constant Gardener, is a dystopian fantasy that depicts the effects of an epidemic that sweeps through a large city, rendering its inhabitants blind. It stars Julianne Moore as a woman who doesn't go blind but pretends that she has so that she can remain with her husband, played by Mark Ruffalo, when he and others who have been stricken are quarantined. The city is unnamed --the movie was shot principally in Sao Paolo, Brazil, with additional shooting in parts of Canada and Uruguay--and the characters have names like "The Doctor", "The Doctor's Wife", "The Thief", "The Accountant", and "Woman with Dark Glasses." Those capable of taking a hint might conclude that the film is intended as an allegory with symbolic characters, but when representatives of the NFB attended a preview, all they saw--or heard, and had described to them or something--was a major motion picture in which a bunch of people who instantly and mysteriously lose their sight insist on taking a glass-half-empty attitude about it. Christopher Danielson, a spokesman for the 50,000-member NFB, says that the blind "face a 70 percent unemployment rate and other social problems because people don't think we can do anything, and this movie is not going to help — at all." For instance, the movie includes images of people who are struck blind while driving, with unfortunate results. The NFB seems to feel that if anyone who sees Blindness comes away less inclined to hire someone who can't see as a bus driver, then Fernando Meirelles and Miramax will have a lot to answer for.

Nothing if not artistically ambitious, Blindness was adapted by screenwriter Don McKellar (who also acts in the movie) from the highly praised 1995 novel by Portuguese author Jose Saramago. (Saramago, who has described his book as "an allegory about the fragility of civilization", apparently took a great deal of convincing to sell the movie rights to anyone, and turned down the first offer he got from Meirelles, as well as an offer from Gael Garcia Bernal, who wound up playing the pivotal role of "the King of Ward 3.") So far, the movie hasn't been able to live up to the book's level of acclaim. It bombed at Cannes last spring and inspired walkouts when it was shown at the more recent Toronto Film Festival. Responding to criticisms, Meirelles has done considerable tinkering with it for its theatrical release, eliminating a voice-over narration and trimming a scene of "sexual violence" that set off the smoke alarms at Toronto. But there's not much he can do to placate the complaints from blind groups, which are grounded in a basic objection to the concept itself. Marc Maurer, the president of the NFB, has said that "The movie portrays blind people as monsters, and I believe it to be a lie," adding, "“The National Federation of the Blind condemns and deplores this film, which will do substantial harm to the blind of America and the world. Blind people in this film are portrayed as incompetent, filthy, vicious, and depraved. They are unable to do even the simplest things like dressing, bathing, and finding the bathroom. The truth is that blind people regularly do all of the same things that sighted people do." Including, it seems, look for reasons to get their noses out of joint over a movie.

Screengrab Fall Preview: Paul Clark's Picks

Paul Clark — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Yesterday, my colleague Scott Von Doviak dared all of his fellow Screengrab staffers to weigh in on our most anticipated movies of the fall. Given my lifelong inability to resist a dare (which resulted in my eating far too many unspeakable things in my younger days) I’ve decided to answer the call. Craving an additional challenge- and hoping to spotlight the wide array of good and bad releases coming soon to a theatre near me- I’ve decided to eliminate all contenders that appeared in Scott’s preview. Here goes:

3 UP

1. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – for years, David Fincher has been one of Hollywood’s most gifted filmmakers, with last year’s Zodiac his best film yet. With Button, Fincher turns his camera on an honest-to-goodness work of literature (an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, fer chrissakes), but don’t expect a workmanlike Tradition of Quality-style adaptation. Button re-teams Fincher with Brad Pitt, who continues to improve as an actor by seeking out adventurous material, and this story gives him his biggest challenge yet, not only playing a character from childhood through old age, but playing him while aging in reverse. It’s the kind of story that requires a visionary to pull off, and I can think of few better candidates for the job than Fincher. Every year, there’s at least one high-profile movie that I actively root for to be great, and this year, it’s Benjamin Button.

2. A Christmas Tale – Unlike Benjamin Button, the latest film by the great French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin is something of a known quantity, premiering at Cannes to almost universal acclaim. But even if it hadn’t already screened, my hopes for this one would be through the roof. In the past few years, Desplechin has become one of my favorite filmmakers, and he’s coming off his finest work yet, 2004’s Kings and Queen. Factor in that Christmas Tale re-unites four of that film’s stars- Matthieu Amalric, Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Devos, and Hippolyte Girardot- and I’m sold. That the film’s IMDb recommends the Steve Martin remake of Cheaper By the Dozen shouldn’t be held against it.

