‘Sin City: A Dame to Kill For’ is all film noir trope and little substance — a film review
August 22, 2014
There’s an inherit problem to the Sin City movies. With so much visual flair, any sense of substance feels obscured by its imagery. As much as these films want to celebrate film noir, they strip the genre down so flagrantly and elevate the genre’s conventions to such heights, there is little left of drama or character. The first Sin City had its moments, wryly empowering women while objectifing them, for instance, but the formula has grown much thinner with the arrival of its sequel, almost 10 years later, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Robert Rodriguez directed the first one, based on the graphic novels of Frank Miller, who now co-directs with Rodriguez.
The film’s visual style, which is part live action and part animation, mostly in black and white with splashes of color and lots of shadows, of course makes it stand out from other movies. There really has never been a comic book adaptation in cinema as committed to the look of the source material as Sin City. But that counts for nothing more than form, albeit a sometimes elegant one. One would hope the involvement of the books’ creator would have fleshed out the characters of the books further, but really this sequel seems even more interested in its own look and feel over any presentation of … I don’t know… How about a little more about the darkness of men beyond action and compulsion? The fact that it was shot in 3D only adds more to the film’s gimmickry over depth.
![sc2-df-05490[4]_lg](https://indieethos.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/sc2-df-054904_lg.jpg)
But really, what more can be done with the age-old film noir genre than to deconstruct it (the best in modern movie-making still has to be Memento)? What Miller and Rodriguez seem most interested in is highlighting the principles of the genre to heightened effect. The hard-boiled monologues, the lighting, the role of the femme fatale, the plot twists. It’s all turned up a notch to heights of comedy. It becomes a joke for several reasons: nothing feels at stake because of the simple narrative and the film’s animated mise-en-scène distances violent acts from any notion of humanity. It all feels like some mean joke against civilization and a celebration of brutality. There’s no room for irony because there’s no sense of standard in Sin City beyond kill-or-be-killed/fuck-or-get-fucked. Characters are reduced to pixels in the worst way.
Ava (Eva Green), with her green eyes and red lips, is the femme fatal of the film’s title. Her acting and dialogue is played with so much loftiness, 
it’s hard no to laugh. The film’s biggest joke arrives when police detective Mort (Christopher Meloni) arrives to Ava’s home to investigate the murder of her husband. The chump falls for her as she purrs a few sly turns of phrase during the investigation, and he forgets his wife and his duty to “just the facts, ma’am.” The fact the “Law and Order: SVU” actor plays the detective adds a meta level of humor to the scene. But then he seems to be literally driven mad with lust. His reaction to his uncontrollable desires is so extreme it feels beyond implausible and falls with a grandiose thud.
A Dame to Kill For would have been so much more interesting had it been a deconstruction of film noir tropes instead of the celebration of them as bullet points to wink at. Typical of sequel syndrome, recurrent characters from the last movie have nowhere to grow from the last movie. Gail (Rosario Dawson) is still the same violent, pissed-off bitch. Hartigan (Bruce Willis) is reduced to a helpless ghost watching his ward Nancy (Jessica Alba) downward spiral in her thirst for vengeance. The most interesting character of the last film, Marv (Mickey Rourke) is nothing more than a bruiser with a memory lapse and no more heart.
The film’s most interesting new character is Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the bastard son of Senator Roark (Powers Boothe) who rules over the town with a corrupt fist. Played with an intense but warm bravado that Gordon-Levitt always so easily conjures up, Johnny at first doesn’t seem to understand just how over his head he’s in when he tries to beat Pop at poker. Johnny is on a quest for recognition that will come with heavier and heavier costs. It’s probably the one story line that veers far enough from genre convention that makes the film at least a little interesting. But by the time the final shootout arrives, it all becomes numbing and tired when it should have felt climactic.
