MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: OPEN UP AND LET THE DEVIL IN

In the 2010s, one of the most interesting new directorial voices anywhere in the English-speaking world has been that of Great Britain’s Ben Wheatley. Without having produced any clear-cut unambiguous masterpieces in in the handful of features and short contribution to the horror anthology The ABCs of Death (one of the lonely few segments of that film that’s worth any damn at all - it is, in fact, my favorite) that make up his career since 2009, Wheatley has eked out a position as an extremely satisfying manipulator of genres and tones, finding pawky humor in the grotesque and maddeningly tense horror in the mundane and suburban. It’s a little premature to claim that I’d be willing to follow him anywhere, but I haven’t been let down yet.

So with all that in mind, it’s a little bit disappointing that the first of Wheatley’s films to put in an appearance on this blog, A Field in England, finds the director producing his first movie that I haven’t loved on the spot. Not because he seems to relaxed whatever internal pressure led to the creation of his first three, enormously idiosyncratic movies - the film, his fourth feature,his fourth, is arguably his most ambitious yet, artistically and narratively. If nothing else, the attempt to mount a period movie set during the Civil War (the 17th Century one in England, not the 19th Century one in America) with only six actors and costumes that look like the most talented mom in middle school put them together for the spring play - and to succeed so fully in that attempt that after the opening scene finishes instructing us how to watch the movie, there’s never another moment when it feels inauthentic or fake - would earn so many moxie points that it would be hard to entirely dislike the film.

The simple beginning to an obtuse, psychologically-driven narrative finds bullying military man Commander Trower (Julian Barratt) relying on an apprentice alchemist and diviner named Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) to find a missing outlaw. During battle, which he watches from the fringes (and if it feels like this is an excuse for us to hear the fighting without seeing it, sure, but it works at establishing the film’s off-kilter tone right at the start), Whitehead is able to escape, meeting up with a pair of deserters, Jacob (Peter Ferdinando) and Friend (Richard Glover), and a freeman, Cutler (Ryan Pope), all leaving the field of battle; their attempt to find an ale house a little way back into the country leads them quickly astray, and right into the path of O’Neil (Michael Smiley), an Irish thief, and the exact same outlaw Whitehead had been assigned to hunt down. O’Neil has a much more intriguing possibility than ale and whores; he claims to know of a treasure hidden in a nearby field, and he’s not going to give up the chance to have a trained diviner help him find it.

It would be simple and clean to suggest that the film takes its turn when the group eats a stew made of wild mushrooms that prove to be hallucinogenic, and it’s certainly at this point that the film most fully reveals itself as a psychological drama with overtones of cosmic, religious terror. But that would be selling the opening act short. At all points, A Field in England delights in presenting the viewer with a world sufficiently disorienting, between the weird emptiness of its setting, the stylised mix of modernism and olde-tymey dialogue in Amy Jump’s script (Wheatley’s regular writer and thus the co-author of his distinctive, odd tones), and the metallic cinematography by Laurie Rose, in a full range of soft greys that never quite commit to full white and only rarely to black. The film looks and sounds like a dream in a rather more direct sense than most “this is a dream” films usually do: the images stubbornly refuse to link up properly even though there’s no obvious discontinuity in the cutting, and objects and concepts suddenly appear in the story as though they were already there and we were supposed to have noticed them before. It looks, and sounds, deeply uncanny, long before the magic mushrooms enter the picture.

The film's general direction, with its generally increasing pileup of suggestions that the field is a version of Hell or at least Purgatory, and the equivalence of O'Neil with the actual devil (first as a joke, increasingly not), rather neatly marries two kinds of content: that is, having unexpectedly chosen to dive into the 1640s, Wheatley and Jump proceed to tell a story with moral concerns that feel period-appropriate, and even with a certain period-correct lack of polish and convincing illusion. If 17th Century Englishmen had access to digital cameras, but nothing else of contemporary technology, A Field in England has the distinct feel of something they might have made, and that's exceptionally cool. Also, this is what helps the film to hang together as much as it does, for as long as it does. For in honesty, while all of the individual parts work terrifically, from the nervous, rough performances to the cinematography to everything, the unified whole feels vaguely aimless and less than totally satisfying. The impression one gets - I got, at least - is that Wheatley and dompany didn't really have a feature's worth of different ideas, and so A Field in England ends up being a somewhat drawn-out affair that is punctuated, whenever it starts to flag really badly, with one of its more aggressively outré gestures.

I won't quite go so far as to say it's boring or pointless, though those words do rear their heads. What A Field in England does offer, by the bucketload, is a pervasive sense of unease, an almost physical sense of things being entirely and perversely not right with the film, as you're watching it. The combination of costume drama, religious allegory, and psychological horror that largely go to making up the movie matches with that unease beautifully, and the increasing fragmentation of the narrative into events that barely make sense on their own and don't seem to flow naturally from what went before proves to be a well-motivated and totally effective choice, and not just aimless messiness. It works as an experience, whatever else it does. But it's the first Wheatley film which I left feeling no clear sense of why - of what that experience was meant to do besides unsettle me mightily. It succeeded, and that's no little thing, but compared to the suggestive themes and social insight of the director and writer's previous work, I'm a little bit annoyed that it's the only thing.

7/10

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GRIN AND BEAR IT

The word that primarily suggests itself in respect to Paddington, roughly muscling out all other possibilities, is "charming". A word which could certainly be employed with a certain level of condescension, sure, but not really in this case. For it is an earned charm, in Paddington; the screenplay by director Paul King, from a story he and Hamish McColl adapted from Michael Bond's series of children's books, reeks with lighthearted affection for its characters, its settings, and its gentle depiction of a colorful, warmhearted England that never was. Even in it hardest-edged details - a crisply sardonic sense of humor with a healthy level of family-friendly misery, and an unremittingly cruel villain - the film never moves very far into darkness. Unpleasant things happen, yes, and they are played for laughs; but the only reason those laughs work, in this form, is because we're never persuaded that the unpleasantness is actually going to stick, or that anything genuinely bad might ever really happen to the characters.

The film takes its first cues from Pixar's Up, setting its stage with an old newsreel of a British explorer, Montgomery Clyde (Tim Downie), leading the first-ever expedition to Darkest Peru (the best example I can give of where the film's sense of humor lies is to point out the unblinking way that no character ever, ever refers to the country as just "Peru", anywhere in the film). Here he finds an unknown species of hyper-intelligent bear, able to form human speech and use tools, and he's so impressed that he leaves them totally unmolested, along with an invitation to find him in London if they ever wish to cross the Atlantic. Many years later, those same bears, Lucy (voiced by Imelda Staunton) and Pastuzo (Michael Gambon) are raising their orphaned nephew (Ben Whishaw), enjoying peace, tranquility, and an endless supply of homemade marmalade. After a terrible storm destroys their home, the young bear finds it necessary to make his way in the world, hopping a boat to England, where he encounter the Brown family, who name him "Paddington" after the station where he's found. Two very basic plots play out after this: Mr. Brown (Hugh Bonneville), a risk analyst, is horrified at the thought of having a bear in the house, but Mrs. Brown (Sally Hawkins) is too kind and caring to throw Paddington out, and the bear's gentle, bumbling ways eventually bring a new kind of life to the stilted Brown household, with children Judy (Madeleine Harris) and Jonathan (Samuel Joslin), and housekeeper Mrs. Bird (Julie Walters), quickly coming over to Mrs. Brown's side, while her husband behaves obstinately British. That whole thing, the one that's been done several dozen times.

The other plot centers on deranged museum taxidermist Millicent (Nicole Kidman) learning of Paddington and setting her sights on taking the bear down to be the prize of her career, with the help of the crusty, unpleasant Mr. Curry (Peter Capaldi), the Browns' neighbor. Which in the abstract isn't terribly fresh either, though the taxidermy angle is appealingly morbid.

