Good joke. Everyone laugh.

Is it possible to write about Watchmen the movie without comparing it against Watchmen the book? Almost every review of the film eventually devolves into a checklist of how plot points, characters, production design - indeed, every shot - recreate or deviate from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' masterpiece. Every devoted fan of the book is going to have a detail or beat they sorely missed (I missed the Hooded Justice, after preventing Sally Jupiter's rape, teling her to cover herself up). To be fair, director Zack Snyder invites this kind of scrutiny; his film is as driven by an obsessive fidelity to its source material as his adaptation of Frank Miller's 300. I hated 300 for its monotonous visual style and seeming anti-intellectualism, and feared that Snyder was the worst possible choice for Watchmen, a comic driven more by ideological conflict than epic battles. During the stunning opening credits sequence, which presents an alternate history of the 20th century populated by superheroes scored to Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'", I realized my fears were unfounded - Watchmen is every bit as ironic, complex and subversive as the book.

Starting with a balletic fight between retired superhero Edward Blake, AKA the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and a mysterious intruder that ends with Blake's murder, Watchmen takes place in an alternate 1985 where the existence of superheroes has resulted in, among other things, a U.S. victory in Vietnam, Nixon's fifth term in office and the impending threat of nuclear war. With superheroes having been outlawed a few years earlier, the costumed crimefighters have either retired or agreed (like the Comedian) to work for the government; only Rorschach (Jackie Earle Hailey) a masked vigilante (described as a "nutcase" by Moore) driven by vengeance and a black-and-white moral code. Rorschach's investigation of Blake's murder leads us into the stories of his fellow crimefighters and their forefathers (dubbed the Minutemen) and the world they live in. The film is a triumph of design; working with production designer Alex McDowell (whose credits include Fight Club and Minority Report), Snyder has created an alternate 1985 that serves as a funhouse mirror of the real 1985, pop cultural signifiers from the decade and artistic influences that informed the book. As I'm a sucker for movies that blur the line between actual and pop cultural history, it's the little details - the Ridley Scott-inspired tv commercials, the Man Who Fell to Earth-inspired wallpaper in the apartment of atom-age demigod Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the Muzak version of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" playing in the tres sheik offices of billionaire mogul and "smartest man alive" Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) - that bring the film's universe to life.

The structure of both the book and the film digresses from the murder mystery plot to flesh out the stories of each of the crimefighters, allowing for an understanding of the personal and philsophical reasons behind each characters' decision to become a masked vigilante even as each new story reveals the limitations of the previous crimefighter's ideology. My favorite character has always been Dr. Manhattan - the film thankfully retains the graphic novel's most powerful sequence (scored to Philip Glass' "Pruit Igoe/Prophecies"), as Manhattan, formerly Dr. Jon Osterman, recalls from his hideaway on Mars how, after an accidental atomization, he was transformed into a "quantum super-hero" whose understanding and control of the physical properties of the universe grow in proportion to his detachment from humanity (insert obligatory reference to glowing blue penis). I was surprised, watching the film, to find a deeper appreciation for Rorschach, a absolutist nutter who nevertheless is more aware of his own shortcomings than any of his fellow crimefighters. This is partly due to the performance by Haley, who succeeded with Little Children in making a pedophile sympathetic and, even though most of his performance is delivered through a mask, is the most compelling performer onscreen in any scene he appears in. The rest of the cast has varying degrees of success - Crudup is unexpectedly but effectively low-key as Dr. Manhattan, Morgan is darkly hilarious as the Comedian, and Patrick Wilson is great as Dan Drieberg, an insecure middle-aged guy, formerly known as Night Owl, who can only get it up after rescuing innocents. Malin Akerman, as Manhattan's girlfriend and second-generation crimefighter Silk Spectre, is alright in an underwritten role (Carla Gugino, as the first Silk Spectre, fares better). Matthew Goode is a visually striking choice for the brilliant and powerful Ozymandias, and the emotional detachment he brings to the role (along with the strange accents) are reminiscent of Thomas Jerome Newton.

It's Ozymandias' part of the film, however, that is slightly lost in translation. I don't mind the change that Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse make to the film's ending - one deus-ex-machina is as good as another, and this one actually makes more thematic sense. But the surgery performed on the narrative to make the change results in a final twenty minutes that feel slightly truncated and off-balance compared to the rest of the film, and I winced when a famous line spoken by one character was omitted and then recalled, out of nowhere, by another. This misstep, however, only serves to illustrate what makes the rest of the film so unique - other than Ghost World, I've never seen another comic book adaptation so committed to the idiosyncrasies of its source material. While its relative commercial failure was probably inevitable - the audience I saw it with was palpably thown off during the rape scene and, by the ending, was completely lost - this only increases my affection for the film. Whether you love or hate Watchmen, it's one of the most admirable examples of a big-budget filmmaker putting one over on unsuspecting audiences; a friend and I continued to debate the actions of the characters for days after seeing it, and I hope some of those who were thrown off guard were inspired to do the same instead of completely dismissing the film. While it remains to be seen whether Snyder is just a master of absorbing his source material or if, as Watchmen suggests, he may be more than a slick visual director, remains to be seen; for now, however, the question is beside the point. The first time I saw Watchmen I was overthinking it, measuring it against the movie I've had in my head since I first read the book. The second time, experiencing the movie as its own thing, I realized how weird and dark and awesome it truly is. Alan Moore would do well to lift his curse.

Taking Woodstock

The trailer for Taking Woodstock debuted on Dimitri Martin's show last week. Watching the trailer - which features a bunch of shots I worked on and raises my hopes that I made the final cut - I have to admit that, despite the self-depricating tone I took when writing about the film last year, it was pretty damn fun to be a part of. I feel like a living simulacrum.

The chai-wallah has done it again!

There's an absolutely exhilarating sequence towards the beginning of Slumdog Millionaire that finds Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar) and Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail), two young brothers living in the slums of Mumbai, as they flee a police officer. Referencing his film Trainspotting, director Danny Boyle follows Salim and Jamal as they navigate the crowded, elaborate alleys of the slum - set to A.R. Rahman's propulsive score, each shot is packed with chaos, color and life before cutting to a series of wide shots that emphasizes the overwhelming poverty of the city. It's a scene that gives you a feel for the experience of living in Mumbai, but Slumdog Millionaire never recaptures that feeling. Mistaking contrivance for destiny, Slumdog Millionaire is technically impressive but gimmicky and devoid of real feeling and, at its worst, frighteningly disconnected from the reality of slum life.

"But it's a fantasy," one might reasonably argue, and Slumdog Millionaire does present itself as a story of a boy and a girl swept up by the winds of destiny. The film begins with 20-year-old Jamal (Dev Patel), whose hard-knock life has left him with only one facial expression, as he is one question away from winning 20 million rupees on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. As the show breaks for the night, Jamal is arrested on suspicion of cheating and interrogated by a police inspector (Irfan Khan) determined to know how Jamal could succeed where doctors and lawyers have failed; "it is written," as the film informs us, and as Jamal explains how he knew the answers to each question, we see how each one is tied to an important moment to his life. This results in an episodic structure that Paul Clark aptly compared to the Cheers episode where Cliff is a contestant on Jeopardy! - I must admit that I had to hold back unintentional laughter when, after we see a tragic memory linked with one of the answers, Jamal solemly says "Not a day goes by when I wish I didn't know the answer to that question." The whole "hand of fate" theme can be a very effective one, but there are probably hundreds of more interesting devices to illustrate this than a game show. And when fate is being used to pander to an audience's anti-intellectualism and desire for instant material rewards, the whole thing just feels shallow and patronizing. The film's outcome, which is never in question, would feel much more triumphant if Jamal exhibited some kind of intellectual curiosity - underdog stories are pointless if the underdog hasn't earned it in some way (without the training montage, who cares if Rocky Balboa beats Apollo Creed).