It’s interesting that the performances that are less touched up by effects, which also includes some soul from Josh Brolin as another man who falls under Ava’s spell, are the ones that bring some interesting heart to the film. But with mostly flat characters and a sense of little at stake plot-wise, the inevitable fight scenes and gun battles are deflated of any sense of urgency. Sure the graphics are impressive. But the 3D offers little seeing as the film tries to stay true to the flat, hand-drawn quality of the comic book. Occasionally objects jump out of the screen in slow motion and some images stand out as lusciously stylistic, as when Ava floats in her pool in the nude. Otherwise, A Dame to Kill For is really nothing more than what you expect from the trailer: randomly colored actors moving across backgrounds driven by violent urges that shift at varying speeds to connote some sense of dimension but no real depth.
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For runs 102 minutes and is Rated R (graphic sexuality and violence abounds). It opens everywhere today, Friday, Aug. 20. Weinstein Films invited me to a preview screening for the purpose of this review.
Film Review: ‘Looper’ smartens up sci-fi tropes to riveting effect
September 28, 2012
Time travel and dystopia: two key tropes of the science-fiction genre. With Looper, director and sole screenwriter Rian Johnson has breathed a fresh verve of visceral life into them. After bursting onto the scene with the neo-noir Brickand falling a bit flat with the Brothers Bloom, Johnson returns to feature directing with a couple of “Breaking Bad” episodes under his belt and a sure-handed confidence.
Looper stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who also co-executive produced the film, impersonating Bruce Willis, who plays his character Joe in the future. The only misstep in Looper maybe the makeup Gordon-Levitt wears to look like Willis, which sometimes feels surreal but other times seems distracting. Gordon-Levitt has the Willis mannerisms down (that cool, half-interested reserve). That’s all many films have demanded to attach two different actors playing the same character.
The film takes place in a future where mobsters rule crowded cities, and you can shoot someone in the back in broad daylight for trying to take your stuff. The invention of time travel 30 years in the future (2072) allows for the two Joes to meet in this current past, 30 years into our future (2042). 
With time travel, the mafia’s hit men have become semi-skilled junkies (loopers) who just wait for their targets to be zapped back to 2042, who they take out pointblank with handheld cannons called blunderbusses. Usually, the targets arrive bound and hooded, making for easy hits. When Joe’s future self arrives hands free and staring him back in the eyes, the younger Joe chokes. Old Joe easily overtakes him because he has the experience of the future, not to mention who-knows-how-many groundhog day-like opportunities of having lived these encounters. The marvels of time travel.
The film’s gimmick may seem to rely on young Joe fulfilling his contract to kill old Joe so he might live out his future 30 years with happy abandon. But Looper has many more interesting things up its sleeve. The future seems to arrive thanks to capitalism gone awry and the loss of human rights. Technology has only advanced to make cell phones smaller, computers holographic, motorcycles wheel-less and drugs as easy to take as eye drops. 
Otherwise, most everyone seems to be a squatter living in decrepit buildings or on the street. The fact that some people are born with a “mutant” telekinetic ability they never seem to master beyond floating a coin an inch above their palm feels like a cute aside. However, Looper does not waste a single plot-point. When old Joe’s reason to avoid his death sentence comes to light, his mission in 2042 proves gasp-worthy.
At just under two hours long, Looper may sound long for a time travel sci-fi flick, but it earns a downshift in tone and pace by the film’s midpoint for an impressionable climax. Johnson knows what he’s doing when he seems to drag out young Joe’s respite from the chase at a farmhouse with Emily Blunt’s single mother Sara and her 10-year-old child Cid (Pierce Gagnon playing too-smart-for-his-age with creepy timing). This slower section is broken up by Old Joe’s scorched-earth rampage back in the city but also with a gradual deliberateness
to allow the viewer to invest in these characters as channeled by some fine actors. Of course, not all movies need to run two hours long, but Johnson knows how to extend and earn the quiet moments with wit, and a revelation that follows will prove breath-taking.. You wonder why some films seem to pass through you like fast food? Those are the 88-minute, non-stop movies, which numb the mind via a barrage of action, horror, comedy and even dance moves, sapping any emotional investment by not pausing for a moment of reflection. A payoff does arrive in Looper beginning with a hired gun in search of Joe who appears at Sara’s door.