What makes Paddington lovely, then, surely isn't its creativity, unpredictability, or its insight into human behavior. It's simply that this ancient, well-worn form is done with such a light touch, enlivened by the absolutely terrific cast - Jim Broadbent is somewhere in there, too - assembled by producer David Heyman in a fine impression of his decade-long work making sure that every actor born in the British Isles found work somewhere in the Harry Potter octology. The role of a stuffy, overly-protective dad doesn't strain Bonneville any more than playing a warm-hearted soul with a steel spine exerts Hawkins, or the wise, tart-tongued housekeeper finds Walters rummaging around in the deepest recesses of her bag of acting tricks. But then, Paddington isn't an acting showcase: it's a sweet, low-impact script that needs a lot of rich but non-fussy performances to keep things steady and free from too much syrup on the one side, or insincerity on the other. And that's exactly what everybody provides, from the enthusiastically amazed Whishaw on down (all apologies to Colin Firth, but it's an obvious good that he ended up dropping out of the role).

The only exception is Kidman, whose performance actually does stand out as a bit of a virtuoso turn; it's a basic hammy bad guy performance, but it offers one of the rare chances for that actor to have any real apparent fun, biting into her part and gnawing on it, while the cinematography and costumes and hairstyling all pitch in to make her look as porcelain an bleached-out and harsh as possible. It's especially gratifying to see Kidman well-used as the merciless villain in a literary adaptation for children, seven years after The Golden Compass so frustratingly refused to capitalise on her visual presence, and what she's up to here makes her one of the finest kids' movie villains of recent years.

That's one of the obvious hooks the film has for an adult viewer (assuming that "it has a gentle, forgiving, and amiable soul" isn't a hook, which sadly, I imagine to be the case); another is that the film is rather snugly made and handsome to look at. Particularly the production design by Gary Williamson, which has the richly stuffed texture of a Wes Anderson film, only scaled back to a more cozily domestic sphere (the Brown house is imagined as a literal doll house at times, and the intricate detailing of every room plays that up well). One location calls to mind the elaborate, dazzling interiors of the Harry Potter films without feeling out of place or breaking things; the rest of the movie presents a comfortable and clean London, recalling the obviously set-bound Mary Poppins both in its stagey artifice and its appropriate softness.

Paddington's unending niceness is its best and defining characteristic, though it's not without some meat on its bones: without arguing so hard that it knocks things out of balance, it serves as a durable parable about how England is strengthened by diversity and immigration (which doesn't quite extend to offering nonwhite faces actual parts to play, but it's hard to imagine which role would specifically benefit from such a choice). And there's also that wry, snappish sense of humor to pull things back from being so soft and cushy that the whole thing is insubstantial. The whole package is simple and not very showy (the CGI Paddington is hardly a cutting-edge piece of effects work and animation, though it gets the job done), but the whole thing is satisfying enough that if it turned out to hang around as a minor classic of contemporary children's filmmaking, I'd not be bothered by that in the slightest.

7/10

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HACK WORK

If your chief hope from the movies is that they tell well-crafted stories in a logically committed way, then no, Blackhat probably would not seem very good. The script by Morgan Davis Foehl isn't deficient, so much as it is vary puffy and disorganised, with no end to its dragged-out moments and inefficiencies, including a lengthy chunk in the back half of the film that hopscotches around Southeast Asia without any sense of narrative economy at all. And not in the "real life can be messy" way. Very strictly in the "we had way too much of a travel budget on this shoot, and decided to spend it all" way. And while it's uncharitable to say that reigning Sexiest Man Alive Chris Hemsworth isn't believable as a top-level hacker - no reason computer nerds can't be ripped and smoldering and have accents that don't quite know that they want to commit to "American" - it's a dubious bit of casting, no doubt about it.

The good news, then, is that Blackhat is a Michael Mann film, and storycraft and logical commitment are thus not as important as mood and style in providing the film's backbone. And oh, such mood and especially such style! Ever since he discovered digital cinematography, way back when with Collateral, Mann has been the American director most intently concerned with exploring how digital cinema can distinguish itself from traditional film-based cinema, rather than trying to find ways to mimic it. Sometimes, that results in Public Enemies, and we are all a little bit sad. But in the stylistic trilogy of Collateral, Miami Vice, (the first shot by Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron, the second by Beebe alone), and now this new film (shot by Stuart Dryburgh, who gets a lifetime pass from me thanks to The Piano) Mann has developed the representational possibilities of urban nights in directions that simply nobody else is interested in, while for the first time really digging in to find out how much he can push the distinctive digital look - hyper-crisp, grainless, flawless color separation - during the daylight hours as well.

If that sounds slickly inhuman, I don't suppose that I could argue otherwise. That being said, Blackhat tells a story in which its primary protagonist and primary (and largely unseen) antagonist communicate not just with each other but with the world largely through computers, and a certain willingness to replace the human with the digital is baked into it. It would be easy to look at the general scope of the plot - a team of American and Chinese government agents and outlaw hackers hunt down a cyber terrorist using his mad hacker skills to blow up nuclear facilities and destroy the stock market - and assume it's a panicky story about how too much internet can Kill Us All!!!, but if that was ever the thrust of Foehl's screenplay, it's absolutely not what Mann is interested in doing in the director's chair. The film is too laconic in its early stages, too eager to take CGI tours through the microscopic innards of computers, presented as beautiful environments of shape, surface and light, too fascinated by the guts of hacking - and, it must be said, too self-aware that "hacker blows up nuclear plants" is pretty much total bullshit - to sensationalise things. The movie ends up at 133 minutes, not because so much happens, but because what does happen isn't leaned on very hard.

So back to my point, which is that Blackhat is a film, to an extent, about computer realities replacing human realities, and the unmistakable digital sheen throughout the film helps to give that undercurrent some more weight. It's not a completely post-human thriller: it has the director's characteristic interest in male codes of conduct as executed by noble wicked hacker Hathaway (Hemsworth) and Chinese military officer Chen Dawai (Wang Leehom), cybercrimes specialist and Hathway's former roommate. With the wrinkle of Dawai's sister Chen Lien (Tang Wei) serving as Hathaway's love interest, while also being unusually well fleshed-out and autonomous for a woman in a Mann film. But the characters are never really more than the sum of their tropes; and that strands even as gifted a performer as Viola Davis in a part that doesn't require nearly her chops for such basic-level "tough guy fed" sarcasm.

Ultimately, then, it's definitely the case that the aesthetic matters more than the character drama, and the mechanics of the plot matter the least. So whatever hierarchy you require to find your movies satisfying, take that into account. But take into account well that the film's aesthetic manipulations are terrific: with precise control of focus and lighting and framing, this turns into a terrific meditation on bodies in motion through spaces, or just as often, bodies remaining firmly in place; it is a film where, late in the game, a shot of Hemsworth pointing a gun off-camera matter far more for its incredibly shallow focus on the gun barrel, leaving the movie star a blurry mass, than for where that gun is pointing or why. It's a film where the editing calls attention to shapes and colors and positions int he frame, more than it necessarily guides the plot. Primarily, the film is about being a physical human engaging with a synthetic, digital world; this is why the comically handsome Hemsworth, whose lean muscles and burly arms insist on his his flesh-and-blood presence even as they make him feel distinctly unreal, is actually an effective anchor for the computer-dominated narrative.