It's clear that Boyle and screenwriter Simon Beaufoy (adapting the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup) are reaching for comparison to Charles Dickens, and Jamal's childhood even features an interlude where he, Salim and Jamal's lifelong love Latika (Frieda Pinto at 20, Rubiana Ali and Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar as a kid) must escape a Faginesque criminal. And though Slumdog Millionaire shares with Dickens an essentially passive protagonist whose life is driven by forces beyond his control, it lacks the passionate criticism of social injustice that gave Dickens' larger-than-life tales dramatic weight. Worse, its shallowness exposes Boyle's paternalism - sitting in a mostly white audience chuckling at the sight of a plucky, shit-covered brown kid, I couldn't shake the feeling that something (forgive me) stinks. I don't mean to accuse Boyle of racism, because that implies more intentionality than I think he's capable of; with each subsequent film, it becomes clearer that he's a hell of a craftsman and an increasingly facile storyteller. This extends to his characters - the film hinges on the question of whether fate will reuinite Jamal and Latika (what do you think?), but they're barely sketches of an adolescent notion of soulmates, and I just didn't care.

There is one element of Slumdog Millionaire I completely loved, however - Anil Kapoor as the game show host. Throughout the first two-thirds of the film I was hanging on every one of Kapoor's smarmy, elusive line readings, trying to figure out what the host's deal was - is he an agent of fate, or is he trying to trip the kid up, or is he just playing to the audience? When we get hints about the host's background and motivations, my attention drifted from Jamal and Latika as I started to picture the host's story in my head. Now that's a movie that would earn an end-credits dance number.

Away We Go!

The trailer for Away We Go, the Sam Mendes movie I worked on last year, is now online. I wish I could point out a scene I'm in, but other than having watched a camera car film the scene at 1:28, I don't know yet whether any scenes I'm in made the final cut. As for the movie itself, it looks cute, perhaps a bit twee for my tastes, but definitely an interesting change-up for Mendes after the brutal (and, according to commenter Mattson Thomson, brutal to make) Revolutionary Road. Between this and Taking Woodstock (and possibly The Maiden Heist), it's looking like I'm the Where's Waldo? of summer 2009.

A homosexual with power - that's scary!

If I were to evaluate films solely on the importance of their ideas, Milk would be the best movie of 2008. Gus Van Sant's biopic of slain politician and gay rights activist Harvey Milk has been in development for over a decade and gone through multiple directors and stars only to be released soon after the painful blow against gay rights it unknowingly foreshadows. Milk is not the best movie of 2008 - it transcends many of the conventions of biopics but is weighed down by others. But its rough patches are easily forgiven thanks to its big heart; Milk is a passionate, humane story not only of Harvey Milk but of the ongoing struggle for equal rights for all. Most importantly, Milk is a challenge to contemporary complacency and a much-needed reminder that the battles Milk waged are still being fought today.

A large part of Milk's success, however, is its lack of self-importance. Van Sant has never been an overtly political filmmaker, and while Milk is a departure from his more experimental recent films, it works as well as it does because it grounds its politics in very personal terms. We're introduced to Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) on the eve of his fortieth birthday, as he picks up young Scott Smith (James Franco) in a subway station. Penn is immediately believable in the role, embodying Milk's sensitivity and puckish sense of humor and conveying, with a quick glance after a stolen kiss, the fear of being outed that even this strong advocate for the importance of coming out once felt. His performance is revelatory, never slipping into caricature and emphasizing Milk's overwhelming, almost compulsive, generosity of spirit (forced to drop his assholish persona, he's also geniunely sexy for the first time since At Close Range). He and Franco have strong chemistry - though the film is never sexually explicit, moments like the shot of Harvey and Scott, having moved to San Francisco, making out against the storefront of Harvey's photo shop have a relaxed, matter-of-fact intimacy that goes a long way towards normalizing representations of homosexuality. Harvey's shop becomes a haven for young gay men like future activist Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch, sporting an excellent 'fro), and as Harvey is finally motivated to stand on a literal soapbox and announce his candidacy for local office, the film makes a strong case for the importance of activism not for the sake of political gain as expression of basic and unacknowledged human needs. The meticulously recreated protest marches later in the film (intercut with real footage from the era) owe their impact to the earlier scenes - political and personal revolution, to Van Sant, are the same thing.

There's always a risk in telling the story of a slain hero of becoming pure hagiography, and the screenplay by Dustin Lance Black, while mostly successful, sometimes flirts with agitprop. Harvey's relationship with the troubled, jealous Jack Lira (Diego Luna) could have been a chance to explore the more complicated aspects of Harvey's role as Peter Pan to a generation of lost boys, but the script's narrative shortcuts and Luna's awkward performance diminish the emotional payoff. And two scenes involving a young, wheelchair-bound gay man, while based in fact, are clumsily manipulative and should have never made it past the first draft. The film is more nuanced in its depiction of Dan White (Josh Brolin), Harvey's fellow supervisor and, ultimately, the man who killed Milk and mayor George Moscone (Victor Garber). While it would have been easy to villify White as a caricature of a homophobe, Black and Van Sant try to understand him, portraying White as a man uncomfortable in his own skin and unable to shake an increasing feeling of disenfranchisement (I suspect a lot of white men feel the same way post-election). Brolin is excellent in the film's most challenging role, and Van Sant and DP Harris Savides frame Milk and White's scenes together in uncomfortably off-balance wide shots that emphasize the divide between one man trying to reach an understanding and another who is incapable or unwilling to understand. Milk's death scene is admirably restrained; as the frame rate subtly changes and the soundtrack drops out, Penn and Van Sant (referencing Milk's love of opera) give their hero a moment of grace as he dies alone and in the way he anticipated.

It's impossible, particularly in the scenes involving the battle against the Anita Bryant-endorced Proposition 6, not to think of the hateful, stupid Proposition 8 and the ongoing struggle for equal rights. The victory of Prop 8 can be largely attributed to the complacency of liberals who regard gay marriage as a hot-button issue; a forward-thinking friend cringes whenever Milk is mentioned, complaining he's tired of movies that "cram a message I already agree with down my throat." Fair enough, except that Milk doesn't preach to the choir and might actually move those who need it most. I realize it would be hard to get those who oppose gay rights to actually watch Milk, not just because they're afraid they might see a blowjob or something, but because they're so fond of criticizing movies they haven't seen (or, better yet, reduce them to a series of lame gay cowboy jokes). But I hope that, a year from now, some of them stumble upon it on cable while channel-surfing. If they're not moved by the closing documentary footage of a thousands-strong candlelight vigil populated by men and women united by a desire for acceptance and love, they should probably check to make sure their hearts are beating.

And I'm going to Tangiers!

I know how uncool it is to love American Beauty, and I'm sort of embarrassed that I do. I still think it's the perfect movie for a 16-year-old - seeing it at that age, it affected me in a profound way, and for that I'll always remember it fondly as a specific kind of masterpiece. That said, every time I watch it, I find myself thinking more and more of my friend Garrison's admission that, during the plastic bag scene, he couldn't stop thinking about cigar-chomping teamsters manning leaf blowers just out of frame. There's no question that Sam Mendes' films are meticulously designed, and the effect is fascinating for some and oppressive for others. Revolutionary Road, Mendes' adaptation of the classic Richard Yates novel, is his most fastidious film yet, but here, the oppressive feeling is wholly intentional. The most scabrous relationship movie since Bad Timing, Revolutionary Road is like a dark B-side to American Beauty's search for poetry in the banality of suburbia - here, there are no signifiers of beauty to be found, death provides no epiphanies, and the sensitive young man in the neighborhood reveals not spiritual awareness but hypocrisy and self-delusion. Dour and unsparing, Revolutionary Road is Mendes' best and most surprising movie yet; I must finally admit to myself that, cool or not, I'm a fan.