3. The Brothers Bloom – as I stated in my Trailer Review earlier this week, I’m in the pro-Brick camp, so naturally I’m excited for Rian Johnson’s follow-up project. But he’s also assembled an irresistible cast (I love Brody and Ruffalo as brothers, and Rachel Weisz is always best when she plays daffy), so I’m extra-stoked for this one. Could we be witnessing the rise of a major American filmmaker? Here’s hoping.

3 DOWN

1. Defiance – tell me if you’ve heard this one before: Ed Zwick directs a film about an outsider who aids a group of minorities in fighting about those who oppress them. That the minorities are Jews and the time period is during World War II only makes Defiance’s Oscar-grubbing even more blatant. Thanks, but no thanks.

2. RockNRolla – you know, I was under the impression that the abject failure of Revolver coupled with the divorce from Madonna meant that the moviegoing public would get a break from Guy Ritchie. Alas, that beautiful dream wasn’t to be. It was nice while it lasted though…

3. Bedtime Stories – Adam Sandler’s comic persona might be juvenile, but he’s always been at his best at unleashing his rage onscreen in decidedly un-kid-friendly ways. Less successful are his attempts to warm the heart, which makes the idea of a Sandler family comedy all the more misguided. The presence of Adam (The Pacifier) Shankman in the director’s chair doesn’t inspire much confidence either.

WILD CARD

It’s not as odd as Scott’s choice of Oliver Stone’s W. (what could be?), but I’m pretty conflicted about Quantum of Solace. What made Casino Royale so damn good is that it combined a kickass James Bond thrill ride with a legitimately compelling story. But although hiring director Marc Forster hints that the producers might be trying for that same balance of action and drama, I have my doubts that lightning will strike twice. Add to this Forster’s lack of experience in the action genre, plus the fact that unlike Casino this one doesn’t have an Ian Fleming novel to provide a solid narrative foundation, and Quantum has a lot to live up to. Sure, it might be diverting, but after Casino Royale, that just doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. However, I’d love nothing more than to be wrong about this.

Trailer Review: The Brothers Bloom

Paul Clark — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Rian Johnson’s stylish high school noir Brick was one of the more divisive releases of 2006, its purplish patois winning as many detractors as fans. I count myself in the latter group, so naturally I’m excited to Johnson’s new film The Brothers Bloom, and this trailer makes me even more so. Based on the trailer, the film looks to be a Richard Lester-style globetrotting caper that Steven Soderbergh has never quite been able to get quite right in his Ocean’s franchise. But it’s the performers who have me really intrigued, with Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo as the titular con artist brothers, and Rachel Weisz playing charmingly goofy as their eccentric mark. It’s also nice to see Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi as something a long way removed from the victimhood of her previous American film, as the group’s “muscle.” I have yet to hear much about the film itself, but based on its pedigree and now this trailer, I’d place it among my most-anticipated movies of the fall.

Morning Deal Report: Please, No "Bucket List" Jokes

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Production on the indie The Confessions of Charlotte Doyle was scheduled to start next month, but that may not happen for a reason you’ve probably heard about by now. Morgan Freeman, who was set to co-star in the film with Pierce Brosnan and Danny De Vito, is scheduled to undergo surgery for injuries suffered in a car accident late Sunday night in Mississippi. Freeman was reported to be in serious condition yesterday, but the latest reports suggest it’s not quite time for the actor to start making out his bucket list. (I know I promised I wouldn’t make that joke, but as it turns out, I’m completely shameless.) According to his publicist, Freeman “has a broken arm, broken elbow and minor shoulder damage, but is in good spirits.” Variety reports, “None of his other projects are expected to be affected. Freeman will star in The Human Factor, the Nelson Mandela bio that Clint Eastwood is directing for Warners, but that shoot isn’t skedded to begin until early next year.”

When selecting news items for the Morning Deal Report, sometimes a title alone is enough to catch my attention. For instance, Drink, Play, F@#k. Warner Bros. has acquired the rights to the book of that title, described by the Hollywood Reporter as “the provocatively titled comedic male retort to the femme-centric best-seller Eat, Pray, Love. The soon-to-be-published Play, by comedy writer Andrew Gottlieb tells the fictional story of Bob Sullivan, a man who, seeking solace after his wife leaves him, goes on a bender in Ireland, takes a gambling jaunt to Las Vegas and a embarks on a sex-tourism trip to Thailand.” This should create some challenges for the marketing department. How exactly do you pronounce that last word anyway?

