NOTHING MORE THAN FEELINGS

The first thing to point out, because it's really amazing the more you think about it, it's a miracle that Pixar Animation Studios' 15th feature, Inside Out, functions at all. It's a feature-length metaphor, in which everything we're watching as the story isn't "actually" be happening, possibly not even within the world of the film. Most of the characters are literally concepts rather than psychological actors in their own right. The driving conflict is "there's a ticking clock and we have to get back before it runs out", or basically the third act that's always the most uninteresting part of Pixar movies stretched out to the full length of the 94-minute film

Regardless, it's Pixar's most effective and most moving feature since the six-year-old Up, and while I think the "Pixar's best!" chatter that you can find here and there is premature, it's very easy to see why somebody would want to promote that opinion. Surely, it's the most ambitious film in the studio's history: it's a feature-length metaphor, after all, which isn't something for the squeamish. Specifically, it's a metaphor about the processes of human memory and emotions in a time of extreme stress both environmental (moving to a new city) and biological (doing so at the very earliest years of adolescence), setting up shop in the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) and literalising the concepts of cognitive theory as physical spaces for the adventures had by her five core emotions: Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Fear (Bill Hader). Who are also literalised, as color-coded humanoids made out of quantum particles that you can just barely see in close-ups as a mottled, almost fuzzy surface of tiny floating spheres.

The actual "what really happened" plot is that Riley has just moved from Minnesota, where she loves her friends and adores playing hockey, to an old rundown building in San Francisco. Picking up on the extreme frustration and stress felt by her father (Kyle MacLachlan), whose business - the reason they moved in the first place - is hitting a potentially fatal snag, and her mother (Diane Lane), helplessly trying to track down their missing moving truck and clearly none too happy about being uprooted herself, Riley tries to force herself to be the same happy-go-lucky child her parents have always praised her for being, but this quickly curdles into a perpetual state of peevishness marked by bursts of terror, and eventually she decides to run away back to Minnesota. And as she does so, she slides into a depressive state where she can barely feel anything at all.

But ah! the way that Inside Out chooses to tell that story is gorgeous and complicated and crazily imaginative: inside the control room of Riley's mind, which has been the domain of the upbeat, bullying Joy for all of recorded history, an accident has sent her and Sadness spiraling into the recesses of Riley's memories, leaving the ill-equipped Anger, Fear, and Disgust to run the show. Meanwhile, Joy and Sadness journey through Riley's headspace, finding her subconscious, her imagination, and the chasm where all of her lost memories are dumped, never to be retrieved again, escorted by the cotton candy-cat-elephant-dolphin hybrid Bing Bong (Richard Kind), Riley's mostly-forgotten imaginary friend. The film presents all of the mercurial and abrupt shifts of personality that accompany being 11 and thrust into a new life as the results of the emotions' desperate attempts to find a solution to their predicament, with everybody (and especially Joy) anxious to get back to the unmixed state when Joy wouldn't let anybody else call the shots. Though with Sadness's shocking, newfound ability to alter the nature of Riley's memories just by touching them, it's clear to us long before the emotions are willing to admit it that Riley's days of unmixed joy are behind her.

The idea that our thoughts and feelings are sentient creatures bumbling around in our heads isn't new, of course: the earliest cinematic version I can name is the 1943 Disney WWII propaganda cartoon Reason and Emotion, and the image of the mind as a person sitting in the body directing it is an ancient one. But Inside Out is as perfect a filmed depiction of that hook as has ever been made, coming up with an expansive, highly creative world of intricately worked-out rules to explore the concepts of cognitive psychology in a simplified, even fabulistic way. It does an extraordinarily good job of establishing its world one piece at a time, so we grasp the basic vocabulary intuitively enough that when the movie starts to use that vocabulary in complicated ways later on, we don't need to have it explained what's going on. Knowing that colors map onto emotions, we can grasp the enormous difference between a day that has produced mostly yellow (Joy) memories and a day that has produced a slurry of green, red, and purple (Disgust, Anger, Fear) memories at a visceral level, both because the colors themselves are unpleasant and toxic all mixed together, but because the film trained us why that's upsetting without having openly told us it was doing so.

Cognitive modeling and inventive visual storytelling aside, Inside Out is simply a great amount of fun to watch. The actors are exemplary: the five core emotions are all obvious but phenomenally on-point casting decisions, especially in the subtle details, like how Poehler isn't just perfect for Joy, but perfect for a specifically bossy, arrogant Joy. And with that handled, the film has already done a huge part of its work, making the emotions appropriately broad, bold personalities to go with the film's searing bright colors and Seussian designs of the spaces inside Riley's head. With those personalities in place, the film can go about the business of mixing them around and working not just as a fun story of two mismatched characters on a journey, but, increasingly, as a deeply effective study of emotions jockeying for prominence, and learning the hard truth that feeling sad isn't always inappropriate and should be embraced when it's the right time for it. Which is a lesson that's not just bold for a nominal children's movie (though not since Ratatouille has Pixar made a movie that strikes me as more geared towards adults), but bold for anything made in American cinema. It's one of the ways that Inside Out feels like Pixar's very own Studio Ghibli film, more emotionally sophisticated and trusting of its audience than even the very best of what we'd normally expect from corporate family filmmaking.

It's also one of the ways that Inside Out is clearly the third film to be directed by Pete Docter, whose two previous films - Monsters, Inc. and Up - already marked him out as the feelingest of Pixar's director stable. His balance of goofy comedy and dumbfounding heartbreak is excellent here, as it would almost have to be; I'll confess that I was promised more robust, devastating tears than I got (the opening montage and scrapbook scenes in Up are both harder-hitting to my mind, as is the incomparable finale of Toy Story 3), but none of Inside Out's feints toward tear-jerking, nor its dumbest, most stereotyped jokes feel at all unearned or unconsidered. It tries to cover the whole range of feelings and it largely gets there.

It has a few rough patches, undoubtedly. Docter and his co-writers never came up with a really interesting idea for Disgust, who feels by far the least consequential of the core emotions, and outside of it main themes, Michael Giacchino's score is disappointingly rote, given that some of his career-best work has happened in Pixar films. And there are other nitpicks and niggles her and there. But the grandness of the film's ambitions and its ingenuity in realising those amibitions, its sheer cleverness and sophistication as a most unique kind of character study, these things eradicate any nitpicks and render niggles the nastiest kind of pettiness. This is at most only a hair shy of top-tier Pixar, and not just the kind of aesthetically adventurous storytelling that all animation should aspire to, it's what all of mainstream American cinema should want to be - funny and meaningfully sad, deeply thoughtful about its world and story.

9/10

(A hedge; I'm not quite willing to commit to 10 yet, though "yet" is the key word there. I can easily imagine liking this more with subsequent viewings, and I cannot conceive of liking it any less)

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AND THEY CALL IT PUPPY LOVE

A review requested by Max, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The hook of 2005's Little Manhattan is, to begin with, absolutely baffling, though if you just glance at it really quickly it might seem to make a kind of intuitive sense: hey, what if we did a romantic comedy, but, like, with preteens? I'd say that Little Manhattan ends up being much closer to the best possible outcome of that pitch, but to be honest, I don't even know what that would mean. But anyway, it's definitely not the worst case scenario. We can take comfort in that.

And as baffled as I am by that hook, it's not even the most baffling thing about the film, which is that it stars a pre-pubescent Josh Hutcherson, and he looked exactly the same as he does a decade later. It would be overselling it to call this "terrifying", but it's a little bit creepy at the very least.

In the film, Hutcherson plays Woody Allen. Now, that's a bit inapt, of course; the whole deal is that this is about 11-year-olds, and Allen started life as a middle-aged man eager to become bitterly old as quickly as possible. And "Hutcherson" isn't one of the more Judaical names, exactly. But filter out those things, and Woody Allen is exactly what we have left: an incredibly neurotic male with an inability to fathom the workings of the female brain that borders on the clinically dysfunctional, and a pipeline directly to the audience in the form of wall-to-wall narration. And it all takes place in New York, but the kind of "in New York" that almost exclusively means "the Upper West Side is the center of all meaningful human civilization, but occasionally we'll drift farther south in Manhattan if we absolutely must".

So Hutcherson actually plays Gabe, 10.75 years old, and the child of a marriage that has gone to a deeply foul place, but due to a weird quirk in divorce laws that, if I were an untrusting man, I'd suggest might have been pulled straight from screenwriter Jennifer Flackett's ass, his dad (Bradley Whitford) has to stay in the same apartment as his mom (Cynthia Nixon) until the divorce is final. So that's the a pretty toxic environment for a child entering the age when girls go from being disgusting Others to fascinating, enticing Others (and female screenwriter notwithstanding, Little Manhattan takes a strictly boy-oriented view of preadolescent courtship). And yet, things will happen as they must, and when Gabe manages to guilt his dad into signing off on karate lessons, the sparring partner he's matched with is Rosemary Telesco (Charlie Ray), once a friend of his and now simply part of the amorphous mass of The Girls At School that he and his exclusively male buddies avoid at all costs. Post-class practice is enough to humanise Rosemary, and from there on it's more or less an inevitability that Gabe's innards start to turn cartwheels every time he thinks about or talks to her.

