Three films a day

Obviously, I’m one of the sort who makes lists. It’s what I do. I’m not proud of it, I just do it. Favorite songs from this period, favorite books with that word in the title, favorite restaurants in a particular zip code. Whatever. So, here I am, end of the year… gotta make a list. It’s in the laws. This list is different for me in that it’s not ordered. I’m not saying which of these was my favorite new-to-me movie because, well, I honestly don’t know.

How did I arrive at the number 23? I could say something like I chose the number 23 because it’s my first year back in Chicago and I’m commemorating the local sports heros who wore that number when I was here in the late 80s and early 90s. But that would be a lie. Or, I could note that I saw 23 movies in each of January, July, and December and so it seemed the right number to use. But, while the statistic is true, saying that played any part in my motivation would be a lie. I could even note that I chose the number because it represents 10% of what I saw this year. And though that would, in fact, be the truth, it’s boring. So, let’s just imagine I came up with the number at random.

Since I don’t want to make this entry novel length, I’ve split it into two parts. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I’ve just finished writing about twelve films and thought “gee, this is already a little long”, so I decided to cut it off at this point. I have no idea when I’ll write about the next eleven, but soon. Soon.

Like I noted above, this is not an ordered list. So, I split it into sections based on trends I noticed within the selected movies.

That’s all I have to say, really.

Now, the list. Again, I had to do it. Had to.

Asia

Yeah, there’s no such thing as “Asian” cinema (any more than there is, truly, European or African or South American cinema), but I can’t help but notice about a third of these twenty three came from Asia. And five of those seven came from Japan! (Strangely, despite my recent fascination with South Korean cinema, not a one of came from there). But, well, I watched a lot of Japanese films this year. I seem to choose one nation’s cinema to learn a little bit more about every year. It’s not an entirely concious decision, yet I look at my queues and I see that next year I’m due to see loads of Italian movies. So, it definitely happens, concious or not. Anyway, this is the first time I’ve seriously looked into Japanese cinema beyond Kurosawa, and my goodness is there a lot to enjoy.

And yet the first film I’m going to mention comes comes from Taiwan. Yi-Yi [10/7] was a film I was mildly reticent to watch, since it’s three hours long. And while I often enjoy three hour films, I seem to have some psychological problem with motivating myself to watch them. Two and a half hour films? Not a problem. Three hour films? Problem. Yeah, I’m not sure why that extra half hour matters. Anyway, Yi-Yi was totally worth the time. It’s a quiet, luminiscent, beautifully shot piece of work. The same must be said for another familly-focused film from 2000, The Vertical Ray of the Sun [5/1], which left me glowing for days after I saw it.

Of the Japanese films, the two yakuza pictures which most impressed me, the amazing Pale Flower [8/7] and the audacious Branded To Kill [11/13], have left some of the most memorable images in my head from this year. In fact, were I able to splice together some footage of the scenes and images which have been indellibly etched in my brain from this year’s crop of movies, at least a handful of moments from the two films would make it. In particular, I’m thinking of the beautiful moment in Branded to Kill where Hanada’s walking, jacket in one hand, rifle in the other, expressing his surprise and joy at surviving a battle in which he was outnumbered (but obviously not outsmarted). And, from Pale Flower, the sequence at the end of the impromptu late night high-speed highway antics. The shared joy between Saeko and the driver of the other car is… incredible. (I’ll digress for just a second to note that I wish I could make such a reel of footage, and you would probably wish I could, too: I may not have cared much for Havoc, but I think that scene where Anne Hathaway and Bijou rap a part of “Can I Get A…” is oddly addictive.)

Ikiru [7/23] and Tokyo Story [12/12] treat similar subjects and in so doing illustrate the very different approaches of Japan’s two most famous directors, Kurosawa and Ozu. They’re each, in their own way, breathtaking pieces of work, and wonderfully human. Which brings me to the most recent of the films in this section, last year’s heartbreaking Nobody Knows [11/2]. I called it depressing, and it is. But I also found it memorable, and truly wonderful.