Finally, Mark Ruffalo will make his directorial debut with Sympathy for Delicious. I’m thinking it’s either about a dog or a drag queen, but I’m wrong on both counts. Per Variety, it’s the story of “‘Delicious’ Dean O'Dwyer, a paralyzed DJ struggling to survive in his wheelchair on the streets of L.A. He turns to faith-healing and mysteriously acquires the ability to cure the sick -- although not himself.”

Related:
Clint Eastwood Would Like Spike Lee to Shut His Face
Will Barack Obama Be America's Next Great Black President?

Cannes 2008: Late-Breaking News!

Paul Clark — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:19:00 GMT

One week ago today, the Cannes Film Festival powers that be unveiled this year's selection of films in Competition. But while there was plenty on that list to get excited about, it seems they weren't finished, as today they announced three more selections in the official Competition lineup.

True to form, one of the latecomers was a French entry, and it proved to be a pretty interesting choice: Entre les murs, the latest film by celebrated filmmaker Laurent Cantet, whose previous works included the 2000 film Time Out. Another American film was added today as well- Two Lovers, the latest from We Own the Night's James Gray, a Cannes favorite. Two Lovers, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Gwyneth Paltrow, is said to be a romance, making it something of a change of pace for Gray, who has to date specialized in crime stories.

But the big news today was the announcement of this year's opening-night film, Fernando Meirelles' Blindness. The film, which stars Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo, will screen in competition, with its pedigree the hope is that it improves on the dicey precedent set by recent Cannes openers such as Fanfan la Tulipe and The Da Vinci Code.

Added out of competition was the opener of the festival's Un Certain Regard sidebar, Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen (no, not that one). Finally, the closing film of the festival was officially announced as being Barry Levinson's What Just Happened?. Sadly, this star-studded film (the cast includes Robert DeNiro, Bruce Willis, and Robin Wright Penn) is a Hollywood satire, not a big-screen adaptation of the long-forgotten sitcom Wha'Happened?. So all you Mike LaFontaine fans in the audience will be sorely disappointed.

But wait, there's more! Two more names were added to the Official Competition Jury (also announced last week), which brings the jury up to nine members. The additions were French actress Jeanne Balibar (who worked with fellow jury member Sergio Castellitto in Va Savoir)...

... and Iranian writer/director Marjane Satrapi, who directed last year's Jury Prize-winner Persepolis and collaborated with jury prez Sean Penn on the English-language version of the film.

The Cannes Film Festival will be held from May 14 through the 25th.

Trailer Review: Blindness

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This is a first-rate teaser in the classic sense, in that it gives audiences a taste of the film's premise and little else. I'd venture a guess that all of the footage we see here is taken from the opening twenty minutes of the film- we meet the characters, the plot (taken from a novel by Jose Saramago) is introduced, and the titular malady escalates to epidemic proportions. It's tantalizing and highly effective. Like Children of Men's Alfonso Cuaron before him, director Fernando Meirelles appears to bring a certain level of deep-seated spirituality to the film's science-fiction roots, something that's apparent even in this relatively short teaser, which is nonetheless full of ethereal fades to white and Gods'-eye-few camera shots. Also, it's nice to see Julianne Moore working in a project worthy of her talent again, after too many ill-fitting comedies and cookie-cutter melodramas, and costars like Gael Garcia Bernal and the always-compelling Mark Ruffalo should make a good match for her.

"Chicago 10": Cartooning the Sixties

Phil Nugent — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:00:00 GMT

When Alex Cox was trying (unsuccessfully) to make a movie version of Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and later, when Terry Gilliam was (successfully) trying to make it, both of them reportedly pissed off Thompson by announcing their intention to incorporate animated sequences into their films. The good doctor is said to have objected to the idea of having his masterpiece reduced to "a goddamn cartoon." This reticence, which in Thompson's case may have been related to a feeling that Garry Trudeau owed him some royalties, may turn out to be the key failing in Dr. Gonzo's longtime mission to make sense of the sixties. Since Gilliam's movie came out, a younger generation of filmmakers seems to have taken up the idea that the period can only be captured as a goddamn cartoon. A couple of years ago, with A Scanner Darkly, Richard Linklater used rotoscope animation to capture a look and feel that he found appropriate to Philip K. Dick's surreal vision of paranoia among druggie burn-outs. Now, the documentarian Brett Morgen (best known for The Kid Stays in the Picture, the movie version of the autobiography of Robert Evans — speaking of cartoons) has employed brightly colored "motion capture" technology for Chicago 10, his film about the trial of '60s political radicals that grew out of the violent chaos of the 1968 Democratic Convention. (At the start of the trial, the defendents were collectively known af "the Chicago eight"; they became better known as "the Chicago seven" after one of them, Bobby Seale, after being bound and gagged in the courtroom at the orders of Judge Julius Hoffman, had his case severed from that of the others. The title of the movie is meant as a way of paying tribute to all of them as well as their lawyers, Leonard Weinglass and the late William Kuntsler.)

