A Liar's Autobiography - 2012 - 2.5 Stars

Directors: Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson, Ben Timlett
Cast: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Carol Cleveland

Monty Python's Flying Circus is one of my formative comedic influences, I remember regularly watching The Holy Grail and Parrot Sketch Not Included, a best of compilation on VHS before I turned 12. I didn't understand half the jokes, but the performances, the jokes I did understand and the frequent nudity, which in retrospect my parents probably forgot about, made the the troupe a staple of my pre-adolescence. Over time my pre-adolescent enjoyment slowly morphed into a profound comedic and intellectual respect for what I still consider to be the greatest sketch troupe of all time. So even though I know most reunion projects merely tap into fans nostalgia so they will fork over money before inevitably being disappointed, I was very excited when I saw that A Liar's Autobiography would be premiering at TIFF 2012 and it was one my most anticipated movies of the festival.

A Liar's Autobiography uses previously unheard recordings of Graham Chapman's semi-fictionalized, satirical biography, that were recorded for an unreleased an audiobook and adds new voicework from the living Pythons (minus Eric Idle) while switching between close to a dozen different styles of animation throughout the film. The animation is for the most part excellent (though I would have loved to see a section directed by Terry Gilliam) and the use of several different animation styles lends the film a marginal amount of chaos and surreallism, but everything that surrounds the animation is conventional, but the film thinks otherwise. Chapman's book satirizes vapid celebrity autobiographies and he has an interesting story to tell, but the filmmakers perspective is vastly different from Chapman's. In the film Chapman's story is being told posthumously and the film undoes most of Chapman's satire of celebrity hagiography as the directors turn their film into the type fawning biography Chapman was mocking. Chapman poked fun at overwrought deterministic narrative's about fame, but the directors are such big Python fans that they can't stop themselves from deifying Chapman as a troubled comedy god who left us mere mortals too soon.

The film opens with a story from Chapman's book about a live performance of The Oscar Wilde Sketch. The directors recreate this sketch via animation and voiceover and while the dialogue doesn't change, the timing, the energy and the performances are all slightly off. The punchlines don't land like they should and somehow most of the humour is sucked out of a brilliant piece of comedy. The film ends with the footage of John Cleese's eulogy for Graham Chapman a transcendent eulogy and one of the highlights of the film, but something the directors did not create. These two moments bookend the film and make an compelling argument that the vivacious subversive wit that made Monty Python so special cannot be recreated and reinforce how bland much of this movie is. The film is not terrible, it's breezy and entertaining, but also slight and inessential, like a really well done YouTube animation. Recently I watched most of the original Flying Circus TV series. I didn't watch the final season, a shortened season, that didn't feature John Cleese. I was told it was largely inessential and didn't think much about it, however after watching A Liar's Autobiography, a facsimile of Python  I wish I had spent my time watching that final season instead because at least it's the real thing.

9.79* - 2012 - 4 Stars

Director: Daniel Gordon
Subject: Ben Johnson's steroid scandal in the Seoul Olympics.

Canadians who consume a lot of American culture and media, like myself, very quickly develop an inferiority complex. I am irrationally excited when I see the Blue Jays, the Raptors or hockey being discussed on ESPN. It doesn't matter why we are being discussed, I am just happy that we are being talked about. To some this may seem like a case of social-media manufactured generational narcissism, but I see the same reaction from fellow Canucks of all ages; even if the discussion is just thirty seconds on PTI about Jeff Frye hitting for the cycle. So even though I was in utero when Ben Johnson set the 100m dash world record and had it taken away during the Seoul Olympics of 1988, I have a strong connection to that race; it is literally a nascent moment for my sports fandom.

9.79* is an engaging, well researched, well shot documentary that also confirms every thought my reptilian sports brain has about this race, the use of PEDs in sports and Carl Lewis's assholery. Gordon biggest coup is  interviewing all the participants in the gold medal heat and allowing them to paint a thorough picture of the track and field world in the 1980s. These men all provide a different perspective on the race: Desai Williams speaks about being Ben Johnson's teammate, Calvin Smith's effeminate drawl voices the strongest anti-PED sentiments and Robson De Silva's has a zen like view of the past as he hang glides over Rio De Janiero. The two stars of the race and the documentary are Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis and while Johnson's frankness is refreshing, Lewis's slipperiness makes him a much more intriguing character. Lewis's ambitions didn't stop at athletics and in interviews it is clear he is equal parts athlete, celebrity, politician and businessman. He is so interested in protecting himself and his brand that it seems like he is always hiding something. His Machiavellian nature makes him a charismatic heel for this documentary, especially when contrasted with Johnson's frankness, a frankness that is usually only present after someone has already been caught.

The results of the race in Seoul are common knowledge for most sports fans; Gordon recognizes this and doesn't bother hiding those results to construct dramatic tension. Instead he takes information that is public, but not common knowledge and parcels it out in such a way that he creates dramatic tension by obscuring his rhetorical point until the last act of the film when he drops the hammer in a satisfying way. Admittedly, his rhetorical point happens to defend someone who I still consider to be one of Canada's great athletes, vilifies a hated American athlete, plays into my general cynicism about how widespread PED use was and still is and vindicates all the beliefs I've held about Ben Johnson for my whole life. So while others may not share my belief that the final act of the film is brilliant payoff from the restraint shown earlier, Gordon's access and visual style, make the movie one of the most entertaining 30 for 30s and a must watch for fans of the series.

24 years later Ben Johnson's victory and scandal are both two of the biggest in Canadian sports history. It's one of the few stories in Canadian sports history that people around the world remember. Fans of dynastic teams have a wealth of experience to draw back on Yankees fans can root for the current team or be nostalgic about Bernie Williams, Reggie Jackson, Mickey Mantle, Joe Dimaggio and Babe Ruth. When you routinely root for mediocre non-public teams you must cherish the moments in the spotlight you get. In 1988 Ben Johnson had an iconic track and field performances and outperformed a legendary Olympic athlete from our biggest rival, then he tested positive for stanozolol. At least he was the lead story on ESPN for awhile.

Everyday - 2012 - 2 1/2 Stars

Director: Michael Winterbottom
Cast: Shirley Henderson, John Simm, Johnny Lynch

Michael Winterbottom's new film Everyday was commissioned by BBC Channel 4, who wanted Winterbottom to make a story about the prison system. It is the story of a mother of four and her husband who is in prison for reasons we don't know and never discover. It's shot entirely in digital, has a documentary aesethic and I assume is heavily improvised. The film has one large extra-textual conceit, it was filmed over 5 years so the children in the film could age properly throughout shooting. Bad aging makeup and multiple child actors playing the same character is something that irks me, so while I intellectually appreciated Winterbottom's choice and the producers for humouring his obsession, ultimately the payoff for this decision is nothing more than a "hey, that's kind of cool" and it only enriches the films on the margins.

The film itself is a low-key naturalistic British drama about a middle class family and a determined mother struggling to make ends meet. The title Everyday is appropriate because it tends to focus on minor day to day events for a family who's patriarch is temporarily incarcerated . Winterbottom and co-screenwriter Laurence Coriat avoid the melodramatic climaxes one would expect from a movie about a single mother with an imprisoned husband and instead focus on how one accepts and adapts to this major change on a daily basis. As with the children's aging in the film,  I enjoyed Winterbottom's intimate-micro perspective of a family on a cerebral level, but no others. Shirley Henderson gives a great performance as an overworked mother, but the low stakes throughout the movie make everything feel inconsequential; as if we were watching a collection of the well shot and edited home videos. I commend Winterbottom for trying an interesting experiment, I just wish the results were more dynamic.