Hollywood

I pick on Hollywood a lot. I probably go too far, even, but that’s because I believe the people behind what gets made have grown to see movies merely as investments. I find that sort of cynicism unpleasant (conversely, my sort of cynicism is welcome and refreshing; yes, as is my sarcasm) and I react to it in my dour way. In late September I finally got to see original adaptation of The Stepford Wives [9/24], and I came away impressed. Very impressed, even. I thought it was a funny and knowing critique of a weird part of the American psyche. And so yet again I found myself yearning for new Hollywood movies I could enjoy. Thirty years ago they could make them, why not now? Surprisingly, in the three months which followed Hollywood showed me they can still make them. Really.

Serenity [9/30] was a gift. And not a small one, either. Joss Whedon’s theartical continuation of his unjustly canceled tv series was the best time I’ve had at the theater in years. If I made one mistake that day it’s that I watched another film just a short while after; it’s not that what I watched clouded out my joy for Serenity—such a thing wasn’t possible—but I wasn’t able to really connect with A History of Violence (another decent thing from Hollywood), because I was drunk with Serenity.

As I said when I saw it, Good Night, and Good Luck [10/23] taught me to give up my foolish prejudices and love the Clooney. He’s someone I have never had a good reason to dislike, and he’s quickly showing himself to be an interesting filmmaker. I’m thankful Good Night, and Good Luck made me reconsider my position on Clooney, for it prepared me for the spinny, sort of wonderful Syriana [12/11]. Matt Damon is another one, you know. I disliked him with some ferocity until The Bourne Identity. Since then, I’ve had a grudging respect for him—no, that grudging respect didn’t save my opinion of The Talented Mr. Ripley, but you can’t win ‘em all—and Syriana really just sealed the deal. And though it’s only been, what, three weeks since I’ve seen it, my opinion of Syriana continues to rise.

Munich [12/24] is the last film I saw this year and there are people collecting a tidy sum in Vegas because they put a couple dollars down on the very long shot that it’d end up on this list. After all, my old anti-Clooney thing was nothing compared downright hostility to Spielberg’s movies in recent years. Yeah, this is two Spielberg films I’ve liked a lot in the last five years (Catch Me If You Can is really quite entertaining), and I’m certainly hoping this is the beginning of a trend. After all, my big problem with Spielberg stems from his choices. I may not care for Spielberg’s penchant for tidiness (or, as he put it: “Most of my movies sum everything up. I try to make movies to give audiences the least amount of homework and the most amount of pleasure.”), but I actually understand it, even if I feel mildly insulted by it sometimes. He seems interested in doing both tidy and not-so tidy in the future, and I find myself wanting to see what he’s going to do next.

#231, 12/24 – Munich (2005) (tofw)

When I saw the trailer for Munich a few weeks ago my intial reaction was very, very strong: No. I didn’t want any part of it, largely because I have a complex and not entirely positive set of opinions about Steven Spielberg’s choices as a director and I couldn’t imagine I would like such a film.

I’ve said it before, and I must restate it here: Clearly, I suffer from a limited imagination.

Last week I changed my mind about seeing it when I read Michelle Goldberg’s piece about the bruhaha surrounding the film. I don’t go to films because they’re controversial, but the criticisms leveled against the film actually asuaged my misgivings. So, I went.

Munich is an elegant piece of historical fiction—and let me emphasize the f-word there, just as filmmakers do when they note at the start of the film that it’s “inspired” by real events—which, intentionally or not, serves as an allegory for present times. Yes, I said elegant. (And if you have heard me talk about my issues with Spielberg’s choices, I know I have to give you a few seconds to pick your jaw up off the floor. So, go on. I’ll still be here.)