Most of this, I hasten to remind you, is heavily mediated through Gabe's rat-a-tat voiceover walking us through the entirety of his inner monologue, both about the funny feelings he gets and his life in New York more generally. And a few fantasy sequences dart through, to underline the mental chaos going on in his life over the two weeks depicted onscreen. It's entirely fair to say that in its extant state, Little Manhattan depends to an utterly absurd degree on the charm of Gabe himself, and the skill of the actor inhabiting him to handle Flackett's dialogue, which doesn't feel like an adult's failed attempt to put age-appropriate words into a child's mouth, so much as it shrinks an adult down into a child and scales back his vocabulary as necessary. Everything about Little Manhattan unnerves me at least a little bit, but the part that unnerves me most is that the heavily ironic tone Hutcherson is made to bear, and his voluminous self-awareness about being a fifth-grader marching through romantic comedy tropes, makes it feel like the film is meant for an adult audience of at least some genre sophistication (so to with the music cues and limited pop culture references), while the actual, like, existence of it seems to imply that it's for kids, or at least for kids and parents to enjoy as a whole family.

Anyway, whatever its peculiarities, Hutcherson does, in fact do more than able work in the central role; I might find it in me to be snitty enough to suggest that he's legitimately more interesting in this part and the character he creates more complete and alive than his infinitely more visible performance as the charmingly sexless non-boyfriend in the Hunger Games pictures. It's something about finding the exact level of archness and frank sincerity required to make Gabe feel like a real romantic lead, while also justifying the thick veneer of artifice that the structure and tone insist upon (the same mixture makes Hutcherson a perfect candidate to play Bradley Whitford's son, as it happens).

It's a bit silly to say that Little Manhattan only works when it has Hutcherson onscreen, driving things; that would imply that it has any other kind of scene. But it's certainly the case that most of the other elements don't particularly work, or are neutral at best: Ray is constrained by a role that's conceived as a deliberate impenetrable blank, and no child actor could be expected to have the skill set to enliven a character whose inner life takes place entirely off the page. And director Mark Levin cedes far too much of the movie to Hutcherson to help her cheat her way into an interesting performance (Levin also borrows the useful trick in shooting movies around child actors of keeping the frame at their own height, hardly creative or radical by 2005, but still a useful way of dignifying the characters' story instead of turning them into a kind of gimmick). The tone of the script can't decide between a guileless sense of cute, or dry irony, and while Hutcherson's line deliveries invariably favor the latter, the sense that the movie constantly wants to charm our socks off keeps jamming up against how visibly hard it's straining to reach that charm.

Yet the irony works, and until it goes wildly off the rails in the last three minutes to deliver a series of the most shockingly incorrect life lessons ("and because of all this, I learned that love is nothing but a series of grand gestures, and the little moments in between are just details"), it's even sweetly insightful about how mindblowingly horrifying it is to find oneself with unwanted and unfamiliar romantic feelings, if one is a boy, at least. That, plus how unabashedly unlike anything else I've seen it is, no matter how much it leans on genre tropes, makes it hard to deny that it's a somewhat beguiling curiosity. It is not, I think, a good film on top of that. But curiosities don't get a whole lot curiouser.

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I'M WITH THE BAND

A review requested by John, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Almost Famous of the year 2000 is surely the Cameron Crowest of Cameron Crowe films. Not just because it’s also the most baldly autobiographical of Cameron Crowe films, though I suspect that fact informs everything else that is true of the film. There’s a strong current of observed reality suffusing it; there’s a wealth of detail in the way people talk and think within the movie, the attitudes they hold and the society in which they move that has a rich, thick feeling of authenticity. Crowe’s screenplay and his direction mix finely-honed reporting skills (it is, after all, about a time in his life when he was a journalist) with an unapologetic lacquer of happy nostalgia, looking back to a time that was neither more innocent nor more promising but keenly remembering what it felt like to think that everything was innocent and promising. And because of all this, it is a film that treats all of its characters as wonderful old friends, people to be forgiven all their mistakes and celebrated for even their smallest triumphs. It is, as much as anything else I can name, a movie that loves its characters with the most ebullient love, each and every single one of them, even when they’re acting at their worst: it is the most generous kind of storytelling, and that is Crowe’s strongest and most characteristic mode.

Whether this is an entirely good thing isn’t clear. Without Almost Famous, it’s quite impossible to imagine Elizabethtown, a film of almost radioactive sweetness and guileless affection for its characters and scenario - I film whose absolute refusal to judge or show even the tiniest measure of cynicism I find awfully endearing, though in the most artless and barbarically clumsy way. Almost Famous isn’t that: it’s a far steadier and more thoughtful piece of filmmaking (I would suggest that it is, in fact, the clear high water mark of Crowe’s CV), if only for the nuance of the way it uses its wall-to-wall classic rock soundtrack as a signpost for character development, rather than the crude nostalgia-baiting of most films that rely on music to do the heavy lifting of authenticating a time period and insisting on the audience’s feelings (Forrest Gump, you shameless hussy).

Is it, though, a gloppy wad of sentimentality? Maybe. Kind of. There is a fine needle to thread here, and not at all moments does Almost Famous thread it - for every scene that's a sturdy piece of observed wisdom about coming of age as a human male, a critical thinker, and a lover of the transporting power of music, there's another that's pure cheese. There are moments that are both of these things at once, including what I'm inclined to think of as the movie's signature scene and probably my favorite moment in all of Crowe: a bus full of tired rockstars, groupies, and teenage journalists joining in, one by one, to sing along to Elton John's "Tiny Dancer". It's hokey and sweet and honest, aggressive and demanding in its appeal to the naïve belief that a song has that kind of unifying, uplifting power. Which of course it does: there are probably not many things that every single adult in the developed world has experienced, but I'm willing to bet that a pleasant sing-along with friends is one of them.

Whatever universal feeling come out of the film are generated from one of the most thoroughly specific scenarios ever to support a coming-of-age film: riffing on Crowe's own life experience, Almost Famous centers on the weeks in 1973 that 15-year-old William Miller (Patrick Fugit) spent touring with the fictional band Stillwater after having lucked (and lied) his way into an assignment to write a 3000-word story about the band for Rolling Stone. The minimal plot that follows finds him swooning with fannish delight at the band's soulful leader guiatarist, Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), with only his good sense for journalism leading him to discover that even very good-natured people can be selfish users and egocentrists. But mostly, it's a hangout movie, in which a slice of early-'70s rock culture parades by a guileless kid and reveal some measure of themselves to him. And this is where the writer-director's peaceable humanism explodes, showing a deep forgiveness and affection for his characters, who even at their shittiest are never really judged by the movie (Jason Lee as generally irritated singer Jeff Bebe is the closest the film has to a spoilsport, and even he never seems particularly unreasonable). There's also the quiet-unto-laconic performances he teases out of a cast that seems even more impressive 15 years on than it did in 2000, when people like Zooey Deschanel, Jay Baruchel, Rainn Wilson have turned into, if not household names, at least That Guys of the first order. These are reasonable, soft people, with even the angriest ones - Lee, Frances McDormand as William's overprotective mother who constantly caves into him to avoid driving him off - tending towards smallish, level-head demonstrations of rage and impatience.

The film tries to do two things at once: present these people as 15-year-old William/Crowe would have seen them (thus the firebreathing but always comforting mother, or the spectral presentation of Kate Hudson's breakthrough role of Penny Lane, teenage earth mother and philosophical groupie who represents exactly the kind of world-altering Feminine Life Force that Crowe would later turn into a hollow nightmare with Elizabethtown, the film for which critic Nathan Rabin coined the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl", only in this case always distinctly too aware of how the boy hero sees her to get within her grasp), and also as fortysomething Crowe, far smarter than his teenage alter-ego, understands them to actually be. Generally speaking, Almost Famous is best when it keeps this perfectly balanced, or errs on the side of adult wisdom; too much youthful innocence is bad for the teeth. It's probably why all of the film's best moments after the "Tiny Dancer" scene are the handful of appearances of Philip Seymour Hoffman as rock writing god Lester Bangs, giving what I think can be uncontroversially counted as the film's clear standout performance, not least because he's the only character who plainly knows more than William in every one of his appearances. When he drops his prickly, sometimes antagonist nuggets of wisdom, Hoffman represents the exact kind of clear-eyed, brutally unromantic perspective that the whole arc of Almost Famous generally moves towards, but he does it without sacrificing Crowe's basic decency. The iconic "we're uncool" scene gets to be iconic in no small part because of Hoffman's rich friendliness in delivering blunt truths, sugarcoating nothing from a position of complete respect and love: the closest the film comes to openly having Adult Crowe sit Boy Crowe down and explain what the next 27 years are going to bring.