Something in the Air (Après mai) - 2012 - 2 1/2 Stars

Director: Oliver Assayas
Cast: Clément Métayer, Lola Créton, Felix Armand, Carole Combes

Making autobiographical movies is a tricky proposition; the director must walk a thin line between using their experience to craft a detailed, naturalistic aesthetic and telling stories that no one else cares about. Something in the Air is a fictionalized adaption of Oliver Assayas's non-fiction essay A Post-May Adolescence. It follows Gilles, an Assayas surrogate, during the summer after his second to last year in high school as he bounces between different French socialist organizations, hippy communes and his father's work while he tries to find himself romantically, artistically and professionally.

The film has a loose, meandering structure, which is designed to mimic our hero's lack of focus as he travels from group to group. At times it's a successful series of focused vignettes, but as the revolutionary movements Gilles is associated with begin to splinter and lose power, so does the film. The film's first hour is dynamic and lively, but the second half loses that energy as the story shifts to one of what happens when youthful vivaciousness fades. The film's second half rings true thematically and historically, but it's a slog to watch the dissolution of revolutionary movement not via coup, but via waning interest and mild evolutions in maturity.

Assayas's strong authorial voice gives the film a strong sense of place, but also causes it to veer into self-indulgence. Assayas digs deep into his own record collection, which gives the film a sense of time and place beyond a generic "the 70's". The soundtrack replaces 70's staples from Sticky Fingers and Who' Next (which I doubt they could afford had they wanted to use them anyways) and replaces them with Captain Beefheart and other more eclectic musicians that Assayas has a connection with. Assayas indulging his musical taste is delightful, the conversations name checking his personal favorite political philosophers are less so. I appreciate that the high-schooler's in the film possess an intellectual surety that can only be held by teenagers. To them the choice between being Trotskyite or a Leninist is the equivalent to the choice between Communism and Fascism, but this specificity is draining during long conversations where Assayas references his favorite philosophers even as it gives the film the same detailed textures I liked about his soundtrack.

Roger Ebert ended his review of Midnight in Paris, by saying , "I'm wearying of movies that are for 'everybody' — which means, nobody in particular." I appreciate that Assayas made a movie that is for someone in particular, but as the movie dragged on it felt like I was watching friends tell a story that I wasn't present for and was littered with inside jokes I didn't get. There is someone in particular who will love this movie, but it's not me.

Frances Ha - 2012 - 4 1/4* Stars

Director: Noah Baumbach
Cast: Greta Gerwig, Mickey Sumner, Michael Zegen, Adam Driver

In a world full of formulaic mainstream comedies and formulaic indie's that are generously called comedies, Noah Baumbach's newest film Frances Ha manages to be as funny as the crude, banter heavy mainstream comedies, while having stronger character work than the multitude of indies about post-college ennui. Frances Ha is a movie about the friendship between Frances (Gerwig) and Sophie (Sumner) and how these two women-children's relationship changes as they grapple with impending maturity and responsibility. A generic premise, but one that gains traction from focusing on female friendship (this movie passes the Bechdel test with flying colours) and strong execution.

The coming of age indie is a tired genre and though Frances Ha uses some genre tropes Baumbach and Gerwig's script is so singular that it never feels derivative. Frances Ha's originality is a function of Greta Gerwig, who gives an amazing naturalistic performance; eventhough her character is chock full of eccentricities, they all feel true to life and not screenwriter created manic-pixie dream girl "look at how much of an individual I am" traits. In addition to Gerwig's great performance the screenplay economically creates well-formed characters in short amounts of screen time via specificity. Hip movies walk a thin line between referencing ephemera to create a positive association with the audience and using ephemera as a touchstone to provide information about characters. Frances Ha mainly sticks to the latter; characters aren't working on "their screenplay" they have fixed the second act to their Gremlins 3 screenplay. These details peppered throughout help world-build and contribute to the great chemistry between the ensemble cast.

Frances Ha was shot in black and white; in a post-screening Q&A Baumbach cited Manhattan; an obvious inspiration. The decision  to shoot it in black and white is not just an homage it gives Frances Ha a strong visual aesthetic that was missing from previous Baumbach films and separates it from the generic sepia-toned, digital look of a lot of coming of age indies. This aesthetic is present on the soundtrack where classic rock and music snatched from French New Wave films refreshingly replace the Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes and other cabin-dwelling, mandolin playing, indie music that are used to show melancholy, inspiration or any other emotion that one might feel in an existential crisis. Shooting in black and white and using classic rock are hardly groundbreaking decisions but it is indicative that every decision in film was purposefully made. On the surface, this is a generic coming of age story, but the direction, acting, writing are all elevated and combine to produce one of Baumbach's strongest films.

*The quarter star is to indicate I preferred this to The Squid and The Whale which I think is a 4 star movie.

Argo - 2012 - 3 Stars

Director: Ben Affleck
Cast: Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, Alan Arkin, Kyle Chandler

Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, thrice is a trend and after seeing Ben Affleck's latest film Argo, I think it's fair to say that Ben Affleck is a pretty damn good director who is capable of consistently making entertaining, albeit superficial Hollywood thrillers. Argo is based on the true story of a CIA agent who went undercover as a film producer scouting locations for a sci-fi film in Iran so he could smuggle American hostages back home during the Iran hostage crisis of  1980.

Argo is a competently shot film that is well-edited, especially during large suspense set pieces where the audience different people performing disparate actions in various locations in close to real time. However, while those segments are well-edited they do strain credulity as we are regularly forced to believe that people halfway across the world are coincidentally performing actions at the last second to save our ragtag group of misfits. When used sparingly yhese kinds of scenarios are classic tension builders in heist movies, but are employed so frequently throughout Argo that crowd-pleasing gears of the movie's plot start showing.

Affleck's pedigree must have helped in casting, where in addition to the names above Richard Kind, Phillip Baker Hall, Bob Gunton and other familiar character actors regularly steal scenes when given the chance to.
It's a fun caper that is already getting some undeserved Oscar buzz, because it's about an important moment in recent American history and is being publicized as a historical drama instead of a light caper. The final shots of the movie was offputting and felt like a cynical attempt to garner pathos for the hero and generate even more oscar buzz, but ultimately Argo is an entertaining two hours and a well-executed, funny, suspenseful, Hollywood thriller, something which is becoming increasingly rare.

Tabu - 2012 - 2 1/2 Stars

Director: Miguel Gomes
Cast: Teresa Madruga, Laura Soveral, Ana Moreira, Henrique Espirito Santo, Carlotto Cotta, Isabel Cardoso

There are structural elements in Tabu which must be talked about. I won't give away key plot points, but there are structural spoilers.

Tabu tells two stories; the story of three elderly women in Lisbon in 2011 and a story narrated by a man named Ventura in 2011 Lisbon. Ventura tells the story of a tryst with one of the aforementioned women and his narration is a constant presence throughout the the second half of the movie, which is titled Paradise. In Paradise Director Miguel Gomes uses many techniques to showcase the haziness of memory; some are well-worn like the use of grainy film, while others are daring, but unnecessarily restrictive; outside of the narration there is almost no audible dialogue in the second half of the film. Eventhough Gomes shows characters speaking the audience can only hear diegetic sounds and music.The decision to not use dialogue, while innovative, hampers the film because it prevents the audience from fully-rendering the main characters in Paradise.

The characters are stock-tpes; our hero is a daring rebel, handsome with long hair and a wispy mustache. The man he cuckolds is a stuffed shirt with short hair cut, a proper appearance that hides his unseemly political motivations. The woman at the center is a free-spirit tomboy who feels repressed by the men in her life. It's too bad the characters are so thinly drawn, because the mise-en-scene and sound design are impeccably constructed throughout. During the climax of the film there are two unforgettable shots, but I found myself more invested in the quality of those shots than the life changing events that befell our leads in those unforgettable shots.