As a story, or even as an action thriller, it's not necessarily the most satisfying thing in the world, though when the same style is redirected to action setpieces, it can be awfully good: there's a gun battle following a slow-motion explosion that's just the most terrific thing. And even without being conventionally satisfying, there's something I found to be gorgeously magnetic about Blackhat: it immerses one into a mood and atmosphere without feeling the need to ground that mood in anything but itself, and it looks beautiful doing it. The ice-cold reception the movie has enjoyed suggests that this approach isn't for everybody, or even most people, but for myself, I found it to be totally absorbing from first to last frame, and a perfect cure for the Januarys.

8/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR

Having been shot in color and on media that doesn't look like a 30-year-old VHS camcorder, telling something that resembles a story pretty much no matter how you look at it, and gliding in at a whimsical four hours and ten minutes, Norte, the End of History certainly earns its reputation as director Lav Diaz's easiest movie.* This means it's also probably in the top 300 easiest films released commercially in the United States in 2014. It's downright scrutable in fact, it's basically just a Filipino riff on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and who doesn't like a good literary adaptation?

The Dostoevsky angle is useful primarily in that it lets a viewer get a handle on a project that's other so broad and ambitious that it would be hard to know where the hell to start with it. But it's also reductive in the extreme to try and use that as a shortcut to "solve" a movie that's as minutely obsessed with class distinctions in the Philippines in the 21st Century, the political history of that country's radical intelligentsia, the impact of modern communications technology, and the representational capacity of cinema, as it is with the moral questions that could have consumed a 19th Century Russian novelist. Although those questions matter, too. The fact of the matter is, Norte is a film of wild ambitions, considering as many topics with as much complexity as it dares to. And with that much running time to play with, it gets to dare a lot.

The content seems simple enough: Fabian (Sid Lucero) is a law student, celebrated by his social circle as the most sophisticated thinker among them, and when we meet him, he's holding court on moral and legal theory. Something he apparently does quite a lot of, getting himself good and worked up about the depravity littered throughout the history of the Philippines, declaring that those who deserve to be punished have not been and that social justice shall never be achieved, and the sort of passionate fiery declarations typical of smart students. It so happens that he's borrowed money from the local loan shark, Magda (Mae Paner), and she's starting to get antsy about him paying her back. Also starting to feel Magda's angry pinch is the extremely poor Joaquin (Archie Alemania), trying to get a business off the ground to provide for his wife Eliza (Angeli Bayani) and their children. The desperate Joaquin is a bit more mercurial in his frustrations with Magda, leading to an angry, loud, public shouting match. But he simmers down. The outwardly calm Fabian, however, ends up exploding with rage and murdering Magda. And with perfect dramatic inevitability, Joaquin is sent to prison for the crime. And thus does the bulk of the movie follow the three strands thus set up: Eliza's exhausting attempts to survive by any possible means, Joaquin's eye-opening experiences in the Filipino prison system, and Fabian's descent into madness as he finds himself a prime symptom of the very arbitrary amorality and failure of accountability that he has spent his academic career decrying.

Befitting an (uncredited) adaptation of 19th Century social issues literature, Norte is greatly serious about explicating its themes under the assumption that the audience is smart and willing to think about the state of society, and its refusal to make good on its promises (the second half of the title is a fairly obvious, and entirely sardonic, reference to the "end of history" musings in the West when Russian Communism finally collapsed, and which the 21st Century has thoroughly shown to be pie-eyed optimism of the hollowest sort). But Diaz and his superb team don't rest on the script (which the director co-wrote with Rody Vera) to do all the intellectual heavy lifting; and given the enormous length of the film, that's certainly for the best. An unrelentingly idea-driven Norte would be an enormous slog, and even granting the more generous standards offered to this kind of long-take, wide-shot cinema, the film proves to be impressively full of energy and kineticism. It's brilliantly shot: cinematographer Larry Manda and Diaz manipulate their images on two axes, wide and deep, to explore the characters and the places containing them. It's impressive enough that the anamorphic widescreen is used so smartly, combining groups of people, and isolating individuals; but where Norte shines is in its exceptional use of deep focus - or, as needed, the absence of it. The ingenuity of moments like the murder of Magda, boldly combining off-screen space with careful management of where characters and shapes reside relative to the camera, is one of the best individual sequence of the year, but impressive shadowbox-like staging is very much the norm, rather than the exception.

The film's color palette is quite fantastic, as well; given Diaz's success with black-and white films, it's a little surprising, maybe, that the contrasts of blue water, pale sky, brown and green land, and the sickly wash of the prison interiors, would be so confidently employed in directing the viewer's emotions and engagement within scenes. And, too, for a director so accustomed to static shots - and Norte is made up largely of static shots - the handful of punctuation marks of camera movement are brilliant as well (between the deep staging and the cunning about what camera movement means when it's only sparingly employed, Norte feels something like an heir to Ozu Yasujiro, though for different ends).

The formalism in the film is very strictly used as a function of the storytelling and philosophy, mind you. This is very much a movie about Grand Ideas, and the images primarily serve to situate us relative to the characters, their words, and their actions, such that we either feel involved or distant in individual moments of thought or revelation (the way that the imprisoned Joaquin is framed, and Alemania's performance, suggest at times a modernist update of a medieval martyr painting into cinematic form). It's a complex and elaborate and extremely precise piece of filmmaking, that is to say, but one that's intuitively watchable and philosophically accessible far more than its on-paper content would suggest. I'm not a damn fool, and I won't go so far as to suggest that Norte is "fun", but four hours of academic moralising could be a hell of a lot more opaque than this crafty, organic film presents them as being, and the result is one of the year's best films, but better still, one of its smartest.

9/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '14: TIMBUKTU (ABDERRAHMANE SISSAKO, MAURITANIA / FRANCE

Reposting on the day of the film's U.S. theatrical release, because it was one of the clear highlights of my very satisfying 2014, and it never hurts to remind people when a masterpiece is hanging around, waiting to be seen.

Winner of the Silver Hugo for Best Director
Screens at CIFF: 10/15 & 10/16
World premiere: 15 May, 2014, Cannes International Film Festival

There is a heightened irony at the heart of Timbuktu that is completely obvious, and which fuels the rage that drives every moment of Abderrahmane Sissako's first feature in eight years, following the great and underseen Bamako: that forcing religious piety onto a population is a one-way ticket to creating Hell on Earth. And thus it is that one of the most visually beautiful films of 2014 (cinematographer Sofiane El Fani has made every single frame positively vibrate with precise compositions, lighting, and use of color) tells one of the most severe, ghastly stories. It creates a totally disorienting clash of sensations, like watching Terrence Malick make a torture porno: how can such flawlessly beauty harbor such casual, unforced cruelty? The film's signature moment is one breathtaking image of a river at sunset, an extravagant wide shot that lingers and lasts and sinks into your eyes with grandeur, both natural and cinematic. And what occurs in this long, long shot? A character we've come to like and respect as a decent man in an indecent world kills a man. Not deliberately nor in malice, but that's of little matter once the deed is done.

The film takes place in Mali (it was shot in Mauritania), during the 2012 rebellions and coups and all manner of dismal conflicts that put a fundamentalist Muslim party in control of the north of the country, instituting sharia law over the population under its control. For our purposes, that mostly refers to the city of Timbuktu, an ethnic polyglot whose openness makes it a prime target for fundamentalist ire; over the objections of the local imam (Adel Mahmoud Cherif), the jihadists wage a kind of urban war against anything that exists outside of their narrowly-defined rules of propriety and morality: artists, athletes, and people who just want to enjoy the outside air despite being women, are all taken down in the raging sectarian violence. Meanwhile, far outside the city, a domestic drama plays out quietly: nomadic cattle rancher Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed), of the Tuareg people, his wife Satima (Toulou Kiki), their daughter Toya (Layla Walet Mohamed), and adopted ward Issan (Mehdi A.G. Mohamed) do their very best to live peaceably in their isolation, but even in the earliest moments we see them, there are encroaching threats from the jihad's reign of terror, and Kidane's prideful refusal to move, against Satima's urgent counsel, is plainly incapable of doing much other than to hasten his and his family's fate.