A well-earned series of plot twists and conflicts in morality will soon unfold that will leave the viewer wondering which characters they should sympathize with. It will surely leave some on edge. Looper built up the urgency to a sense I had not felt since I saw Drive last year. I felt as conflicted about these characters as I did for those in that ingenious identity mind-bender from Hong Kong, Infernal Affairs, which inspired Scorsese’s the Departed.
Johnson has produced a film with such confidence, you can forgive him for taking any perceived liberties with the rules of time travel and its effects on the notion there is only one continuum of existence (of course, it’s beyond that, thanks to quantum mechanics, so get over it). Looper indeed has a playful side, but Johnson turns on the dread just as quickly, making for one of the better, smarter science fiction films surely to leave all sorts of viewers satisfied.
Trailer:
Looper is Rated R (the violence does get gruesome) and runs 118 min. It opens in wide release today. TriStar Pictures invited me to a preview screening for the purpose of this review.
You have to admire Christopher Nolan. Count him among those few Hollywood directors alluded to in an earlier post who can prop up a tent-pole film franchise with minimal artistic compromise. Nolan is also among those few former indie directors working in Hollywood with the fortitude to maintain his voice in the corporate machine of mass-consumption filmmaking. In the Dark Knight Rises, his third film following the comic book hero Batman, he finishes his trilogy with a giant flourish that never forgets its humanity. The film has a visually symphonic quality so brilliantly composed, it makes its near three-hour runtime fly past. In this day where filmmakers seem to pander to the continued shortening of attention spans to produce a film of such a runtime at Warner Bros. is a feat in itself. But the film also offers so much more. The key to the film’s brisk pace lies in Nolan’s unsentimental cutting of scenes, the invested performances of his actors and an ingenious plot design (whose major twists you will not find spoiled here).
Though the story of the Dark Knight Rises unfolds along the classical dramatic curve of screenwriting made famous by Syd Field, Nolan knows how to push it to edgy extremes and stay with it. When Batman and his beloved Gotham City seem to arrive at their nadir, the twists never relent, all the way to the film’s final frame. Watching the Dark Knight Rises unfold feels like watching an elaborate sculpture form out of an intricately laid out array of toppling dominoes that span an array of directions and double back. 
You can tell Nolan has learned a lot from his last film, Inception (2010), whose story of dreams within dreams wrapped in a mystery-heist-thriller, also probably owes a debt of its own existence to Nolan’s reputation as Batman’s current cinematic creator. Most everything that happens in the Dark Knight Rises feels connected and warranted. As he has firmly stated in interviews, this marks the end of his trilogy of Batman films, and it makes for one heck of a finale. The Dark Knight Rises even has an ending nearly as good as Inception.
Nolan inherited the Batman franchise on somewhat shaky ground in his career as an indie director gone Hollywood. He burst onto the mainstream’s radar with Memento (2000), a film with twists in its narrative structure so visceral it could leave an audience member dizzy by the end credits. However, a remake of the Swedish thriller Insomnia (2002) followed. It felt so devoted to the original, it left many with a “why-bother” shrug. Somehow Nolan was next handed the keys to Batman, after the famed DC Comics hero was re-envisioned from sixties-era camp to stylized Gothic hero by Tim Burton and then run into the ground by Joel Schumacher who would miscast a glut of distracting Hollywood stars.
With Batman Begins (2005), Nolan would re-write the degree of sincerity warranted to a form of entertainment (the comic book) invented to amuse teenage boys in the early part of the 20th Century. 
Until Nolan, Hollywood had long treated the comic book film as disposable entertainment. Even the Burton films feel slight in comparison to what Nolan created. Nolan instead focused on the gray areas that had long kept comic books alive with adult readers in the 1980s, when the term “graphic novel” appeared, as well as trailblazing independent comic book publishers that explored more grown-up dimensions of character and society.