Oral storytelling is a building block of civilization, but it's also an incredibly narcissistic act. It's difficult to consistently duplicate, it's slow and it's told from one perspective. The oral tradition is in many ways more about the singular power given to the storyteller, than the sense of community and history it fosters. In Tatu, Miguel Gomes plays with inherent narcissism of oral storytelling as we regularly see African servants in the periphery of our narrator's grand-tale of unrequited loved. The trials and tribulations of the servants are of actual significance, but they are sidelined so an old man can tell his story about the one that got away. While this is a savvy criticism of western culture, I don't think Gomes is trying to implicate the audience for caring about this affair at the expense of the horrors of colonialism, which makes the ironic distance achieved from the perspective he gives us even more alienating when we the film shifts back to the love story we are supposed to care about. Tabu features a Portugese cover of the Ronnette's classic Be My Baby, which is an excellent metaphor for the film. All the technical brilliance, innovation and craft is still present, but there is something off, which prevents the art from having any emotional resonance.

The Raid Redemption - 2011 - 4 1/2 Stars

Director: Gareth Evans
Cast: Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, Donny Alamsayah, Yayan Ruhian, Pierre Gruno

The Raid: Redemption follows an Indonesian SWAT team as they try to takeout a legendary crime lord who is holed up on the top floor of an apartment complex in the slums of Jakarta. Most of the apartment complex's residents are junkies, drug dealers or other criminals who will do whatever possible to protect their lawless building and its leader. If you are intrigued by this premise, you will like the movie. If you are on the fence about the premise, you should watch the first 15 minutes, if you like them, you will like the movie. If  you don't like the premise or the first 15 minutes you won't like the movie and your brain hasn't been turned to mush from playing too many video games.

The Raid has been compared to relentless video games in so many reviews that I was wary of it in the way I am often wary about arthouse fare. Do I really want to watch 90 minutes of uninterrupted asskicking / closeups of butterflies narrated by an elderly Swedish man? To my surprise Gareth Evans showed some restraint and made a well paced movie: the scenes between fights are all competently acted, drive the plot and allow the audience to catch their breath, before the electronic music kicks in and we are ready to see some more skulls bashed via Pencak Silat, an Indonesian Martial Art.

At times the movie is slightly overwhelming and feels like a Streets of Rage type video game where Axel (or whoever you chose) goes into one generic setting, get rushed by several bad guys and stays in that setting until a sufficient number of buttons have been mashed/people have been killed that he can advance to the next stage. To combat this problem Evans wisely creates a number of disparate settings within the apartment complex, which gives each fight an aesthetic that differentiates it from previous fights and gives the fighters different peripheral items to creatively murder people with. However Evans' best defense against monotony is impeccable choreography and cinematography that supersedes the occasional repetitiveness of the fight scenes.

This Sunday I was watching Breaking Bad when a couple of non-watchers entered the room and started asking questions about the show "Is that the dad from Malcom in the Middle?", "Why is the meth blue?", "His name is Heisenberg ... bad ass" and so on. At this point I excused myself for the room and wasted time until I could watch the 12:30 rerun without any distractions. I am not particularly proud of my actions, but what other people would describe as minor annoyances are horrible tragedies that prevent me from watching my show the "proper way". As I watched The Raid: Redemption, my testosterone frequently spiked to such highs that it could only be released by unintelligibly exclaiming "HOLY FUCKING SHIT WAS THAT A HAMMER?" I looked over to my friends who were also screaming unintelligibly and realized in this case I was watching the film in the proper way.

The Dead Zone - 1983 - 2 1/2 Stars

Director: David Cronenberg
Cast: Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Martin Sheen

I am afraid my citizenship might get revoked for admitting this, but The Dead Zone is the first Cronenberg movie I have seen and even worse, I didn't really care for it. There are moments of excellence in the film, so it's not as if I have given up hope on this plucky underdog Jewish-Canadian filmmaker but I, like most people, don't like being disappointed.

The Dead Zone is an adaptation of a Steven King novel about Johnny Smith (Walken) a man who awakes from a coma with the ability to foresee other's futures when he touches them. As someone who has seen Ed Glosser Trivial Psychic too many times to count and is vaguely familiar with Cronenenberg and Steven King, I was expecting a hammy Walken performance, some good horror setpieces and a Twilight Zone type ironic twist. I got all of that, but there was a lot of brooding in between the elements that I liked, which ruined the films pacing and muddled the film's message.


The double-edged nature of supernatural powers is a common theme in science-fiction and while the quandaries faced by Johnny Smith are addressed throughout the film none are given enough screentime to give the story thematic relevance. Should Johnny Smith be playing God with his supernatural knowledge? Does he have a moral responsibility to use his power even if it causes him immense physical pain? Is sacrificing the ability to have personal relationships worth gaining the power he has?* There is lip service given to all these questions and some others (like a brief detour where Johnny Smith is a local celebrity) but most of the conversations about these questions are clunky and one-sided and all of they cannot all be answered in one 90 minute feature. Cronenberg tries to answer all of them, while having a dense plot and in the process ends up answering none of them.

Muddled themes aside there is still a lot to like about this movie: Walken doesn't just give a great hammy performance, he gives a great performance and shows real humanity and restraint throughout. Martin Sheen gives a dynamic performance as an evil, charismatic, politician and Cronenberg wisely gets wooden performances out of the rest of the cast so Walken and Sheen's energetic performances standout even more than they usually would.

After watching the movie, I read the plot summary of Stephen King's novel on Wikipedia and the film, like most adaptations diverges from source material. As I read the summary I kept thinking to myself "this could be a great movie". It's too bad that Cronenberg didn't deliver a film with a more focused thematically or narratively to take advantage of some great performances and source material.

*Most glaringly his lack of personal relationships isn't solely a function of his power, it's also a function of his coma and while there is a movie to be made about people in coma's acclimatizing to society, The Dead Zone is not that movie.

Lost in America - 1985 - 3 Stars

Director: Albert Brooks
Cast: Albert Brooks, Julie Hagerty

Albert Brooks is one of the great comic minds of his generation, whether doing stand up, performance pieces on late night shows or directing short films on SNL, he always manages to inject his projects with a unique point of view, strong comic conceits and a feeling that anything can happen. Despite his talents, I find it amazing that there was a point in history where Albert Brooks could write, direct and star in a movie and even more surprisingly that he was allowed to keep making movies after his previous projects failed commercially. It's not surprising he never had a big hit, his leading men are brash, neurotic, obnoxious and arrogant. He's Alvy Singer if Alvy actually confronted the blowhard talking about Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall. Brook's descendants include George Costanza and other popular supporting tv and film characters, but none of Brooks' progeny have had success as leading men, because spending a lot of time with them is exhausting.

Lost in America opens with a long tracking shot through David Howard's (Brooks) darkened home, as David listens to Larry King interview film critic Rex Reed. I initially thought was an interview written for the movie, but it is the audio from an episode of King's radio show. In the interview Reed talks about how he'd rather watch a comedy by himself than in a crowded theatre and that he "doesn't respond very well to mass hysteria anyways". It's a petty way for Brooks to open the movie, especially because most of his output seems to be arguing against a "get laughs at any cost" ethos and is more about subverting audience expectations and not pandering to the audience. (See his standup about opening for Richie Havens on Comedy Minus One). Some cursory googling has shown me that Brooks is taking shots at Reed for giving his earlier films poor reviews and while the opening scene provides hooks the audience it also feels childish and exploitative.

Outside of establishing an uncharacteristically strong visual style for a comedy, this opening sequence has very little bearing on the rest of the film, which is about David Howard missing out on a promotion, blowing up after missing the promotion, quitting/getting fired and deciding to sell his house to pay for an early retirement so he can travel the country with his wife (Julie Hagerty) in a Winnebago. The movie's premise opens the door for some insight on how people fall into routines and end up living boring, unsatisfying lives, as they hope each minor improvement in car/job/home quality will solve everything. Unfortunately the Howard's journey off the grid begins with a large deus ex machinas, that undermines everything the film tries to say about upper-class ennui. Choosing to enter an early retirement and leaving the rat race is not equivalent to being forced to work at Der WienerSchnitzel to pay for rent at a trailer park, but the end of the film seems to be promoting this false equivalency.