For Sissako, one of the great humanists presently at work in world cinema, the obvious approach to depict this misery and nastiness was through great restraint that implies the worst without being remotely exploitative or undignified to the suffering of those who ended up on the bad side of the jihadists. Case in point: one of the main events that triggered the director's decision to make this film was when he witnessed footage of the stoning of an unmarried couple, buried up to their necks before being executed. That event is re-created in Timbuktu, and it is grueling and horrifying, but not because it is grotesque and explicit. In fact, by refusing to give the audience any sort of release along those lines, the sequence - which takes place in a wide shot and cuts short long before things get too violent - is even more distressing and brutal, since it is so painfully objective and matter-of-fact. The complex, geometrically pleasing compositions remain in this moments of appalling violence; in refusing to sensationalise the acts, the film avoids reducing them to the level of entertainment, but instead demands that we consider them as part of the same flow of life that can produce intimacy and beauty. And that is the worst thing of all.

It is quite impossible to consider Timbuktu to be anything but a great work of art, with its intensely moral worldview and the complicated, hugely rewarding relationship between its beautiful images and its bottomless awareness of human misery. And it also represents an interesting turn in the director's career, though one about which it is easy to be leery: it's the most explicitly "art housey" of his movies so far, and in this case, that means terrific things: marrying the hallmarks of great African cinema (the strong use of contrasting colors as a storytelling and character-building element; terrific sense of humans as a function of physical place) with European art cinema (the narrative structure, the way the politics are expressed ironically). But it also feels far more conventional than the other Sissako I've seen, and I'd hate to think of him ceding the unique personality that led to Bamako and Waiting for Happiness, films that absolutely could not ever have been made in Europe. That's the pessimistic outlook, of course; nothing in Timbuktu gives us any cause to fear that the director is compromising his visions in the slightest, only augmenting them with slightly more stock-issue aesthetic choices. It's still one of 2014's very best films, and that's what matters most of all.

9/10

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BOY OH BOY

There's very little doubt that The Boy Next Door is a terrible movie. But it is so cheerfully overt about it that it offers the very real possibility that everybody involved in making not only knew just how terrible it was, but in fact that they might actually have signed specifically because of that fact. We've all seen the ads, I hope and pray, where a sexually predatory high school student played by Ryan Guzman, (who looks every millisecond of the 26 years he had spent on this earth at the time of filming) leeringly talks about how much he likes "your mom's cookies"; that's not just a snarky laugh line that an in-on-the-joke trailer editor decided to foreground, that's the level that the entire film resides at. Sadly, there are no lines quite as punch-you-in-the-face as that elsewhere in the screenplay, but the overall level of ripe camp promised by that moment? Oh, the film teems with it.

The plot: Claire Peterson (Jennifer Lopez) teaches classic literature to gifted high school students in southern California, and she is in a misery. As related in a flagrantly impossible opening montage that uses confusing mismatches of sound and image in a manner that might be regarded as artistic by a moderately gifted film school freshman, Claire is in the midst of a hell of a marital crisis, precipitated by her husband, Garrett (John Corbett), having an affair with one of the women who works at his company's headquarters up in San Francisco. She smells like cookies, was apparently the line in an accidentally-discovered love letter that pushed Claire over the edge. And by the way, if you end up seeing The Boy Next Door, just accept that the next time you eat cookies, you'll be thinking of vaginas. The film wants it that way, and there's nothing wrong with it.

Throwing the bastard out - but not so far that, months later, they're not cautiously feeling out the shape of possibly reconciling - Claire only has left a 16-year-old son, Kevin (Ian Nelson), and a catty best friend and boss, Vicky (Kristen Chenoweth), whose overly mascaraed face and loud way of talking give the impression that she has a blood alcohol level in the double digits. But life, overall, isn't so terrible, especially when the old cancer-ridden man next door (Jack Wallace) welcomes his nephew into the house for their mutual benefit. This is Noah Sandborn (Guzman), who is in high school, though the film stops itself cold to make sure we completely, absolutely understand that he's of legal age, owing to how he dropped out for a couple of years, in the most anti-dramatic scene about the legal bedrock of an adult/adolescent sexual coupling since the bizarre Romeo & Juliet laws scene from Transfomers: Age of Extinction.

For, you see, as much as Noah is interested in being the mentor and stable male figure in Kevin's life (the film's refusal to capitalise on the avalanche of hints it drops in the early going that Kevin has a crush on Noah is a tragic failure to up the stakes to ever further heights of tawdriness), what he really wants is to make sweet love to Claire, as anyone might, given Lopez's terrifyingly perfect, unaging body and face. And, one night, after some of the most ridiculous innuendo ("Those kinds of shoes are for a woman trying to be sexy. DOT DOT DOT. You don’t need to try." And trust me, you can absolutely hear that "dot dot dot" in Guzman's line delivery), they go right on ahead and make that love, and director Rob Cohen eagerly plunges in, framing it with all nudity-free filthiness - hands in panties, hands on boobs, protracted male butt shots - of the storied height of the erotic thriller in the early 1990s. It's hard to say whether it's more arousingly smutty or unrelentingly silly, but it's a whole lot of both.

Of course, it turns out that Noah is a crazy, sexually obsessed stalker psycho, and he spends the rest of the movie Glenn Closing in on Claire's life, eventually going full-on slasher movie crazy in a finale that takes place in a burning barn. A barn which the film, with only eight real characters to choose from, places under the ownership of Vicky, despite her seeming to be as much of an agriculturalist as the stars of Sex and the City. And in so doing, it also ramps the gore up from "none whatsoever" to "Lucio Fulci", going totally batshit for ten straight minutes before ending almost the exact second that the primary conflict is over. The Boy Next Door has, perhaps, heard of denouements, but it does not give a shit for them.

Cohen has the good sense to direct this all with snazzy pacing and the shameless sense of building dread of a cheap horror film, while writer Barbara Curry feeds all the characters a steady supply of hokey pronouncements to speak as they tromp through her scenario that has already become implausible by the 30 minute mark and keeps getting bigger and bigger from there, including overwrought car crashes and a full-on Se7en-style crazyperson lair before it even hits the third act. Given everything, it's difficult to say what "good acting" might even look like here, though the cast is, at any rate, providing exactly the right kind of action. Lopez flutters and gasps and looks bestruck; Guzman smolders and flairs his pecs and stares with lust and madness poring out of him, totally refusing to contain his hamminess; Corbett is pleasant, boring, and dad-like. As vessels for a very overcooked, very unmodulated set of emotional states, the leads are perfect, and though I can't imagine these parts being challenging for an actor of even the slightest talent, that doesn't mean that one can't do a good job with them, even so.

It's crap, of course: utterly arbitrary (Claire passes by so many chances to shut the whole thing down that one must assume that she secretly likes it), cut with a minimum of cohesiveness in favor of a maximum of startling shots, even when we don't really need to be startled, and it has absolutely no insight into the human condition (unless "teen boys will go to any lengths for sex" is an insight). But it's a blast: entertaining as any trashy thriller could hope to be, and hilarious as any bad movie in a long time. Is it intentional? Maybe. I don't care. I just know that I had a hell of a time watching it, and if this is the kind of movie year we can expect from 2015, I'm all for it.

3/10

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2014: THE YEAR IN MOVIES

Most years, this is the part where I grouse a little bit about how, to quote one of the year's best performances, I just thought there'd be more. That the movies would be a bit more inspiring, more fun, more challenging.