Yates' book tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple trying to break free of suburban conformity, in a terse, often blunt style, laying bare their self-delusions with the dispassionate clarity of an entomologist studying insects wriggling on a pin. The movie is as much a dissection as the book, starting as it does with a sharp cut from Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (Kate Winslet) flirting at a party, their lives filled with possibility, to the now-married Frank awkwardly applauding April, once an aspiring actress, looking defeated at the curtain call of a mediocre community play. We learn that Frank and April moved to suburban Connecticut when she became unexpectedly pregnant, with Frank taking a job at the same business firm his father slaved at for decades. In the first of several brutal arguments in the film, we learn that Frank and April have fallen victim to exactly what most young marrieds fear, the complacency and stagnation they vowed they were above. It's fair to ask whether the book, published in 1961, has any contemporary relevance, and whether we really need another indictment of suburbia. Which is fair, except that's not the point of the book or the movie - it's clear from the start that April and Frank, with their pretensions and arrogant belief that they're better than the people surrounding them, have chosen and doomed themselves to unhappiness. Mendes' snappy, Billy Wilder-influenced sense of mise-en-scene, coupled with the attractive, antiseptic production design (reminiscent of Interiors), invites not comical scorn but understanding - wouldn't it be easier, after all, to just give up?

While Frank reacts by doing the bare minimum at work and screwing a secretary (Zoe Kazan), April is determined to turn her life around, proposing to Frank that they move to Paris (Frank has often complained that Europe is the only place for intelligent people to live), where she'll get a job and support Frank as he figures out what to do with his life. As this plan first renews their passion for each other before going awry, Mendes' cannily exploits our memories of his famous leads (though if I read one more review that says "This time, the iceberg is their marriage," I'll gag). Winslet (whose performance I wrote about in greater detail here) is astonishing as April, juggling a complex range of emotions in the character's increasing anomie. DiCaprio is given perhaps an even more challenging role - while both characters receive plenty of criticism from Yates, the film's April is at least conscious of her own mistakes, while Frank is gradually exposed as a bullshit artist with middling daddy issues - and, to his credit, he commits to playing a severely unlikable character in a performance that recalls Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge. When Frank and April square off, we're reminded of the undeniable chemistry that made Titanic work, and it's quite a thing to see that chemistry turn sour.

Revolutionary Road captures the novel's tragic, somber tone, but what surprises most about the film is its grasp of the book's underlying black comedy. Watching the film, I became increasingly aware of how it depicts the mundane as completely bizarre and grotesque - nosy neighbor Mrs. Givings (Kathy Bates) is photographed to look like a gorgon, and Frank's alcoholic workmate Jack Ordway (Dylan Baker), with his bizarrely aristocratic accent and strange timing, seems like he could kill everyone in the office at any moment. By the time Mrs. Givings' son John (Michael Shannon) visits from the local mental insitution to offer his two cents to the Wheelers, the film becomes a sort of baroque farce. While it's true that John is a writerly device, a way for Yates to say what the other characters won't, the character works for two reasons. First, Shannon is fearfully good in the role, as much a force of nature as Heath Ledger's Joker. Second, John's not insane - like many of the kids I grew up with, he's been hospitalized for his sensitivity and inability to "play the game." It may be cliche, but the truth is that the suburbs can be a destructive environment for anyone who refuses to settle. If the fights in the film's last half feel melodramatic, it's only because small-town life is punctuated by melodrama and just plain bad drama (as the opening scene suggests). Nobody is better than Mendes at portaying middlebrow banality; if you're sick of middlebrow banality, well, I totally get that, but for this suburb-raised kid, it's good therapy.

Play the Game (3/5/09)

What can I get ya, spring chicken?

The Wrestler is a movie for children of the eighties. Though the film's archetypal underdog story is surely familiar to audiences of any age, I suspect the film has particular resonance for anyone who grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Whether one liked wrestling or not, it was a constant part of our lives - oh, to think of all those wasted hours getting my ass kicked at WWF Royal Rumble on SNES - and, like most ephemeral crap culture, a projection of the values that, as kids, we were just learning were ours to inherit. While pro wrestling is as popular as ever, Randy "The Ram" Robinson, the titular character, is very much a product of an era when our heroes wore neon green pants and our villians had names like The Ayatollah. A walking anachronism living in the shadow of long-ago victories, Randy is of course played Mickey Rourke, that preternaturally gifted actor who, not too long ago, seemed like he was headed for the dustbin of history. That Rourke's story mirrors Randy's in many ways has been played up for months, but his performance is more than an act of pop-culture verisimilitude. Rourke's sensitivity, intelligence and complete lack of vanity, coupled the meticulously observed direction of Darren Aronofsky, create an unforgettable portrait of a man in tights (physically and emotionally!).

The excellent opening credits sequence, a collage of fliers and wrestling mags scored with Quiet Riot's "(Bang Your Head) Metal Health" (Randy's theme, which we'll hear throughout the film), gives us a glimpse of the height of Randy's celebrity before we're introduced to The Ram as an aging burlyman barely getting by on matches at small regional venues. Aronofsky's protagonists are frequently driven to obsessive lengths to recapture some perfect memory - a child's high school graduation, or a romantic walk in the snow - destroying themselves in the process. For Randy, the distant hope of "a ticket back to the top" drives him to put his body through incredible amounts of abuse for the sake of an ever-diminishing audience. Countless reviewers of The Wrestler have cited Barthes' essay on wrestling (and more felt the need to mention Marisa Tomei's breasts), and the film's scenes in the ring, particularly a punishing match with The Necrobutcher (playing himself), underline the sport's increasing nihilism. What makes Randy so poignant is that he's a one-trick pony (as Bruce Springsteen sings in the title track) who truly believes in the cliches behind wrestling - when he's driving around in his van listening to old metal ballads, his complete faith in the prefabricated values he embodies is unbelievably poignant. If the script by Robert Siegel, which finds Randy attempting to romance stripper Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) and repair his relationship with his estranged daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood), seems formulaic, it's only because Randy can only begin to understand his loneliness, regret and fear of anonymity through cliche. Armond White's complaint that the film is anti-spiritual completely misses the point - The Wrestler is about characters trying to find meaning in lives completely divorced from the real. It's perfect that, when Cassidy inevitably compares Randy to Christ, she's not referencing not the Bible but The Passion of the Christ.

What makes Rourke's performance so astonishing is his ability to take a character who is always, to some extent, performing, and allow us to glimpse the inarticulate despair underneath. When Randy attempts to reconcile with his daughter, we can tell that he's rehearsed this speech many times, but we also know that he means every word (Wood is excellent and underrated in a part mostly built on emotional traumas we never see). As the film follows Randy's every move, we come to see how his need to please the fans comes from a generosity of spirit - even when he's stuck working at a supermarket deli counter, he tries to give each customer a fun, memorable experience (like Paul Clark, I'd gladly watch another half-hour of deli scenes). At the same time, Randy's a self-pitying narcissist, and the film doesn't shy away from his worst moments. It's a credit to Aronofsky, though, that he never takes a condescending or judgemental approach to the character, asking only that we try to understand him. This approach extends to Cassidy, who doesn't get as much screentime but, thanks largely to Tomei's fantastic performance, we come to realize is hardly ever telling us (or Randy) what she's really feeling even as Tomei tells us everything we need to know about her - the conflict between her fear (like Randy) of losing the thing she's great at to age and her increasing acceptance of a life away from the security of a stage.

It'd be wrong to label the documentary-style filmmaking strategy - all handheld and available light - a return to Aronofsky's roots, because even when he his films were low-budget, they were never this stripped-down. It takes a great deal of confidence to abandon all directorial artifice and trust in the story and performances to carry the movie, and the approach pays off wonderfully here. As DP Maryse Alberti follows Randy into the harsh flourescent lights of his day job and the barely-lit club where Cassidy works, we're overwhelmed by the oppressive banality of Randy's life. When contrasted against the startling immediacy of the scenes in the ring, we start to understand why Randy is stuck in the past, even if that proves to be his undoing. The first time I saw The Wrestler, I found the conclusion frustrating, as there were several more appropriate resolutions for The Ram. Watching it again the other night, though the similarity to a certain series finale was still a bit distracting, I realized that, frustrating though it may be, it's the only ending that makes sense . Randy is never going to do the reasonable thing, and it's to Aronofsky and Rourke's great credit that we love him for it.