This register of clarity saves the film from its indulgences (which include a 162-minute director's cut that transparently wants nothing more than to add time for Crowe to linger with the characters and music he loves; an even more generous, humanist statement than the 122-minute theatrical version, but it's here that we really take the exit ramp to Elizabethtown), which certainly include the generalised Baby Boomer conviction that this particular music really mattered; every generation believes that of their music, of course, and every generation is equally wrong, but 1973 is right at the end of the era that the media at large has generally been willing to play along with (full disclosure: I'm actually a huge fan of all the music on this film's soundtrack - I can only imagine how enervating it must be to anyone who can't claim the same thing - but I was born late enough for the Boomers to have already revealed themselves to be full of shit). And the uncritical attention given to the beatific, hushed expressions of late-hippie thought (but what isn't given uncritical attention in Almost Famous?) does leave the film a little stranded in its writer's reveries.

There's always something to pull it back (and that's actually the shape of William's development throughout the movie: be captivated by indulgence, then pull back; so perhaps it's meant ironically): the steady drumbeat editing by Joe Hutshing and Saar Klein, the crisp and uncharacteristically domesticated (which is not to imply that it's bad) cinematography by John Toll, or simply the uncommon humanness of the characters. It's a screenplay-driven film, beyond a shadow of a doubt, but Crowe-the-director knows when to have his collaborators stop babying Crowe-the-writer. And the movie that emerges as a result is, despite its lumps, awfully lovable: beyond question my favorite of the filmmaker's career, albeit one that I like less now (almost inevitably) than when I first saw it at the dangerously impressionable age of 19. If Almost Famous teaches us anything, though, it's that we're all capable of surviving what we do as idiot teens, and then to look backwards at our shapeless young selves with affection and forgiveness. And in a movie full of nice thoughts, I wonder if that might be the nicest.

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: PUNK ROCK GIRLS

“Scandinavian social realism” and “fluffy character-driven comedy” are what you might call non-overlapping magisterial. But that’s not the sort of thing to stop Lukas Moodysson, whose seventh feature We Are the Best! marries exactly those two genres and does it with surprising ease and charm. As one of European cinema’s foremost humanists, Moodysson has always been prone to treating his characters with particular generosity and forgiveness, and the jump from something like Together, and its deft lightness of touch, to a full-on comic exploration of human behavior at the edges, is not such a very long one, perhaps. At any rate, We Are the Best! works like gangbusters; it’s perhaps a little bit too similar to the writer-director’s big breakthrough, Show Me Love from 1998, to feel as fresh and insouciant as it wants to, and it has the inevitable roughness that comes when a movie builds itself completely around young actors, but it’s so likable in its storytelling and so earthbound in its observations about the travails of early adolescence that it could overcome much stiffer problems than it has facing it.

Set in the early 1980s, the film is about the dream of punk, then on its last legs as a meaningful cultural force. The heroes are a pair of tween girls, androgynous Bobo (Mira Barkhammar) and mohawked, politically riled-up Klara (Mira Grosin), the latter of whom provides all the angry passion that drives the two friends to turn listening to music into an act of defiance against the system, the cultural rise of disco and new wave, and the old punks like Klara’s brother who gave up on punk when it started to fade out of fashion. On a whim, and to screw with some asshole teen boys playing clamorous rock in the local community center’s rehearsal space, the girls form a band to give vent to their disgust with the state of things. When it turns out that they can’t, between them, play a single note on any instrument, they finagle a talented religious schoolmate, Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne) into serving as their lead guitarist and teaching them about music on the way.

That’s about it as far as heated drama goes. There is, eventually, some small conflict between the three when boys enter the picture and Bobo and Klara set their eyes on the same one, but this is all in the grand tradition of European art house drama. That means low stakes, limited plot, and a focus instead on watching people’s behavior in an unforced, naturalistic state. The success of We Are the Best! comes, then, from its terrific depiction of three contrasting (but not conflicting) personalities, and their outsider status: as young people trying to force adults to treat them with any kind of dignity, as young women in a cultural context that favors men, as political activists surrounded by comfortable conformity and apathy. It’s clear enough from the way Moodysson, adapting a comic book by his wife Coco Moodysson, treats them that he’s pro-punk, pro-political engagement, and pro-feminism, though We Are the Best! never remotely turns into a tract. In fact, one of the best successes of the film is that it looks on the girls and their enthusiastic naïveté from a clearly adult perspective. There is a point at which their passion shades into silliness, and the film knows it; while it admires the fervor of youthful ideology, it also recognises the limited scope of that ideology. The tone doesn’t eulogise punk rock, but merely acknowledge that its passing left a void in which those who had a driven certitude that society wasn’t working needed to find their own voice, since that voice wasn’t being provided by the culture at large.

Ultimately, it’s a film about children becoming young people and finding their identity, rather than about the particular meaning or merits of those identities, and it adopts a most forgiving and loving position to the mistakes and dead-ends that process can consist of. It’s a coming-of-age story that’s honest and moving without being nostalgic in even the smallest degree, an enormously difficult pitfall for the genre to avoid, though one that the roughness of the film’s realistic aesthetic and its caustic punk soundtrack help to keep at bay even if Moodysson’s writing wasn’t so clear-eyed.

An altogether delightful, intimate character study that’s consistently funny without being flippant or insincere (the tone is overwhelmingly “we can laugh at these kids now because we did the same goofy things once upon a time”), and limited only in smallish ways. The acting could be better, is part of it: some of that is inherent to the writing, since the most overwrought character, Klara, results in the most frequently mis-aimed performance. There’s a lot of grounding that needs to be done to keep her political rants sounding like passionate beliefs instead of just repeated gobbledygook, and Grosin has some problems making that happen consistently. And then on the flipside, we have Hedvig, the most quiet and reflective of the girls, the one who is most based in watching and thinking and responding, and LeMoyne’s performance is the best, or at least the most stable. To be fair, the acting is, across the board, very good more often than not. But when the young performers are missing the mark, it’s pretty distracting and debilitating.

The other problem, and oh, how “problem” is a leading word, is the style: in the middle of the 2010s, we’ve hit a point where the low-fi handheld docu-realist aesthetic of European stories about the life of people of limited economic means has entirely run out of anything new to do or say. The script, the tone, and the acting are the important things here, and they are all solid and doing what they must. But We Are the Best! simply isn’t very interesting or enlightening to look at, feeling like the camerawork and editing are on autopilot for most of the time, and serving only to give a good foundation for the script to do its job. There’s of course nothing wrong with any of that, but for all its real pleasures and its touching, accessible humanity, if anybody responded to the first five minutes of the film by sighing “not this again?”, I would have to reply that, yes, that’s pretty much exactly right. It’s a film for seeing familiar things being done well, not for being surprised or challenged.

8/10

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MOVIES I MISSED IN 2014: HEY, JOE

Joe is the most rewarding film directed by David Gordon Green in years, and it's also the film that leads me to suppose that there's probably no real hope of him ever returning to the exemplary heights of his early career. It is a clear improvement on and refinement of the concerns of Prince Avalanche, the film immediately preceding it in his filmography, but it's also entrenching him in a frankly less ambitious vein of work than he first made his name with. At heart, Joe is a gloomy piece of realist cinema with a bit more regional flair than normal, and it is awfully good at being that. But the sense of poetry and the uncanny knowledge of place that made George Washington one of the very best debut features of the last 15 years is totally absent. Anyone could have made Joe, though in fairness, not all that many people could have made it as well as Green has.

Filmed in the same desolate stretches of Texas as Prince Avalanche, the film tells of the relationship that grows between Joe (Nicolas Cage), an ex-convict working with a crew to clean out commercially undesirable trees to built a pine farm, and Gary (Tye Sheridan), a teenager with an alcoholic father, Wade (Gary Poulter) and a desperate need for guidance and wisdom, even from as dubious a source as Joe. Not, by any conceivable stretch of the imagination, an unusual pair of figures for a character study to focus on (it's the second film in Sheridan's brief career to touch on that dynamic, after Mud) though Joe shakes loose from convention in enough ways to feel more inspired than redundant. Gary Hawkins's script is unusually alive to the economic and social conditions of rural Americans, to begin with, and Green's direction of that script draws constant focus to the mud and decrepitude and general sense of things being ancient and shitty that dominate the locations in which the story unfolds. That is, Joe works not because of the story it tells as such, but because of the way it draws that story up from an enfolding context. Joe and Gary are symptomatic of the exhausted state of poor rural whites as much as they are characters in their own right, and for building itself around a culture rather than around a fairly generic coming-of-age scenario, Joe certainly deserves our attention and respect.