I’ll also call it fiction just to be safe. There is some controversy around the source material, you see. Did “Avner” do in real life what the book claims he did, or was he just an El Al security guard in New York City? Frankly, that’s irrelevant to the film. Spielberg’s Munich works around a simple, quiet fact: When a state has its agents assassinate suspected enemies—be it by placing a bomb in a hotel room, or tossing captives from airplanes into the Atlantic Ocean, or firing a Hellfire missile into a car—it has not afforded the dead due process. This isn’t a political blog, and I have no intention of turning it into one, so I won’t give my opinion about this issue. But I think Spielberg presents this fact and then asks a question. Namely, what are we to think when nations take actions outside of the law to get to their enemies? He doesn’t tell you what to think. He just asks. The problem is the issue is so loaded, so charged, very few people can hear the question.

I like that the film asked the question.

There are things I didn’t like about Munich, yes. Quite a few, including the final shot which I bristled at for personal reasons. But my problems with it add up to very little when all is said and done. Munich is probably my favorite Spielberg film ever.

And no, not just because of my huge, longtime (well, four years now) crush on Mathieu Amalric.

[@Century 12 Evanston]

#230, 12/18 – Twin Sisters (2002) (dvd)

(Yeah, I sat on this writeup for a week.)

OK, really. It’s not that I have a problem with World War II movies. It’s that the cliches are starting to get to me. The Great Raid sure had ‘em. And this movie—and I assume the popular novel on which it’s based—structures itself on a solid foundation of cliches. Someone I know once wrote a checklist of the things you’ll get in a World War II film such as this and the items I could remember all turned up. (I wish I could find the actual list, but I tried and I’ve had no luck.)

Curious (and assuming that the film is faithful to the book), I decided to find out when the author of the book, Tessa de Loo, was born. 1947. I thought so. I’m not saying you need to have lived through an event to be able to write about it. But I am saying she felt she needed to touch all these key points in her story because this isn’t something she lived through. Anyway, while I was doing my looking, I caught a quote about how this movie “humanizes history”. That’s absolute twaddle. It does no such thing. It puts a pair of interesting characters in the middle of the cliches and sets them running down divergent paths. Oh, it’s actually kind of touching. But it doesn’t do much humanizing.

Yes, I still kind of liked it all things considered. Everybody did the best with what they had. It’s an interesting attempt at trying to deal with things like fate and understanding. I just thought the whole thing could have stood a lot less history and a lot more humanizing.

#229, 12/17 – Pickpocket (1959) (dvd)

Yeah, I saw it eight days ago. So?

I really liked Pickpocket. Quiet, full, nimble Pickpocket. It was my first Bresson film, and it left a very solid impression. Coming so soon after my recent experiences with Ozu, I can’t help but notice that both directors make choices which fall outside of mainstream filmmaking. And some of their decisions, when it comes to what to show versus what not to show, are very refreshing and remarkably similar.

Ha. Right after I wrote about how I perceive them as sharing certain qualities I did a Google search on them. I didn’t know about the Paul Schrader book which groups Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer together, though that helps me understand why Criterion chose Schrader to introduce Pickpocket. I didn’t watch the introduction because I dislike Schrader’s filmmaking, but now I’m curious about what he said. Fortunately, I still have the DVD here (yes, eight days later because I plan to watch it again), so I’ll take the time to enjoy the extras.

While restrained in one sense, Pickpocket is also dazzling, at least partially because the thieving scenes bring some strange measure of exhiliration with them.

I need to watch this again, and I’m sure I will.

#228, 12/17 – King Kong (2005) (tofw)

Well, the special effects were cool. Naomi Watts and Adrien Brody are as cute as ever. The winks here and there to the audience (“Fay’s a size four!”) are appropriately fun. Oh, and I loved the opening sequence.

Uh.

Yeah.

I got a lot out of those three hours.

[@ Village Theatre North]

#227, 12/17 – The Great Raid (2005) (gitn)

I didn’t like it. Historical movies are tricky and I think the screenplay tripped over some of the very problems Egoyan pointed out so well in Ararat.

That said, although it travels fairly well-trodden territory—World War II and POW camps—it deals with one very notable rescue mission, and I really liked how the crucial rescue scenes were executed. And there’s James Franco and Benjamin Bratt, and the other Fiennes. But it exhibited far too much of the old Cowboys-and-Indians style for my liking.