Lost in America is still the product of a unique comic mind and features some top notch comic setpieces and one off gags. The scene where Brooks gets fired cements him in a class with Bob Odenkirk and John Cleese as one of the great comedic yellers of our time. A scene featuring Gary Marshall as a Casino floorman is a real highlight and is a great piece of sketch comedy. Julie Hagerty gives an off beat performance that is very good and that somehow matches Brook's energy, however ultimately this movie is a disconnected group of funny performances and setpieces that don't build to a larger thematic point, despite its best efforts.

Zelig - 1983 - 4 Stars

Director: Woody Allen
Cast: Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Patrick Horgan


Zelig is a fake documentary about Leonard Zelig: The Human Chameleon. A man who has such an intense desire to be liked that he takes on the characteristics of other people in his environment, including gaining weight, growing facial hair or even changing the colour of his skin if need be. I call Zelig a "fake documentary" and not a "mockumentary" because it predates the original mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap and it shares no stylistic characteristics with Guest films or The Office style TV shows. It is not improvised and has zero talking head interviews. It is not aping fly-on-the-wall documentaries, it is aping historical documentaries. Allen and Gordon Willis impeccably recreate this genre whose primary tools are two classic stimulants: archival footage and professional narration. Casting Patrick Horgan, the voice of dozens of Sherlock Holmes audiobooks, as the narrator, gives the fake documentary authenticity and the film a straight man. Allen plays the funny man and his mannered, nervous speech plays well off Horgan's dry narration. Horgan is delivering monologues for most of the film, but Allen's writing and directing and performance consistently wring laughs out of gags in "historical" pictures, videos and songs.


It can be tough to notice because it's often cloaked in self-deprecation or perfectly-constructed jokes, but Woody Allen is very perceptive about the human condition. His self-deprecation cloaks soul-baring moments in irony, which lessens their emotional impact, but is also true to his characters. Their neuroses are not quirks, but defense mechanisms because the characters are too afraid of saying something honest and direct about themselves without being protected by a veil of cleverness. The documentary framework of Zelig might appear overly clever, but it mirrors Allen's characters; their film is full of winking ironic moments, but the story is still told in a realistic way. The structure allows Zelig to satire documentaries, news media, males roles in society and The Golden Era Hollywood, however Zelig is a minor figure and if his story were told it would probably be told in psych-textbooks and dry black and white documentaries. The commitment to imitating, but not mocking the genre grounds the movie and prevents the pervasive irony from ruining the film's sentiment.


The premise of Zelig seems so broad, like a mediocre SNL sketch, that through the first act I found it hard to believe there would be any insights on human behaviour. However I didn't really care because there are so many great one liners throughout, " I have an interesting case. I'm treating two sets of Siamese twins with split personalities. I'm getting paid by eight people." "I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. Freud felt that it should be limited to women." "The Ku Klux Klan, who saw Zelig as a Jew, that could turn himself into a Negro and an Indian, saw him as a triple threat." However as the movie progresses it turns into a poignant fable about conformity, insecurity and neurosis. If one tries to fit in too much they lose their unique humanity, if they constantly speak their mind they are boorish and obnoxious: the goal is to find the unattainable golden mean. Similarly Zelig needs to maintain a tonal balance between a legitimate insight on humanity and killer punchlines that threaten to undermine the earnestness that is earned via the original insight. Fortunately Allen's ability to maintain a tonal balance is one of his great strengths and he succeeds in making a wickedly funny, touching, reflection on neurosis and an effective love story.

The Dictator - 2012 - 3 Stars

Director: Larry Charles
Cast: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris, Ben Kinglsey, Jason Mantzoukas

"It's screamingly, hysterically, laugh-through-the-next-joke, laugh-for-the-next-week funny. It's so inventive…This is a film by an original and significant comic intelligence."

"A comic put-on of awe-inspiring crudity and death-defying satire and by a long shot the funniest film of the year. It is "Jackass" with a brain and Mark Twain with full frontal male nudity."

"Wildly funny. Its best jokes approach some savage, atavistic core of cultural taboo and make the viewer wonder: Is it really possible to laugh at this? But by the time you formulate that question, it's too late: You're already laughing."

"The result is a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high-and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism."

Those who pay attention to the critical consensus and review aggregators are aware that those laudative reviews are not about The Dictator. They are about the first Larry Charles directed, Sacha Baron Cohen vehicle, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. When Borat was released I was already a huge Baron Cohen fan because of his HBO series Da Ali G Show. I was incredibly excited to see Borat, especially after it received the kind of hyperbolic praise quoted above, but I ended up underwhelmed. I never liked watching more than 2 episodes of Da Ali G Show back to back because it was too uncomfortable and Borat was 84 minutes long; almost three episodes back to back. As a result the movie felt much longer than it actually was. I don't know if this is true, but It felt like most of Borat's raves were from people unfamiliar with the TV show, the satire in the film was no more cutting than the dozens of episodes I'd seen on HBO and it was odd that what I thought was another addition to the Baron Cohen oeuvre was being called his magnum opus.

My other criticism of Borat, which sounds hypocrtitical given my praise of the TV show, was how loosely plotted it was. It was a series of set pieces back to back with loose bits of connective tissue about Borat trying to find Pamela Anderson because he saw her on Baywatch in Kazakhstan. After watching The Dictator, I realize that one of Borat's biggest strength and its most dangerous decision was its loose structure. I can't think of a single post-Borat comedy with a wide-release that was more concerned with delivering hilarious comic set pieces than servicing love interests or redeeming our hero or raising the stakes via cliches (sick parent/grandparent, house foreclosing, etc). Even when idiosyncratic comedic voices are given the opportunity to make a film, their films inevitably follow a generic structure: our hero is at point A, hits rock bottom, meets a girl, slowly climbs up to above point A to point B, falls to even lower rock bottom usually due to a plot contrivance introduced in the first act, triumphs at the end marries the girl and rises to point C where everyone is happy. Lots of mumblecore movies follow this arc, every Apatow movie follows this arc, even Pootie Tang which possesses a bizarre and unique comic voice follows this arc and The Dictator follows this arc.

A lot has been made about televised drama surpassing film dramas in the new millennium, I feel that argument is incorrect and reductive for reasons I may outline in a longer post, but ultimately it is because film directors have more varied perspectives and means of expressing themselves than television show runners. Not a lot has been made about television comedy surpassing, movie comedy and I feel there is a much more compelling argument to be made in favour of that because televised comedy favors idiosyncratic voices. Televised comedy allows Adam Reed or Dan Harmon or the aforementioned Pootie Tang director Louis CK a large amount of freedom; sometimes they fail spectacularly, but at least they are taking creative risks, instead of developing star vehicles for bankable actors and hoping by the end there are enough funny jokes that the movie will gain an audience.

The Dictator is a fish out of water comedy about Admiral General Hafez Aladeen, who is in New York City to give a speech to the UN, where, for plot reasons I won't get into, he is usurped by a body double and is forced to live in New York without the palatial luxuries he is accustomed to. Unlike Borat, The Dictator relies on a strong cast of supporting comic actors, such as Fred Armisen, Nasim Pedrad and Jon Glaser, but the real highlight of the movie is Jason Manzoutkas, best known for scene-stealing guest spots on Parks and Recreation and The League, who frequently gets bigger laughs in scenes where he has to go head to head with Sacha Baron Cohen.

Dictators aren't the hardest people to satire, it's not as if there are many people that are pro-tyranny. There was a time where mocking tyrants was a daring act, but not in a culture where there are Gadaffi Meme-Generators and we are 5 years removed from an SNL sketch where Adam Levine serenades Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Despite that The Dictator maintains a sharp, albeit unoriginal satirical edge throughout and is willing to mine jokes from everything in a dictator's life. There is an inspired bit of satire delivered via a clunky monologue where Aladeen compares America's corporate oligarchy to a dictatorship, but generally the strongest jokes in the film are observational jokes about the minutia of Aladeen's day to day life, which I feel must have been written by co-writers and former Seinfeld scribes Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaeffer. The broader comic setpieces including the "9/11 2" joke that has been shown in all the previews are overwritten set pieces, that require suspending your disbelief even in The Dictator's absurd universe.