"And now let's head down to the awards - the Hollywood Awards!"

Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle, Penn, Winslet, Ledger, Davis. Those are my predictions for who will take home Oscars tonight, and who cares why. Tonight promises to be one of the most predictable Oscar ceremonies in memory, and I don't know anyone who feels tonight's nominees reflect the best that 2008 had to offer (after the one-two punch of Scorsese and the Coens winning, the comedown was inevitable). Here's who I'll be rooting for tonight, in any case (longer write-ups of some of these are still ahead):

Best Picture - Slumdog Millionaire is as sure a bet as I can remember, and it's totally undeserving. The Mumbai-set Cinderella story is sometimes entertaining and features a terrific performance by Anil Kapoor as a game show host, but I was unmoved by the generic central romance, and there are literally hundreds more interesting devices to explore the machinations of fate than a game show. It's superficial and patronizing and, at its worst, borders on exploitation of its impoverished child actors. I haven't seen Frost/Nixon or The Reader. Milk was a bit more conventional than I'd hoped, but it's still a very good film and its heart is in the right place, so I wouldn't mind if it won. I guess I'm rooting for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, David Fincher's strange and compelling epic; still, it's the first time in thirteen years that no film I truly love is in the race, so I won't cry at its inevitable loss to the chai wallah.

Best Director - Same. Not much else to say except, really, Danny Boyle is becoming an increasingly superficial director, and I'm sick of that self-satisfied grin plastered on his face at every awards ceremony like he's the cat who got the cream. Still like Trainspotting, though. Also, consider that Stephen Daldry now has as many Best Director nominations as Stanley Kubrick.

Best Actor - It's great seeing Richard Jenkins finally get some recognition, and his performance in The Visitor is subtle and impressive, but the movie is kind of boring. Brad Pitt is better in Benjamin Button than people are giving him credit for, but he's better as Chad Feldheimer. Sean Penn goes full-gay in Milk and gives the warmest and most moving performance of his career, and he certainly deserves the win. Still, it would sting to see even Penn take it away from Mickey Rourke, whose Randy the Ram is the most heartbreaking performance of the year. He knocks it out of the ballpark, everyone loves a comeback, and who doesn't want to hear the Mick's acceptance speech?

Best Actress - Kate Winslet is my favorite actress working today and I'd love to see her win, but I keep putting off seeing The Reader because it frankly sounds terrible and I fear this is indeed a "Career Achievement Award." I haven't seen Changeling, and though Meryl Streep and the rest of the cast of Doubt does strong work, I can't separate the performances from the hoariness of the script and direction. Melissa Leo is terrific in Frozen River, and if she won it'd be a great "triumph of the underdog" moment. But I'll be rooting for Anne Hathaway, who as the self-destructive Kym in Rachel Getting Married manages to invoke our sympathies for a complicated and potentially unlikable character.

Best Supporting Actor - This is maybe the strongest category this year, but I'd hate to be the actor who, in a surprise victory, steals it from Heath Ledger. His victory has been preordained since early last year, which would be irritating if the Joker wasn't also the performance of the year. I love Robert Downey Jr., but if the geezer faction of the Academy gives it to him as some statement that Iron Man was better, it'll be as groan-worthy as Rob Lowe and Snow White.

Best Supporting Actress - If anyone from Doubt is going to win it should be Viola Davis, who lent the film its few moments of emotional plausibility, and I suspect she may upset frontrunner Penelope Cruz (who was great as a passionate, impulsive artist in Vicky Cristina Barcelona). I like Taraji P. Henson more than most, I suspect. But I'll be rooting for Marisa Tomei, whose aging stripper Pam is as responsible for The Wrestler's emotional impact as Rourke, and who totally proves herself worthy of that first Oscar.

Best Original Screenplay - I said this in the Muriels comments as well: I just don't get In Bruges, and I say this as someone who acted in a McDonagh play and found it brilliant. I'm willing to have someone explain this to me. Milk is very good, but my few problems with it can be traced back to the script. I haven't seen Happy-Go-Lucky, and I was slightly less enthusiastic with Frozen River as a film than with Leo's performance. So I'll go with Wall-E, because nobody puts as much importance in story as Pixar, and because it should have been nominated for Best Picture.

Best Adapted Screenplay - Hmmm. I haven't seen two of these, didn't care for two more, and the flaws that kept Benjamin Button from masterpiece status are clearly attributable for Eric Roth's script. Whatever.

Best Cinematography - Some strong nominees here. I did like the look of Slumdog Millionaire, though Anthony Dod Mantle's gorgeous cinematography was rendered incomprehensible by the seizure-inducing editing. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has perhaps the most gorgeous digital cinematography yet, but the need to shoot slo-mo scenes on 35mm (including the movie's most striking image) points to the format's ongoing limitations. I'll definitely be rooting for the IMAX-enhanced beauty of The Dark Knight.

Best Editing - Ditto The Dark Knight. Where others saw incoherence, I saw a brilliant economy of storytelling.

Best Art Direction - Gotta go with the attractive, antiseptic surfaces of Revolutionary Road that threatened to suffocate those poor Wheelers at any moment.

Best Costume Design - I hope the fashions on display in Milk come back very soon.

Best Makeup - All of these would be fine winners, but I'll go with the aging makeups of Benjamin Button...

Best Visual Effects - ...which were seamlessly blended with some of the subtlest, most believable CG character work in memory.

Best Sound - The squeal of the Batpod winding through an office building rocked my socks off.

Best Sound Editing - Consider that everything in Wall-E had to be created from scratch, and it's the obvious winner. Go Ben Burtt!

Best Score - Danny Elfman's score for Milk is surprising even as it recalls some of his best work, but Thomas Newman's score for Wall-E is weird, romantic and delightful.

Best Song - After three weeks of Slumdog Millionaire at Images Cinema, I've heard enough "Jai Ho" for this and the next lifetime. Go, Sledgehammer!

Best Animated Film - Wall-E.

Best Documentary Feature - Man on Wire will probably win, and it's very good. But how great would it be to see Herzog up there?

No opinion on shorts, etc., so I'll stop here. Here's hoping for a night of Rourke and Herzog acceptance speeches, and if not that, let's hope Jerry Lewis says "Polack" at least once. Good luck staying awake, everyone!

Glad to be weirdly close.

I've never understood why "depressing" is routinely thrown around as a criticism for films that deal with loneliness and despair. To me, a depressing movie is something like Confessions of a Shopaholic, Fool's Gold or anything else that cynically sidesteps any real connection to human experience under the guise of escapism. When a filmmaker takes an honest look at our anxieties, weaknesses and particularly our mortality, it's like a spiritual palate cleanser - I leave the theater feeling refreshed and upbeat. Charlie Kaufman has never shied away from downbeat material; his protagonists are frequently caught in existential crises they haven't necessarily defeated by the end credits, and the humor in his films springs from heartache, insecurity and self-loathing. The darker aspects of Kaufman's screenplays have previously been offset by the more playful sensibilities of directors Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, so Synecdoche, New York is perhaps the purest realization of his unsparing yet humane vision. There's no question that Kaufman's maddeningly dense directorial debut is an extremely daunting experience and, particuarly for artists and creative types, one that cuts to the bone. A film about the ways that art allows us to create meaning in a world that often seems meaningless, Synecdoche, New York levelled me, and yet few films have left me feeling so fearfully alive.