But I will not be doing that here. The films released in the United States in 2014 made it, as a body, one of the strongest years of film I can remember living through, and certainly my favorite in the decade that I've been blogging. Whether it was a summer crammed full of really smart, inventive popcorn movies, the great run of genre-bending indies in both horror and science-fiction throughout the year, or the sheer number of films that grappled with film language and how images communicate meaning, across genres, countries, and levels of difficulty, I never stopped being surprised and excited. It was a treasure trove: even bumping my list of honorable mentions up to 15 instead of my usual 10 (so it's a top 25, for once), I still couldn't make room for everything I felt deserved a spot.

I don't know, maybe I'm just getting old and my tastes are softening: for the first time in living memory, three of the four biggest Oscar players have made my top 15, which is always a kind of disconcerting place to be. But then I think upon these films, and imagine the years spent revisiting and rediscovering them, all I know is that I'm grateful for such rich work, and the vibrant filmmaking culture they speak to. And then I peek ahead at 2015 and some of the films I already know are going to be heading up next year's version of this list, and I'm more eager to see where the art form is going than I have been in quite a long time.

(links go to my original reviews)

The 10 Best Films of 2014
1. Goodbye to Language
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel
3. The Last of the Unjust
4. Under the Skin
5. The Missing Picture
6. Mr. Turner
7. Snowpiercer
8. National Gallery
9. The Babadook
10. Boyhood

1. Goodbye to Language
(Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland / France)

The artiest sort of art film; the kind where, when it is accused of being wilfully obnoxious and pretentious, it's hard to come up with a reasonable counter-argument. The only one I have is that it's marvelously full of wonky energy and surprising low-brow humor, alongside its mind-expanding experiments with what can be done with visual representation in the age of digital cinematography and 3-D. Godard is up to nothing less than a full-on assault against our understanding of what it means to see a movie, demanding that, in every beat of his radical formal experiment, we confront our relationship to the moving image and how it denotes meaning. Or, we can just laugh at farts. It works either way.

2. The Grand Budapest Hotel
(Wes Anderson, USA / UK / Germany)

Of course it's a confection: eye-pleasing colors, frivolous comedy, twinkling music of the most fussily decorative sort. There's a reason why cakes are a major plot element. And then again, like every one of Anderson's films, it uses its delicate surfaces as a means of working around and in to a sense of profound loss and melancholy. It's never worked as well as it does here, in a music box parable of the end of an elegant way of life in the fires of World War II and the difficult some people (Anderson clearly being among them) have in allowing the past to remain in the past. Farce, elegy, '60s-style caper: it's a sorrowful delight, and the director's best film.

3. The Last of the Unjust
(Claude Lanzmann, France / Austria)

Hardly the indulgent parenthesis to Shoah that far too many people want to dismiss it as; released in the director's 88th year, the fifth and probably last work crafted out of his mountain of 1970s interview footage is a reckoning with time, memory, and the genre of the documentary like none other. It is a carefully curated and shaped recursive argument in which the elderly Lanzmann recalls the young Lanzmann interrogating the elderly Benjamin Murmelstein's words of praise for the enormously controversial younger Murmelstein. Immensely valuable as a work of history that plumbs one corner of the Holocaust, but no less important as an inquiry into how Holocaust narratives are formed, and, indeed, what the phrase "Holocaust narrative" even means.

4. Under the Skin
(Jonathan Glazer, UK / USA)

A film that's already great, and then it sticks in your head, and sticks, and sticks. Using enormously unconventional tools of improvisation and voyeurism to shape the narrative, the filmmakers create a one-of-a-kind mixture of poetic body horror, hallucinogenic science-fiction, and tone poem on urban loneliness and lust. The film is simultaneously eerie and tender, resting securely on the back of Scarlett Johansson's performance as one of the most wholly alien aliens in recent cinema, flashing just enough human emotion through that we can still feel for her/its confusion, dislocation, dissatisfaction, and ultimately fear of mortality. If there was just one film this year that I can guarantee they'll still be talking about a generation from now, this is it.

5. The Missing Picture
(Rithy Panh, Cambodia / France)

Among the boldest cinematic memoirs that have ever been made or could ever be made. Confronted with the reality that a huge slice of his life has been eradicated from history, first by the dictatorship responsible for committing the atrocities of his youth, then by a world content to largely forget about that regime after it was gone, Panh engages in a unique form of testimony, reconstructing still images in three dimensions and moving pictures, giving form and physicality to his memories of life under the Khmer Rouge. An invaluable document of moral crimes too easily forgotten, and a stirring attempt to reconstruct and legitimise a personal history, it is troubling, powerful, and the most essential film on this list.

6. Mr. Turner
(Mike Leigh, UK / France)

If it did nothing else, the fact that this tribute to the elegance of 19th Century landscape painting was an immaculate demonstration of the potential of cutting edge digital cinematographer would please me a hell of a lot. It does a lot else, restoring the good name of the biopic with an elusively structured, endlessly resonant portrayal of a Great Man who's a crabby shit when you get to know him. With Timothy Spall giving a career-defining performance in the title role, it's one of the strongest psychological portraits of Leigh's entire career, and a terrific exploration of how the personal and the social interact and influence each other. It's generically Prestige Cinema at its most accomplished, beautiful, and challenging.

7. Snowpiercer
(Bong Joon-ho, South Korea)

There are satiric films we praise for their crafty sublety; Snowpiercer is not one of those. It's about as blunt and angry as a high schooler who just discovered Marxism, and God bless it for that; we need more outrageous and impassioned statements in favor of class justice in the world. And all the better if they're situated in such a top-notch example of speculative fiction at its most gonzo. Creating a fable-like environment of Train-As-World, the sheer volume of brashly imaginative spaces in the film is enough to make it a minor genre masterpiece, but with the flashy action, wonderful menagerie of caricatured performances, and warped sense of humor that pervade the entire feature, there's nothing "minor" about it.

8. National Gallery
(Frederick Wiseman, France / USA)

The English language doesn't offer enough words to convincingly make the case that a three-hour meander through the galleries, storage, and bureaucracy of an art museum is one of the year's most legitimately fun and totally captivating movies. But if you trust me enough to dive in, you'll be treated to a most fascinating, inquisitive documentary, asking and answering without words, throughout its running time, the twin questions of Why does art matter? and What makes art interesting? The film never proscribes solutions, only offers up a number of possibilities as it encounters a seemingly limitless number of ways of engaging with fine art; it finds everything it glances at endless interesting, and it communicates that interest with electrifying immediacy.

9. The Babadook
(Jennifer Kent, Australia)

No burying the lede: it's here because it's a fucking miraculous horror film, terrifying at a primal level without any cheap tricks or gore, just rock-solid sound design, a flawlessly creepy boogeyman, and That Goddamn Book, maybe the scariest prop I have ever seen in a motion picture. But it's also here because all of that is in service to a remarkable psychological thriller about a toxic mother/son relationship, and a drama about the pain of grieving that doesn't shy away from any bullshit: moving past loss is hard and it sucks, and it makes you angry. Maybe not this angry, but the raw emotional honesty of The Babadook is even more impressive than the visceral terror that honesty begets.

10. Boyhood
(Richard Linklater, USA)

The clearest sign of 2014's overall strength is that I could barely make space in my top 10 for one of the most audacious and successful experiments in mainstream cinema in a generation. Carping that it's a gimmick is entirely missing the point: the filmmaking method and the story told are exactly identical, providing a window into how one life, one family, and the surrounding culture evolve over time. Linklater and his collaborators have blessed us with a completely singular object, and even if bits and pieces of it don't work (I'm not all that found of the last three years, myself), the whole is one of the most organic and unique psychological portraits in the history of English-language cinema.


