Category: Reviews

2012 Oscar Nominated Shorts

The shorts categories at the Oscars are always the most boring part of the endlessly long ceremony, unless you can crack jokes at how the “God of Love” director probably got a B on his student film, didn’t get a haircut and then won a friggin’ Oscar for it.

But it’s not just for the reason that you typically can’t see the films. It’s for the reason that, even if you did track down the films, why when you could only watch them on a junky 360i YouTube screen, would you even want to watch them?

Seeing the Oscar Nominated Shorts in a theater, with an audience, all in a row, you can begin to sense their quality, charm and ingenuity.

Animated

Watching the five animated shorts, I was struck by how clever, artistic, original and purely cinematic they all were.

Only one of the five has dialogue, and only two of the five are entirely computer generated.

I asked myself why Pixar or DreamWorks don’t make films that experiment with animation styles considering how artistic something in two dimensions can actually be. That was until I actually saw the Pixar short, “La Luna.”

La Luna

Pixar has outdone themselves. They make gorgeous films that everyone can agree are gorgeous, and the story of a boy out with his father and grandfather on a boat is cute and affecting in a less exploitative way than fellow nominee “The Fantastic Flying Books.” The family job is to climb up to the moon and sweep some shimmering stars around to form the curvature of the moon each night. Coupled with astonishing images, “La Luna” is a film that encourages exploration, hard work, family ties and individuality, which is likely a lot more than you can say about “Cars 2.” This is the short that should win, and maybe it still has a fighting chance. It would be the first time in 11 years to win since 2001’s “For the Birds.”

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

This film has been cleaning up animation awards left and right, it’s got a cool looking interactive iPad app to go along with it and it’s got the pedigree of children’s author and illustrator William Joyce to boot. And as lovely, colorful and sweetly saccharine this story about the joy of reading is, the whole film feels like a PSA for reading. It not so subtly illustrates that to read brings books alive, brings color into the world and grows old with you. It’s a message that parents and children will eat up, and so will the Academy. It’s my pick to win.

Dimanche (Sunday)

“Dimanche” is a darkly funny and yet inventively irreverent story of a boy who flattens coins on train tracks. It’s underscored in notoriously simple and exaggerated black and white, pencil drawn, cel animation. In this way, director Patrick Doyon creates a morbidly bleak world where all the adults are monstrous vultures like the obtuse crows crouching over the town’s train tracks. It’s got an almost twisted ending that might keep it away from Academy voters however.

A Morning Stroll

Why did the chicken cross the road? To experiment with animation styles of course. Grant Orchard and Sue Goffe’s film is about shapes, times and perspectives all illustrated through one odd short story of a chicken walking down the street, pecking on a door and disappearing inside. In 1959, the animation is one-dimensional. In modern day, it’s in color and 2D, and the CGI image of 3D 2059 is too hilariously gruesome and disturbing to spoil here. Watching that ending, I’d be shocked to see if it really is Oscar bait. But let me just say this: I want the Zombie Breakdance app.

Wild Life

“Wild Life” comes from former nominees Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby, and although it’s set in Canada, it’s a lush, colorful Western. The images are constantly moving oil paintings with a lovingly intimate look. Its initially cute and folksy dialogue evolves into something with actual pathos that is lacking in the other whimsical shorts.

Also packaged with the Oscar nominated shorts were four others that made the short list, “The Hybrid Union,” “Nullarbor,” “Amazonia” and the absolutely drop dead hilarious, viral video worthy “Skylight.” That’s the one you should really try and find on YouTube. Continue reading “2012 Oscar Nominated Shorts”

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

I hate “Law and Order.” I hate how identical it feels week to week with its dense, ridiculous plots and minimal visual intrigue. It’s almost completely soiled me on crime procedurals.

But Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has made a peculiar crime procedural by oddly making “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’s” story more mundane and its artistry more remarkable.

It’s the story of a group of detectives out searching for a body after two men have confessed to a murder. They were drunk when they committed the act and can’t remember where the body is buried, so their search for it is intentionally slow and arduous.

But the entire time Ceylan transports us to another world full of darkly captivating natural splendor. The long, winding roads through the hilly Turkish countryside are painterly tapestries in the camera’s eyes, and Ceylan slowly glosses over them in deliberately expressive shots. So often he challenges us to scour the lush landscape, and we become enchanted by the subtle motion of cars rocketing like fireballs as they gracefully penetrate the image. Continue reading “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”

David Copperfield World Premiere

I live in Indiana. The chances of me getting to see a World Premiere for any movie are slim to none.