Since Kaufman's protagonist, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is a theater director, it's tempting to read Synecdoche, New York as autobiographical (to be fair, casting oneself as the lead in a previous screenplay sort of invites this reading). But Kaufman's protagonists are almost always artists, and as a story of the creative process, the film is more personal than self-referential; as with Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, the biggest conflict here is the divide between what we aspire to create and our own frailties. When we meet Caden, his marriage to painter Adele Lack (Catherine Keener) is failing and he's suffering through a series of mysterious ailments that, among other things, deprive him of the ability to salivate or cry. The early scenes of Caden directing a regional production of Death of a Salesman tell us how to read the rest of the film; "Everyone is disappointing the more you know someone," Adele tells Caden, and Caden's directions to his actors double as Kaufman's suggestion that drama is an attempt to understand these disappointments and, perhaps, to find something sublime in our imperfect lives. A scene where Caden reminds a room of actors that someday they'll all be dead should ring true for any director, whose job it is to sometimes make everyone around him feel completely terrible (and what does this say about anyone who would want this job?).

Adele's paintings are extremely small-scale, while Caden, who is awarded a MacArthur genius grant and uses the money to stage an experimental theatre piece inside an enormous warehouse, finds his own work becoming more and more elephantine. As the play expands over the years to encompass everyone in Caden's life and, eventually, a Caden double named Sammy Barnathan (Tom Noonan) who has been observing Caden for years, the film also grows beyond the dramas of Caden's life - his second marriage to narcissistic actress Claire (Michelle Williams), his search for his estranged daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein as a kid, Robin Weigert as an adult) and his bittersweet friendship with his soulmate Hazel (Samantha Morton), who lives in a house that is always on fire - to encompass our collective drama, even hinting at the dystopian future we fear awaits us around the corner. Synecdoche, New York began with a studio exec's suggestion that Kaufman try writing a horror movie, and it often plays like a realization of our worst nightmares; this may be why many critics and audience members have rejected it as completely unpalatable (the multiple shots of characters examining their own shit probably didn't help either). But the film's dourness is offset by two things. First, it's extremely subjective, taking as its POV a struggling artist, a particularly difficult breed of human being (my wife is a saint). While I've encountered artists like Adele who choose to only experience the enjoyable aspects of life, I've never really understood how they pull that off (Olive's fate suggests that this is unadvisable, in any case). Second, if cinema is a collective art form, than the catharsis in the face of misery I described in my opening can be a powerful shared experience - though it's Hoffman's character in Doubt who preaches that doubt can be a powerful bond, it's Kaufman's film that realizes that concept more fully than the other, heavy-handed and stage-bound film can begin to. Besides, Synecdoche, New York is hardly two hours of suffering - it's too funny and compassionate, too self-deprecating in its unhappiness (note the multiple scenes where Caden cries during sex), too recognizably human to dismiss.

Kaufman is met in his outsized ambitions by Hoffman (never better) and the murderer's row of actresses playing the women who make up Caden's universe (why is it that movies about directing are always also about fucking?). I pretty much fell in love with Morton's Hazel, who is always at Caden's side but rarely says what she's really feeling, and the casting of Emily Watson as Morton's double is as delightful a metatextual high-wire act as the double team of Noonan and Diane Wiest as Caden's masculine and feminine selves. They and the rest of the cast admirably rise to the occassion of pulling off the emotional and conceptual obstacles Kaufman has constructed for them - as a FFC commenter pointed out, only Kaufman could construct a heartbreaking scene around the line "I'm sorry for abandoning you to have anal sex with my homosexual lover, Eric." Director of photography Frederick Elmes and production designer Mark Friedburg also deserve a great deal of credit for creating the flat, slightly dated world of the film, which grows more and more surreal as it progresses. And Jon Brion's score is a masterpiece of sustained anxiety - all of these elements together result in a film that is mostly about the anticipation of terrible or wonderful or important moments that, when they arrive, are over before we've realized it. Which would seem psychotic if it weren't generally true.

Play the Game (2/6/09)

Top 10: 2008

You know what was a terrible year for movies? 1992. There were a few great ones, and a few others (Bram Stoker's Dracula, Alien 3) I like more than most, but otherwise it was stuff like Encino Man and Ladybugs all year long. Compared to 1992, 2008 looks pretty good, but there's no question that it was a so-so year, and a disappointment after the flood of greatness that was 2007. Still, the year ended pretty strongly, so what follows is a list of a handful of excellent movies and several more great or very good ones. It was one of those in-between years that found established auteurs experimenting with new genres and techniques with mixed but fascinating results. And while the prestige movies sometimes underwhelmed, it was a better-than-average year for popcorn movies, two of which made my top three. 2008 was too much of a grab bag for an overriding thesis; suffice to say that there was greatness out there, often in the most surprising of places.

Movies I haven't seen yet (curse you, limited release!): Let the Right One In, Happy-Go-Lucky, Wendy and Lucy, Frost/Nixon, The Reader, Gran Torino, Ballast, Waltz with Bashir, Hunger, The Duchess of Langeais, W

Underappreciated: Speed Racer, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. C'mon, lighten up.

Movie I Wanted to Like: Forgetting Sarah Marshall came highly recommended by several friends whose opinions I trust. I know I'm probably overthinking it, but it just seemed regressive, hypocritical and sad. However...

Performances I Liked in Movies I Didn't: Russell Brand in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Anil Kapoor in Slumdog Millionaire, the cast of Doubt

Biggest Academy Awards Mystery: How Synedcoche, New York, the best and most original screenplay of the year, was overlooked in favor of In Bruges, which isn't original at all. I know it isn't Most Original Screenplay, but still...

Best Repertory Screening: Blade Runner with Q&A by Doug Trumbull was awesome, but the digital projection, while pristine, felt a little odd, like I was watching the movie in an enormous home theater. So I'll go with Halloween at the Brattle - a collector's 35mm print, pink, faded and beautiful.

Best First-Run Screening: The Dark Knight with a sold-out, captivated audience.

Worst Movie of the Year: The Happening. Greg, I'm actually fascinated to hear more about why it was the best of the year for you.

Worst Movie I Loved: Mamma Mia!

Best Blog Comment: "What's truly sad, Bemis, is the sarcastic, elitist, snobbish cynical universe YOU apparently occupy, in which even a cheery 'Hello' would have hideously naive meaning and give rise to the opportunity yet again to elevate yourself by putting down everyone else. Screw your elitist stupidity, Mama Mia was a blast, and that means it succeeded. PLEASE get some therapy! - An Author"

Most Anticipated in 2009: Inglorious Basterds, Shutter Island, The Tree of Life, Watchmen, Public Enemies, Where the Wild Things Are

And the list:

1. The Dark Knight Not much to say that hasn't been said already, but this is worth repeating: Heath Ledger is so scary in this it's unreal. I can imagine his Joker hooking up with Anton Chigurh and the Zodiac for the most disturbing buddy movie ever made. Ledger so thoroughly inhabits his character with every tic and gesture that it's easy to conclude that if you took him out of the picture, The Dark Knight wouldn't be nearly as effective or popular. But, of course, he is in the movie, and is the heart of Christopher Nolan's amazing portrait of a hero and a city at war not with its villian but what he personifies - entropy. It's the greatest balancing act of the year, honoring its source while reaching far beyond our expectations of what a "superhero movie" can be, never losing sight of its characters and complex storyline while still satisfying our appetite for visceral thrills. Is Batman a neocon? Did the geeks overreact? I don't care; once its moment in the zeitgeist has passed, The Dark Knight will still be an troubling, strange and exhilarating pop masterpiece.

2. Synecdoche, New York A movie that made me feel absolutely terrible for several days, and I can't stop telling anyone who will listen that they need to see it. Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut, about a theater director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) going to grandiose lengths to create the illusion of meaning in his life, has been accused of solipsism, but it's far too honest and self-deprecating for that. Funny because it's so horribly, horribly true, Kaufman strips down the artist's pretensions and ambitions to reveal the basic, unflattering truth: those of us who make art, who are compelled to collaborate, do so because we're afraid to die and we don't want to be alone. How wonderfully odd that a movie filled with medical horrors, shit, pain and heartbreak could ultimately reveal itself to filled with such compassion and empathy.