#226, 12/15 – Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (2004) (dvd)

I first saw a still of Patty Hearst at the Hibernia bank in 1980. I was sifting though a book of pictures and there it was. I had no context for it at the time: it was just a black and white photo of some woman with a gun. The caption told me it was Patty Hearst, and may also have mentioned the SLA, but all I could think (in my eight-year-old fashion) was who the fuck is Patty Hearst, and what makes her worthy of the attention?

Who the fuck is Patty Hearst? I’ve never figured that out and I’ve begun to understand that I never will. The other part, though, the thing about why she got the attention? That I started to piece together as the years went on. The flash-of-realization moment came in high school, when I heard a teacher say that Charles Foster Kane was a standin for William Randolph Hearst. (Whoever he was, I thought.) And my head, it works oddly. It stores things which still need processing and saves them for later reference. As soon as I heard the last name, I remembered Patricia Campbell Hearst and the picture, and I began to wonder. So I did a little looking up, and of course it came to me before too long. She was worthy of the attention because she’s rich. Little has changed in thirty years.

It was only a few years ago, while I was listening to Patti Smith’s brilliant 1974 cover of “Hey Joe” (and just as the SLA had come into the spotlight again), that I decided to read a narrative of the Patty Hearst case. And Guerrilla to its credit, but also perhaps to its detriment, plays like an audio/visual retelling of the very brief piece I read. There wasn’t anything new there for me, except for the well-used audio tape recordings and video footage. I guess that should have been enough—because narratively it feels just fine—but somehow I was hoping for more. More analysis. More commentary. More something. Patty Hearst is iconic. Patty Hearst is enigmatic. And I guess I felt disappointed about how the movie took no chances. As soon as Hearst is arrested, we fly to the resolution. Trial. Commutation. Pardon. Talk Show appearance. Roll credits. No exploration. Of course, it’s hard to explore when most of the people involved in those first 60 days of Patty Hearst’s incarceration are dead. The two who aren’t (the two who lived long enough to serve time for doing it, I should say) probably have no interest in talking. (At the very least, their commentary is noticably absent from the documentary; as is Hearst’s, I suppose naturally.) But when the three people who can tell us things we don’t already know aren’t participating, I suppose I was due to be frustrated.

So, who the fuck is Patty Hearst? I guess maybe while I was watching the movie I got my hopes up again that I might find out. No chance of that. Not with this movie. I’m being unfair, I know. But it’s a question I’ve had now for twenty-five years. Even though I rationally know that there’s no way I could ever find such a thing out, I still wish someone would give me the answer.

#225, 12/14 – Amour de Femme (2001) (dvd)

At a certain point I said to myself “this feels like a TV movie”, and it turns out that’s exactly what it is. That’s no insult coming from me, because I’ve seen some terrific TV movies in my day. I wouldn’t call this one terrific, but it’s a simple, quiet love story which mostly works.

#224, 12/13 – The Changeling (1980) (dvd)

A ghost story featuring George C. Scott and Trish Van Devere (a woman whose most recent feature film credit seems to be a 1988 Bronson picture called Messenger of Death! That title slays me) is all right with me. And I certainly liked it, even if some of it screams, well, 1980.

#223, 12/12 – Tokyo Story (1953) (dvd)

Sometimes I experience a filmmaker at just the right moment. Such seems to be the case with me and Yasujiro Ozu, a filmmaker I’d never seen a full film from before last week. Although I claimed (quite truthfully) that Early Summer was the first film of his I’d seen I had, I must admit, tried to watch an Ozu film a few years ago. Tried, and failed.

My Netflix history tells part of the story with Good Morning.