Played by Christian Bale, Nolan’s Batman felt tortured and haunted. But beyond the characters, Nolan knew how to incorporate social malaise as part of his Batman stories. His second Batman film, The Dark Knight (2008), famously examined the moral compromise of a country spying on its own citizens in the wake of President George W. Bush’s administration policy to wiretap citizens without a warrant (read this). Meanwhile Batman’s antagonist was the nihilistic Joker, whose sole motivation for violence was to have a laugh. Heath Ledger would go on to win a posthumous Oscar® for his portrayal.
Picking up where the Dark Knight left off, the Dark Knight Rises brings a new nemesis into the mix along with another prescient story. 
Clearly inspired by Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, the 1997 graphic novel written by Sin City’s Frank Miller, Batman’s alter ego, billionaire Bruce Wayne has gone into recluse mode. After Gotham City passes an ordinance that seems to put criminals in jail with minimal due process, Batman “retires.” The law, called the Dent Act, alludes to one of the other villains of the Dark Knight who ironically met his demise a martyr at the hands of Batman. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) used to be the city’s District Attorney, until his face was partially melted away by the Joker, turning him into the psychotically schizophrenic Two-Face. When Batman kills Two-Face to save the life of the police commissioner’s son, Batman takes the fall for the sake of Dent’s legacy and the passage of the law.
Enter the revolutionary: Bane (Tom Hardy), a misguided monster out to “save” Gotham from a perceived tyrannical rule that implicates the city’s wealthiest, including Wayne. References to class warfare abound. When Bane and his thugs terrorize brokers on the floor of the stock exchange, 98 percent of the audience will probably find themselves rooting for Bane.
The muscle-bound Bane almost shares as much screen time as Batman. He starts as an enigma who also wears a mask, which generates a tortured but eloquent voice, similar to Batman. His origins eventually come to light, and he becomes humanized to almost creepy affect, as a sort of echo chamber of all that seems rotten in today’s society.
Beyond Batman’s already established regular sidemen Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) and Wayne’s father-figure butler Alfred (Michael Caine), the film introduces several new characters into the mix and takes time to flesh them all out with conflicted characterizations, one of the best, next to Bane, being Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman (Anne Hathaway). Dumping the campy dominatrix quality of the Catwoman in Burton’s Batman Returns (1992), this Catwoman grows from ethereal mystery woman to a creature of charm and heart.
But another delightful introduction into the mix is Joseph Gordon-Levitt as an ambitious “hothead” of a rookie cop, John Blake. Both Hardy and Gordon-Levitt make returns from Inception, as does Marion Cotillard who plays Miranda, a cipher of a character more complex than she at first seems. Great performers are present all over this film, not the least of which is Bale himself who treats his Bruce Wayne/Batman with as much care as his portrayal of the real-life Dieter Dengler in Werner Herzog’s amazing and underseen Rescue Dawn.
Though the film sustains an edgy, dark tone with its drab, cold color palette, the Dark Knight Rises defines itself with action. The set pieces, including a mid-air plane hijacking scene that introduces Bane, takes one’s breath away. Nolan incorporates digital effects with subtlety among live-action stunt sequences (that plane scene!). Unlike most of these films, Nolan seems to skip out on the digital “stuntmen,” heightening the film’s realistic qualities and, in effect, the film’s stakes. Nolan also avoided the temptation (and probably the pressure) to shoot the film in 3D. It was however, partially shot on IMAX, so the bigger the screen the better.
Having long ago set the tone for the current new era of proper super hero films, there is little room for Nolan to reinvent Batman, however. It just as well may end here (though his next job happens to be as producer on the reboot of the next Superman Film). I should not fail to mention that the Dark Knight Rises is not without its action movie tropes. The film indulges in a couple too many monologues of righteousness between characters that these do-or-die action films tend to lean on for characterization. 