Morgen, who was born not long after the convention, sees his relative youth as an advantage here. "The world simply did not need another movie about the ’60s made by someone from the ’60s," he says. "We weren’t making a movie about 1968 per se. I don’t want to smell patchouli. I don’t want to see bell-bottoms." He says that he was driven to return to the protest culture of the sixties as a way of challenging what he sees as the political apathy of his own generation and those younger — and towards that end, instead of the usual hippy-dippy music choices, he includes newsreel footage of Chicago cops thrashing protestors to the accompaniment of Rage Against the Machine. (The movie also features voice work by Jeffrey Wright as Seale, Liev Schrieber as Kunstler, Hank Azaria as Abbie Hoffman, Mark Ruffalo as Jerry Rubin, James Urbaniak as Rennie Davis, Dylan Baker as David Dellinger, and the late Roy Scheider as the famously demented Judge Hoffman.) Towards that end, the movie concentrates on the trial as an example of (often hilarious) political theater, a kind of media prank. Though by all accounts it is scrupulously accurate in its details, some of the original participants take exception to its revolution-can-be-fun angle. "This is an Abbie Hoffman story." says Tom Hayden. "Abbie was a great rebel, but there is a danger in theatricalizing history." To which Leonard Weinglass adds, "The film is entertainment, but it is not a political education." (It should be noted that the idea that the trial could best serve its political purposes as an example of living satire also dates back to the time of the trial itself; as early as 1970, just months after the trial ended, Bantam published a paperback collection of comic highlights from the court transcripts. It was titled The Tales of Hoffman and included a chortling introduction by the radical "political critic" Dwight Macdonald.) For his part, Morgen is so high on trying to "get the story out" that he's thrilled by the news that Steven Spielberg is thinking of making his own Chicago seven/ eight/ whatever movie: "We’ve been consulting with them and providing them with our databases." In the meantime, the surviving participants will continue to learn what Hunter Thompson already knew about the dangers of becoming a cartoon. Or as Leonard Weinglass says, complaining about his animated doppelganger's costume design, "Never in my life have I had a lavender suit."

Academy Awards Also-Rans

Phil Nugent — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Now that the Academy Award nominations have been announced, we can all buckle up and wait to find out who the lucky non-winners are. Don't get us wrong: an Oscar win has a lot to recommend it. It bestows upon the recipient not just bragging rights but a new, higher pay ceiling and, if he doesn't screw it up the way Kevin Spacey did, a privileged glow and a long-term shot at juicier roles. But as anyone who's spent ten minutes reading about Cary Grant or Alfred Hitchcock knows, there's nothing that sets a major Hollywood figure apart like never having won an Oscar — that is, a real Oscar, and none of that special lifetime career achievement bullshit. Then, every time someone writes a profile of you, they can set aside a moment to tear their hair out over the fact that you never got the big prize — and everyone, including the people who'd never given it a second's thought before, will automatically do you the honor of agreeing that, yes, it is a shocking thing now that you mention it. In recent years, the sudden realization that Paul Newman and Martin Scorsese, to name two examples, had never won Oscars set off palpitations in the entertainment media, and cries went out urging the Academy to do the right thing, to make sure that they did not go to their graves un-Oscared, even if it meant honoring, by association, such lesser works as The Color of Money and The Departed. It's hard not to feel that, by finally joining what sometimes seems to be the majority, these men lost a little something that had previously set them apart from the likes of Red Buttons, Cliff Robertson, Roberto Begnini. One would think that Scorsese, with his ravenous enthusiasm for obscure and neglected filmmakers whose posthumous reputations glow with the luster one associates with misunderstood genius, would get this as much as anyone, but the lure of the little gold statuette is a powerful one. Let's take a moment to honor some of the people who will have to content themselves with asking Marty how it feels to hold one.