Shipped to me: 05/14/2002
Returned: 07/23/2002

When a DVD sits in my apartment for two months it means I lack the proper motivation to watch it. Looking at what I had watched right before then I see that I had suffered through Mulholland Drive, and I’d failed—yet again—to sit through Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (shipped: 01/03/2002, returned:05/16/2002). 2002 was easily my worst movie year ever. After the run of films which made the end of my 2001 notable, including three each from Bergman and Cassavetes, I lost my movie-watching mojo. Big time. I struggled to sit through any movie I tried—for a variety of reasons, but largely because I just wasn’t in the mood for movies. I’m pretty sure a number of movies I didn’t appreciate in 2002 are things I would like much more if I tried them again now (except Romeo + Juliet; all due respect to the fans of Luhrmann’s stylistics, I will hate that film until I die). I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to see anything from Febraury until November. It turns out I was pleasantly surprised by the very movie I got after I returned Good Morning, actually: Next Stop Wonderland (shipped: 07/23/2002, returned: 11/26/2002). Everything fell into place for me after that. Go figure.

I tried to watch Good Morning right before returning it, but I couldn’t have gotten more than 15 minutes in before I stopped it and said “not for me”. It felt a bit too much like Leave it to Beaver. And, you know, I don’t necessarily think my assessment of what I saw from Good Morning was wrong. But that’s not point. I’m pretty sure if I’d tried watching Tokyo Story in 2002 I would have struggled to get even half way through it. I just wasn’t in a place where I could appreciate purely domestic films like this.

Three years later, it blew me away.

Ozu said the loud things very softly. His characters often went through their big moments without fanfare. If they screamed, they did it sotto voce. These characters aren’t robots, but they are far less prone to grandstanding and scenery chewing. The way Shukishi deals with the events of the film reminds me of what Ray Carney once said of Carl Th. Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc (a movie I watched in 2002 that I should rewatch now):

A great scene is not when the actor cries, but when the viewer does–which is frequently in response to an actor’s refusal to. The fact that Dreyer’s Joan of Arc doesn’t weep is why we do. The fact that Inger stays cheerful no matter how bad things may be is why we love her.

It’s something I wouldn’t have noticed as well if I wasn’t paying more attention to the movies I watch just now. Hell, there are elements at work here I wouldn’t have noticed at all even a year ago. But I get it now. It helped that I saw Early Summer last week; it got me used to Ozu’s approach—and thank goodness—else I probably wouldn’t have gotten much from this one at all. Ozu’s choices are often outside of the Hollywood style with which we’re all very familiar, and while my first time with him wasn’t as unsettling as my first time with, say, Tarkovsky, I still needed to acclimate.

This movie is largely about gaps. Yes, generation gaps. Gaps between expectations and reality. Gaps created by a devestating war which was only eight years in the past.

Many things were changing in 1953. Were they changing for the better?

It’s official: This is the year I fell in love with many of the facets of Japanese cinema.

#222, 12/11 – Little Caesar (1931) (gitn)

I’m not going to check, but I think with the exception of Soylent Green, and now this, I’ve pretty much seen nothing from Edward G. Robinson’s career. Freaking odd, that.

I’m not very hip on gangster film history, but I’ve gotta believe this is one of the first (and certainly one of the most influential) talkie gangster films ever made. And regardless I would have to believe it’s one of the more successful. It’s interesting to see different techniques coming in to play here. Watching film as it started to grow up, if you will. The acting seems very stage-influenced, and the narrative is helped along with a handful of placards very reminiscent of silent films. But it was an enjoyable piece of gangster lore, even if with my 2005 eyes, watching people pretend to be hit by gunfire back then seems both quaint and almost amusing. Special effects have brought representations of violence a long way. (Too far, I would even argue.)

Anyway, I’ll remember this one for one placard in particular: Rico continued to take care of himself, his hair, and his gun—with excellent results.

My oh my.

#221, 12/11 – Syriana (2005) (tofw)

The first thing I told a friend who had also just seen the movie (albeit about 1000 miles south of here) when he asked me what I thought was that it was the least condescending Hollywood picture I’ve seen in years. Years. That’s a huge plus. Or, as Zacharek put it:

The seriousness of “Syriana” is its chief selling point; it’s a solemn, ruminative piece of work whose entertainment value—if that’s what you’re looking for—rests solely in the way its writer and director, Stephen Gaghan, keeps its multiple story lines clicking forward at once, sometimes swerving into one another, sometimes just chugging along on parallel tracks. This is a movie made for grown-ups. It doesn’t waste time or insult our intelligence with needless explication; it drops its crumbs of information scene by scene, always staying two or three steps ahead of us.