Also, as much hype was placed on keeping Bane’s plan for Gotham secret, the film should be docked for giving us another climactic “countdown” that’s almost de rigueur in action movies. However, it does redeem itself for revealing the flaws in the goals of the Tea Party-type (or Occupy) extremist Bane. His plan to “give Gotham back to the people” results in a terrifying portrait of anarchy that Nolan does not fear dwelling on for an effective amount of screen time.
Another crutch that seems over-used at first but later brilliantly subverted includes the bombastic mood-enhancement of Hans Zimmer’s score. It can get grating in its obvious quality during the beginning of the film. I began to worry how much longer will the film rely on the layering crescendo of an orchestra and the boom from a barrage of percussion to make its point that this is scene or that scene is DRAMATIC. 
Then there arrives this fantastic moment about an hour into the film when Nolan eschews music to nerve-wracking effect. It happens during the first confrontation between Bane and Batman in the sewers of Gotham. You almost forgive the initial overuse of scoring ahead of the scene where the only soundtrack is the sound of physical violence. The moment also includes a wise decision by Nolan to include momentary cutaways to a few scattered onlookers, most of which are Bane’s henchmen. Contrary to many of these moments in the good v. evil canon, they do not cheer their leader on, but watch with a quiet, cold, curious interest. It’s the accumulation of these small but definitive moments inserted among terse action sequences that make the film such an awe-inspiring thing to watch unfold.
My favorite of the four trailers available, as of this post:
The Dark Knight Rises is rated PG-13 and runs 164 minutes. You can catch it at any multi-plex right now in HD, 35mm and IMAX.
2009 top 23 films
December 26, 2009
Since the end of the year is upon on us, and the lists are starting to pop up in all sorts of media, here is my list of favorite films of 2009. I have included links to buy on Amazon where appropriate, so you can support this blog in an easy way (Note: some links are pre-orders or pages where you can sign up to be notified when a release date for the item has been announced).
1. (500 Days) of Summer
An omniscient narrator sets the film up early on by noting “this is not a love story,” but few films ever capture the feeling of falling in love as well as this movie. Director Marc Webb proves himself a deft craftsman of the stale genre of romantic comedy, which too easily becomes formulaic. The couple in (500) Days of Summer share some beautiful, subtle moments of tenderness as well as heart-rending moments of disconnectedness that never comes across as heavy-handed. The movie constantly reminds you that these are two different people with different ideas of a relationship, yet they stubbornly continue dating while remaining lovable all the same thanks to the wit of the script and the strong chemistry between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel.
2. Inglourious Basterds
Buy: DVD or Blu-ray or 3-Disc Collector’s Edition Blu-ray
Inglourious Basterds is a true film lover’s film. Quentin Tarantino has always shown a deft ability to exploit the tools of cinema for maximum effect on the nerves through action and suspense while showing a true affection for movie-making. I’ve come to feel that whenever he is fully involved in a movie (not just writing a script), he can do no wrong. I saw this movie toward the end of its run in theaters, and even in a small movie house with a sparse audience, when the final scene ended the audience broke out in applause. Great writing, performances and pacing throughout Inglourious Basterds shows a movie’s run time matters little when the director can make it entertaining throughout.
3. The Fantastic Mr. Fox
No one does awkward as artistically as Wes Anderson, and his foray into stop-motion generated story-telling raises his lovable, damaged characters to a new level. In the strange alternate world of Fantastic Mr. Fox, the characters’ self-conscious struggles with their own shortcomings never fit more comfortably into an Anderson-directed flick. The challenge of appreciating Anderson’s work depends on how willing the audience is to acknowledge their own faults in the self-deprecating humor that drives his movies. With Fantastic Mr. Fox, he ingeniously disguises that premise behind fuzzy animals with human qualities. However, the film never sugar coats their animal behavior with innocent cuteness. The sharp delivery of dialogue between the characters sometimes slips toward wild unpredictable primal behavior, which wittily treads the line of silliness and danger. Unlike so many movies for kids, this movie felt organic and authentic, and what do kids need most but true, heart-felt honesty, even if that truth might have its dark places? As Fantastic Mr. Fox continually reminds us, “We’re wild animals.”
