National Board of Review 2008 Awards

Posted on IMDB today. I'm kind of shocked that Changeling found its way onto the best films list, but clearly there is some undue Clint Eastwood love circulating there.

Mickey Rourke in Entertainment Weekly

If you've ever given a hoot about Mickey Rourke (and I sure do - Boogie in Diner, Henry in Barfly - 'nuff said), then check out this awesome feature from EW.

Chad Betz Top 10 Films of 2007

1. No Country for Old Men
2. There Will Be Blood
3. Zodiac
4. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
5. Once
6. Ratatouille
7. Margot at the Wedding
8. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
9. Death Proof
10. Eastern Promises

Chad Betz reviews Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Would anyone like this film outside of the slant "it's Lumet's big comeback"? Yes, the film has a certain sloppy energy to its direction and the acting of Hoffman, Hawke, and Tomei's breasts. But the nonlinear approach to a thriller looks plain amateurish and unwieldy compared to the way it's been handled in the past by Nolan and Tarantino; hell, Guy Ritchie did it better. And the cineastes want to talk about unlikable characters in Margot at the Wedding? There's not a single tolerable character in this fucking movie (the only other time I've ever said that about a film featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman was Capote). Usually that's not a big deal for me, but why am I supposed to care where this convoluted mess of a plot is taking these miserable characters, who do only two things: (1) screw/screw over each other (2) wallow. I even hated the little girl. SPOILER (if you can really spoil such sod as this): there's a point late in the film where Hoffman threatens to shoot Hawke and Hawke asks him to go ahead and do it. To which I wanted to say, "Yes, and save a bullet for me, too."

Seriously, where are these accolades coming from? Was anyone tricked into thinking it had tight plotting? Tight like a piece of ceram wrap wrapped around a big smelly fish. The character motivations never rise above questionable. The story's more dismal than No Country For Old Men's while lacking any of the poetry; the hammy stabs at profundity (Hoffman confessing his very obvious worthlessness to his dealer, Hoffman ransacking his own house, Hoffman crying about becoming his dad) seem pointless and mostly just a pain to watch. The film's conclusion quickly escalates into ridiculousness. And the editing together of all of it is haphazard and horrendous, the flashing freeze frame gimmick used to switch between timelines one of the worst crimes in the field since The Boondock Saints raped my eyeballs. Don't just avoid this movie, ostracize it.

Chad Betz reviews Margot at the Wedding

Margot at the Wedding

Coming off the painfully funny and unflinchingly incisive family divorce and dissection of The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding feels like it must also be stealing a hefty sum of pages from writer-director Noah Baumbach's own life, so unbearably realized are all of its characters and their interactions. Critics have lambasted this film for being a character-based drama without a single likable character; this is a definite case of misjudgment, as all these characters strike me as being a bit like William H. Macy's character from Magnolia, all still in search of a healthy and mature way to express the love that's causing them to behave in destructive patterns, unwittingly ruining their own loves and soiling their best intentions because they can't escape perspectives that are self-oriented. Of course, Nicole Kidman's character study is the centerpiece here, and if Daniel Day-Lewis was this year's embodiment of Ahabism, Kidman's work is more everyday if no less insidious, intense, and saddening. In the end the film is far more kind to her, though, implying that despite all her actions their is something redemptive in the movement of her heart, it's just a movement constantly distorted by her hubris.

The story drifts a bit between its events and would have benefited from the more pronounced building of tensions that Baumbach used to push The Squid and the Whale forward; also, the humor is still funny but less convincing than The Squid and the Whale's utterly natural incorporation of levity through the clash of character foibles. Watching Jack Black run for half a minute in fear of an incensed father made me chuckle, but it seems more of an insert than a result. If there's an improvement, it consists in Baumbach taking more cues from the early work of Eric Rohmer, crafting a talky film that doesn't really feel talky because the talk is not plot, it's character splayed out through the rhythms of conversation -- these long passages punctuated with almost-silent visual moments (Margot in the tree, the pool, the pig slaughtering, Margot running after the bus) that are thus imbued with force like that of a punch to the gut. Harris Savides made digital look like film earlier this year with Zodiac; here he channels the spirit of DP Nestor Almendros into a decidedly modern, loose approach that's the perfect fit for Baumbach's elaboration of connected short stories into one feature length. Not quite a great film perhaps, but like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, it's at least a fine collection of great scenes that give some context to each other.

Chad Betz reviews No Country for Old Men

No Country For Old Men

In which the Coen Brothers erase the memory of their past few colossal flops and apply their strengths (dark humor, blunt editing, remarkable plotting focus) and the strengths of their cinematographer Roger Deakins (stark lighting, precise composition) to the most poignant thematic material they've yet handled, the apocalypse now jeremiad of Cormac McCarthy's wonderful little book. But the Coens don't just show a formally near-perfect handle on McCarthy's cinema-ready prose...for the first time I feel like they've fully grasped the emotional potentialities of the story they're telling, and their relatively straightforward adaptation of the book makes only the deftest tweaks to enhance the shuddering impact of their film.