Honorable Mentions
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Cheatin'
Edge of Tomorrow
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Heli
The Homesman
Ida
The Lego Movie
A Most Violent Year
Norte, the End of History
Only Lovers Left Alive
The Raid 2
Selma
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya
Two Days, One Night


Best Unreleased in the U.S.
The Look of Silence


Bottom Ten

10. Annie (Will Gluck, USA)
All musical comedies really need are upbeat singers and likable songs. Annie has a cast veering between boredom and active hostility, and the music is overproduced pop crap; Quvenzhané Wallis’s attempt to bind it together with appealing, cheerful optimistm only throws into relief the forced shrillness of the whole film.


9. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Jonathan Liebesman, USA)
It’s not just the chaotic staging or casual sexism, both of which are depressingly common. It’s not that the turtles are some of the most hideous CGI characters in history. It’s all these, in the matrix of an insultingly insincere and derivative screenplay, that make this noise orgy so unendurable.


8. Left Behind (Vic Armstrong, Canada)
“Better” than the Kirk Cameron films only in that it doesn’t appear to have been shot in redressed church basements, this film ruins an unruinable premise - Nic Cage fights the Antichrist - with a scaled down, tepid airplane thriller with no stakes, muddled themes, and Cage at his most boringly well-behaved.


7. As Above, So Below (John Erick Dowdle, USA)
On the subject of an unruinable premise: how monumentally incompetent do you have to be to make goddamn catacombs look overlit and airy? As incompetent as Dowdle & Company, whose ability to drain the atmosphere from their horror film is compounded by an inscrutable spiritual parable grafted onto the second half.


6. Devil's Due (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett, USA)
The irritating titular pun is the most cunning thing in this weak-kneed “Satan’s baby” flick. It employs found footage aesthetic with a film-breaking carelessness, though its conviction that the under-acted domestic drama at its heart is more interesting than its meager pleasures as horror is an even greater sin.


5. 3 Days to Kill (McG, France / USA / Greece / Russia)
Enervating, generic Eurotrash action, with a cartoon devil woman taunting a puffy, inert Kevin Costner through vividly unexceptional setpieces. Besotted with its unending litany of unamusing jokes and languid, underwhelming character drama, it's a chore to get through, and it's impressively stupid even by the standards of producer Luc Besson.


4. Sabotage (David Ayer, USA)
A starry-eyed tribute to horrible people being horrible, though the worst is when they're simply sitting around airing out their personalities. Toxic in its attitudes towards women, insulting in its attitudes towards non-whites, it features a comatose Olivia Williams giving its best performance, and it is the ugliest damn thing.


3. The Expendables 3 (Patrick Hughes, USA)
Nothing I saw all year made me half as angry at the time I'd wasted. The filmmakers gave up entirely in their third at-bat giving us mildewy, soporific action and painfully contrived plot developments and dialogue. It's hardly the worst-made film on this list, but it is absolutely the laziest.


2. Annabelle (John R. Leonetti, USA)
Somehow making a hellish-looking doll seem bland and rote, while wallowing in fake-out scare scenes so ludicrously over-telegraphed that they're almost laughably tedious, it's certainly the year's most boring horror film; and that's without mentioning how immensely tacky it is, using real-life tragedy as the springboard for its nonsensical story.


1. The Legend of Hercules (Renny Harlin, USA)
Unlike the other films on this list, Hercules is at least a spectacular great deal of fun in its badness, between the basic cable-level effects, and Kellan Lutz’s jolly, loopily ineffective starring turn. Bozo nonsense of the first order, and incompetent filmmaking and screenwriting at an Ed Wood level.


Best Use of 3-D, Non-Godard Division
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
In a film that added precious little to its vastly superior predecessor, just about the only clear justification A Dame to Kill For offers for its independent existence is the inventive, inveigling, and texturally complicated way that it translates Frank Miller's graphically aggressive flat images into convincing three-dimensional environments.


Best Surprise
John Wick
Even armed with the knowledge that it was much better than the basic idea of Keanu Reeves avenging his dead dog had any right to be, I was nowhere near ready for how much better: nothing less than the best American action film of the current decade, a movie using highly impressionistic editing to imply rather than state the plot outright, a movie boldly using color as a storytelling element, a movie with absolutely terrific fight choreography every inch of the way. Reader, the gap between this and my list of honorable mentions could not have been finer.


Biggest Disappointment
Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
Words have meanings, of course, and "disappointment" probably shouldn't mean "I was expect a visually grotesque nightmare of abysmal plotting and insults piled on insults, and all I got was a lousy, forgettable movie". But that is what I mean now. My hope had been that it would be a contender for Worst of the Year; as it was, even at the time I first saw it, it couldn't crack the bottom 10.


Best Popcorn Movie
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Just about everything a body could want from a summer franchise movie: vivid settings, terrific special effects, and absolutely jaw-dropping sound all used to create a grand old sense of spectacle. Meanwhile, the intelligent (but not too intelligent) engagement with society and morality, and the way it actually advances its series' overarching story within the context of an entirely satisfying self-contained narrative, give it brains and bite more than its most superficially entertaining elements suggest. And if there was any doubt before that motion capture performances were "real" acting, there most certainly oughtn't be now.


Guiltiest Pleasure
Eva Green's glorious ham and cheese on rye performance as the living embodiment of the most devout misogynist's fantasies of the castrating terror of empowered women in 300: Rise of an Empire


Film That Will Least Deserve My Positive Review a Decade Hence
Maleficent
Blame impossibly lowered expectations: prepared for the ugliest, dumbest, most insulting piece of shit that Disney could possibly use to extend its brand dominance over the minds of America's little girls, the fact that it was kind of halfway intelligent about its storytelling decisions, and boasted a terrific Angelina Jolie performance, tricked me into thinking that I liked it. I have since re-watched it, and, well, I still like her...


Film That Will Least Deserve My Negative Review a Decade Hence
Noah
Maybe it's just that it looks all the better with the dimwitted Exodus: Gods and Kings serving as a counter-example of what a secularised Bible movie can be when it's really going poorly, but I don't think so. In the many months since it first came out, I've thought more about Noah than many more apparently more successful and objectively good movies, and have concluded that its insane messiness is indivisible from its fearlessness: this is the kind of movie that plunges recklessly after its ideas, as a story, as a work of visual storytelling and world-building, and as a collection of performances, and it does this without checking itself or polishing itself to a dully respectable sheen. We need more of those, not less.


Film I'm Most Eager to Re-Visit
Godzilla
In retrospect, having this serve as the end to nine months of giant monster movies was an error: I was a bit kaiju'd-out, and the insipidity of the film's human lead made it hard to think about it. Maybe I'll end up liking it more, and maybe I got it exactly right when I liked it just a little, but I'm eager to have a chance to see it when it seems like something fresh in Hollywood ecosystem, not when it feels exactly like 40 other movies I'd just finished watching.


Best Moment
Creation in Noah, a quick recap of the first chapters of Genesis done in harshly chromatic colors, kaleidoscoping editing, and an overall sense of boundless energy and visual creativity that's maybe the most characteristic and probably the best stretch of filmmaking in Darren Aronofsky's whole career.


Worst Moment
The climactic debut of "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" in Jersey Boys, which continues that film's primal sin - turning a frothy jukebox musical into a sepulchral biopic - while adding in a new wrinkle: an orchestration that's just dissimilar from the original version that the incredibly iconic song lands with a dissonant rage on your ear, like loved one who has been replaced by a pod person.


Best Cameo
Uma Thurman, as the viscerally angry and tart-tongued wronged woman who just wants to show her children the whoring bed, in Nymphomaniac (the degree to which this is a "cameo" can be debated, but it's not much screen time in a whole lot of movie).