That being the case, this strength also rather inevitably leads to the film's biggest liability, which is its uniformity of tone. And not just any tone, either, but the most oppressive one the filmmakers can whip up. I'm irresistibly reminded of Winter's Bone, the biggest recent example of the "savage life of the economically ravaged hinterlands of the American South and associated areas" genre, a film that is in many ways great, but ultimately doubles-down so hard on its depiction of suffering and anguish that it ends up feeling like misery porn with an artistic flourish. Joe isn't nearly so dark as that (though it's also not as probing), but its non-stop town of suffocating lack and human limitations - shored up even more by the bleak and angry score composed by Jeff McIlwain and David Wingo - ends up feeling more punishing than illuminating, and before the film ends, it's become unclear if all this harshness is driven by realism, or if it's just trying to make the audience feel bad and the punish the characters.

What saves it - much as it saved Winter's Bone, come to think of it - is the high quality of the acting. Virtually the entire cast was made up of local non-professionals, which leads to some awkward line readings from performers clearly uncomfortable with the proximity of the camera, but at least in the case of Poulter - a dysfunctional drunk playing a dysfunctional drunk, who died shortly after the film's premiere at the 2013 Venice Film Festival - the neorealist casting gambit paid off hugely, with a character whose broken, even loathsome behavior is so helplessly natural that when his put-upon, abused son smirks indulgently, it's not difficult to understand what drives that kind of surprisingly generous response.

Mostly, though, the film is dominated by its two professionals, Cage and Sheridan, both of them excellent. Sheridan is, in truth, playing a bit too close to his Mud performance, but with enough wiry adolescent fury and confusion informing his actions that it's almost as impressive as revelatory work was there. But the real revelations come from Cage, in his most controlled piece of screen acting in years: the most recent film that can even begin to compare was his manic turn for Werner Herzog in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans, but if somebody tried to sell me on the notion that his last work at this level was in Adaptation. way the hell back in 2002, I wouldn't fight them. A lot of the performance's success comes from context: we know Cage is capable of weird explosions, and when we see Joe working hard to keep himself leveled out and calm in his dealings with a world that arbitrarily beats up on him, it's easy to see the insane, hammy Cage twitching away just under the skin of this subdued, glowering Cage. But it's also less meta than that: Cage brings a wonderful burly authority and wasted sadness to the character, fleshing out depths already present in the script and insisting on the character's domestic tragedy in ways that maybe weren't so present.

Those two actors are the best insurance the film has against becoming pointlessly depressing; them, and the characteristically on-point cinematographer Tim Orr, capturing the filth and ugliness of the setting with a fascination for textures and patterns of light rather than exploiting it for maximum redneck-baiting, and contrasting this with the calming, dappled beauty of forests that blend the roughness of indie realism with the respectfully spiritual Malickisms that Green himself seems to have largely abandoned. The film looks great, but more important, that look is designed to intensify the presence and authenticity of the film rather than just show off.

All this results in a film that is strong and moving, though never quite as much as it feels like it could be; and its insights are all ultimately a little pat. The overall sense of the movie isn't entirely one of being stunned with discovery, but of reconfirming things we already knew, from Green's earlier films, from the films that took their cues from those films, and so on. If the director only ever makes films exactly this good, it will be an admirable career he has left in front of him, but not one that feels like it's pushing all that hard against a tradition of grubby American indie filmmaking that does feel like it's just about played itself out.

7/10

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THE LITTLE DRUMMER BOY

Hype is a brutal fucker. Coming to Whiplash cold, it might be entirely possible to find it a fun, nervy little sudser about Type-A personalities clashing with lacerating verbal violence, done up in an appropriately hyper if not terribly innovative style. Coming to it, instead, with the knowledge that it’s pretty much a done deal for an Oscar nomination or five, my response is instead a baffled, almost hostile, Really? That? It’s satisfyingly ragey soap opera for boys (and there’s another whole conversation to be had about the critical reception of certain genres, backstage melodramas, say, when they are focused on males instead of females; especially in the the case of a film where there’s a grand total of one major character who is a woman, a totally generic girlfriend who could be cut out of the film entirely with only minor changes made to the whole. But that is not this conversation), and it has a real barnburner of a performance bringing the antagonist to life, and the setting in the high-stakes world of top-tier New York jazz conservatories is novel, if not inherently grabby. But there’s not much about it that’s terribly special: back in the ‘90s, when style-driven indies were easier to find than they are now, there were a dozen films like this every single year. Though I suppose the fact that it hearkens back to a more robust period in the indie marketplace is something.

Something of a dark parody of the stock inspirational teacher film, Whiplash is the story of Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller), New York native, son of a happily unexceptional high school writing teacher (Paul Reiser), and hellbent on becoming the greatest jazz drummer of his generation. To that end, he has managed to enroll in the highly competitive and prestigious Shaffer Conservatory, where his relentless after-hours practicing catches the eye of Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons). Fletcher is the most celebrated instructor in the school, and the band he leads the most sought-after ensemble, but he’s also a verbally (and sometimes physically) abusive taskmaster, who has no mercy, forgives no mistakes, and has a seemingly bottomless well of imaginative cruelty to harass and push his students. Andrew has the terrible misfortune, or the great luck, if you look at it from a certain angle, to show the kind of promise that Fletcher has been hunting for his entire career, and thus the 19-year-old is subjected to the largest quantity of the bandleader’s dictatorial attentions. A bond forms between the two, but it is not an affectionate one; it is savage and relentless.

Points for bluntness of theme: without moralising one way or the other, Whiplash unapologetically claims that most of us are not special snowflakes, and that becoming exceptional takes a terrifying commitment that leaves little room for maintaining your humanity. And that’s a lot more honest and interesting than more of the usual “you can do it! whee!” boilerplate. It’s guilty of over-enunciating this idea, to be sure - it is spelled out explicitly in dialogue twice, once in a scene that works because of Simmons’s offhand delivery, once in a ghastly scene set around a dinner table that’s one of the most archly over-written things on offer in 2014 - and its commitment to not expressing an opinion whether the sacrifice of one’s soul is worth becoming a great artist does, at times, leave it feeling like it lacks a point of view or an overall purpose.

But then, the purpose is to be a corker of a two-hander, with Simmons spitting out the words of writer-director Damien Chazelle’s dialogue like a WWII bomber leveling a European city, and Teller managing just to hold on, which is pretty much all the script permits to the character for the first two-thirds or better. It’s a thriller at heart, which models itself after its protagonist’s frenzied drumming, building up in speed and collapsing and then starting off right where it left off. If the results are somewhat monotonous in tone, it’s not really fair to call that either a shortcoming of the movie, or a mistake: it is about single-minded people pushing themselves harder and harder and harder, so a certain single-mindedness and linear momentum is appropriate. The acting certainly falls in line with that - it is by far the most effective performance I have ever seen Teller give, in large part because it requires only a narrow range of expression - touching on the essential qualities of the characters without muddying them down with too much technique that would only tend to distract from the film’s overall momentum (it’s for this reason not at all Simmons’s best performance - perfect for the role, but a bit mechanical and too much on the surface - though I ‘m not going to begrudge him the Oscar nomination he has locked down for delivering it).

It is a sinewy film, all tensed-up and propulsive and alert, and while Chazelle relies a bit too heavily on close-ups of bloody hands and sweaty faces to put over the psychological cost of all that tension, the film's best moments (virtually all of them related to musical performance) are genuinely impressive filmmaking that suggest the first-time director's potential to do something great, though they're too conspicuous and isolated for me to credit that this is that great thing. The best scene, by far, is the last, which I hesitate to even describe (the entire edifice of the plot would disintegrate without the things it reveals about Andrew's mind, but it also feels anything but inevitable), but it's the one place where the editing, the camera angles, and the sound design - which is wonderful throughout, making the instruments and music active, physical characters alongside the people - are all working to create an excellent piece of physical cinema, hot and frenzied. The slower, more openly character-based scenes are a bit rockier; outside of his core duo, Chazelle has not deigned to give any of his side characters inner life, and this results in some strained, tedious places where Andrew is being fed lines by joylessly functional stick figures, and Teller screws himself up a little too hard to provide two characters' worth of emotion. But the good parts are very good, and the bad parts are unexceptionally mediocre, and even if it's nowhere remotely near the year's ten best films, Whiplash is an enjoyable potboiler with just enough insight into alpha male desire to feel like something slightly deeper.

7/10

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1983: In which the New Hollywood kids, reeling from the unexpected arrival of the 1980s, pay for their alleged sins

Whatever sequence of events, marketing pressures, shifting audiences preferences, and directorial indulgences contributed to the death of the New Hollywood Cinema at the dawn of the 1980s, it's satisfyingly easy to point out when the corpse stopped twitching. In February, 1982, New Hollywood idol and godfather, if you will,* Francis Ford Coppola released what is almost incontestably the most ill-advised, jaw-dropping insular, willfully alienating and implausible film made by any of his generation of filmmakers after their respective rises to prominence, the glowingly colored Las Vegas drama about a collapsing marriage, One from the Heart. I will contentedly declare that I enjoy, sort of, and admire, in a way, this fucked-up little geyser of Coppola's most weirdly personal aesthetic fascinations; but holy crap, there's just no way it should exist.