BEST ACTOR: Except for Johnny Depp and Viggo Mortensen, all the nominees here are already lost souls, with Oscars already stashed in the broom closet. Still, George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones have only won for Best Supporting Actor in the past, so I'm sure it would feel a little special if they were able to corral one for being top banana. (Jones's nomination is also notable for being the only direct evidence included in the list of nominations that there was something this past year called "movies about the Iraq war.") Notable among the missing: Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey, Jr. of Zodiac, two very fine performances that could just as easily have been shoehorned into the Supporting Actor category, but which had the misfortune to have been included in a movie that really took it on the chin for having been released early in the year. (The Academy has traditionally favored movies that were released late in the year and so were fresh in the minds of voters, a tradition that the development of home video has done surprisingly little to reverse.) The Academy did reach back to movies released in the first half of 2007 in order to bestow a Best Actress nomination on Julie Christie for her work in Away from Her, but Gordon Pinsent, who had to carry that picture, and whose performance was equally fine, was slighted, which may have something to do with the fact that no Academy voters have fond memories of having used a picture of him torn from the pages of Vogue to help them get through puberty thirty years ago. Similarly, Will Smith's performance in I Am Legend, a movie that he was obliged to keep alive single-handedly for long stretches, was in its way every bit as impressive a feat of movie-star acting as Clooney's glamorously world-weary turn in Michael Clayton, but he was in a movie about fighting rabid vampires, whereas Clooney was in one about reaching deep down into the pit of one's soul and learning to say no to the forces of evil, represented by a bunch of lawyers who could easily be taken for rabid vampires if you squint.

BEST ACTRESS: It's really no surprise that one of the most remarkable performances seen this year, that of Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog, isn't here: the movie was, again, released a very long time ago, it wasn't a hit, and in the ranks of people remembered for having been on Saturday Night Live, Shannon is probably closer to Chris Farley's side of the scale than Bill Murray's in the public mind. That could change if she gives many more performances like this one, but God knows where she's going to find the roles. It's a bit more surprising that Angelina Jolie's A Mighty Heart has sunk without a trace; it's not the best performance of the year, nor is it Jolie's best performance, but in a year that, as usual, was not overflowing with instances of women being given the chance to strut their stuff in big, juicy parts, you might think that Jolie's lending whatever muscle she has a movie star to telling the story of Daniel Pearl's widow would get her a token nod. Maybe all the factors that it had going against it — released in the summer, box-office failure, heavy subject matter, plus the mixed feelings that so many people seem to have about Jolie (is she a star, or a tabloid freak?) created a kind of perfect storm. Ashley Judd's wild-eyed, insane sexy mama in the off-Broadway sort-of-horror picture Bug was something to see. I don't know if the studio even bothered to send out screener copies to Academy voters, though if they were on the fence about it, I'd have chipped in for the cost of the postage, just so I could fantasize about how many of them would end up calling in priests to exorcise their DVD players.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Chris Cooper punted two good shots the Academy's way, first with his creepy performance as treasonous spook Robert Hanssen in Breach, then with an excellent demonstration of the character actor functioning as secret star in the big action flick The Kingdom, but the Academy passed on both. Steve Zahn was amazing and heartbreaking as a doomed P.O.W. in Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn; he didn't get nominated either, but just last week he was amazing again, effortlessly channeling Robert Duvall as the young Gus McCrae in the Lonesome Dove prequel, so maybe the Emmys will make it up to him later. Jeff Daniels' straight-talking blind man in The Lookout deserved more attention than it got, and Clarence Williams III made a solid meal of about two (uncredited) scenes as Bumpy Johnson in American Gangster. (Ruby Dee did get nominated for Best Supporting Actress for playing Denzel Washington's mother in that movie. Her performance isn't nearly as rich as Williams', but she's certainly due for a little attention, and maybe the Academy figured, regarding her and Williams, that it was either one or the other.) The funny thing is that the category is padded out with people — Casey Affleck, Javier Bardem — who got enough screen time in their movies to qualify as lead actors. Bardem's Supporting Actor status feels like it's rigged to make it easier for him to claim the award, though I'd look for a late surge to form behind Hal Holbrook after people realize that he's not only nominated but actually still alive and capable of being cheered by a win.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: I don't get the universal consensus that Cate Blanchett was a supporting actress in I'm Not There. I guess that, again, it comes down to amount of screen time, but nobody else in that movie had any more screen time than she did; certainly nobody else put theirs to as good a use. I probably wouldn't mind so much except that, by shoving her into this category for her phenomenal performance, it feels as if the Academy is shafting Amy Ryan, nominated for a hair-raisingly skanky performance as a bad mother for the ages in Gone Baby Gone, and Tilda Swinton, whose completely reprehensible and yet completely understandable corporate villain gave Michael Clayton a surprising amount of its soul. A little tinkering might have left room for Marisa Tomei, who in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead made Philip Seymour Hoffman's faithless wife convincingly empty and slow-witted and shallow in her dissatisfaction with her existence, yet still made her seem very much worth screwing up your life over. This would have also been the place to honor little Nina Kervel-Bey, who made one of the year's most remarkable debuts in the French film Blame It on Fidel. She's actually the star of the movie, but from Tatum O'Neal to Abigail Breslin, the Academy has traditionally shoved little girls into the Best Supporting Actress category, as if "supporting" were synonymous with "short." Appearances to the contrary, Ellen Page turns twenty-one next month, so her nomination in the Best Actress category (for Juno) does not break this trend. It would have been nice, though, if Page's co-star Jennifer Garner could have been sandwiched in here. In The Kingdom, Garner is still trying to prove herself as an action heroine, with mixed results, but she gave the performance of her career so far in Juno — a carefully nuanced performance and a brave one, one that depended for its (and the movie's) full effectiveness on the actress's willingness to slowly open up to the audience and reveal what's on the inside of a woman who has the shell of a frosty yuppie robot.