But IU Cinema Director Jon Vickers has granted me that opportunity with a strange, but certainly not unwelcome selection.

The 1922 Nordisk Film adaptation of “David Copperfield” had its World Premiere Saturday with the performance of a student performed, conducted and composed score by IU Jacobs School of Music sophomore Ari Barack Fisher.

The film had never existed in any digital form, had no existing score and may have never screened in America, but the Library of Congress and the British Film Archives provided a surprisingly pristine film print to the world-class cinema Saturday night for the special occasion.

Having reported on the film for the Indiana Daily Student (which you can read here), I knew to expect good things, but I’m now proud to report that “David Copperfield” is a quaint, lush and lovely silent film that now has an equally moving, touching and complex score to accompany it.

Here is a film made in Denmark that has the stunning production values of a Hollywood film, and in that way it is a dense movie full of changing tones and moods. Fisher’s score adheres to that wonderfully. Continue reading “David Copperfield World Premiere”

Chronicle

“Chronicle” puts a twist on the found footage drama and creates a compelling and inventive teen drama of epic proportions.

You’ve found a bottomless pit with a glowing alien object buried deep inside. Interacting with it gives you and two friends telekinetic powers. Do you use it to stop crime, unveil a government conspiracy, battle an alien invasion or turn evil?

Hell no! In “Chronicle,” you use it to fly, pull pranks and lift up girls’ skirts. God knows finding out she’s wearing black panties is more of a mystery than an Area 51 cover up.

“Chronicle” is a clever, fun, intense and at times twisted take on a high school teen drama, and for that this “found footage” film surpasses all the cliché monster or horror movies that typically litter the genre. Continue reading “Chronicle”

Warrior

“Warrior” is an ugly, jittery, annoying and contrived film that never relents in beating you.

“The Fighter” isn’t exactly “Raging Bull,” but it’s a better film than most give it credit for. To call “Warrior” just a Mixed Martial Arts “Fighter” set in Philly however is giving “Warrior” way too much credit.

Watching “Warrior” I realized all the things “The Fighter” actually does not do. It has no split screen montages, no wives telling their husbands fighting is the wrong life for a family man, no shaky cam fight scenes, no unbeatable foreign behemoth, no money problems, no dark pasts conjured out of thin air, no legal issues, no dead mother, no washed up father lamenting his glory days, no fake SportsCenter clips and most of all, no parables.

“Warrior” has all of these things, and yet lacks a minute of the fun in watching Micky Ward’s train wreck of a brother, his posse full of trashy sisters, his tart and sexy girlfriend or his commanding and memorable mother. Continue reading “Warrior”

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

On the heels of a much-undeserved Best Picture nomination for “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” I began to wonder how it could’ve appealed to so many Academy voters. On paper, Stephen Daldry’s film is total Oscar bait, but in execution it feels more genuinely hurtful than exploitative, melodramatic and weepy.

Much of that has to do with “Extremely Loud’s” extremely unlikeable lead character, the 9-year-old Oskar Schell. Oskar is portrayed brilliantly by the first time actor Thomas Horn, who carries the film and has a strong assertion over this character’s mannerisms, but Oskar’s irritating characterization, either stemming from Jonathan Safran Foer’s popular novel of the same name, or from Eric Roth’s (“Forrest Gump,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) screenplay, does the movie wrong. Continue reading “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”

Haywire

“Haywire” is a no-frills action movie that measures what can be accomplished in a genre film.

Something with as many ass kickings as “Haywire” couldn’t possibly be called an experimental film, can it?

Steven Soderbergh built one around porn star Sasha Grey, so why not for martial arts fighter Gina Carano?

“Haywire” is a no-frills action movie that measures what can be accomplished in a genre film.

It minimizes on sweeping photography or handheld queasy cam effects and produces a stylized, precise and expertly choreographed film. Its simplicity is compelling just in admiring the craft of it all.

Carano plays Mallory Kane, a secret agent betrayed by her private contractor (Ewan McGregor), but the plot too is stripped to its bare bones to the point that the cryptic details are just filler for “Haywire’s” artsy combat set pieces.

Soderbergh gives us full-bodied fights that lovingly make use of space, his rapid editing still delineating clear angles as though he were photographing Carano in the octagon.

The gorgeous Carano makes for an unusual movie star with how at home she is during the film’s many battles.

She’s the key in a film uninterested with her striking sexuality. But Carano demands presence, and although she could serve as a better feminist icon than Fincher’s Lisbeth Salander, Carano is too tough and impressive for anyone to really notice or care.