3. Wall-E My daughter doesn't really care for Wall-E, which is fair enough - at one-and-a-half, it makes sense that Monsters Inc. is more her speed. But I can't wait until the kids are old enough to share this one with me, because it's such a bold, imaginative entertainment and because it may be the best introduction for a sensitive young mind like Luna's into the state of the time and place she was born into. A message movie that avoids heavy-handedness in favor of the simple plea that we remember to love the world we live in, Wall-E loves its young audience too much to lie to it, but in offering hope without cheating or pandering, it ranks as Pixar's best (and that's saying a lot) and stands alongside the 60's and 70's sci-fi classics it pays loving homage to.

4. Revolutionary Road The most misunderstood movie on my list. It's fair to assume, in the shadow of American Beauty, that Sam Mendes' latest is yet another variation on the "weird things happen in the suburbs" subgenre that Mendes helped popularize. But his latest, like the Richard Yates book it's based on, goes far deeper than that. A domestic horror story which casts as its monsters complacency and self-delusion, Revlolutionary Road brings to its source a surprising undercurrent of dark humor, its impeccably designed surfaces merely the decoy Mendes uses to snare us. Superbly acted by its leads and featuring an unforgettable performance by Michael Shannon, Revolutionary Road strikes at the heart of fears any married person knows well, and does so with unflinching, sharp-witted, and ultimately devastating effect.

5. The Wrestler A perfect marriage of character and actor. There's no doubt that Mickey Rourke had the talent to pull off the role of Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a failure pile in a sadness bowl coasting on memories of glory in the ring, even if his own life hadn't gone to hell. But the pathos that Rourke's experience brings to the role is overwhelming. Robert Siegel's script hits all the formulaic beats, and deliberately so, as Randy is a self-mythologizing walking anachronism who really, truly believes in life as a three-act underdog story. Director Darren Aronofsky returns to his low-budget roots, with the constant use of handheld camera following Randy's every move, probing for his contradictions, hopes and regrets, questioning what it is that we expect our icons to be. The ending is both triumphant and devastating, and the Springsteen song that follows is, well, it's The Boss.

6. Che I'm waiting until DVD to write a proper review of this one, since I saw it under less-than-optimum circumstances - On Demand, at my parents' house, late at night and very tired. But my increasingly sleepy state was, perhaps, the perfect way to absorb Che, which turns Che Guevara's successful campain against Batista and his failed revolution in Bolivia into a deliberate, often deliberately mundane, story of process - history as "things that happened." Breathtakingly shot on the RED One camera and punctuated with surprisingly robust action sequences, Che is primarily focused on how theory becomes action - how intellectuals sitting around a living room talking about change becomes guys with guns in the jungle - and, in its disjointed structure (Full Metal Jacket is a fair comparison), how ambition gives way to failure. The result is the most cerebral epic in memory, anchored by Benecio Del Toro's pitch-perfect performance.

7. Rachel Getting Married The movie on this list that I'll most likely watch as cinematic comfort food after a long day. While Jenny Lumet's script contains elements of tragedy, Jonathan Demme's return to form is remarkable for its generous portrait of a broken but enduring family. The breathing room Demme's stripped-down, handheld approach affords his cast results in a breakthrough performance from Anne Hathaway and strong ensemble work all around. And though the movie's multicultural portrait of family has been dismissed as a liberal wet dream by some, when one of the wedding guests looks around the room and announces "This is how it is in heaven - just like this," all I can do is smile.

8. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Its detractors argue that the film has nothing deeper on its mind than "Brad Pitt is so pretty." Fair enough, but on the other hand, Brad Pitt is sooo pretty, and no director has done more interesting things with Pitt's marquee-idol visage than David Fincher. Benjamin's backwards journey through life is more than a technical marvel; Pitt's face becomes the canvas for an epic meditation on what makes our fleeting lives worth living. A handsome, sometimes awkward, deeply romantic mash-up of state-of-the-art filmmaking technology and classical Hollywood storytelling; I can't wait to see how Fincher branches out next.

9. Snow Angels The most underappreciated film on my list. David Gordon Green had a fine year, with two films that couldn't be more different - the hilarious stoner action/comedy Pineapple Express and this, a somber, wintry adaptation of Stuart O'Nan's novel. When I wrote about the movie before, I described it as "the bittersweet contrast of the idealism of young love and a marriage gone tragically awry," but rewatching the movie last night, I realized that there are actually multiple threads in the film exploring the many ways that people fall in love, fall apart and (in the best cases) find each other again. A challenging and often depressing experience, but also a rewarding one that lingers long beyond the final, haunting cut to black.

10. Tropic Thunder 2008 was a strong year for sophomoric comedy, between the aforementioned Pineapple Express, Will Farrell and John C. Reily behaving like asses (and wonderfully so) in Step Brothers, and the Coens' gleefully misanthropic Burn After Reading. Of all these, a soft spot remains in my heart for Tropic Thunder, a vulgar, deceptively smart send-up of movie-star egotism and the overblown Michael Bay style that, I fear, will be remembered as the dominant aesthetic of the cinema of the aughts. The sharpest Hollywood satire since The Player, doubly so because, since the actors involved have all been guilty of the cynical moviemaking they're parodying, it feels partly like an act of contrition. This is particularly true of Robert Downey Jr.'s Kirk Lazarus, a metatextual high-wire act that Downey carries off beautifully. "I don't read the script, script reads me."

Top 10: 1998

1. Rushmore (Wes Anderson)
2. The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen)
3. The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick)
4. Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes)
5. Happiness (Todd Solondz)
6. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Terry Gilliam)
7. Dark City (Alex Proyas)
8. Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg)
9. The Truman Show (Peter Weir)
10. Pi (Darren Aronofsky)

Did I ever tell you I've been struck by lightning seven times?

F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a comic fantasy less concerned with the philosophical questions of its protagonist's condition - born an old man, his age reverses through his life until he passes away in his crib - than the opportunity it gives Fitzgerald to wryly observe how one's life is dictated by the expectations set forth. David Fincher's film of Benjamin Button, less a social satire than a remarkably intimate epic, is far from a faithful adaptation, and yet it comes closer than any other Fitzgerald adaptation to capturing the romantic quality - the bittersweet awareness that everything fades - at the heart of the author's work. A remarkably intimate epic, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button the story of a life - and a century - telescoped into a collection of moments, with each moment's beauty proportionate to its impermanence.

Born at the end of WWI, Benjamin (Brad Pitt) is a baby with the health and appearance of an elderly man. His mother died in childbirth, and his father swiftly abandons him on the steps of a nursing home, where he's found by Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), a woman who works at the home and raises Benjamin as her own child. We follow Benjamin's life lived in reverse over the course of the 20th century; the screenplay is by Eric Roth, who also wrote Forrest Gump, and the film's formal resemblance to Gump have already been well-documented. But those whose criticism of the film begins and ends with these similarities are stuck on the words and missing the music - in Fincher's hands, what could have been unbearably treacly (and occasionally is - damn that hummingbird) becomes oddly moving. Like Mr. Gateau (Elias Koteas), the master clockmaker in Button's prologue, Fincher's technical precision and attention to detail deepen the meaning of his work's one extraordinary quality. His films are driven by a fascination with process, whether the subject is the logistics of an elaborate game for bored millionaires, the mechanics of a home invasion or an investigation that may never be solved. In Benjamin Button, Fincher uses his peculiar protagonist to examine life itself as a process - while Gump was preoccupied with inserting its character in historically significant events, Benjamin's essential passivity as a character, his detachment from time, results in time serving only as a backdrop for universal experiences, most importantly his romance with Daisy (Cate Blanchett). While the film's images have an impressive scope, it's ultimately an ode to the pleasures of friends, family, food, drink, travel, lovemaking and The Beatles (though not in that order); Benjamin Button makes profound statement about the meaning of life, nor does it aspire to. But as a meditation on the simple joys in life, it's a rich and rewarding large-scale entertainment.