BEST DIRECTOR: The fun in this category has usually been in thinking about how it feels to be the one director who wasn't nominated even though his movie was nominated as Best Picture. However he may laugh it off in public, you know that the message he thinks he's getting is, "And last but not least, nominated for Best Picture in spite of having been directed by..." This year it is the director of Atonement, the esteemed young filmmaker what's-his-name, who has to wonder if everybody thinks the actors built the sets while he was in the bathroom and came up with their blocking while he was at lunch. Suffice to say that Julian Schnabel, the director of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, fills out the category just fine, though it might be even finer if, say, Jason Reitman had somehow been overlooked in favor of Zodiac's David Fincher. Another surprisingly plausible contender might have been Ben Affleck, who sure did a hell of a lot better job behind the camera on Gone Baby Gone than he's ever done in front of it. Affleck may not have the face of a director — that's a compliment, Ben — but I'm in favor of anything that encourages him to stay back there.

Top Ten of 2007: Paul Clark

Paul Clark — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Note: Like Leonard, I don’t live in one of what Hollywood would consider a major cinematic market, so I have yet to see some of the year’s best-reviewed films, such as There Will Be Blood and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. But I think it’s better to post this now rather than waiting until I’ve seen all the major movies, which for all I know won’t happen for months.

10. The Hunting Party

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again- 2007 was a damn fine year to be a movie lover. Because of this, there were probably a dozen films competing for the final spot on this list, but in the end I had to go with a sentimental favorite, one that deserves much more love than it’s gotten so far. Richard Shepard's darkly comic tale of three journalists (Richard Gere, Terrence Howard, Jesse Eisenberg) searching for a Bosnian warlord succeeds not so much because of its story as for its salty, unironic portrait of male friendship. As in Shepard’s last film The Matador, The Hunting Party is a story about men drawn to violence who booze and bond in outposts far off the beaten path. At a time when Brokeback Mountain is still a punchline, it takes real chutzpah to write a scene in which one man tells another, “that’s why I love you,” without going for a laugh.

9. Time

Korea’s prolific and controversial director Kim Ki-duk has become something of a whipping boy for the cinematic cognoscenti, but there’s no denying that the guy’s got skills. Time, his best film to date, appears on the surface to be a response to Korea’s plastic-surgery craze, but at its heart it’s a story of amour fou, like Seconds played for tragedy rather than thrills. In Kim’s hands, plastic surgery becomes a metaphor for how self-conscious we’ve become, so insecure in our skin that we’re no longer able to simply give ourselves over to others, not even those we love. Also, Kim’s gift for astonishing imagery is as keen as ever, especially in his use of a seaside sculpture park.

8. I’m Not There

The premise- six actors playing six different versions of Bob Dylan- sounds like an academic exercise only a semiotics major could love. But each onscreen Dylan is only a pawn in the game of director Todd Haynes, a piece of the puzzle that has become the Dylan mythos. With his ingenious structure, Haynes highlights the contradictions, tall tales, and outright fabrications of Dylan’s legend, revealing him to be less a self-conscious chameleon reinventing his image for the public as a lifelong searcher who cared little whether we wanted to follow. The wonder is that I'm Not There is so much fun- sometimes electrifying, sometimes goofy, but always fascinating.