From the introduction of the idea of the "dismal tide," the inevitable erosion of ourselves and the world in which we live, to the way the sheriff's monologues are integrated, sculpted, and emphasized, the Coens don't just "get it"; they're as moved by these things as we are, and their detailed work here conveys it, dare I say, heartbreakingly. One of the smartest changes is the removal of an episode between the sheriff and Llewellyn's father late in the book; this ensures that the film remains a landscape of boys, desperate men, and Chigurh's violent nihilism incarnate (tapping into the most hopeless form of male machismo) all fatherless, left to drag down their wives and mothers into the same pit. Just as it's a story without fathers (when Llewellyn tells Carla Jean to say goodbye for him to his dead mother, it's like his father never even existed), it's a world without a Father. This is a damned bleak scene to paint. The faint, almost completely stifled hope of the film lies in the sheriff's stories about his predecessors, about his father who died young, in the sheriff's dream of his father that closes the book and the film with one last quiet but resonant note of grace. Maybe it is just a dream, the light which we cling to, but it's absolutely necessary in a reality that spews up darkness to tear away at every earthly love and possession.

Chad Betz reviews Eastern Promises

And now...Chad Betz:

"I think David Cronenberg has always had trouble with depicting fully two-sided relationships. The Fly, Spider, Videodrome, Naked Lunch, etc. have prominent relationships that mostly just function as something for the protagonists to react to as they continue their disintegration. This is put into a hilarious light by Rabid with whiny boy chasing porn star girlfriend across the country. The dynamic between Law and Leigh in eXistenZ is semi-interesting, but mostly besides the point anyways since that film's excellence has everything to do with its conceptual and formal rigor.

And it didn't matter because that was all that those films needed. They were focused on their singular central characters. Dead Ringers is so awesome because it's a sort of non-exception, it's Cronenberg and Irons exploring one character from two sides and using that split for the conflict and reactive purposes served by Geena Davis in The Fly or Miranda Richardson in Spider. But instead of cheapening the internal conflict by externalizing it in some BS abstractive move, Cronenberg and Irons still treat both brothers as whole entities and people, and so the internal conflict just gets doubled and plays contrapuntally. And it's freaking great.

*SPOILERS*

With Eastern Promises, you have Viggo Mortensen's Russian mafia driver/undertaker/rank-climber who's pretty interesting, and then you have Naomi Watts' investigative midwife, who isn't. She's just underwritten, the background information of a miscarriage isn't used enough in her character throughout the middle of the film, the time spent with her mother and uncle is mostly a waste -- the Viggo-Vincent Cassell comrades/lovers (Cassell plays the homosexual son of the mob boss played by Armin Muehler-Stahl) dynamic's about a hundred times more involving. This would be okay if Naomi's connection to Viggo interacted with him in compelling ways; it would even be okay besides that if the film's conclusion didn't depend on there being a balanced give-and-take between the two. But.

I mean, I get it, at the end Naomi's complete because she gets the baby. Viggo's incomplete, he's still in "the Zone," the deadness he says he's felt since he was young. He got a glimpse of completion and life with Naomi, he kisses it goodbye at the end. Or did he? Oh my, the ambiguity. I just find it disappointing because the conclusion has little emotional resonance when it could have had so much, when it could have been a regular Dead Ringers if Naomi's character had just been better developed and better integrated with Viggo's storyline, and if we could have really seen how Naomi might have represented Viggo's last hope. And the twist with the police muddies the issue even further. It feels like a botched storyline because it's a half-assed one that can't hold up to the otherwise striking implications of its finish.

But I'll still take it over A History of Violence, which, for my money, had zero interesting characters and a completely listless closing scene. Plus no crazy bath-house fight."

Chad Betz Review of Paprika

SPOILERS

As an explosion of dream imagery, Paprika wows. As a cogent narrative, it amounts to about as much as most other "important" Japanese animated films -- inscrutable plot machinations developing towards a cosmic battle between absolute good and absolute evil. Expect a lot of talk about existence in the positive and the negatory, and frogs banging on drums.

Paprika is one of a long line of modern Japanese films that overcompensate for their society's past repression of women by imbuing the heroine with god-like power and ultimate purity. The titular character is half-Kiki, half-Virgin Mary; she is cutesy and mythically well-endowed, pseudo-climactically canceling out the film's pitch-black antagonist through a metaphysical sort of confrontation that's beyond absurd, a Godzilla vs. Mothra staging that's basically a blow-up of what happens when particles of matter and anti-matter make contact. The film, however, also couches this confrontation in terms of woman being the answer to man. And, as a man, I have to ask: are we really that bad? I admire Paprika's attempts to deepen its text with psychology, but psychology is a complex tangle of gray areas, and when most of the film's primary characters end up reductively yin and yang, inner drama is lost to showy theatrics. And a big naked girl swallowing a big naked man-shadow.

Make no mistake, though, this is some of the most captivating animated imagery this side of Miyazaki. Even rivals Miyazaki, and with its adult rating and more oblique ambitions, occasionally marries Miyazaki with Murakami. It's unfortunate that the whole's not more nuanced, that the characters are too conceptual, and that half the time you're wondering what the four-letter-word is going on.