While in New York Aladeen meets a feminist-socialist-hippie-brooklynite played by an enjoyable Anna Farris. The films gets some comic mileage out of Baron Cohen taking over her food co-op and making it ruin more efficiently through his dictatorial attitude, before they ... fall in love swoon. Ostensibly they are mocking, genre conventions, but they are still peddling the hoary tropes comedy audiences have become accustomed to. In Borat there was a feeling that anything could happen at any time, The Dictator shows flashes of that comic anarchy, but ultimately the packaging is so insipid that that any time you feel anything can happen you are quickly reminded that there is only one thing that can happen.

The Cabin in the Woods - 2012 - 4 Stars

Director: Drew Goddard
Cast: Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford, Amy Acker, Kristen Conolly, Anna Hutchinson, Chris Hemsworth


BIGGEST SPOILER WARNING IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND GO SEE THIS MOVIE RIGHT AWAY. YOUR EYES WILL FALL OUT OF YOUR SOCKET IF YOU DISCOVER EVEN ONE LINE OF DIALOGUE FROM THIS MOVIE BEFORE YOU SEE IT


So much of the dialogue surrounding The Cabin in the Woods has been about not revealing spoilers that I feel it has both over-hyped and underrated the movie. The conceit of CitW is hinted at in the opening scene and becomes clear during the first act, from there more layers begin to peel off and we are kept engaged and surprised until the final frame. Since those layers continually peel off throughout the movie, I felt the attitude of spoiler alarmists were too extreme: it's as if they believed that any discussion of the movie revolved around a binary proposition of summarizing the whole plot or dead silence. In my Cyrus review I argued that it is best to see all movies with no prior knowledge and I still agree with that, however I do not think that CitW was so sacred that even daring to mention its premise was blasphemous.

The dissemination of information in modern society has made it easier to separate the wheat from the chaff, but it has also made it harder to be legitimately surprised by anything. I appreciate the effort by critics to encourage people to see this film tabula rasa, but the chatter was so overwhelming that I sort of wish I knew the premise going in, instead of being inundated with vague comments about the necessity of a blank slate. The film works best if one is expecting to see a generic horror movie and is surprised by the deconstruction that follows, but a movie written by Joss Whedon that is being coyly discussed throughout the media is ipso facto not a generic horror movie.

I am going to preemptively apologize for ascribing motivations to other critics, but I can't help but think a lot of people protecting CitW were doing so because they are acolytes of Joss Whedon.* I have seen very little of Joss Whedon's work and am generally indifferent towards him, but I doubt other premise-heavy genre deconstructions warranted extreme warnings, partially because they are worse films; I doubt reviews of movies like Phone Booth had similar  disclaimers, but I wouldn't have given Phone Booth 4 stars. The chatter is surrounding CitW is not completely unearned, but it's worth noting that the cult of Whedon casts a large shadow.

The initial premise of The Cabin in the Woods is a clever one, there is a giant multi-national corporation that elaborately stages horror movies scenarios using unknowing participants for an unknown reason. It's a good hook for a horror movie and sets the stage for strong genre-deconstruction and film-criticism. There is currently an abundance of self-aware horror movies (there was even a Piranha 3DD trailer before CitW) what makes CitW better than other meta-movies is its execution. The plot is impeccably constructed, the performances are top notch, especially Richard Jenkins, who is a welcome addition in any movie and there is a strong balance between horror and comedy throughout the film. All these elements combined to create one of the funnest experiences I have ever had in a movie theatre and I doubt a little bit of a priori knowledge would change that.

*Sidebar: Can we please stop applying this bullshit underdog narrative to Joss Whedon. He has produced 4 network television series that ran for a combined 300+ episodes, he has a writing credit on Toy Story, Serenity is one of the few TV shortly-lived TV series to ever get a spin-off movie and finally he just directed The Avengers, which will make 800 million worldwide by the time The Cabin in the Woods is available on DVD. He is incredibly successful by any metric and has had several platforms to showcase his wares.

Gerhard Richter Painting - N/A Stars - 2011

Director: Corinna Belz
Subject: Gerhard Richter

I don't think I have ever seen a movie who's title better describes the film than Gerhard Richter Painting; a fly on the wall documentary that has access Richter's studio throughout 2009 as he prepares for exhibitions all over the world. It's a tough film to grade because the films biggest strength is its access. Even in a world where almost everything is documented it was a coup for Belz to convince Richter to participate and allow her to intimately document a master performing his craft. Belz's access is the hook, but she deserves a lot of credit for injecting the film with her own assured visual style that makes the piece engaging. I have to assume she collected hundreds of hours of footage and did an excellent job paring all of it done into a compelling film.

Belz uses limited archival footage ofRichter, the highlight is an interview where a young Richter says he doesn't like talking about his paintings because painting if a form of communicating without language. In the present Richter is uncomfortable being filmed while painting because he feels the camera is capturing him it his rawest. In the movie's best sequences we watch Richter paint and we are thrown into a meditative state, that is similar to the feeling one gets as they are painting. It is after these sequences we understand Richter's claims that could otherwise be dismissed as abstract claptrap.

Art is often viewed as inspiration-driven, but the film, which uses footage from a whole year, makes a compelling case that craftmanship and hard work are just as valuable. Richter is in his late 70s, but he clocks in everyday and works hard, we see him diligently working on an abstraction for the whole day, only to back away and conclude that it doesn't work: his assistant agrees with him. As someone with no formal or amateur training in art history, I don't understand why his painting doesn't work, but after seeing him carefully create this painting and confidently dismiss it, I trust Richter's instincts, even if I can't see what's wrong with it. As a photographer, Richter understands how randomness plays a huge role in creating art, there could be an amazing photograph at any moment, but that's meaningless if he doesn't capture it. Richter has been working in art for decades, his technique is top notch and he still works tirelessly because he knows eventually he will be there for a moment that allows him to create a masterpiece.

Cyrus - 2010 - 3 Stars

Director: Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass
Cast: John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill, Marisa Tomei, Catherine Keener, Matt Walsh


THE SPOILERS BELOW ARE EQUIVALENT TO HAVING WATCHED A TRAILER FOR CYRUS


There is an art to making a great movie trailer. My favorite trailers are montages that are basically music videos and give away very little plot, two recent examples of these are The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or Where the Wild Things Are. I also like trailers for comedy or action movies that are so plot light, that I know nothing really can be spoiled for me, but I can preview the aesethic/comic sensibility of the film: recent examples of those are trailers for The Raid or Ted. I have always loved movie trailers, but eventhough I didn't see the trailer for Cyrus, it is making me reconsider my trailer policy, because Cyrus made me realize how many potential surprises I am sacrificing by watching trailers.

Cyrus is the first film I have seen by the Patron Saints of Mumblecore, Mark and Jay Duplass. Its seven million dollar budget makes it a veritable mumblecore blockbuster and though the acting has a naturalistic and improvisational feel to it, the movie doesn't feel amateurish. Being unfamiliar with the Duplass filmography, I went into the movie expecting anything could happen, which is why I ended up being surprised by a plot that in retrospect revolves around a lot of hoary tropes. John C. Reilly plays a man-child, who has been in an existential rut since he broke up with his ex-wife (Catherine Keener) who is about to get remarried. He meets Molly (Marisa Tomei) at a party and they instantly connect, the only problem is ... Molly has a live in 21 year old son named Cyrus (Jonah Hill) who is socially awkward and extremely protective of his mother. If I had seen a trailer for Cyrus I would have spent the whole first act, waiting to meet the eponymous character, but fortunately I hadn't and the movies loose feel made me believe that anything could happen, which allowed me to be surprised by some pretty big cliches.