Worst Cameo
Toni Collette as the most overqualified and, one presumes, expensive piece of unspeaking set decoration ever in Tammy.


Best Line
"Goodbye, yard! Goodbye, crepe myrtle! Goodbye, mailbox! Goodbye, box of stuff Mommy won't let us take with us but we don't want to throw away. Goodbye, house, I'll never like Mommy as much for making us move!"
"Samantha! Why don't you say goodbye to that little horseshit attitude, okay, because we're not taking that in the car."
-Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) and Mom (Patricia Arquette), Boyhood. Screenplay by Richard Linklater, with input from his actors


Worst Line
"From an economic standpoint alone, what you’re asking is problematic".
–Pharaoh Ramses (Joel Edgerton), not letting Moses’s people go, Exodus: Gods and Kings. Screenplay by Adam Cooper & Bill Collage and Jeffrey Caine and Steven Zaillian


Worst Come-On
"Your barge and you are quite impressive."
–Thermistokles (Sullivan Stapleton) to Artemisia (Eva Green), 300: Rise of an Empire. Screenplay by Zack Snyder & Kurt Johnstad


Longest Incomprehensible Mass of Syllables
"Ragnar Danneskjöld?"
"Dagny Taggart!"
-The first meeting of train magnate Dagny Taggart (Laura Regan) & pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld (Eric Allan Kramer), Atlas Shrugged III: Who Is John Galt?. Screenplay by James Manera & Harmon Kaslow & John Aglialoro and the angry, omnipresent ghost of Ayn Rand


Best Title
Only Lovers Left Alive


Worst Title
Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return


Best Poster
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Such piercing, raging simplicity! The blaring red of the frame makes the blackness of the chador seem that much deeper, and then that causes the little fleck of bloody red marking the girl's lips is drawn out as much more terrifying and menacing. The crisp but not flowing lines give the art a tension that serves it well as the ad for a horror film. And position of the text - even the pullquote - even the festival laurels - all serve to help define the central shape of the vampire and guide our eyes always back to her angry face. Bold pop and nervy terror blending perfectly.


Best Teaser Poster
Gone Girl

A muted image that tells us nothing except that isolation from the rest of humanity will play a part, a news crawl that communicates just enough to suggest that this placid, empty scene is hiding something horrible. And I love the way that the enormous tagline dies off with the peek-a-boo hint of the first word in the film's title. Does everything a teaser should: uses a striking image to leave us confused and curious. And it does it as well as it possibly could.


Best Title Treatment in a Poster
Blue Ruin

The whole poster is terrific - that little bright white tagline is brilliantly placed and brilliantly terse - but the enormous size of the title, the way that it bleeds into the lonely image at the bottom, and especially that broken dirty glass effect, suggesting age and fatigue and poverty, still makes me sigh a little bit with pleasure whenever I see it.


Worst Poster
X-Men: Days of Future Past

Cluttered tentpole posters stuffing a whole cast's worth of characters ino one space aren't new, and they always suck. But this is a whole new level: the awkward relative position of Hugh Jackman and Jennifer Lawrence's bodies, making them look like tragic lovers rather than action movie antagonists. Worse yet is the weird impression, between the colors and textures, that the bulk of the mutants are the design on some kind of stylised silk shirt that Wolverine is wearing for God knows what reason. And no matter how long you let the messy design, ugly colors, and terrible use of empty space linger on your eye, you're still never prepared for the absolute worst of it, Professor X and his levitating fireball farts.


Best Trailer
Knight of Cups



Of course, being thoroughly in the bag for Terrence Malick in the first place can only help, but that's just the thing: the stunning three-way collision of genre story mechanics, pacific human feeling, and Malick+Lubezki visuals filtered through prosumer video equipment is the sort of thing that I contend could make a Malick partisan out of thin air. Combining Michael Mann urbanism with airy mysticism, the trailer is already one of the most singularly uncontainable things I saw all year, and the promise of the movie to come out of it is almost unbearable.


Worst Trailer
Paddington



It's one thing to sell a children's comedy as a broad farce with gross-out humor and idiotic carnival music; Paddington looks like an early contender for Worst of 2015 from this footage, but no worse than it had to be. But producing this kind of brain-rotting junk from what is, by all accounts, a wildly delightful family movie (I still haven't seen it, alas), now that takes some kind of miraculous anti-cinema voodoo.


The Ten Best Classic Films I Saw for the First Time in 2014
Ordered chronologically

Hypocrites (Lois Weber, 1915)
The Tale of the Fox (Władysław Starewicz & Irene Starewicz, 1937)
The Young Girls of Rochefort (Jacques Demy, 1967)
Chronicle of the Years of Fire (Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, 1975)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)
House (Obayashi Nobuhiko, 1977)
Yeelen (Souleymane Cissé, 1987)
The Age of Innocence (Martin Scorsese, 1993)
Beau travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
Evolution of a Filipino Family (Lav Diaz, 2004)

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ONE DECADE LATER

Thanks to everyone who contributed - we raised a grand total of $5335!

Ten years ago on this date, I spoke to a very kind doctor at Evanston Northwestern Hospital (since sold and renamed NorthShore Evanston Hospital), and he told me that in all likelihood, I had testicular cancer. One week later, and one testicle lighter, a different doctor, with the associated Kellogg Cancer Care Center, confirmed this likelihood as a certainty, and we made plans for my chemotherapy schedule and eventual surgery to remove a mass from a lymph node near my left lung.

I'm not going to bother retelling all of that, because I've done it enough times - the morbidly curious can find my thoughts on the matter recorded in real time over yonder - but one doesn't pass a milestone like this without feeling obliged to stop by and pay it a little extra attention. Particularly as I realise, the further away in time I get from being sick, that it's still springing surprises on me and altering how I move through the world in ways that I don't always perceive right away.

But you're not here to be my therapists. You are here because as I sit and ponder and deal with life, I also want to celebrate a decade of much internal conflict, of triumphs and frustrations, of making the most of the time I'm given and wasting time when it makes sense to, a decade, primarily, of being the fuck alive, by giving back a little bit. Thus do I proudly announce the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser & Review Auction. Readers who were here five years ago perhaps remember my last exercise in soul-bearing, and the subsequent fundraising effort it kicked off. And we did it again to even better effect this time!

(The rest of this post has been deleted on account of being totally unnecessary now that the fundraiser is done).

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IT'S A HELL OF A THING, KILLING A MAN

It seems irresponsible to review American Sniper without doing so through the lens of the enormous cultural conversation surrounding it, but having actually seen the damn movie, it strikes me as rather bizarre that so many tens of thousands of words have already been spent discussing it without most of them being, y'know, accurate. Given the parameters of The Dialogue around the movie being so divorced from what seems to me to be its reality, I don't even know how to engage with that dialogue. So sadly, I'm just going to have to treat this like a movie that happened to come out, that I happened to see, and we'll all have to pretend that it hasn't already been buried under a mountain of essays from all corners of the political spectrum.

So, American Sniper: Clint Eastwood's most thought-through, well-mounted, and thematically snug movie since Letters from Iwo Jima, centered on what is far and away the most subtle, insightful, and nuanced performance that Bradley Cooper has ever given. Indeed, I can't think of an Eastwood film since The Bridges of Madison County which so successfully foregrounds an actor and banks everything else on that actor's performance doing work that would be impossible if the film tried to approach it any other way. For American Sniper is, first and above all, about a man who wants to turn himself into a machine; a man born into a value system in a nation at a time where his sense of right demands that he give up a certain measure of his humanity for The Greater Good, and it resides entirely upon Cooper's performance to communicate what that entails. That, and one scene where Jason Hall's screenplay drops a broad-ass line to the effect of "aren't you even human any more?" into the mouth of the main character's wife, but by Eastwood movie standards, that's almost inscrutably subtle.