Yep, I agree. She went on to say she thought the movie was too confusing for its own good, a point I more or less agree with, though not entirely. Maybe I’m confused about my own stance. Hmmm. See, like I also said to my friend while I was sitting on the el, waiting for the train to pull out of Howard: say what you want about the story’s successes or failures, but it was conveying a message, and I think it did so very well.

That said, it was confusing. Apparently I didn’t fully realize what role Stu Gharty Peter Gerety played. Nor am I sure I really got how one of the storylines ended up. And I’d still like someone to explain to me why we were even shown Jeffrey Wright’s father in the first place. Really, what were those scenes about? I just don’t agree with Zacharek’s overall take, though. I’m more in line with Edelstein who beautifully lays out his own confusion here:

The next scene shows an even more saturnine than usual Christopher Plummer snipping flowers (a symbol for something) while psyching out a muted, bespectacled Jeffrey Wright as some kind of investigator. Plummer—so sleek, so economical, so redolent of malevolent authority—wants Wright to report to him about the machinations behind the merger of two mammoth energy companies to create a corporation with revenues greater than the GDPs of Pakistan and Denmark. In the course of his inquiry, Wright is promised by someone (I’m not sure which company he works for) enough money for a home on Martha’s Vineyard if only he … Well, I’m not exactly sure what he’s supposed to do. He’s the only black man in the boardroom, though, and his old dad registers mute disapproval at his collusion. (I think.) Wright is the unreadable moral center of the film: Will he expose the conspiracy (upbeat ending) or permit it to flourish (downbeat ending)?

Yeah.

Syriana is kind of excellent. It’s gripping and it feels so good to not be talked down to by a Hollywood film. But… really, what the hell? Right after I got home I told my local movie buddy that if I really cared a lot about story, I would have needed a whiteboard to keep up with Syriana. Seriously. The Boston Herald’s James Verniere writes at one point “[i]f you are able to figure out who is ripping [a major character’s] fingernails off and punching him repeatedly in the face and why, you know more than I did.” Well, I know the identity of the torturer. I have no fucking clue what it really means, though, or why he went all fingernail-rippy. No clue.

As I was watching the movie I kept saying to myself “I should see this again. Wow.” Of the criticism I’ve read since getting home, I most agree with Wesley Morris (well, I just hope he’s right about the second viewing) when he writes:

In its seriousness, “Syriana” has an absorbing, ominous roundness that plays even better with a second viewing. The plots come, rather inexorably, to a head. These events aren’t presented as the side effects of paranoia. They ring scarily true. If the film isn’t fair (it leans left, and the oil people are often comically heartless), it does achieve a kind of balance. Gaghan has written the baddies so that their righteousness isn’t hollow. The runaway corruption (the Oil Man of the Year awards!) almost makes sense.

In fact, the most disturbing quality of “Syriana” is how rational it seems. This, alas, is the way it is, Gaghan seems to be saying. His aim is true, but he seems defeated long before he gets riled up. In this sense, “Syriana” has a backhanded power. Gaghan knows it’s only a movie, and he seems unhappily resigned to the idea that it can’t be more.

I liked it quite a lot. I’m tempted to say there hasn’t been a thriller of this caliber since, yeah, I’m going there: The Parallax View. I will enjoy watching it again. But next time, I’m making sure my whiteboard is right next to me.

[@Century 12 Evanston]

#220, 12/10 – A Sound of Thunder (2005) (gitn)

I’m more than aware of Ray Bradbury’s work. Hell, I spent much of my sophomore year of high school checking Bradbury books out of the library. I read the short story on which this movie is based years and years ago. And it’s pretty good.