The acting in Cyrus is all top notch and while there are no big comic set-pieces it is consistently funny and it manages to remain tense without delving into cringe comedy. Jonah Hill has gotten a lot of credit for his role in Moneyball, but I found his performance here to be similarly low-key and much stronger. I initially wrote off his performance in Moneyball as a fluke, but after Cyrus I have become a Jonah Hill convert. My major problem with the film is Molly's inconsistent characterization. She is presented as a Manic-Pixie Dream Woman, who unfortunately is burdened with being too loving a mother and having a weird child. Except that child's weirdness is largely her own fault, if your son is 21 years old living at home, unemployed, not in school, friendless and has a gigantic Oedipus complex, it makes me doubt your basic competencies as a mother and a person. Marisa Tomei manages give depth to this character and I believed John C. Reilly would fall for her, but I didn't believe that the Cyrus's mother and John's girlfriend were the same person and I didn't believe the Duplasses were trying to make a point about fractured identities. I liked the mumblecore aesthetic and the realistic performances and will be watching future Duplass films, but I next time the plots and characters don't feel as loose as the performances.

Tabloid - 2010 - 4 Stars

Director: Errol Morris
Subject: "The Case of the Manacled Mormon"

Tabloid is the story of Joyce McKinney and "The Case of the Manacled Mormon", it is a story best discovered as one watches the film and I would suggest people watch this movie with as little prior knowledge as possible. Morris manages to get interviews with most of the principles involved in the story, including two exceedingly British tabloid journalists, who touch not only on the specific case, but the nature of being a young tabloid journalist in the gossip-hungry UK.  

As an effete intellectual, I am supposed to be dismissive about tabloid stories, but every now and then get sucked into the vortex of a tabloid story. I spent an embarrassingly large amount of 2011 watching the Charlie Sheen meltdown, but eventually I stopped because I was bored. High profile tabloid stories are monotonous, they take years to play out and are constantly reported on. This is why family-members, high school teachers, secretaries and other peripheral players will inevitably get hounded by reporters: tabloids need to find something, anything, to report on. In Charlie Sheen's case the first 15 minutes of his daily free-associative rambling was top-notch lunacy, but following several hours of daily interviews, UStream live chats, twitter rants and assorted ephemera became overwhelming and repetitive. E! True Hollywood Story and other copycats, made me skeptical of a documentary about a tabloid story, but in retrospect these types of stories are perfect fodder for documentaries because a skilled filmmaker can excise all the fat and create a captivating highlight reel.

Errol Morris is one of the few documentarians who can make their movies fun, without interjecting themselves in the middle of them. Morris' career is based around documenting the actions of eccentrics, he is so successful because he respects the humanity of his subjects, which allows them to open up. Morris smartly refrains from explicitly judging the principals and allows the audience to make up their mind via first-hand interviews with McKinney and secondary characters in "The Case of the Manacled Mormon". From the opening credit sequences Morris embraces the pulpy fun of Tabloid through a series of visual flourishes, whether he is panning to a campy cartoon that explains Mormonism or superimposing tabloid headlines over talking heads as if they were onomatopoeia in Adam West's Batman.

Every time I finish a Morris film I am amazed at how his subjects answer almost every direct question honestly: he taps into a natural human inclination to tell the truth when directly confronted with it. Throughout the film there are moments we think McKinney is lying, but we also believe she is so deluded that she thinks she is telling the truth. This film is a must watch for film fans, because Morris as per usual found a captivating subject for a documentary, but it is also an excellent takedown of tabloid journalism. In just under 90 minutes he manages to succinctly and thoroughly condense a story that ran off and on for 30 years that is so captivating because the historical distance eliminates the ephemera that is a byproduct of round the clock coverage.

Yojimbo - 1961 - 4 Stars

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Eijiro Tono and Tatsuya Nakadai

SPOILERS IN THE LAST PARAGRAPH

"The time is 1860 ...

the emergence of a middle class

has brought about the end to power

of the Tokugawa Dynasty ...

A samurai, once a dedicated warrior

in the employ of Royalty,

now finds himself with master to serve

other than his own will to survive ...

... and no devices 

outside of his wit and his sword"

So sayeth the opening titles of Kurosawa's Yojimbo. In those titles, Kurosawa introduces one of the major themes of the movie, the obsolescence of a once noble profession. So it is fitting that as I watched the movie 50 years after its release I was both struck by its mastery and its antiquity. Kurosawa is one of the great filmmakers and it shows throughout the film, but the samurai film, like the samurai belongs to a bygone era.

The plot follows our no-named hero, played by Toshiro Mifune as he tries to pit two rival sides against each other so he can profit from the aftermath. It's a well constructed plot with lots of betrayals, double agents and ambitious gambits. It can be hard to follow all the machinations, but that is the point. The only person in the film who knows what is going on is our hero and even as we see every move he makes, we still don't know what he is thinking. Mifune is an incredible screen presence, he towers over everyone and has the range to play a stoic enforcer and a roguish trickster. Sergio Leone remade Yojimbo as A Fistfull of Dollars and as iconic as Clint Eastwood's performance is as The Man with No Name, Mifune, a shorter man, feels like a more intimidating screen presence. Some of the acting in Yojimbo is hokey to a modern audience accustomed to neo-realistic acting, but Mifune dominates the movie and overshadows some of the broader performances in the film.

As someone who grew up watching both the macho action films of the 80s and 90s and the CGI-fests of the current era, things like poor stage fighting and bad foley work give the movie an amateurish quality. This is an unfair criticism, akin to saying that a Kia Sorento is more impressive than the original Model T, it's especially unfair given how well staged and shot everything else in this movie is. Kazuo Miyagawa's work in this film is brilliant, the shots of rain and windswept streets is some of the best black and white photography I have ever seen. I assume he used a trick like how he famously dyed rain in Rashomon, but it doesn't make the shots any less impressive. The movie contrasts tight shots from people trapped in their houses watching action through shutters with shots of the open area in the town's main street. The shots of the main street are impeccably constructed; we can follow all the action in the background and the foreground with ease and they are still beautifully shot.

In the second act of the film a gun is brought into the town and as one would expect it quickly shifts the power in favour of the party with the gun. Guns are more efficient weapons than samurai swords and unlike swords guns can inflict great damage in the hands of an amateur. In the third act the movie asks, would you rather trust an archaic master or an efficient amateur? I am accustomed to ruthless technical efficiency and use it to my benefit everyday, however in Yojimbo Kurosawa makes an unimpeachable case that the archaic master is the right choice.

Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest - 2011- 3 stars, 4 stars

Director: Michael Rappaport
Subject: A Tribe Called Quest

Last fall during TIFF I saw the world premiere of Pearl Jam Twenty. I like, but don't love Pearl Jam, which made me one of the biggest PJ haters at the screening. The crowd's energy created a fun movie-going experience and Cameron Crowe got lots of great footage, but it was largely a piece of fan service and didn't try to ask any tough questions. After watching Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest I know how the rest of that PJ 20 audience felt. The Low End Theory is in my all-time top 5 hip-hop albums*, Midnight Marauders is close behind. I can remember listening to Vivrant Thing throughout the 8th grade, before I even knew ATCQ existed  and I once traveled to El Segundo just so I could leave my wallet there. This is all to say, that there was about a 0% chance I would dislike this movie, so my rating is split: 4 stars for fans of the band and 3 stars for non-fans.

After watching PJ-20 I described it as a hagiopic and to Michael Rappaport's credit BRL has actual conflict and a strong narrative that isn't "look at how awesome we are". ATCQ was formed while all of the principals were still in high school, despite their youth they became one of the most innovative hip hop bands of all time. While their legacy prevails, their last classic album was released when many similarly aged MCs (I hesistate in calling them their peers) were just getting started. Their third album Midnight Marauders was released before Reasonable Doubt, Ready to Die, Illmatic, Do You Want More?!!!??! and many other seminal east coast 90s hip hop albums. BRL has interviews with Pharrell Williams and ?uestlove who treat ATCQ with such reverence that they sound like The Rolling Stones talking about Muddy Waters, eventhough they were born 3 years and 1 year apart, respectively.