The film was conceived as the pilot, essentially for Coppola's passion project, American Zoetrope Studios. Tucked away in Los Angeles, right underneath the major studios' noses, Coppola hoped to make a haven for the creative, visionary filmmakers who'd suddenly found the ground shifting under their feet. Looking to make a quick, cheap film to get American Zoetrope's feet solidly underneath it, Coppola's simply little domestic musical quickly exploded from a $2 million quickie to a $27 million monster of fussy sets and sniper-precise manipulation of objects and actors within those sets, of startling, gorgeous colors, of Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle glumly wail about the basic disconnect between humans as set out in the vivid and grotesque imagery of Waits's lyrics for the wall-to-wall songs. Instead of declaring American Zoetrope open for business, One from the Heart shot it point-blank in the forehead: as could be predicted by pretty much every human being who watched the film besides Coppola himself, One from the Heart was an enormous flop, earning less than $700,000 in its humiliating U.S. theatrical run, and plunging Coppola - whose personal fortune had formed the backbone of the film and American Zoetrope's financial portfolio - into crushing debt.

This is not, however, a review of One from the Heart.

After the positively murderous failure of his grand folly, Coppola - an Oscar-winning filmmaker who went 4-for-4 in the 1970s in directing movies that would be almost instantaneously regarded as essential modern masterpieces - found himself plunged straight into Director Jail. I am not sure when to say he was released; I am not honestly sure that he ever was released, unless we assume that cobbling together defiantly oddball little curios like Youth Without Youth on European shoestring budgets represents the obvious career path for the man behind The Godfather.

Coppola was obliged to become a singularly financially-driven filmmaker in short order - exactly the opposite of what the American Zoetrope experiment was hoping for. But becoming a commercial sell-out does not necessarily require one to forget all about how to make movies, and it is very much the case that most of Coppola's blatantly pandering cash-grabs are also, to some degree, concerned with artistry and creativity as well, they just have to hide it a little. And this brings us to the very first of those cash-grabs, 1983's The Outsiders, something that we'd now call a YA adaptation (the screenplay was by Kathleen Rowell, the first she ever saw produced), but at the time of its creation was simply an example of a filmmaker discovering, somewhat by accident, that here was a property which would almost certainly make a nice chunk of money and also provide a crutch for him to do interesting things that had very little to do with the actual task of adapting S.E. Hinton's 1967 novel (published when she was just 18!), which came to his attention when a Fresno, CA middle school class voted him the filmmaker they most wanted to see tackle the book that was held in dear esteem by all of them. A fun exercise is to glance over Coppola's filmography to that point, take out all the titles that are spectacularly inappropriate for middle-schoolers, and determine that the class apparently rallied behind Coppola on the strength of his 1968 adaptation of Finian's Rainbow, every kid's favorite musical.

The Outsiders - about which I know nothing at all save that it is the basis for this film, and my apologies to its apparently strong, multi-generational audience of passionate followers for my ignorance - is a pretty basic JD story set in a vaguely defined Oklahoma in a vaguely specified 1960s. It takes place in a small town where teen culture is apparently divided between two gangs: the lower-glass Greasers, and the rich Socs. Our main points of entry in to this world are the two youngest, least-qualified members of the Greasers: 14-year-olds Ponyboy Curtis (C. Thomas Howell) and Johnny Cade (Ralph Macchio). They are chiefly in thrall to Dallas Winston (Matt Dillon), the sort of low-key cad who reads as "charismatic" almost exclusively to younger, impressionable males, but for Ponyboy, at least, the Greasers are a family tradition: among its members are his elder brothers Sodapop (Rob Lowe) and Darrel (Patrick Swayze), who seems to be the oldest and most leaderly of the gang. The boys end up accidentally killing one of the Socs, and go into hiding under the dubious guidance of Dallas; during their exile in the wilds of the Plain states, they manage to heroically and selflessly save some children from a burning church, and return home, to find that heroism hasn't quite wiped the legal slate clean, and also the Socs are plotting a rumble to get back at the Greasers.

Straightforward enough (and about a quarter shorter than the "full" version Coppola presented to Warner Bros., which apparently kept more of the resonance of the book intact - it has since been released to DVD), but there's absolutely no sense at any point that The Outsiders is to any meaningful extent a story of life among the gangs, no matter how much it keeps tapping you on the shoulder to ask, "By the way, did you say something about West Side Story? No, huh? I could have sworn you did. What about Rebel Without a Cause?" It is, instead, an attempt to capture penetrating, iconic imagery of the American West in a way that reflects the particular soulfulness and questioning of these young, tragically dislocated hoodlums. More specifically, it's an overt nod to Gone with the Wind, which is specifically mentioned at multiple points in the dialogue and obviously referenced, especially in the middle of the film, in sequences that crib from that film's famous "silhouettes against an orange-red sky" motif.

It's unapologetic Romanticism, in a film that looks at its teenage characters, with their overheated passions and intense feelings; and then looks at its prospective teenage audience, with its proprietary, emotionally invested ownership of the book; and then decides "well, let's go ahead and be sincere about all this, then". Which is kind of refreshing and bold: a movie about heightened teen melodrama that firmly embraces that melodrama with both arms, trying to find cinematic equivalences to to the heady, potent certitude that this feeling we are feeling is the absolute most important thing ever. The Outsiders is gorgeous, shamelessly so: Coppola and cinematographer Stephen H. Burum invest heavily in draping the perfectly attractive scrublands of Oklahoma, the picture-postcard nostalgic locations, and the slightly-too-clean but soft and peaceable interiors, in dappled lighting and slow movements, and Coppola and editor Anne Goursaud then combine those images in emotionally intuitive rather than narratively driven cuts. Unexpectedly, it turns out to be something like Malick's Badlands for '80s teen audiences (this is, again, most true of the film's middle, which I find to be easily its most compelling sequence: the beginning is over-invested in period signifiers that don't really matter, the end suddenly starts to double down on the plot and climaxes in an impressionistically lovely, but otherwise imprecise gang rumble), right down to the way that the dusky dryness of the setting is both enormously specific in every detail of every building, while also feeling like a dream-soaked Neverland. The textures and sounds of the physical setting are enormously important, that is, while the notion of Oklahoma, 1965, is almost completely besides the point.

Coppola and company do an outstanding job of creating and sustaining a mood through their visuals, and occasional shifts into Expressionism (Ponyboy, recalling his parents' death, has a car apparently drive over his face during a dissolve, with a cut to that car wrecking in a visually and audibly garish shift that's almost funny in its shocking violence), making a film about the idea of being an isolated teenager trying to find love, family, and a place as a series of dense and empty images, with Coppola's father Carmine providing an absolutely terrific score that unsentimentally provides a sense of placelessness, and Howell, excellent in only his second credited film role, seems to absorb all the internal confusion, yearning need, fearful self-doubt, and anger of every movie about juvenile delinquents ever and turn them into an excellent vessel for the film's concepts.

What I'm not as convinced about is that Coppola and company do as good a job, or even a good job, period, at telling the basic story of characters that Hinton set out. In between all the deliberately, self-consciously iconic imagery, the character moments feel a little straightforward and disinvested, and though the film is impressively stocked with young people who would go on to have important and highly visible careers - besides Howell, Dillon, Macchio, Swayze, and Lowe, Diane Lane has a big role, and Tom Cruise and Emilio Estevez both show up - Coppola only really seems to take an interest in Howell, and Macchio and Dillon as the people Howell interacts with the most, leaving the rest of the cast as attractive faces to fill out the frame with business that seems more about creating a sense of movement than doing anything to build character or stress the reality of the world being depicted. And Howell himself is, as I said, more effective at channeling concepts than really clarifying who Ponyboy is: in fact, The Outsiders in this form is largely predicated on Ponyboy not being anyone specific, but being an abstracted concept about "being a lonely teenager". The result is that The Outsiders works entirely as an explication of a mindset rather than as a depiction of individual minds, and while its target audience has, apparently, found this gratifying and legitimising for some 30 years now, the film strikes me as being stubbornly remote, for all its undeniable beauty and talent.