3 ½ stars

Drew Peterson: Untouchable

In October of 2007 when Drew Peterson’s wife Stacy went missing, we in the Chicagoland area got to hear it first as nothing more than a missing person story. Bolingbrook was a stone’s throw away from my Chicago suburb, and as the story slowly grew into a national media frenzy, it was all the more amusing because it was so close to home.

The Drew Peterson story wasn’t just an amusing media frenzy; it was OUR media frenzy, and the story just kept getting better and better.

It hit a peak when not only was there to be a Lifetime movie about Peterson, Saturday night’s “Drew Peterson: Untouchable,” but the head scratcher Rob Lowe was cast and looked surprisingly good as the former police officer.

Watching “Untouchable” was for me a strange, almost perverse guilty pleasure of feeling closer to this scandal than any other. I did not expect to find deep insight, humanization or answers in of all things a Lifetime movie, but this bland, boring and bullheaded TV movie does little other than dramatize the whole media circus into a condensed, two-hour soap.

Even on a trashy level, it pales in comparison to the ongoing amusement that was, and is, Drew Peterson’s story. Continue reading “Drew Peterson: Untouchable”

Sideways

I watched “Sideways” at least three times before I decided I liked it. The characters are smug, entitled, loutish, pretentious and depressing, and yet like a good bottle of wine it required a delicate aging until I savored it for its maturity, beauty and perfection.

Miles (Paul Giamatti) is the Pinot Noir of pricks, a rare survivor of someone who’s likeable, clever and dopey all at once. Divorced for two years and scraping to find a publisher for the lengthy novel he keeps in not one but two shoe boxes, he goes on a trip to wine country for his best friend Jack’s (Thomas Haden Church) bachelor party.

Miles listens patiently as Jack announces his plans to get laid one last time before a life of marriage. Because he’s only tacitly unsupportive, we get the feeling we shouldn’t feel pity for either of them. Miles is in such a rut and yet still notoriously sarcastic, pitiful and righteous in everything he does we hope he might act up if he just gets laid too.

Alexander Payne’s film is darkly funny in this way, overwrought and pretentious at times but sincere and touching in a way we wouldn’t expect.

“Sideways” is a wonderfully well-crafted love story and coming of age drama for a group of middle aged men little seen in the movies. Miles and Jack’s courtships with the locals Maya (Virginia Madsen) and Stephanie (Sandra Oh) are lovingly relatable.

In one instant Miles can give a crash course on snobbish wine tasting, systematically examining its smell and its color before hilariously berating Jack for chewing gum. But contrast that with his and Maya’s theories on when a bottle of wine is at its best: even drunk they are mature adults capable of generating thoughtful metaphors on how drinking reflects mortality and the possibility of missing out on life’s luster and flavor if you don’t enjoy it at its peak.

“Sideways” matches its characters’ level of pretension with a trendy window panel montage and a jazzy soundtrack. It stays distant from these people and their tendency to embarrass themselves, and in the process finds pitch perfect comedy in some wonderful set pieces on the side of a hill, on a golf course and in the house of a local couple having sex.

This is a terrifically heart wrenching, intelligent and sincere film with a great ending that doesn’t last a second too long. Its tricky characters may be an acquired taste, but my pallet has developed the maturity to appreciate their charms.

4 stars

The Hurt Locker

“The Hurt Locker” is a pulse-pounding, hyper-realistic war epic but also a moving character study.

It happens to every Best Picture winner: the average Joe movie goer comes out to see the big prestige film of the year, and it gets criticized in all the wrong places.

For “The Hurt Locker,” one of the few memorable masterpieces to win the Best Picture Oscar that will be remembered as a symbol of the 2000s years from now, it was soldiers claiming it was hardly as realistic as it appeared. No soldier would ever be able to leave the FOB alone and in street clothes.

This is true, and no soldier would ever drop a smoke bomb to blind the vision of his team as he went to defuse an elaborate ring of six bombs on his own either.

“The Hurt Locker” is not merely the most pulse pounding, intense and theoretically authentic Iraq War film ever made; it’s a harrowing character study pummeled home through a tightly made action and suspense movie in this modern warfare setting.

Kathryn Bigelow’s film is strikingly visual and compelling, sometimes awesome and at others harrowing. Each moment is so finely tuned and precise in its cinematic perfection that it reflects the care Alfred Hitchcock would’ve enlisted had he made a war film. Continue reading “The Hurt Locker”