4. Syndromes and a Century
Buy: DVD
My only regret about this film is that I had to catch on DVD to experience it. It must have looked amazing on film. Still, the movie rises above most other films on DVD through its transcendent use of sound and vision. Never have I seen a film capture the sense of observing as strongly as Syndromes and a Century. The film lingers on landscapes, objects and people in a trance-like manner that compels the viewer to activate their internal eyes.
5. Broken Embraces
I really think Pedro Almodovar can do no wrong. His twisting tales wind from comical situations to deep insights into humanity while stopping at interesting and entertaining detours in-between. Broken Embraces, a story about family connections hidden in a near Hitchcockian-mystery is one more in a series of recent masterpieces by Almodovar. It’s hard to say if I think it is better than Talk to Her, Bad Education and Volver. He is one of the few directors currently working whose only competition is himself.
6. Avatar
George Lucas must be crying. His much-hyped Star Wars prequels fell short of their supposed revolution in digital filmmaking, and now James Cameron’s Avatar comes along to swoop down and take the recognition. Where the new Star Wars films felt like nothing more than live action and animation clashing together, Avatar feels absorbing and nearly organic (still missing in these digital characters is the actual sense of physical weight. Even in this movie, the digital creatures feel as if they are floating in the frame, instead of weighted to the ground by gravity). With Avatar, we again have the recycled hero-myth story, as also seen in the original Star Wars movie from 1977. The difference in the effects utilized to tell the story in Avatar, however, are so absorbing (especially in 3-D) that it’s enough to make anyone who saw the original Star Wars in the theater suffer a heart attack.
7. Star Trek
I had grown tired of the Star Trek films years ago. I think part of the problem of these film adaptations was that they were TV shows given the high gloss of cinematic re-envisioning. They were just fancy TV shows with the same cast members. With a new cast of actors and a springboard originating in the movie house, this movie felt like a true blockbuster worth repeated viewings in the cinema and now on DVD and Blu-Ray. I think credit lies in director JJ Abrams’ lack of preciousness for the TV series. During interviews for the movie he was quick to note he had never been a fan of the TV show, and it shows, as he breaths new life into the stale series with a newfound tension among shopworn characters.
8. District 9
Buy it: DVD or DVD Special Edition or Blu-ray
This sci-fi film felt like something done by the matured audience of the E.T. generation. It’s E.T. with a social conscience, not just a romanticized kids’ adventure film. Director Neill Blomkamp asks deep questions through the notion of aliens landing on earth, subsequently adding deeper stakes to the action sequences, which made for one of the more harrowing sci-fi films in the genre’s history.
9. Up
Buy it: DVD or DVD Special Edition or Blu-ray
I think the opening prologue of Up, yet another Pixar success story, was one of the greatest set up pieces in cinema. A marvelous bit of character development unfolds almost wordlessly, and you soon know what is at stake when old Mr. Fredericksen takes flight to South America in a floating house. You can tell the movie has a talented group of animators with true pumping hearts, unlike so many kiddie films cooked up by committees whose low brow attempts to humor their young audiences so often falls flat, cold and dumb. Up is one of those rare cartoons that transcends its digital images to reveal a living, breathing soul.
10. Tokyo Sonata
Kiyoshi Kurosawa took his filmmaking to a higher level with this family drama that unfolds during these economically crippling times that affected all corners of the globe. There are no surreal, supernatural elements to lean back on here (as much as I love his strange, unrealities that speak to the deeper core of our realities), just true family drama and crippling repression (both psychological, not to mention financial) .
