January Films

Wow - it's been 2 weeks since I posted anything, other than a space filler... I shall try to make up for that. I have seen some nice films in that time (and all through this month) - not as many as I thought I was going to, but still... so to get back in the swing, here's a kind of round up-new-movies-seen-post, covering most of the month.

I don't know where to start, so start at the top: There Will Be Blood arrives trailing hype and accolades and delivers. It took a couple viewings to completely sell me, but it did sell me. More than just an allegory of the modern republican party - oil men and religious freaks in a poisonous alliance, taking turn abusing each other: god-botherers subjecting the oil men to bizarre ritual humiliations - in exchange for which the oil men rob them and their followers and everybody else blind.... For all the epic scope of the thing, it's almost a chamber drama, fathers and sons and brothers, real, imagined, symbolic - watching it the second time, though, the themes, the parallels, the underlying methods and patternings come forth - details, in the filmmaking, in the story, come out - it delivers on all that PT Anderson has been promising. The Andersons - Paul Thomas and Wes - have, for the last decade or so - been clearly to the champions of this generation of American filmmakers, and this film solidifies that once again.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: why did I skip this when it came out? Was I just so disappointed with 3:10 to Yuma that I figured another artsy western would be a waste of time? was it just the length? were there bad reviews? It was a mistake, whatever it was. Thank goodness it came around again, a recap of some touted films from last year, and I got to see it - it's really good. It's long, not much seems to happen, sure, but it does happen - it makes you wait, as the characters wait - it's structured around the delay of the inevitable: the title lays it out, and you wait for it - the characters wait for it - everyone, it seems, quite aware of what is going to happen, just a matter of how. (Though the how - basically a series of people getting shot in the back of the head.)... A fine, elegant looking film, with some slick performances - Pitt playing off his star power, Affleck weird and squirrelly, and Paul Schneider giving a fascinating supporting bit as someone who's dumb as a board, but a tick smarter than the rest of them... Maybe not quite on par with Zodiac and There Will be Blood and No Country for Old Men - but another excellent genre film given an art film twist....

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: a nice adaptation - some interesting choices. Depp can hold the screen with anyone, and here he has Rickman for balance (who makes a better villain?) Bonham Carter and Spall make fine second bananas, and the juvenile and ingenue are cute and bland as one expects. The music is fantastic, of course.... When it came out, I saw a few comments calling it "inert," complaining about the lack of movement... That's not far off - though it shouldn't exactly be criticism. First - because of the way Burton shoots it - he uses static shots - it looks like he's shooting storyboards. He does that a lot - his style, in most of his films, is more like a comic book than a film - the shots seem to have a kind of self-contained quality: they do what they do because of what they look like, rather than what happens in them, or how they link together, exactly... Second - and this is criticism - the "third act" ("development" as Bordwell and Thompson might have it, corresponding, I think, to the first half of the second act of the musical itself) - is inert. The rest (parts 1, 2 and 4 - the "setup", "complication" and "climax") is dramatic - the story is enacted; but this part is not - it is all summary. "Todd became a murderer and Mrs. Lovett baked the bodies into pies." There are three or four songs - but this part of the film does nothing but make an excuse for those songs. It's plot role is summed up in the summary. The film sags, until the boy finds the girl and things start moving again...

Persepolis - handsomely animated adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical comic. Great looking - beautiful black and white, silhouettes and cutouts that are handled with great subtlety and flexibility - nice to see a full length animated feature that uses the art to expressive effects. The story is about what you would expect - a feisty girl growing up in Iran before during and after the revolution - the themes, of liberal hopes for change dashed by the mullahs, and the continued efforts to civilize the place, to maintain one's dignity and self-respect in the face of various forms of oppression - are fairly common in Iranian films... This being made in France, they are perhaps more explicit than in films by people like Jafar Panahi or Darius Merhjui...

Charlie Wilson's War - amusing, hilip Seymour Hoffman is spectacular - not sure what more to say about it.

Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story - thoroughly silly music movie spoof, probably only a couple jokes, though they stay funny throughout... there are a few outstanding moments - the Beatles bit, say - and all of it is diverting... probably nothing special, but I still find myself quoting it, though no one else seems to have seen it. "It's called Karate!"