It made its money, anyway: no blockbuster, but enough to ease Coppola back from the nightmare of One from the Heart-induced destitution. It worked well enough that his very next film, released the same year, was another Hinton adaptation about troubled teen gangbangers, Rumble Fish, confirming him as a reliable maker of solid, artistically interesting, but also artistically unambitious movies. It's such a perfect metaphor for '70s cinema transitioning to '80s cinema that I'm almost embarrassed to make it the punchline of a whole review: the artistic madman, tamed and docile, but still making movies he at least can believe in, and all to give the audience exactly what it was asking for and nothing more. It's a lovely film in a lot of ways, for all that it's a little too safe, and it's at any rate a more satisfying example of the artist-as-talented-hack exercise than The Godfather, Part III would prove to be, for starters.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1983
-Moms watching their daughters die of cancer prove shockingly popular in Terms of Endearment
-Tom Cruise in his underwear is popular, but it's not really shocking, in Risky Business
-A Christmas Story is not especially popular at first, but over the years, this will change

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1983
-It's Bond vs. Bond, as the "official" movie Octopussy outperforms the return of Sean Connery to his most iconic role in Never Say Never Again
-Robert Bresson ends his career with the pseudo-Marxist thriller L'argent
-Bizarre Japanese filmmaker Oshima Nagisa and bizarre British pop star David Bowie collaborate in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

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HOLLYWOOD CENTURY, 1973: In which fresh cinematic modernism is used for rampant nostalgia, and all the New Hollywood kids are pals with each other

The posters and trailers for the 1973 release American Graffiti, one of the first (if not the first) American movie marketed almost solely on the basis of pandering to its target audience's nostalgia, challenged that audience to remember, "Where were you in '62?" For the film's director and co-writer, George Lucas, the answer to that question is that in 1962 he was involved in a terrible racing accident at the age of 18, which short-circuited his professional interest in cars and sent him on an alternate path that eventually went through film school. This was important for the obvious reason that Lucas's subsequent career in cinema redefined the commercial realities of the film industry more than any other individual filmmaker before or since, and while I suppose that somebody in the late '70s would have made a movie with the impact of Star Wars, that person probably wouldn't also have seen the wisdom in retaining the merchandising rights to that theoretically blockbuster. So calling Lucas irreplaceable in film history is perhaps rather more literally true than for most other people who might get tagged with that irresistible bit of hyperbole.

This is not, though, the moment to talk about the much-rehashed story of how Star Wars and its waterlogged buddy Jaws ruined everything glorious and artistic about the '70s (which, like most much-rehashed stories is a skyscraper-sized pile of bullshit, but it's not the moment to talk about that, either). We are here now for American Graffiti, which was the other important outgrowth of Lucas's '62 accident. It is a film about the car culture of California teenagers, and it does one of those things that all movies about young people want to do and only a couple have ever really done very successfully, which is to be about one extremely specific time and place that only existed for a fraction of a moment, and through the sheer force of that specificity, manages to be about something much more universal (using that definition of "universal" common in cultural criticism, viz. middle-class, white, and male. But like any other subject, there's nothing wrong with making movies about middle-class white males if you make them very well, and Lucas did that here). It is one of cinema's greatest high school coming-of-age movies, in which the idiot fun of driving around listening to music and doing a piss-poor job of trying to hook up with members of the opposite sex at some point has to give way to becoming a Grown Up. It is a conservative film in this respect, particularly compared to its most obvious descendant, Richard Linklater's shaggy and rebellious Dazed and Confused from 20 years later; in fact, with its unambiguously conformist, "real men go to college or start families" message, it might be the single most conservative great American film of the 1970s.* This has earned it some backlash here and there, and it's really quite an odd standout in the context of the essentially counter-cultural New Hollywood Cinema, but there's so much obvious, unmistakable honesty to it that I frankly don't think its ideology matters. And that honesty comes from Lucas's own life experience, I think, where the culture that his film praises, eulogises, and abandons, in that order, was very nearly responsible for killing him. If any experience is going to make it okay for an artist to say, "you know what, kids, you actually should turn into your parents", that's the one that will do it.

It's a very nice, non-confrontational film, both of which tend to sound like insults rather than terms of praise; but Lucas, compared to virtually every one of his significant peers, was a nice, non-confrontational man. And American Graffiti is a film practically born out of niceness: it was conceived when Lucas, off the cool performance of the acerbic sci-fi parable THX-1138, decided to make his sophomore feature a movie that would give normal people pleasure to watch. It exists because of a kindness: Francis Ford Coppola, the icon of all the film school brats of the late '60s and early '70s but a particular mentor to Lucas, used his enormous post-Godfather clout to do a favor to the young director. Lucas, and his married co-writers Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, treat the characters - whom they obviously like very much - nicely as well, gently nodding at their mistakes without a molecule of judgment. The only thing that's not nice is the final moment, a cold bucket of water that reminds the audience that the film's lovingly depicted Kennedy-era sweetness (sometimes called "innocence", but the film is too salty and sexed-up for that word to make any sense at all) led directly into Vietnam. And I think the casual coldness of that last gesture - unquestionably the most aggressively New Hollywood detail in the whole thing - does a lot to counterbalance the film's apparently rosy, uncomplicated view of a more optimistic time (Katz and Huyck, incidentally, found it tasteless that Lucas only told us the fates of his male characters, not his women; but it's really hard to imagine how the pacing could possibly be maintained if they were added, and it would be disingenuous in the extreme to pretend that this movie ever cares about its girls as much as its boys).

American Graffiti depicts the end of summer: it's the last night in town for teenagers Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss) and Steve Bolander (Ron Howard), who are set to go out east for college in the morning. Meeting up with their friends Terry "The Toad" Fields (Charles Martin Smith) and the older guy John Milner (Paul Le Mat), they start dinner at dusk at a drive-in restaurant before parting ways to spend the evening soaking up the sounds and atmosphere of an unnamed Modesto, California, engaging in the local custom of "cruising", tooling around aimlessly through the commercial district in cars bantering with other similar auto enthusiasts. John ends up saddled with the much younger Carol (Mackenzie Phillips), who humiliates him and cramps his style, but also ends up proving a pleasant conversation partner; Terry lies his way into impressing a gearhead blonde, Debbie Dunham (Candy Clark), and continues having to prove his masculinity despite being a fearful nerd; Steve keeps picking fights with his girlfriend Laurie (Cindy Williams), behaving rather bullying and chauvinistic and superior; and Curt experiences a full-on Long Night of the Soul, trying to decide whether or not he's ready to move on to whatever the hell happens when you go to college. Throughout, the trappings of 1962 are depicted with intense sociological focus mixed with real enthusiasm for the place, the songs, the attitudes, and oh, so much the cars (which Lucas's camera caresses with the same rapt awe that he'd later use for Star Destroyers); and the characters themselves, especially the morbidly backward-looking John and the deeply unsettled Curt, engage in mini-nostalgia of their own, trying to remember back to when things were simpler and more beautiful. The film's way, perhaps of admitting that it knows it's presenting an admiringly whitewashed depiction of the past, for reasons of emotional truth rather than historical mercilessness.

That all being said, I will confess that my love for American Graffiti - which I think to be Lucas's clear pinnacle as a director and maybe the best film about teenagers ever made - isn't entirely about it's mixture of romantic nostalgia and pensive awareness of what that nostalgia might be clouding up about the presence, nor its tragicomic insight about what happens when adolescent boys start to realise that adolescence is speeding towards its close. It's actually about its fucking gorgeous impressionistic soundtrack: this is one of the most audio-driven films ever made. The sounds and music don't merely create a very precise, living, lived-in, organic world for the movie's story to take place in (say whatever we will about any of Lucas's films as director: every one of his movies takes place in a magnificently well-build world), but also providing the emotional spine for a film whose script purposefully keeps away from clean, flowing structure as it shifts from plot to plot and frequently abandons all of them for a shot or two of life in Modesto just spilling out. At which point I might well mention the names of Walter Murch, the sound editor, and Verna Fields and Marcia Lucas, the film editors, all of them critical collaborators in shaping the movie's texture and rhythms.

Famously, American Graffiti includes no fewer than 41 pop singles on its soundtrack, virtually all of them appearing diegetically: performed by a band at a school dance, blasted out of car radios. The way the are placed into the film, warping and fading up and down as cars move around the camera's physical location, is perfect, basically: it suggests with strident realism the exact way that the music would sound if we were actually in the place the movie positions us: echoing off buildings, sliding towards us from a distance, bellowing right in our ear. Nothing in the movie creates its tangible sense of place more effectively or immediately: within seconds of first stepping outside to hear the music coruscating around us, American Graffiti has defined its reality and never for the rest of the movie lets it go. It then falls to the sound effects to create atmosphere and mood, rather than create a sense of realism: an exact reversal of how these things usually work that gives the film a startling originality even four decades later.

The music also does function in the more conventional sense of commenting on the action, sometimes directly and ironically. In the latter category, we have things like the wonderful moment of Laurie and Steve, temporarily reconciled, dancing slowly while around them kids are hectically bobbing to a live cover of "Louie Louie". In the former, we have songs like "The Great Pretender" coming on just in time to drive home Curt's feelings of dislocation. And some songs are just songs, just the thing that happens to be on the radio. As part of its general sense of things getting more ragged and vague as the night moves on - it is a film where the draggy fatigue of being out all night having fun hits hard and ends up giving its half-mythic dawn climax a downright hallucinatory feel - the moments where the songs openly describe the action start to come more and more, neatly suggesting the way that a trivial pop song can seem really perfect and emotionally correct for the moment you're hearing it, the more suggestible and defenseless you become. For that is very much the arc the film describes: growing more frazzled and confused as the long night of the soul keeps marching on.