So I was looking forward to the movie in a 3am silliness kinda way. Especially since, hey, look at the stars. Edward Burns, Catherine McCormack, Ben Kingsley(?!). In a scattered movie all covered with cheese. Really, what are you actors doing at night when you mistakenly believe no one with a telephoto lens or videocamera can see you? And can I play too? Jeez.

Ironically, the movie breaks the cardinal rule of the Bradbury story (it leaves the path, if you will), and the results aren’t so good. This film makes about as much sense as I do when I start talking about conspiracy theories which revolve around the mathematical skills of the boll weevil. Sure, the characters were coherent, in that I understood what they were saying, mostly. But other than that? Forget about it. This movie’s ideas about time travel? Make no sense. Its ideas about evolution? Make no sense. Its ideas about Chicago, circa 2055? Cute, but they make no sense. How much of it is Bradbury? Almost none of it. The setup is the same, but the ramifications of straying off the path in the short story were handled in a much more believable fashion.

Anyway, yeah, since the premise of the film was ridiculous, I tried embracing it as a pulpy Island of Dr. Moreau-type creature feature. But, well, remember how irritated I get when something which only has one possible outcome is played for suspense? Yeah. When you have three characters walking into a dangerous situation and two of them have been established as crucial for the movie’s do-or-die mission, which of them is gonna get eaten? That’s just lazy.

And it shows the movie’s core problem. A Sound of Thunder isn’t horrible . I mean, it’s OK to be senseless. And it’s really OK to be earnestly senseless. People will jump all over the dumb and deride this film for its inconsistencies, and I respect that. But some of the dumbness is clearly in the service of trying to make the thing watchable. Suspenseful, even. I’m fine with that. If only they’d actually put some more effort into it. I don’t mind dumb nearly as much as I do lazy.

#219, 12/9 – The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) (tofw)

I’ve seen a lot of biopics in my time. I don’t like ‘em very much, but I’ve seen a lot of them all the same. And, much as one would probably expect, I have had almost no trouble differentiating between the people depicted in those movies and the actors portraying them. I don’t see Philip Seymour Hoffman when I think of Truman Capote or Wilhem Dafoe when I think of T.S. Elliot. I don’t see Helen Mirren whenever Ayn Rand comes to mind, either. (I do see Tilda Swinton—and wearing men’s clothes, at that—whenever I think of anything, but that hardly counts.)

Yet I cannot think of C.S. Lewis without instantly seeing (Sir) Anthony Hopkins in my head. (But I don’t picture Debra Winger when I think of Joy Gresham. Weird.) Did I react to (Lord) Richard Attenborough’s Shadowlands that strongly? That positively? I’m not really sure. But I watched it and read the beautiful Till We Have Faces in the same fortnight. And that’s where the mess comes from, I think. I associate the book with the woman who gave it to me (we’ll call her Dale because that’s her middle name). I associate the movie with the book and, naturally, Dale. (I associate exactly two movies with Dale: Shadowlands and Lost in Yonkers, the only movie we ever saw together.) And I remember imagining Anthony Hopkins reading some of the book’s words aloud. I can’t really connect the dots, but somehow the calculus has been done in my head and C.S. Lewis is Anthony Hopkins. It’s that simple. And now that I’ve told you the truth, I hope you use this knowledge wisely.

This is my way of saying, I think, that I half-expected Disney’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to be introduced by Lewis Hopkins himself. Such is the power that film, people with the middle name Dale, and retold myths have on my brain. There was, alas, no Hopkins. And no Dale. Experiencing C.S. Lewis without them was kind of lonely.

I’m a heretical film-watcher, and if you haven’t figured that out yet, I’m about to open your eyes: I didn’t care for the Lord of the Rings movies. And if you know how much respect I have for Peter Jackson, you’d know how much I was rooting for them. But they just didn’t work for me. Well, that’s 2/3s true. I emotionally connected to and rather loved the Passion of the Frodo, as one Salon contributor (who? I forget… oh, Cintra Wilson) called The Return of the King. But those first two films? Yawn. It was nice to see that Middle Earth could be brought to the screen. But all I could see was technical wizardry and pretty New Zealand landscapes. It wasn’t enough for me. Until the final movie, that is.