The heart of the documentary comes from the relationship between Q-Tip and Phife Dawg. Q-Tip is a musical prodigy, who in one of the films most captivating sequences shows how he bit the drums from Lonnie Smith's Spinning Wheel for Can I Kick It? Q-Tip is someone who will remeber the bass-line from a song he listened to 5 years ago and manage to reincorporate into a new song. Phife Dawg is a funny, affable diabetic-sidekick, who resembles every short yappy sidekick in every movie ever. I would love to grab a beer, smoke a joint or talk to him about sports, but his irresponsibility would become frusturating. Rapparort smartly frames the documentary around the relationship between the two, who were best friends as kids and became the front men of ATCQ for more than a decade. Q-Tip is a perfectionist who has spent many nights working by himself in the studio and became the breakout star of the group. Phife Dawg resents the acclaim Q-Tip has received, while Q-Tip pities Phife's lack of discipline. They are still friends, but as friends grow up they start to value different things and grow apart. BRL is a fascinating oral history of a seminal hip hop band, a touching story about two best friends growing apart and a must-watch for any hip-hop fan.

*For fun in no order
Illmatic
Supreme Clientele
The Low End Theory
Chronic 2001
Hell Hath No Fury

Meek's Cutoff - 2010 - 4 Stars

Director: Kelly Reichardt
Cast: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Paul Dano

It's hard to write about plotless movies, without feeling like you are spoiling the whole movie, if you mention a kernel of the narrative like "two men named Gerry get lost while hiking" it feels like you told them the whole story. If you say "nothing happens" the viewer is prepared for nothing to happen. Meek's Cutoff isn't Koyaanisqatsi, but for the sake of not giving away too much, all I will say about the plot is that it follows a group of settlers on the Oregon Trail looking for water.

My knowledge of The Oregon Trail stops at the video game, so I can't speak with authority about Meek's Cutoff's verisimilitude, but it does feel real. I have always been fascinated with the minutia of history, but most of the details in historical fiction are reductive and touristy, "oh look at that grog of mead, how quaint". Meek's Cutoff presents a brutal, stunning portrait of how tough it must have been to be an early settler travelling on the Oregon Trail. The premise of needing to find water creates urgency, but is also a nice historical detail, people needed to carry around weeks worth of water in covered wagons, when travelling undeveloped land. Most of the film's verisimilitude comes from showing the daily monotony of these settlers and while watching longshots of pioneers walking next to covered wagons seems boring, the cinematography is awe-inspiring.

For full disclosure, I received an important phone call halfway through the movie and the opinion expressed below might be a function of my fragmented viewing. The first half of the movie is a hypnotic look at the day to day life for these people travelling along The Oregon Trail it was as beautiful meditative experience that reminded me of the best parts of 2001 or Tree of Life. The second half wasn't nearly as strong, Michelle Williams anachronistic character was too empowered for a 19th century women and that caused me to doubt the characterization of others in the film. I think the blustery xenophobia shown by Bruce Greenwood's Stephen Meek was on point, but next to Williams he felt like a strawman created by Reichardt. The above makes it seem like the second half of the movie is bad, it's not. The second half has two excellent set pieces, the cinematography and period detail remain excellent and the ending is something that will and should prompt lots of discussion.

Stray thoughts
-I remember reading an interview with a Deadwood cast member, who was asked to describe the set, he responded with one word "mud", I suspect the cast of Meek's Cutoff would respond with one word "dust"

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans - 2009 - 3 3/4 Stars

Director: Werner Herzog
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Xzibit, Val Kilmer

My rating system is hardly set in stone, but this is my general criteria.
5 Stars - A perfect movie that is original or high concept
4 1/2 stars - A movie with minor flaws in conception or execution
4 stars - A movie that does what it sets out to do, but has some flaws.
3 1/2 stars - A movie that does some of what it sets out to do, but has some flaws.

I am not going to proceed past 3 1/2 stars since the above is just a setup so I can explain why I gave BL: PC-NO a quarter star. I haven't seen Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, but I have seen enough clips of it on youtube to understand the premise, he is a Lieutenant and he is Bad. My limited understanding of the original, my familiarity with Herzog/Kinski movies and my borderline expertise in the works of Nic Cage made me excited for this movie as soon as I saw a trailer for it. That was before I knew the movie would include Val Kilmer, Michael Shannon, Xzibit and other character actors who successfully counter balance or ratchet up Cage's insanity throughout the movie. If you want to see Nic Cage doing degenerate things that include taking a bump of cocaine while driving a 13 year old murder witness to a casino in Biloxi in the same movie you see Herzog pontificating via iguana cam this movie is for you.

BL: PC-NO other strength is a really strong sense of place. Most movies are set in LA or NYC or LA trying to be another city or some other city trying to be NYC. It is very nice that BL:PC-NO is actually shot in post-Katrina New Orleans. Herzog constantly reminds of us that via shots of the perpetually grey, rundown New Orleans skyline. He also uses the devastation to New Orleans thematically to parallel Cage's characters downward spiral and to showcase the general desperation motivating all of the characters. It also helps explain how Cage can get away with stealing so much contraband from police evidence without any of the higher ups noticing.

For a movie that stars a wired Nic Cage who is constantly dialed up to 11, Herzog still finds time to do a lot of pontificating that doesn't quite work, unless you are familiar enough with his work to find his half-baked existential philosophy charming, which I do. So this is a movie that "that does some of what it sets out to do, but has some flaws.", but also a movie that "does exactly what I hoped it would, but has some flaws" allowing me to put it safely in 3.75 star territory, at least i don't need to design a 3/4 full star graphic.

Caché - 2005 - 4 Stars

Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Juliette Binoche.

Even if he directed English language features Michael Haneke would never be the most accessible or popular director, but Caché has such a strong premise that it could be (and probably already has been) turned into an mediocre popular found footage horror series, fortunately Haneke puts his own stamp on a strong premise to create an exceptional exercise in suspense. Caché is about a upper-class intellectual french couple (Auteuil and Binoche) who receive an anonymous videotape at their house. They put the cassette in their combination DVD/VCR player and see a still shot of the exterior of their house during an non-specific day in their life. We don't know who is mailing the tapes, what they want or even if they are dangerous, though every thriller ever made has trained us to be afraid of this unnamed messenger ...  I realize this sounds a lot like Lost Highway, but any similarities one might see cease to exist by the 10 minute mark.

Binoche and Auteuil are worried about their potential stalker, especially because Auteuil is a minor celebrity, he hosts a public tv show that discusses literature; apparently those exist in France. Binoche's character, Ann Laurent (A Haneke trope not a Lost Highway allusion) occasionally feels like an audience surrogate as she tries to glean information from her husband, but she manages to credibly portray concern for her husband, curiosity about their situation and fear that her husband is lying to her, that we buy her line of questioning. Most thrillers require characters to be stupid out of narrative convenience; one of Caché's triumphs is that even as Binoche and Auteuil act relatively rationally they make limited progress and receive no catharsis. In typical horror movies we know to be scared because the hot girl went into a dark room by herself. In Caché there are no obvious contrivances and our leads tend to act intelligently in such a high stress situation. One would think acting intelligently would lead them out of this situation, but the characters and the audience do not get the catharsis they expect. The stalker feels malevolent and omnipresent, which creates a sense of perpetual dread. Haneke wisely avoids conventional cues that precede horrific events and rarely has more than 3 people in a scene, making us believe a fatal event could happen at any time.