It's never subtle, not really, but it's so effectively executed that "subtle" wouldn't be a merit and "unsubtle" plainly isn't a flaw (there's nothing remotely subtle about being a teenager, after all). The film is an unabashed crowd-pleaser from the mind of a man who would spend literally the entire rest of his career chasing audience dollars rather than feeding his artistic muse, and it rewards the idealised viewer's love of being a teenager in 1962 with outright shameless pandering. But married to the sloppy authenticity of the high-grain cinematography, the docu-realist setting, and the flickering awareness that, for all the fun they're having, these kids are still going to have to change and become different people, either because they're ready to, or because the shattering cultural upheavals of the next decade will do it for them. Friendly and ebullient and romantic, but never, as a result of all those things, blindly stupid, American Graffiti is pretty much terrific all around: one of the most formally adventurous movies of a bold age, one of the most accurate depictions of teen psychology put to film, and a remarkable snapshot of a culture that existed, as such things go, for hardly the blink of an eye. It's by no means one of the most "important" New Hollywood films, but it's unstintingly great cinema, or I don't know what.

Elsewhere in American cinema in 1973
-The Exorcist explodes at the box office, setting of a new trend in religious-themed horror
-The failure of Columbia's Lost Horizon finally kills off the mega-musical as a genre
-Terrence Malick makes his debut film, the poetic nature tribute/crime thriller Badlands

Elsewhere in world cinema in 1973
-A collection of Czech refugees working in France create the animated political parable Fantastic Planet
-European-style realism and native African cinematic traditions are combined in the Senegalese Touki Bouki, by Djibril Diop Mambéty
-The anti-prolific Spanish director Victor Erice makes his debut with the fantasy-tinged drama of childhood Spirit of the Beehive

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ABOUT A BOY

It's fun, kind of, to finally catch up with a major talking point movie after it's been out awhile, and to have seen its reception shift around a bit. With Boyhood, we've seen the initial near-religious rapture of its Sundance reviews give way, bit by bit, to a backlash, and now we're far enough along that anti-backlash has already started. Though it's telling that the "backlash", such as it was, has been more along the lines "you do understand that this isn't actually the best movie in the history of cinema, right?" than "this movie is bad". Or even "this movie is less than pretty terrific in a lot of ways".

I don't know where that puts this review along the spectrum, though I will say that not only is not actually the best movie in the history of cinema, I don't think that it's actually the best movie in the career of director Richard Linklater - for all its sublimity in recreating the pace and texture of a human life over a span of 12 years, I can't say that I feel liked I learned quite as much about human beings or the limits of cinema as I have from the Before... series.* Then again, "not as good as Before Sunset" leaves plenty of wiggle-room for plenty of all-time masterpieces, and Boyhood certainly puts in a strong argument for itself on that front. If nothing else, it's entirely fair to consider it one of the most ambitious productions in the history of narrative cinema, so much so that it becomes difficult to separate the production from the film's actual content. Though given that the content and the production are very nearly the same thing in this case, it's no real sin to conflate the two.

What that thing is, of course, is a boy growing up in Texas over twelve years. Linklater assembled a cast in the summer of 2002, with seven-year-old Ellar Coltrane taking the role of Mason Evans, Jr, and ever year until 2013, they'd get together to film a few scenes taking place over a handful of days or less in Mason's life, ending with his first day at college. The result is a 165-minute collection of moments in time that track Mason's growth, Coltrane's, Linklater's, and even to a certain extent, America's: not the least of the film's pleasures is in watching how politics and pop culture developed over those 12 years, either for the kick of nostalgia it provides, or simply for the sociology of it.

And, moreover, it's just about the fastest 165 minutes I can recall, with its fragmentary construction (as much like 12 short films that flow into each other without pause as it is a single unified whole) meaning that it never spends too much time in any one place, and with the performances so exquisitely minimal and natural that just watching the characters do nothing at all is totally absorbing. Coltrane may or may not be a natural actor - his work includes a lot of shuffling and looking down and mumbling, in ways that are absolutely to the benefit of his character but don't suggest whether he needs to be hunting for a chance to play Macbeth anytime soon - but he inhabits the role in a most relaxing, wonderfully unfussy way, and he's still only giving the film it's third-greatest performance at best: as his parents, divorced before the film starts, Before... veteran Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette are absurdly excellent. It is a film that is resolutely fixated on Mason's life and the events that Mason perceives, as he perceives them, so even though we spend the same 12 years watching Arquette and Hawke develop their characters (mostly: Hawke certainly doesn't show up for every year, and I'm not absolutely certain that Arquette does), we aren't explicitly allowed inside them, like we are with him. That leaves it entirely up to the performers to give depth and inner life to the characters, and one of the biggest joys of Boyhood is how fully they do so: it's never exactly clear what goes in on Mom & Dad's lives when they're not tending to the immediate, Mason-related matters that we see onscreen, but it's clear that something does; the sense of unspoken history that percolates through their work is miraculous. Arquette especially: her performance here is absolutely one of the best I've seen in the current decade, playing a harried single mother prone to making terrible life choices about men, and letting us see the flaws and strengths in her character without begging for sympathy or making easy choices. She has two separate scenes in the 2013 material where I just about broke watching her: the "my younger child is going to college" breakdown, obviously, but just because something is obvious doesn't mean that it can't be complex and unexpected in how it plays out; and her response to Hawke's clumsy appreciation for how good of a job she did raising their kids, which is at once surprised, grateful, and mostly irritated that the parent who got to play Fun Dad You See Every Other Weekend would condescend to her - the way she holds her body back from him, almost shocked, is peerless whole-body acting.

But for all that his parents are miraculous creations of acting and storytelling, Boyhood is Mason's film, and it is a beautiful one. The flowing chronology of the movie (at times the only way that the film flags a new year's arrival is through Mason's hair) and the mixture of Major Scenes and the most banal kind of everyday experiences don't add up to a "story" in any classical sense. It moves something like a memory, recalling events but not necessarily their context, recalling the beginning and endpoints of an event but not the middle. But as the characters and actors live it, and we watch it, it's happening in real time, giving it a very different feeling than that of a memoir. It's a very present-tense movie, always most interested in what's happening right now, rather than what's going to come, or what's already been; it is the perfect analogue for the mind of a child and teenager, in that regard.

All in all a truly great experience: what holds it back from instant canonisation for me are mostly an accumulation of bothersome details or flat points, like some of the rockier performances: Linklater's own daughter Lorelei, in addition to looking nothing like the biological offspring of Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke, grew disinterested in the project for a bit in the middle, and her performance (already one of the film's weakest) bottoms out at the same time; and there are performers not as good as the main trio at keeping track of their characters year by year (there's been plenty of chatter about how the brief intrusion of a traditional dramatic situation in the mother's brief, horrible marriage to an alcoholic interferes with the rest of the movie; I don't think it does that at all, and in fact I believe that structurally, it's worked into the film with a lot of intelligence for how life is punctuated by That Big Event that seems to color memory for years before and afterward. But Marco Perella's performance as the new husband is wildly inconsistent and veers near to camp towards his final scenes, and I think that damages the subplot more than anything).

I was also horribly let down by the ending: 2013 goes on rather a great deal longer than any other year, giving the impression that Linklater and editor Sandra Adair had a hard time saying goodbye to their material, and it eventually takes us through the entirety of Mason's first day at college. And that's simply not the story that Boyhood has been telling, at any point. It's about the present of childhood and adolescence, not the future possibility of young adulthood, and the final scenes try to force it into an entirely different shape (though at least it allows the film's last two shots to echo its first two shots). It's not film-breaking, by any means; but it's also the only part of the movie that I found myself wondering why I was supposed to care about what I was watching.

Still and all, the thing as a whole is an incredible, almost unparalleled achievement: by virtue of being self-contained, it's arguably more impressive than the Before... films - and it's kind of astounding to think of the scope of Linklater's ambition when noticing that Boyhood started shooting prior to Before Sunset - and as a work of fiction, it demanded a level of advance planning that the Up documentary series, which can simply allow life to happen as it will, doesn't. It's possible to watch the shifts in the filmmaker's technique over the years, as he moved from School of Rock to Fast Food Nation to Me and Orson Welles to Bernie, and yet Boyhood feels entirely of a piece within itself: there's no sense of the highs and lows he was hitting at the same time (and boy, is Me and Orson Welles ever a low). If the film feels incomplete, it's only in that 165 minutes ends up feeling not nearly enough time spent with these people: the fake human lives depicted in the film are so nuanced, and one becomes so invested in watching those lives grow and evolve that watching the film is less a matter of observing characters than spending time with friends.

Fingers crossed for Manhood in 2026.