I needed to say as much so that this next heretical statement may be put in context: I prefer The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to either of the first two Lord of the Rings films. That’s right. I prefer it. There’s one in every crowd, and as is often the case, I’m the one. The key word here, though, is prefer. I didn’t love it (for a reason I will explain in a second), but oh how thoroughly I enjoyed it. I connected with it. That’s enough. That’s all I ever really need.

Let me get the bad thing about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe out of the way first. The score? Annoying. Distracting. Obnoxious. Too much. Too Disney. (Fortunately, it’s the only part of the film that I would call “too Disney”. My strong and everlasting dislike for the company aside, a Disneyfication of Lewis would be a disservice to us all.) I don’t know how I managed to get good at ignoring it before too, too long, but I did. And thank goodness.

Other than that? Maybe not pure gold, but there was something wonderfully precious about it to me all the same. And you know what it was? The kids. The film’s main triumph is the kids… The kids and Tilda. Tilda and the kids. The film’s two triumphs are Tilda and the kids… and—right, you thought I was gonna keep doing it. Seriously, though, the kids are the heart and soul of this film. And in those kids is the divine spark I wanted Jackson’s first two Middle Earth films to have. Funny that I’d find it here. In a Disney picture with a Christ figure and an armoire. (Yes, and Tilda Swinton, too.)

This has been a good autumn for me and the Hollywood movies I’ve caught in the theatres. Serenity set the pace, of course. This couldn’t top Serenity— Jackson’s next film has a chance of doing so, but I doubt it will—but it’s still something I’m very glad I saw. Yes, glad. I found it engaging (it’s the kids, I tell you), well-paced, and absolutely worth the time. Wherever you are, Anthony Hopkins, I hope you enjoy this one. And you too, Dale.

[@Century 12 Evanston]

#218, 12/8 – Undertow (2004) (dvd)

Ha! I’m starting this one on paper. (Yeah, that’s actually what it says on the piece of paper I started this writeup on.) This is odd. With the exception of my intial writeup for The Holy Girl, which I scrapped, these things spring from me when I’m at the keyboard. But here I am, in an Evanston auditorium, waiting for The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe to start and thinking about David Gordon Green’s third film.

It’s surprising how thrilling his thriller actually was. During the film’s really big sequence I suddenly realized I was holding my breath. And at another point during that same segment I screamed “Don’t do that!” at the screen. I’m not usually a screamer.

As recently as early October I didn’t know who David Gordon Green was. Sure, I’d seen All the Real Girls and really liked it, but I hadn’t taken notice of the director’s name. This despite the fact that Atlanta’s own Matt Chapman is apparently in the film. Somewhere. Matt, I doubt you’re reading this space, but where the hell are you in that movie? I didn’t see you, and I swear I looked. Did Patricia The Great distract me at the wrong time? Or Zooey. Zooey’s voice could have distracted me. (Did you know I love Zooey’s voice? I mean her talking voice, but I’m also quite into the version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” she did with Leon Redbone.)

Heh. I was going to ramble on further about how I’m watching movies at home differently now, and why—and how I’m really rooting for Green’s future— but the previews started before I anticipated. And there’s Undertow’s Josh Lucas, who I kind of love in the same way I love Ron Livingston, starring in another widget from the Bruckheimer factory which I’m pretty sure I will never see; and if anyone ever dares trying to make me see it, well, to borrow a phrase from Battle Royale, every inch of me will resist you. (I think I’ve developed a strong distaste for the cliches and conventions of sports movies.) Oh, but there’s the wacky black mother. Right there in the trailer! Thanks, Jerry.

God, most of Disney’s movies instinctively make me want to run away and hide. These are some uninspiring trailers… Ah, but still— I’m here to see a Disney film, and it’s about to start. Tilda, take me away.