11. Moon
Like District 9, Moon feels like a sci-fi film looking for something more than simply flash and entertainment. It fits best among the sci-fi dramas of Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is a terrific achievement by newbie feature director Duncan Jones (who got his degree in philosophy and then went into advertising). Jones has a lot to offer as a young sci-fi director. He seems much more focused than the much-hyped Richard Kelly, who serrendiptously stumbles through his convoluted plots. High hopes abound for this young, new talent who is already at work on his next sci-fi film entitled Escape From the Deep.
12. Ponyo
Buy it: DVD available now or DVD preorder or Blu-ray preorder
The revered Hiyao Miyazaki returns with another animated fable that deals with man’s ecological impact on the planet couched within a love story at its most innocent: a boy fascinated by a weird-looking goldfish that wants to be human. Miyazaki and his team at Ghibli Studios indulge in their talents of hand drawn animation that eschews technology with just as much sincerity and pure love as that between the boy and the fish. The results are amazing and beyond what digital work can capture. In one scene, the waves in the angry sea undulated with incomparable organic rage that most likely would be lost in cold computer algorithms.
13. The Headless Woman
Buy it: DVD
Lucrecia Martel proves herself a master of upper crust alienation with her latest film, the most focused of her career. The extreme situation of a hit and run that may or may not involve a little boy is a catalyst for the title character’s actions or, better put, inaction. Actress Maria Onetto does an amazing job portraying a woman who tries to carry on her routine despite the mystery of her actions gnawing at her psyche. Martel’s distant and purposely unfocused manner of storytelling never found a subject more apt to her style.
14. Antichrist
I came away from this movie thinking I saw an attempt at something deeply probing into the psychology of marriages. It felt a bit like the same feeling I had when I saw Eyes Wide Shut for the first time (I’ve seen it countless times since and count it among Kubrick’s masterpieces). I’m still figuring out Antichrist. I got stuck with a bad screening plagued by technical difficulties during the film’s digital projection, which did not help matters. But I have a feeling this film could have been a rich experience into the dark well of the unconscious.
15. Watchmen
Buy it: DVD Director’s Cut or DVD Ultimate Cut or Blu-ray Director’s Cut or Blu-ray Ultimate Cut or the graphic novel
If anything, no matter how much director Zach Snyder tried, this movie proves you cannot make a faithful film interpretation of a comic book masterpiece. There are just too many key elements in this story that are so grounded in the comic book medium to effectively translate to a movie audience. Still, there are some excellent characters and ideas in here that came from a genius mind: original comic book writer Alan Moore, who rightfully refuses to attach his name to the cinematic version. Ironically, it is his ideas that give the movie its deeper quality, hence why I am including a link to buy the book, which truly is the best way to experience this story.
16. I Love You, Man
I Love You, Man was a hilariously uncomfortable bromantic comedy out of Hollywood for men who are not afraid of feelings. Yes, these jokes are nothing new or groundbreaking, but they had never been committed to celluloid with such genius comic timing, thanks mostly to the performances by Paul Rudd and Jason Segal, who did none too shabby as the apple of Rudd’s eye. But, make no mistake, this is a true love story among straight men, the only kind of relationship that could come out of a mutual appreciation of Rush’s music, mind you.
17. Julia
Buy: DVD
Director Erick Zonca and actress Tilda Swinton do a remarkable job at creating a hero out of a self-absorbed, even psychopathic alcoholic. Julia takes the idea of the deluded alcoholic and enhances the mal-perceived invulnerability, not to mention the paranoia and desperation, of the afflicted lush by throwing her into an extreme situation involving a kidnapping. The situation inevitably goes awry, taking her over the border to Juarez, Mexico where things go from bad to worse, forcing her into some kind of redemption. Besides the deftly wound story, the powerful performance at its core by Swinton will undoubtedly and criminally go over-looked during awards season.