Though surveillance cameras can be invasive, they have a bizarre integrity to them. No one is editing the footage, no one is even moving the camera, the frame has strict borders and it captures everything within them. There is no room for the truth to hide on a surveillance camera. Even basic tasks like fast-forwarding or rewinding show a different reality than what is presented in raw surveillance footage. There is a scene where Auteiul is in the editing room and even his low-budget show can cut out part of another panelist's arguments if they feel it will make a better finished product. A filmmaker could give the audience all the answers his film's world, but they choose how much information they dole out. Caché creates a false sense of integrity through surveillance cameras, we believe what we see in the rigid shots through the film, but Haneke is behind the curtain and he is in complete control.


Spoilers below

 I'm pretty spoiler-phobic, so I barely touched on the plot beyond outlining the premise. This movie is also an allegory about how the French treated Algerians, but I can't really touch on that without explaining a lot of the plot/ talking about the last shot of the film. If anyone is actually reading this blog and wants to discuss that in the comments, feel free to comment.

Midnight in Paris - 2011 - 3 Stars

Cast: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Michael Fassbender

Director: Woody Allen

Midnight in Paris, the latest Woody Allen film, is about a Hollywood-screenwriter and Allen-surrogate played by Owen Wilson who has grand literary ambitions, but can't put them on paper. Wilson does a nice job of making the Allen-surrogate his own and provides his own unique gentile charm that is nice change of pace from the typical Woody characters. Like all late period Allen-surrogates Wilson has a gorgeous, shrew of a fiance, played by Rachel McAdams. McAdams is such a warm screen presence that she almost makes the character undetestable, but falls just short. Wilson travels around contemporary Paris with a rotating cast of his fiance, her parents and a pompous intellectual played perfectly by Michael Sheen. While some of the performances make this section of the film affable, the dialogue is very heavy handed, especially in a painful scene where Wilson brings up his father-in-law's support of the Tea Party.

One night while walking around Paris the clock strikes midnight and Wilson is transported into the 1920s where he is free to hobnob with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Luis Bunuel among others. Allen wisely avoids trying to explain any of the logistics behind the conceit; the film is a fantasy and creating strict rules would weigh down the film. If the fantasy above is one you have had before, you will love this movie, if not, you will still be mildly entertained. Once Wilson arrives in Paris, there are few surprises, he meets his heroes, gets to make 85 jokes where the punchline is predicated in historical irony and lives out the fantasy of being in "a golden era". The movie's climax is a "minor insight", so anyone expecting more than a trifle will be disappointed.

There is a scene in American Masters: Woody Allen where we see Woody rummaging through loose sheets of yellow legal pad on his bed, each piece of paper has a comedic premise like, "A man inherits all the magic tricks of a great magician". One quickly realizes that even a prolific worker like Woody will generate a lot more premises than actual movies. Woody ends this scene by saying "I'll spend an hour thinking of that and it'll go no place and i'll go onto the next one." Midnight in Paris is a charming daydream, but a minor movie; maybe Woody should have grabbed the next piece of paper from the pile.

California Split - 1974 - 4 1/2 Stars

Actors: George Segal and Elliot Gould

Director: Robert Altman

"Gambling is a disease, but it's the only disease where you can win lots of money!" - Norm Macdonald

There is a myth that people will like art about subjects they are experts about. I read a lot of Moneyball reviews that said "I loved it and I am not even a baseball fan!". For me those reviews missed the point because I disliked Moneyball and I am a baseball fan. My criticisms of the movie read like Bart Simpson's commentary on Aaahhh! Wilderness!, "The guys who wrote this show don't know squat. Itchy should have tied Scratchy's tongue with a taut-line hitch, not a sheet bend."

As someone who has spent a lot of time gambling and has had every gambling movie ever recommended to me; I tend to find gambling movies infuriating and as my expectations erode my pedantry remains fierce as ever. I decided to withhold my cynicism for California Split because of Altman's pedigree and fortunately my high expectations were met. The Hustler is the best movie about gambling I have seen, but California Split is the best gambling movie I have seen. The Hustler is about being cursed with a talent that forces you to live in a repugnant world; it didn't need to be about a gambler. California Split embraces the culture of gambling and gives a frank, non-judgmental portrayal of it that I haven't seen before.

Altman's films tend to deal with fringe characters; he casts non-traditional heroes and his overlapping dialogue makes the audience aware our heroes aren't the only people in the world. California Split uses both these techniques to great effect. George Segal and Elliot Gould are run of the mill recreational gambling addicts, sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but regardless they are at the casino/fights/track on payday. They leave the grandstands as soon a race is finished, why stand around when you can get fresh bets in? I am so used to seeing Gould and Segal play elderly Jewish buffoons that I forgot how cool they once were; Gould's charm carries most of the film, which has a loose episodic structure, a wise choice that illustrates that most of the events of the film are run of the mill for our leads.

The loose structure allows Altman to show that gambling can actually be fun and gives the movie a lived in feel that accurately shows that when you live in a gambling culture any event, like a fight in the crowd during a boxing match, can bet bet on and every action from "Hit me!" to "I hope this gets her to sleep with me" is viewed as a gamble. Gambling is not the most tragic vice, but it is the most melancholy. Unlike other vices gambling is scalable; it's much easier to bet 10 times up as much, than smoke/drink/snort 10 times as much. Gambling's scalablity always creates a twinge of regret; even when one wins they wish they bet more or quit at their peak. California Split's strength is presenting gambling's melancholy insatiability in a film that make it seem so damn fun.

NB: I almost gave this 5 stars, but didn't want to kick off my blog with two 5 star reviews. I think California Split is a 4 star movie, but it deals with one of my favorite subjects in such a strong way that it's a 5 star movie for me. I decided to split the difference and give it 4 1/2. I hope Zombie Robert Altman will forgive me.

Certified Copy - 2010 - 5 Stars

Actors: Juliette Binoche, William Shimell

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Spoilers Below - This is a movie that's plot is so light that it's almost impossible to talk about the movie without having seen it. Anyone reading this should trust me and see the movie immediately, it's on Netflix WI in Canada.

Certified Copy opens with William Shimell's character lecturing about his book, Certified Copy, which discusses replication and authenticity in art. Why is a counterfeit less valuable than an original? What is the difference between being inspired by someone and copying someone? These sorts of questions are constantly asked in visual art in exhibits like Sherrie Levine's "After Walker Evans". Personally I find those pieces of visual art to be smart-alecky and cold. At points Certified Copy feels like it might just be a formalist exercise, which can be intolerable over the course of a full length feature: once you understand the filmmaker's thesis you don't want to watch any more of the movie.

Fortunately CC is such a well executed film that it doesn't feel clever even though it is. This is my first Kiarostami film and he is an excellent technician, each shot is purposeful and showcases the themes of the movie, especially an early shot where the streets of Tuscany are reflected through the windshield of a car driven by Binoche. CC is so successful because the performances by Binoche and Shimell, the latter an opera singer who has never acted before brings the regal iciness one would expect from a British baritone, are so strong that you need to be made of stone to not emote during the film. As the film ends I thought to myself they are just people projected on a screen, why do you care what happens to them? Exactly.

Good News Everyone!

This blog is active again. My good friend at http://thewhat-have-you.blogspot.com/ made me realize that when you watch a lot of movies you tend to forget what you liked/disliked about them and creating a journal that captures your reaction to films is worthwhile.

I will be ranking films from 1-5 stars and will generally be reviewing whatever film I saw most recently, but occasionally digging back into my netflix queue to talk about movies i saw in the last year or two. Unfortunately the incredible TV allusion in the title of this blog is now useless; life is tough.

So you can get a general idea of my taste here are the movies with 5 stars of my netflix queue in no particular order.

La Pianiste (Haneke, 2002)

Monty Python's: Life of Brian (Jones, 1979)

Fitzcarraldo (Herzog,1982)

Toy Story 3 (Unkich, 2010)

The Conversation (Coppola, 1974)

Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950)

Groundhog Day (Ramis, 1993)

Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)

Annie Hall (Allen, 1966)

The Incredibles (Bird, 2004)

Certified Copy (Kiarostamii, 2010)

The Wrestler (Aronofosky, 2008)

Five Easy Pieces (Rafelson, 1970)