I was surprised after watching (and then reading reviews of) the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man that there was such a fervent (if small) backlash against it. The movie – about a Job-like Jewish professor in a Minnesota suburb in the late 1960s – struck me as so right that I didn’t allow for opposite reactions. Yet there they are.
When I say that the filmed version of Watchmen and the horror remake Quarantine are faithful to the point of tedium, I intend that largely as a compliment. Great talent, care, time, and money have been spent not fixing what ain’t broke. Considered separate from their sources, both movies work. But they’re damned depressing.
Lars von Trier’s Antichrist in 560 characters over four Tweets: descriptive, positive, a turning point, and ultimately (in both the “finally” and “fundamentally” senses of the word) negative.
In his “Great Movies” article on Caché, Roger Ebert teases that he found a key to understanding this ever-mysterious movie: “How is it possible to watch a thriller intently two times and completely miss a smoking gun that’s in full view? Yet I did. Only on my third trip through Michael Haneke’s Caché did I consciously observe a shot which forced me to redefine the film.”
A throw-away bit of connective tissue struck me in Jim Emerson’s announcement of his and MSN’s movies of the decade: “That’s a pretty mainstream list (hey, it’s for MSN) – and so is mine.” Not really, I thought. Unsurprising? Yes. Dominated by English-language films? Yes. But mainstream? This is, of course, a matter of definition.
Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell exists mostly to remind the world that Sam Raimi made The Evil Dead and can still make The Evil Dead, which is good to know because Sam Raimi is re-making The Evil Dead. But amid all the giggle-inducing grossness are a few grace notes – unnecessarily skillful business that reminds us that Raimi also made A Simple Plan. I’m going to talk about one of those bits.
While I still don’t really understand the Twitter phenomenon, I’ve loved using the 140-character limit for extreme forced concision. The aim is always to pack these ridiculously short reviews with enough meaning that I don’t feel guilty about never writing more about a particular movie or television show. I would never say that 140 characters is sufficient to discuss much of anything – let alone a feature film – but it’s a great if arbitrary writing exercise: How much can you say within Twitter’s confines? For the most part, I’ve been happy with the results. But with Tell No One, I feel that I need to explain myself.
It is a car salesman that carries writer/director Kirt Gunn’s Lovely by Surprise on his shoulders until the movie blossoms. To his credit, Bob doesn’t actually sell cars. In the automobile-sales process, he dispenses hackneyed life advice, admonishing his customers that they need to spend more time with their families, and do they really want to part with that old clunker, filled as it is with memories? He is played with sincerity by Reg Rogers, in the sense that Bob means everything he says. But there’s a fakeness, a performance, about Bob – a smiling, cheery devil-may-care mask that makes him both inscrutable and intensely compelling. A genuinely independent movie, Lovely by Surprise hit DVD this week after playing the festival circuit, and what’s surprising is that it’s as successful as it is.
Much to my surprise, I can find no reference to the nearly universal cinematic “wedding-ring rule”: Any time a wedding ring is a prominent prop or visual motif in a movie, infidelity will be a central theme. The obverse: Any movie with infidelity as a central theme will feature the wedding ring as a prop or visual motif. I could offer dozens of examples, but the best might be Lantana, which is obviously about sexual straying but has a greater interest in marriage overall, especially the underlying, intertwined issues of trust and honesty. Although it’s nearly too blunt in its themes, the movie feels continuously right, nailing not only relationship dynamics but interred grief and pain. Throughout, it gets the tone, nuance, and scale of life correct.
Memento is such a triumph of tricky narrative structure that it’s difficult to get (and keep) a grip on what happens, let alone the objective truth of its protagonist’s past. Christopher Nolan’s second feature, which he wrote and directed based on his brother Jonathan’s short story, seems perpetually slippery and elusive. I’ve seen it at least six times since it was released in the U.S. in 2001 (it debuted at festivals in September 2000), and even though I know it well, each time it repeatedly throws me off. The movie’s closing line – in context, a sick joke by Nolan – is an excellent summary of how I feel watching it: “Now … where was I?”