The film is adapted from the memoirs of Chris Kyle, self-aggrandising "most lethal sniper in U.S. military history", though the filmmakers are content to reconfigure him as necessary to make the movie they want to. It's impossible to fathom Cooper's version of Kyle bragging in print about slugging Jesse Ventura, or whatever the hell it was; when he's praised as "the Legend", or reminded of his career kill count, he adopts a pleasant but blank expression that communicates "that's so nice of you and can we maybe talk about anything else?" with the silent pleading of a man who's much better at avoiding talking about things than acknowledging them. It's the cousin to the expression he wears when his Stateside wife, Taya (Sienna Miller) talks about how much she and their kids just love it when he's home; the facial vocabulary of a man who doesn't like feeling emotions and thinking about himself, and found that transforming himself into a military killing machine facilitated that non-feeling. The real-life Kyle has, in other words, been retrofitted into a perfect Eastwood protagonist, the clearest of all descendants from Will Munny in the director's 1992 Western Unforgiven. He even delivers the Munny-esque line "It's a heckuva thing to stop a beating heart" when taking his son out deer hunting, late in the film, delivered without Munny's world-weary fatigue. For that would require introspection, and introspection is something Kyle is thoroughly incapable of performing.

American Sniper illustrates Kyle's mind by fully settling into his warrior POV (which doesn't require or imply that it adopts his opinions as its own, but I've resigned myself to waiting until 2025 or so to start that fight), which to begin with, results in a pretty ingenious structure for a pretty conventional biopic. The opening 20 or 25 minutes start with the future deadliest of all possible snipers about to pull the trigger on his first human victim and then flashing back to race through a potted history of his life prior to the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks, glancing at the Big Obvious Signpost moments like it can't wait to get back to Fallujah, Iraq. It then spends time meandering through his four separate tours in-country, with Eastwood's characteristic bleached-out cinematography, courtesy of his regular DP Tom Stern, serving as it customarily does to strip all of the sentiment out of a scenario that barely had any to begin with. When Kyle goes home, he spends just enough time with his wife for her to just barely make an impression on us (I have never, ever had much use for Miller before, but the particular impact she makes is so profound with so little screentime that I'm not likely to doubt her again in the near future), and he's always back for another tour without a scene depicting his decision or his attempt to sell Taya on its merits. In short, the story won't engage with interpersonal conflict, it blasts through all of the explanatory history that might give us some insight into the protagonist, and it ignores everything in its haste to get back to war. And that is what I mean by settling into Kyle's POV.

The filmmaking reinforces this: the excellent sound mix especially, with its layers upon layers of explosions and gunshots at multiple distances from multiple directions. But the editing by Joel Cox and Gary D. Roach (also Eastwood regulars) is equally on-point, charging ahead during the overt action scenes and giving the more languid chatting non-combat scenes an erratic vigor, a constant sense that even if we're relaxed now, we're still in the middle of a fucking war zone. And then there's the more direct matter of how the film frankly depicts the messy suddenness of human death by bullets, small geysers of crimson that pop out of human bodies, Iraqi and American alike, with unromantic proficiency, leaving nothing to the imagination. It does not, by any measure I'm able to recognise, suggest that being in war is exciting - unlike the very similar The Hurt Locker, nothing in American Sniper suggests that Kyle is an adrenaline junkie or flirts with a death wish - and the increasingly washed-out expressions on Cooper's face, coupled with the unyielding desaturation of the images, clearly indicate that it's taking a lot out of Kyle to be in that environment.

The question the movie focuses on, then, is why he's there, and why he keeps going back; why, after having killed a child right off the bat, he'd keep placing himself in a position where his only task is to keep killing and killing. The best scene in the film shows Kyle training his scope on a little boy wandering around an RPG launcher, quietly begging him not to pick up the weapon: not wanting to shoot another child, feeling visibly sick at the thought of killing another child, and yet it plainly does not occur to him as an option not to kill the child if it comes down to it. Why does Kyle do this, the film silently asks, and then it even more silently answers: because he doesn't have the imagination to conceive of anything outside of the moral code he has always lived by, even when it causes him anguish, even when his wife - importantly, the only other human in the film given even the vaguest semblance of an inner life - tells him straight to his face that his beliefs are wrong and causing pain, even when his great "I shall be a hero and slay the dragon" moment is reckless and ends up putting the exact same American soldiers he was "heroically" saving into more active danger than if he'd just sat there and done nothing at all. He wanted to turn himself into a machine, and he succeeded in doing so, and the movie stares at him without judgment or praise as he goes about that process. And when his refusal to look inside himself means that he can neither acknowledge privately nor even consider as a possibility the reality that the actions he has committed and the actions he has witnessed have caused him to suffer from PTSD, the movie stars non-judgmentally at that, too. But the longer it goes on, the more it trusts us to see that disorder peering out from behind Cooper's increasingly flat eyes, and understand that his desire to avoid human feeling is increasingly a desire to avoid naming his own suffering and thus his own perceived weakness.

All of which makes it epically frustrating when the movie ends by descending into a maudlin, arch-biopic sequence of leading up to Kyle's death while back home in Texas, playing as a straightfaced version of the same "life is happening!" montage that's used to such mercilessly ironic effect in the film's opening, and ending on the corniest "he's off to meet his death!" scene since the penultimate scene in 2012's Lincoln. And having thus pointlessly fucked his own movie, Eastwood doubles-down with a travesty of a montage of images from the real-life Kyle's funeral and memorial services, a sequence that's exploitative to begin with, and also moonily plays up the notion that this was an unambiguously wonderful man whose passing is much to be mourned, which is found nowhere else in the movie, and indeed is almost exactly contradicted by its persuasive argument that this was a prickly man whose refusal to look inside himself caused only suffering in himself and others. It's a different, vastly worse movie - the movie, in fact, that American Sniper has been accused of being (by liberals) and praised for being (by conservatives), but that it emphatically isn't for some 127 of its 132 minutes. But oh me, oh my, how shittily pandering those five minutes are.

Meanwhile, is it racist? Not really, but it doesn't do a very good job of inoculating itself against that charge - there's one scene in particular, involving a made-up insurgent assassin with a penchant for drills, that doesn't do serve any meaningful narrative purpose and provides almost the entire basis for the argument that the film as a whole presents the Iraqi people as bloodthirsty brutes; and even that isn't quite a slam dunk 1+1=2 piece of evidence, given context. Mostly, though, American Sniper simply doesn't care very much one way or another about the people of Iraq; an apparently damning statement, until we mention as well that it doesn't care one way or another about any American, citizen or soldier, whose surname isn't "Kyle". This is a character study, not a political statement, and the only real sin it commits is presenting that study in a framework that is entirely impossible to strip of politics, and could only be perceived otherwise by somebody with a reflextive America-centric worldview. A sin that somehow didn't taint the equally apolitical Hurt Locker, despite that film actually coming out when the Iraq War was still officially ongoing.

That being said, it's a marvelous, marvelous character study, driven by a superb central performance and unpolished, spare filmmaking and writing that allow that performance to be the motive force of everything else the film does and is. Some of what it is, is ambivalent to the point of being problematic; a tiny bit of what it is, is acutely vile; and most of what it is, is a smart, complex portrait of a largely fictional man who desperately wanted not to be complex at all. What the film's reception reveals about American culture is uniformly discouraging and depressing, but as a two-and-a-quarter-hour piece of cinema made by an inconsistently great director who got his mojo back in a huge way after too many years of burnished mediocrity, I come about thiiiis close to loving American Sniper, and even with its ugly-ass flaws, I wouldn't trade it away for anything.

8/10

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