Fincher's surprising understatement extends to Claudio Miranda's painterly cinematography, Alexandre Desplat's fantastic score (which would fit just as well in a David Lean movie), and the realization of Benjamin as a character. The makeup and visual effects teams do a masterful job of making Benjamin believable at every stage in his life. What impresses most, when most digital work is usually about spectacle, is the subtlety of their approach - after a while, I forgot about looking for the seams and accepted that I was looking at an old young man. The believability of the character is aided immensely by Pitt's performance, which has been somewhat underrated; usually, even talented actors are befuddled by the motion control process, but Pitt manages to project Benjamin's emotional age and experience through his CGI/latex visage. And when Benjamin reaches middle age and looks like Brad "Sexiest Man Alive" Pitt, it's like looking at this now-familiar face through new eyes - it's a perfect marriage of his character and the star baggage he brings to the role. This brief moment where he meets Daisy in the middle (and man, is Cate Blanchett on a roll) plays less like a Hollywoodized notion of fate than a poignant expression of what it is to choose to love someone in an impermanent lifetime.

The film also boasts a strong supporting cast - Henson avoids "Mammy" stereotypes by giving Queenie poise and dignity, Tilda Swinton is excellent in her bittersweet scenes as a woman enjoying a fleeting romance, and Jared Harris, as an drunken, salty sea captain (is there any other kind?), nearly steals the film. The contemporary framing narrative, with Daisy sharing Benjamin's story with her daughter (Julia Ormond), isn't quite as successful, mostly because of the awkward incorporation of Hurricane Katrina - in a movie otherwise unconcerned with social commentary, it feels overly literal. But I can forgive this, since it allows for a devastating final shot that ties the film's themes together in a single, iconic image. Fincher was bound to lose some of his target audience with Benjamin Button - while before he's made films for geeks prone towards an ironic outlook on life (myself included), here he's trying to speak to everyone. The result isn't the masterpiece it aspires to be (or that Zodiac is), but it's refreshing to see a director pushing himself beyond his familiar territory, especially when the results are so rewarding.

Top 10: 1988

1. The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese)

2. Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg)

3. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (Terry Gilliam)

4. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Philip Kaufman)

5. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis)

6. They Live (John Carpenter)

7. The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris)

8. A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton)

9. Die Hard (John McTiernan)

10. Beetlejuice (Tim Burton)

Stay with me tonight. Let me borrow you.

Few directors working today have as fine an understanding of mood as Wong Kar-Wai. The stars of Wong's films are not just the above-the-title actors but also reflections of neon lights on a storefront window, or a snippet of a long-forgotten standard, or a stain from Maggie Cheung's impeccably applied lipstick - they're pure pop, sensual appreciations of human experience filtered through surface pleasures. Wong's 2046 promised to be an epic of mood moments - four years in the making and shrouded in secrecy, it arrived at Cannes in 2004 bearing the weight of expectations it wasn't made to fulfill. With a multilayered narrative that veers between past and future, fiction and metafiction, it's a grandiose experiment resting on a simple message of the need for human connection like an elephant dancing on the head of the pin. It's a perverse film, the biggest little movie ever made, but dammit if it isn't pretty to look at.

A sort-of-sequel to Wong's masterpiece In the Mood for Love, 2046's protagonist Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) shares a name, profession and history with the character Leung played in the earlier film, but doesn't quite seem to be the same character (it took me a while to adjust, as I had an easier time relating to the first Chow Mo-wan). This time, Chow's a sci-fi writer and playboy recovering from a broken heart by bedding a number of women. Among the women that weave in and out of Chow's life are Su Li-Zhen (Gong Li), a professional gambler with the same name as Chow's lost love; Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), a cabaret singer who lives in the room next to Chow's; and Wang Jing Wen (Faye Wong), the daughter of Chow's landlord. These and other women drift in out of the episodic narrative, along with various pop allusions and references to Wong's other films, each woman costumed and lit with such precision that they appear perfectly preserved. It becomes clear that the film is not about any one of these relationships (though the women, particularly Zhang, are all excellent), but Chow's narcissism and the way he "rewrites" each encounter in retrospect. The first time I saw the film was frustrating, as I wondered if Wong realized this about his protagonist; the final scenes reveal that, yes, this was the point all along. In retrospect, I admire Wong's patience in letting the character get where he's going, and his expectation that his audience will be capable of the same; it also helps that Leung, a master of internal acting, is a perfect leading man for Wong.

2046 can be painfully hermetic, particulary in the scenes from Chow's sci-fi novel that shares its title with the film. 2046 is a mysterious place that, in a distant future, many attempt to escape to because it never changes - there's no loneliness or loss. It's a fascinating concept that expands the themes of the '60s-set story, but it's also dramatically inert. The future we see in these scenes does not reflect a '60s concept of the future so much as one we'd expect in 2004 - the future scenes are antiseptic, beautifully shot but inaccessible, and in the film's second half they threaten to overwhelm the main story. It's possible that this is intentional, a visualization of what it's like to live inside one's own head; since I'm occasionally told I need to get out of my head, I can appreciate that. But without the rapturous moments that Wong's earlier films built to - Faye Wong cleaning Tony Leung's apartment to "Dreams" in Chungking Express, or the extended holy moment that concludes In the Mood for Love - the film works wonderfully as an intellectual exercise, but never really found its way into my heart like those films did. Again, this may be exactly how Wong wanted me to feel.

There's a great deal, however, for a film lover to enjoy in 2046 - each shot is a beauty, the film's world taking on a wonderfully tangible quality. I believe in the world Wong creates here, but I can't live in it. It remains to be seen what place 2046 will take in Wong's filmography - after the disappointing My Blueberry Nights demonstrated that even his middling work looks beautiful, I wonder whether he'll keep treading water or if, as Chow seems to be at the film's end, he's ready to move on to new worlds. But whether 2046 proves to be Wong's final destination or just a station on the way, there's no denying that it's a radiant place to stay for a while.

Top 10: 1978

1. Halloween (John Carpenter)
2. Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero)
3. Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick)
4. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman)
5. The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino)
6. Superman (Richard Donner)
7. Interiors (Woody Allen)
8. The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese)
9. Animal House (John Landis)
10. Heaven Can Wait (Warren Beatty and Buck Henry)

Family conquers all.

I got married at a fairly young age, so I'm often asked what it's like by people in my age range. It's hard to explain what it's like to be married, but easy to explain the experience of getting married - it's being at the center of a riot of emotions that isn't all about you. One minute a usually reserved friend is giving you a drunken proclamation of her love for you, the next is spent breaking up an argument between two relatives that is ostensibly about seating arrangements but actually stems from psychic wounds inflicted before you were born. One of the best things about Rachel Getting Married is the way it perfectly captures the emotional turbulence of a family coming together with understated wit and generosity. Shooting on video with the freer approach of his documentary and concert movies, director Jonathan Demme has made not only his best and most emotionally affecting film since Philadelphia, but also the best wedding video ever.

The titular bride's sister Kym (Anne Hathaway), a recovering addict, arrives at her family home for the wedding festivities straight from her most recent stint in rehab. While the movie finds laughs in the tension between straight-laced psychology student Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and her unpredictable sister, it never becomes the latest sitcom-y quirkfest. Nor does Jenny Lumet's script romanticize Kym's self-destructiveness, although Rachel correctly observes that Kym (like many addicts) would like to be seen as endearingly fucked-up. A highlight of the film is Kym's awkward rehearsal dinner toast, which veers between hilarious and painful as her well-intentioned attempt at reconciliation is derailed by the language and humor of twelve-step programs (Hathaway's bracingly honest performance reveals talent only hinted at in Brokeback Mountain). For Kym, making amends proves to be far more challenging than overcoming addiction, and as we learn about a tragedy in the family's past, Rachel Getting Married reveals itself as a precise portrait of a family finding reason to celebrate in the shadow of unthinkable loss.