9/10

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HOPE IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS

The third leg of Ulrich Seidl's Paradise trilogy, Paradise: Hope, isn't nearly as severe and bleak as Love and Faith, nor is at unmitigated in its cruelty as I, for one, fully expected it to be, given the setting of a "fat camp" for overweight teenagers to be humiliated, overworked, and deprived into slimming down (something that none of them actually seem to do). It is not, mind you, free of cruelty: there is a scene that finds all the campers lined in a row and forced to smack their guts and buttocks as they skinny adult trainer runs them cheerfully through the song "If You're Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Fat", a moment to pierce the heart of any of us who know weight problems in youth.

In the main, though, it's a surprisingly conventional story of a 13-year-old girl, Melanie (Melanie Lenz), who's shipped off to someplace she desperately wants to be while her aunt is busy spreading an especially dogmatic strain of Catholicism and her mother is off buying sex in Africa (events covered in the previous movies and not even slightly alluded to here, though the aunt puts in a cameo and the mother is unheard on the other side of a phone). In this powder-keg of hostile adolescence, Melanie makes unexpected friends, finds herself exploring sex in a safely proscribed net of boys and girls equally intrigued and terrified of each others' bodies, and finding a very cautious first love. Things start to get weird when the boy she loves turns on her after they start to get to serious, but it's all part of the great cycle of coming-of-age. Also, the boy is Arzt (Joseph Lorenz), the 50-something doctor watching out for all the kids' medical wellbeing. Ah, there's that special Austrian miserabilist flair we were waiting for.

Hope, thankfully, doesn't belabor the ghastliness of its scenario, or situate itself as a nightmare melodrama about a child being preyed upon by a pedophile (it's actually a bit unclear how far the relationship between the two progresses; certainly into the realm of "totally unacceptable", but probably well shy of anything overtly sexual). Limiting itself entirely to Melanie's perspective and awareness of events, it counts entirely on the viewer's understanding of everything that's wrong with the central relationship, and saves itself the Lifetime movie ominousness that would easily have scuttled the film if it had been there. Instead, by refusing to make a horror movie of it, Hope is both more naturalist and also more upsetting, since the non-monstrous Arzt is far harder to digest than a stock movie villain Arzt would have been. People who look and seem decent and in most ways are probably decent are still capable of coming this close to committing evil acts, and if Arzt ends up pulling back, it's not necessarily in a way that makes us think, "see, he was a good guy all along", for that's manifestly not true.

Still, it's a sign of how much less programmatic Hope is than the other two films that a man and girl can dance around the pedophilia line like this without it plunging either of them into moral chaos; or, for that matter, without it coming to define the movie. Hope is a far less ironic title than Love and less cynical than Faith - it is a movie about a girl being exposed to all kinds of messy, complicated, fascinating elements of life, and predatory doctors are only one of them. It's arguable that the most important relationship to the the narrative isn't between Melanie and Arzt at all, but between Melanie and Verena (Verana Lehbauer), another camper who acts as Melanie's spirit guide, of a fashion, showing her how to be alive and make terrible mistakes and come back out of them. The film is hopeful in that it is about the feeling of being a young teenager who gets to experience everything for the first time; that can be scary and dangerous, it can be boring and empty, and Hope doesn't deny that. But it's also rich and intoxicating, and Hope is very eager to foreground that, making this easily the most pleasant and palatable of the Paradise films.

It's probably not therefore the best - Love, with its much more complex and unconventional psychology, wins that title. The best parts of Hope do have a tendency to remind one of other movies which do about the same thing to about the same effect (if generally not in the same way - pedophile movies are thin on the ground, even in Europe), and though Melanie is a well-drawn character, she's not at all unique. Right alongside being the most pleasant in the trilogy, Hope is also the least demanding, with images that read themselves far more readily than anything in the first two, and more clear-cut situations with more generically-defined stakes.

Still, it's rewarding and humane in a way that Faith absolutely isn't and even if its imagery is less sophisticated than Love's, it still has some very striking compositions that take excellent use of the film's specific geometry (it takes place largely in rooms with lots of right angles and empty space, and Seidl and cinematographers Edward Lachman and Wolfgang Thaler exploit that for many fine images of children being lined up and penned by the adult characters and the frame alike). If it's not as probing and thus not as evocative, it's still successfully able to sketch out a specific emotional state as lived by a specific human being, and on that level, it's a success.

Also, as the shortest of the trilogy by 20+ minutes, it's also the only one that doesn't feel redundant and bloated and anxious to justify itself as a feature; it has feels self-contained as neither Love nor Faith do. If there's one thing we can all get behind, it's that self-contained movies that don't take more time to tell their stories than they need to are the way to go.

7/10

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL '13: LA PAZ (SANTIAGO LOZA, ARGENTINA)

Screens at CIFF: 10/18 & 10/20 & 10/21
World premiere: 11 February, 2013, Berlin International Film Festival

The Argentine coming-of-age psychodrama in static long takes La Paz treads in so many clichés that I honestly don't know if it avoids tracking all of them all over the nice clean movie theater, let alone how it avoids doing so. Perhaps, then, it does not, and is in fact a disastrously messy, overreaching affair that relies on implicit, deliberately unexpressive storytelling tricks so heavily that it doesn't end up saying a damn thing about its intriguingly specific and complicated central character beyond "emotionally disordered people have emotional disorders".

Perhaps, though, it does. I was actually a little bit smitten with La Paz, though I cannot pretend that everyone else would or should be, and it has the very acute feel of being a "festival film", the sort that seems at its very best when you see it sometime during the third consecutive day of four movies in a row and all of the damn things are willfully obscure art films. Still, La Paz has a heck of a central character in Liso, played with gorgeous restraint by Lisandro Rodríguez, building a character who isn't just as awkwardly unsocial and lost, but downright confused by these hoo-mans and their ee-mo-shuns. That sounds a little alienating, but Liso would undoubtedly be alienating if we ever met him or one of his many real-life analogues, and it's far preferable to the way that e.g. Hollywood movies tend to portray the very emotionally roughed-up as being sharp wits and gentle souls who just need a little bit of love to get their feet right, or as showily Actors Studio basket cases, a collection of tics anchored by nothing remotely human.

The plot: having experienced an acute bout of depression in the backstory, Liso is released from an institution for in the film's opening scene. The quality of his care can be guessed by noting that his attending nurse and he have one last fling before he heads out to the care of his upper class parents (Ricardo Felix and Andrea Strenitz), a brittle pair of well-off yuppies (if the film has one truly indefensible flaw, it's that these character, especially the mother, are depicted with a tiny bit too much glee at exposing how shallow and unlikable they are). Living with them does him little to no good, but their put-upon Bolivian domestic Sonia (Fidelia Batallanos Michel) does turn out to be a more vital emotional tether, and she proves understanding enough that it gives him something to build on, as he attempts to re-learn (or, probably, learn for the first time) how to interact with people in a way that is emotionally rewarding and not just socially prescribed. The only other peace he finds is in his semi-frequent visits with his aging grandmother (Beatriz Bernabe), who uniquely among all the people in his life doesn't respond to him as someone with an emotional disorder.

La Paz moves slowly and methodically through Liso's brain, the character study equivalent of a striptease more than anything, with writer-director Santiago Loza pinning his main character down and simply staring at him for long, silent moments, with such unstinting closeness that even the smallest movements feel like huge, transcendent character beats. None of this would work at all without Rodríguez's performance, which takes place at times entirely not just on his face, but in his eyes specifically, creating the sense of significant, troubling emotions being kept safely buried where they aren't expressed such that anyone could notice them if they didn't e.g. have a camera trained at his face for an entire 73-minute feature.

Eventually, once we've started to get a handle on why Liso is so deliberately slippery and unknowable (we don't really get a handle on knowing him until the last couple of scenes), the film starts to play with a bit more narrative, and give Liso' mother far more activity, not to her benefit as a character; there's a certain layer of incestuous fascination that goes on and perhaps would have been better for the film if had stayed completely backgrounded - like everything else involving the mother character, it smacks of cliché and lazy criticism of an easy target, and while there are many reasons to assault the bourgeois upper-middle class in a study of emotional constipation, La Paz doesn't put in the heavy lifting to make that assault a natural part of the movie. Instead it just feels tacked on, with the mother's general unpleasantness a way of dismissing her character without having to deal with her in as fascinating a manner as Sonia (whose Bolivian heritage gives the movie quite a better way to explore how the Argentine moneyed classes deal with those below them), or even Ivonne (Ivonne Maricel Batallanos), the girl that spectacularly fails to help Liso on the road to bland, conformist family-making.

Still, the final sequence, which snaps everything into focus both for the character and the film's themes, does a lot to redeem much of what seemed "off" throughout the whole movie, and La Paz ends up feeling significantly more complete and driven than it did at any point in the film proper. That's a nifty trick and well-suited to the subject matter, though it doesn't quite keep the film from being a little pokey even at such a short running time. And certainly, the movie traffics in far too many art film stylistic clichés to be considered groundbreaking in any way, shape, or form. But it ends up working and being an entirely sensitive depiction of an easily-exploited topic, and for these things it deserves a nod of appreciation.

7/10

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