7. Offside

The idea that Iranian women aren’t allowed to attend soccer games would seem to be the setup for a dour polemic, but director Jafar Panahi has other plans for their story. In Panahi’s eyes, the law isn’t so much an injustice as a colossal pain for all involved, and by highlighting the absurdity of the situation, Offside becomes the stuff of high comedy. And a rousing crowd-pleaser to boot- Panahi shot much of the film in the bowels of the stadium during an actual World Cup qualifying match, and even at a distance from the field, the energy is palpable. In the end, football is a uniter, not a divider, and once the detained women escape their captors to mingle with their celebrating countrymen, they’re able to share in the victory that their laws had tried to deny them.

6. Joshua

In a year that saw Rob Zombie’s Michael-heavy remake of Halloween, one might be excused for wondering what an evil-kid thriller was doing on my list. But George Ratliff’s Joshua is another breed altogether- a genre movie in the abstract, but a particularly chilly and thematically-rich one. Moreover, Joshua is very much an of-the-moment bad seed, not some pint-sized supernatural boogeyman but the product of ineffectual and indulgent parenting. Jacob Kogan is creepy in the title role, but the real revelation is Sam Rockwell, giving the performance of the year as his father, a man whose parenting skills are limited at best, and who is ill-equipped to deal with a son whose behavior goes so sharply against his own. When he finally realizes what he’s up against it’s too late to stop it, and thanks to Ratliff and Rockwell, this realization hits with the power of a gut punch.

5. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

In Assassination, director Andrew Dominik plays a tricky game- to make a Western that doesn’t so much de-mythologize the genre as re-mythologize it by making explicit the undercurrent of mythmaking that was always a part of the West. It could have been a disaster, but somehow it works beautifully, thanks not only to the beauty of the filmmaker but also the performances. Brad Pitt is fine as a Jesse James who is all too mindful of the larger-than-life figure he cut in the West, but the film belongs to Casey Affleck as Ford, the youngster whose boyish hero worship festered into violent obsession. Ford was foolish enough to believe that he could create his own legend, but all he did was to be swallowed up by Jesse’s, and because of Affleck’s performance this reviled figure becomes downright tragic.

4. The Host

The best giant monster to attack theatres this past year didn’t stomp Tokyo, but Seoul, in the superior Korean creature feature The Host. With a flair for showmanship and populist storytelling that nearly equal those of Spielberg in his Jaws days, director Bong Joon-ho has made a monster movie to stand alongside the greats in the genre. Part of the credit should go to the effects wizard who created the disgusting yet somehow lovable monster, but I dare say the movie wouldn’t work so well if not for the endearingly flawed family at the movie’s center. Even on a list this full of darkness and despair, there’s always a place for pure, unadulterated entertainment, and The Host gave me more sheer moviegoing pleasure than any film of 2007.

3. Gone Baby Gone

Most of the praise for Gone Baby Gone has centered on the film’s performances- especially the much-feted Amy Ryan- and the surprising amount of thematic resonance to be found in the film. But I think director Ben Affleck deserves a great deal more credit for how powerful this film is than he’s been getting. Most obviously, Affleck has a real feel for his setting- a working-class South Boston neighborhood- and the people who inhabit it. But while this location seems at first like backdrop to a mystery involving a kidnapped child, it eventually takes center stage in the story, which turns into an breathlessly compelling study in the consequences of tribalism. “Guys take pride in where they’re from, like it was something they did,” states protagonist Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck- again!) in the film’s opening voiceover. The tragedy is that Kenzie- thinks himself above it all- buys into this idea as much as anybody.

2. No Country for Old Men

For most of its running time, No Country for Old Men works primarily as an uncommonly exciting chase thriller, in which the overmatched Lewellyn Moss struggles to stay ahead of stone-cold killer Chigurh (Javier Bardem). But while first two acts of the film are enough to mark it as the Coen brothers’ best work in years, it’s the final act, which avoids the expected confrontation between Chigurh and Lewellyn in favor of something more philosophical, that the film to another level of greatness altogether. An observer for most of the story, Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) suddenly comes face to face with the idea that even if you run from the evil that you fear may be hiding behind one door, there’s no guarantee that it won’t be waiting for you behind another. “You can’t stop what’s coming,” indeed.