18. Where the Wild Things Are
This much-hyped kids movie even went so far as making it to 3-D and IMAX screens and topped the box office during its opening. But, man did it disappoint people, ultimately losing close to $25 million (see box office mojo). When I saw it, I overheard a man sitting behind me, who brought a pack of rowdy kids with him, declare: “That was the worst movie I’ve ever seen!” God forbid a kiddie film actually holds up a mirror to the savage nature of children. Director Spike Jonez and writer David Eggers’ take on Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are is a collision of darkness, adventure, wonder, fear, aggression and mystery. With its few famous words (338), the book can only lend itself to interpretation. What you put into it, is what you get out of it. The movie is the product of two clear lovers of the book (a film sanctioned by Sendak), and with its spare story and the raw reactionary behavior of its characters, it continues to ask the audience if they are in touch with the wild thing within them.
19. A Serious Man
Hyped as a personal film by the Cohen brothers, supposedly the closest they have come to producing a movie based on their childhood, this film proves to be one of their more puzzling works of art. I recall being accosted on the way out of the movie by a group of elderly Jewish people who asked me “What does it mean?” Mind you, I am not Jewish, nor do I look it (though when I worked at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, people thought I was an Ashkenazi Jew based on my Latin looks). Two women lead the questioning, looking at me like I was keeping some secret. As they continued to ask “What does it mean?” the older men just stood behind them. All I could think was how this made an even better ending to the great, cryptic ending of the actual movie. I’ll keep my answer to the ladies between them and me.
20. Away We Go
This movie felt larger than the funny notion of putting a pregnant couple into a road movie in search of the ideal place to raise their family while visiting their dysfunctional relatives and friends across North America. Away We Go shows how we live in our own realities and dreams and how uncertainly they fit into the
world. The best anyone can do to cope is by finding the true self, in the Jungian sense. The greatest home one can find is within the partner one chooses to share a home with. The final scene is transcendent in the way it captures these characters taking their realities into a dream, as a family unit. It felt surreal and powerful and much deeper than some witty road movie.
21. Up in the Air
This is probably Jason Reitman’s tightest film yet. I think the power of it lies in the humanity of his characters. They are less cartoonish than those of his other acclaimed works, Juno and Thank You For Smoking. Reitman not only handles the cold downsizing of today’s corporate environment with an evenhanded yet emotional quality, he also peers deeply into the soul of a man who can deliver the notices without feeling any guilt about it while continuing to enjoy the hollow experience of travelling between assignments.
22. Paranormal Activity
Buy: DVD or Blu-ray or DVD Limited Edition
I have to give Paranormal Activity its due for its technical merit in creating a nerve-wracking horror movie without the cheap, in-your-face gore. It wasn’t only in the bedroom scenes that unfold in the dark, as you see the effects of the things that go bump in the night. The set-ups were brilliant with a so-called expert in the paranormal showing his wariness to enter the house and the simple scan across images from a demonology book, hinting at what this entity might look like. Paranormal Activity was a fun, creepy ride that proves nothing is scarier in the movies than what you cannot see.
23. The Road
An exercise in desolation that puts you in the uncomfortable philosophical and psychological position to consider the question “What would you do?” On what appears to be a dying planet Earth, God has seemingly abandoned man both spiritually and physically. Nothing can thrive on the planet except man. All the vegetation has somehow ceased to grow and the animals have all died off, leaving the few human survivors to cannibalize their fellow man or scavenge for any edible scraps left from the previous society. As a father and son (played with melancholy desperation by Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee) search for some hope at the coast, one cannot help but wonder what lies at the core of human nature: good or evil. Probably the most hopeless movie ever made.
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In many ways, this is not a definitive list for 2009. It’s a personal favorites list. Also, there are so many movies from 2009 that have yet to play in Miami or I missed opportunities to see: Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Jane Campion’s Bright Star, Lorna’s Silence from the Dardenne brothers, Tulpan, Police Adjective, Black Dynamite, The House of the Devil, An Education and on and on, so this list is bound to change or, better yet, grow.
Everyone will have his or her own list. If you feel passionate about something I have not included or included, do share. Also, share your own lists, while you are at it. They can be mere top 10s, too.
Independent Ethos 