Cinematographer Declan Quinn's camera is like a ghost in the room, quietly capturing the ongoing story of the Buchmans, realized by a pitch-perfect ensemble. Many reviews have singled out estranged mom Abby's (Debra Winger) late-film explosion, and it's great to have Winger back. But I found myself most moved by Bill Irwin as dad Paul - the actor's comedic skills help to create a character whose humor and generosity have kept him going. The best scene in the film, an impromptu dishwasher-loading contest between Paul and Rachel's quiet, sweet fiance Sydney (Tunde Adebimpe), is a hilarious bit of "youth vs. experience" one-upmanship suddenly punctuated, like a punch to the gut, by a reminder of the past that catches us off-guard the way these things do in life. Demme, whose most recent features were interesting but airless formal exercises, has rediscovered the loose-limbed energy of his early films - the emotional revelations arrive not according to formula but with the unpredictable rhythm of life.

This freewheeling approach is most evident during the extending wedding festivities. Demme gladly veers away from the plot to make room for Adebimpe (lead singer of one of my new favorite bands, TV on the Radio) to serenade DeWitt with Neil Young's "Unknown Legend," to meet Rachel and Sydney's extended family and friends, and for a mini-festival of musical performances. Some have complained that this section is self-indulgent, overlong and implausible, and I'll admit that when Robyn Hitchcock showed up it took me out of the movie for a moment (I guess David Byrne tending the grill would have been a bit too much). But I'll give Demme a pass on that, especially since the wedding is such a joyous celebration of life and family that it proves more satisfying than any conventional dramatic resolution. While the multicultural aspect of Sydney and Rachel's wedding has been singled out for praise and criticism for its sociological implications, I prefer to see it as Demme seems to - he's depicting this family's story as universal, the wounds of the past assuaged by the promise of a future where the world is one big family. Idealistic, to be sure, but I'm down with idealism.

Play the game (1/1/09)

The Curious Case of President Brundlefly

Dennis Cozzalio's latest movie quiz arrives just in time for a bit of reflection before 2009 is upon us. This time the test is administered by Professor Kingsfield, whose lessons in The Paper Chase were part of a recent management training I had to attend (along with "lessons" from Breaking Away and Young Frankenstein, for some reason). Let's begin:

1) What was the last movie you saw theatrically? On DVD or Blu-ray?

Theatrically, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - schmaltzy, but well-crafted and heartfelt enough that I didn't mind. On DVD, the original My Bloody Valentine (pretty soon, every mention of an '80s horror movie will be preceded by "the original").

2) Holiday movies— Do you like them naughty or nice?

At least a little bit naughty. For instance, my favorite Scrooge (one I've watched every December since I was a tot) is the 1970 version with Albert Finney. It features decaying ghouls and a tour of hell along with the obligatory jolly, dancing British people - a good reminder that Dickens' story, and the holiday, are as much about religious guilt and keeping our wintry demons at bay as they are about tinsel and elves.

3) Ida Lupino or Mercedes McCambridge?

Ida Lupino

4) Favorite actor/character from Twin Peaks

My first thought was Audrey Horne swaying to Angelo Badalamenti's "dreamy" music at the Double R Diner. But The Little Man From Another Planet also deserves mention.

5) It’s been said that, rather than remaking beloved, respected films, Hollywood should concentrate more on righting the wrongs of the past and tinker more with films that didn’t work so well the first time. Pretending for a moment that movies are made in an economic vacuum, name a good candidate for a remake based on this criterion.

Kindergarten Cop. Great premise, bland execution. I'd love to see what Terry Zwigoff would do with it.

6) Favorite Spike Lee joint.

Do the Right Thing

7) Lawrence Tierney or Scott Brady?

"Why am I Mr. Pink?"

"Because you're a faggot, alright?"

8) Are most movies too long?

I'm much more likely to criticize a movie for being too rushed. I rarely understand the "too long" complaint - to paraphrase The Age of Innocence, it seems like people are faster to leave a movie than to go to one.

9) Favorite performance by an actor portraying a real-life politician.

Fred Willard as Ron Alberston as President McKinley.

10) Create the main event card for the ultimate giant movie monster smackdown.

Brundlefly vs. Blairmonster: Requiem. Christmas 2010.

11) Jean Peters or Sheree North?

Sheree North

12) Why would you ever want or need to see a movie more than once?

The movie stays the same, but I change. Plus, I like movies.

13) Favorite road movie.

Badlands

14) Favorite Budd Boetticher picture.

Alas, I haven't seen any.

15) Who is the one person, living or dead, famous or unknown, who most informed or encouraged your appreciation of movies?

My mom, who encouraged my early interest in film by sharing her favorite movies, discussing them with me and encouraging me to form my own opinions and preferences.

16) Favorite opening credit sequence. (Please include YouTube link if possible.)

Vertigo. Can't beat Saul Bass.



17) Kenneth Tobey or John Agar?

Kenneth Tobey

18) Jean-Luc Godard once suggested that the more popular the movie, the less likely it was that it was a good movie. Is he right or just cranky? Cite the best evidence one way or the other.

Godard is wrong about a lot of things. Some great movies are inherently divisive, while others touch a collective nerve. The best evidence I can think of is E.T.'s premiere at Cannes, where it recieved rapturous applause from the toughest possible audience.

19) Favorite Jonathan Demme movie.

The Silence of the Lambs

20) Tatum O’Neal or Linda Blair?

I really like one performance of theirs apiece, so on that basis...Linda Blair.

21) Favorite use of irony in a movie. (This could be an idea, moment, scene, or an entire film.)

Haven Hamilton singing "200 Years" in Nashville. Actually, all of Nashville. Actually, Altman's entire body of work.

22) Favorite Claude Chabrol film.

Never seen any Chabrol either. Couldn't you have asked for my favorite Renny Harlin?

23) The best movie of the year to which very little attention seems to have been paid.

When I caught up with Snow Angels this fall, I was surprised to find that it's subtler and more moving than its mixed reviews would suggest, with a strong central performance by Sam Rockwell. While it's more conventional than Green's previous work, the bittersweet contrast of the idealism of young love and a marriage gone tragically awry rang true to me. Pineapple Express was good for a laugh, but this is the best DGG movie of the year.

24) Dennis Christopher or Robby Benson?

Christopher, for his performance as Eddie Kaspbrak in the miniseries adaptation of It.

25) Favorite movie about journalism.

Zodiac

26) What’s the DVD commentary you’d most like to hear? Who would be on the audio track?

The conversation between Werner Herzog and Crispin Glover on Even Dwarfs Started Small is pretty great. I'd love to hear Herzog interview Glover on What Is It? (actually, I'd just like to finally see What Is It?).

27) Favorite movie directed by Clint Eastwood.

Unforgiven

28) Paul Dooley or Kurtwood Smith?

A few years ago, my wife recognized Kurtwood Smith walking by, and he responded by kissing her on the cheek. So I'll go with Dooley, for not being a homewrecker.

29) Your clairvoyant moment: Make a prediction about the Oscar season.

Heath Ledger will win the 2009 "Montage of the Dead" applause contest.

30) Your hope for the movies in 2009.

That, after a so-so 2008, a year that brings new Scorsese, Malick and Tarantino lives up to its potential.

31) What’s your top 10 of 2008? (If you have a blog and have your list posted, please feel free to leave a link to the post.)

I'm going to have to ask for an extension on this one, Professor - limited release strategies prevent me once again from catching some of the highest-profile winter releases until mid-January. So far, I've awarded two movies an A+ this year: The Dark Knight and Wall-E.

BONUS QUESTION (to be answered after December 25):

32) What was your favorite movie-related Christmas gift that you received this year?

A Videodrome t-shirt from my mother-in-law.

Happy new year, everyone!