1. Zodiac

From the beginning, David Fincher’s evocation of the still-unsolved case of the Zodiac killer has been something of an anomaly. It’s a serial-killer movie that practically never goes for cheap thrills, and a three-hour fact-based period piece that’s almost bereft of epic sweep. In short, it’s tough to put my finger on what exactly makes Zodiac such a masterpiece. For me, the most awe-inspiring aspect of the film is its near-obsessive attention to detail, one that’s downright fanatical even by the standards of the true-crime genre. But using the thousands of tiny clues and incidental pieces of business that surrounded the Zodiac case, Fincher immerses us fully in the world of the case, one in which the crime-solving technology and interdepartmental procedures of the day were always several steps behind the schemes of the killer.

Also worth mentioning: Everything Will Be OK (sorry, no trailer)

When I was making this list, I decided to restrict myself to feature-length films. However, taking into account all new movies I saw this past year, none hit me quite as hard as Don Hertzfeldt’s thrilling new animated short, Everything Will Be OK. In little more than fifteen minutes, Hertzfeldt tells the story of a man who is doomed to die. His doctors give up on him, his mother moves in to help, and the man himself goes off the deep end. And then, without warning, he suddenly gets better, much to everyone's annoyance. Everything Will Be OK has the feel of an especially good Raymond Carver story, both in its sense of irony and its reliance on small but significant detail, but the twisted sense of humor and unique animation style is all Hertzfeldt. Call it number zero in my top 10.

Morning Deal Report: Step Up for Scorsese Pic

Peter Smith — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Mark Ruffalo has joined Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's Dennis Lehane adaptation Shutter Island.

John Cusack may star in Weinstein Co.'s period drama Shanghai. Gong Li is already attached. Sort of a departure for him.

Remember the Tom Swift books? Neither do I, but if you do have fond memories of the series, prepare for them to be trampled.

— Peter Smith

Movies We Missed: My Life Without Me (2003)

Peter Smith — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Mark Ruffalo has had an interesting career. He became an indie poster boy and critical darling overnight with the release of You Can Count On Me. He did his bank account a favor as the leading man in regrettable movies like 13 Going On 30 and Just Like Heaven. But he balanced those with ultra-indies like We Don’t Live Here Anymore and XX/XY. He’s also played detectives for big-name directors (Jane Campion, Michael Mann, David Fincher) to results varying from questionable to near perfect. As Ruffalo returns to the screen this week as a troubled father with a haunting secret in Terry George’s Reservation Road, we wanted to look back at one of his most honest and exposed performances, in the rarely seen My Life Without Me, where he plays a man who unknowingly falls in love with a terminally ill, married woman.

Why we missed it:

If it weren’t for the help of Pedro Almodovar, Isabel Coixet’s English language debut may never have been seen very far outside of Spain. Even with Almodovar’s name attached as a "presenter," the terminal-cancer plotline was a hard sell.

The cast of talented but little-known actors didn’t immediately draw attention.

Why we should have known:

Ruffalo's presence should have raised some eyebrows.

The trailer hints at the hopeful and inventive tone of the film.

Why we ended up kicking ourselves:

Sarah Polley and Ruffalo both give knockout performances without a single moment that feels forced or false. Together they convey the rush of discovering love, and the heartbreak of its eventual loss.Scott Speedman and Leonor Watling prove effortless in supporting roles.

The potentially heavy material is treated with skill and imagination. Coixet, working from a short story from author Nanci Kincaid, looks for the real.

Why we may have been better off without it:

There are unnecessary cameos (Debbie Harry) and an annoying co-worker (Amanda Plummer). But those are easily forgiven.

— Bryan Whitefield

Chicago Film Writing Roundup

Peter Smith — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

On occasion, the Screengrab lets me bring you news from the rich world of film writing in my home town of Chicago. In the Tribune this week, foreign correspondent John Crewdson — inspired by Rendition — contemplates whether or not 'message' movies are really effective vehicles for spurring social change, and film blogger Michael Phillips talks to Mark Ruffalo about how his religious upbringing influenced his art. In the Sun-Times, Miriam Di Nunzio gets Malcolm McDowell to make the curious admission that he doesn’t think Caligula "is as bad as it once was" (has it somehow gotten better over the years?), and local legend Roger Ebert wins a Gotham Award from the Independent Feature Project. And in the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum, as part of his upcoming "Unseen Orson Welles" project, brings us the Italian neo-Marxist Giorgio Agamben’s choice of "the most beautiful six minutes in the history of cinema." — Leonard Pierce