-Chad Betz
Guest Reviewer

Danny Boyle Interview on Rottentomatoes.com

Rottentomatoes.com recently posted this round table interview with the 28 Days Later, Trainspotting, The Beach, and Shallow Grave director, Danny Boyle. The subject is mostly his new movie Sunshine with some SPOILERS included that you have to skip over.

Chad Betz Reviews Once

Editor's Note: I will begin posting Chad Betz reviews whenever he feels like sending one in. Please take the time to look over his reviews. They are much more insightful and wonderfully written than anything I ever wrote.


Saturday, June 02, 2007

Once might be the finest musical ever, and that's because it's the first musical that really captures why music is important to the lives of those given to it. By making its actors of musicians and musicians of its characters, the film allows its musical scenarios to play out naturally. By making music the action to the characters' inner monologues in the moment, not outside of it, not big production numbers surrounded by birds and children's choirs and cute dance choreography, by doing this the film keeps us focused on the music and the people playing it. And this is music that is about real life situations and the real emotional reactions to those situations; as the songs play out so does the relationship between the film's main two characters, unceremoniously named "guy" and "girl."

That's what pop music is about, right? A "guy" and a "girl" and all that entails. In its brief span, Once manages to draw out these two archetypes with an understated balance of sadness and joy; all the while backstories limit their fleeting current story together, so their "once" happens in front of our eyes like a dream cut to factual tape, shaky handheld camera and rough editing making us feel like a friend watching a home video rather than a distanced observer in a cold theater. It's the anti-Chicago.

Musicals are often romanticism, and this is a musical about finding romanticism that's honest with how we live life from day to day. It's simultaneously morose and hopeful, and I can't think of a better film representation of how music can do what Paul Schrader suggests drama does: document the incremental movements of the human soul. Once is both music and movie while avoiding grand leaps and pompous gestures... it is nothing but beautiful, painstaking increments, which are as much a part of the soundtrack as the soundtrack's a part of them. The first time "guy" and "girl" make music together is a scene I don't think I'll ever forget, and that's because it captures a moment that so many of us have cherished or still long for, that instant where you see a reflection of the best parts of your own soul in someone else, and it quietly shakes you to the core. For now it's just you, her, and the God that made you both.

Those are the moments for which we live. That someone finally made a musical about such moments feels utterly right.

Bringing Out the Dead

I was roaming around the Jeffrey Overstreet review website lookingcloser.com and found a review of Bringing out the Dead. I didn't really agree with it, so I thought I'd do the film justice on here.



Bringing out the Dead is about a lot of things: the sad state of the world, the strong hold of hopelessness, redemption. But what I really latched onto when I watched the movie was the theme of saving and being saved. This isn't in the spiritual sense of the word, though I guess it could be interpreted as such. Nicolas Cage needs to save people to save himself. Without that act, the act of bringing people back to life, he is losing his. He is like his patients, each spends a moment in between the living and the dead, waiting for someone or something to push them over in either direction. Cage's Frank has just been spending more time there than the people he loses. Frank needs saving. But he can't be rescued because he can't save anyone else. When he lets a patient die, he "saves" that man from the struggle he (Frank) can't win. And death becomes salvation. While it is easy to think this is when Frank is "saved," I think he truely finds his truth and a gentle push toward hope when he lets himself fall asleep in the arms of Patricia Arquette. He is letting someone save him. That's how I think the film's ending can be interpreted in a spiritual sense - there is nothing you can do on your own to save yourself. You have to let someone else do it for you.

I also think that this works as another form of the Wizard of Oz Syndrome (WoOS). Like the cowardly lion, the scarecrow, and the tin man, Frank is after something he already has. Frank desperately wanted to save someone, and he did, just not in the way he thought he had to. He "saves" Patricia Arquette's character, Marc Anthony's character, and the drug dealer. He doesn't bring them back from the dead, he just keeps them here with the living. And if Frank really saw, actually let himself see, that he was doing what he felt he had to do, the epiphany Overstreet talks about would have happened much sooner in a different way.

Great Movie.

P.S. - Overstreet usually gets it right.

****

Chad Betz on Little Children and Children of Men

My friend Chad Betz posted this on his xanga a while ago, and it was so insightful and well-written that I shall include it here.

Whisper Slurry: Little Children of Men

ah, the hopes of humanism.

weirdly, there's been a movement in recent cinema where fatalism has been appropriated by humanist ideology for the purpose of aggrandizing the humanist dream of complete self-actualization. it probably didn't start with American Beauty, but that's a good touchstone. these are films that recognize the depravity of man, yet use that depravity as a catalyst which pushes characters to navigate everything from the dirty underground of suburbia to a dystopian wasteland in an effort to escape themselves. and they somehow, almost magically, succeed. humanity is the inhuman scourge, but humanity is also the superhuman savior, and in humanity we ultimately trust.

philosophically, it's illogical. or naive. the dead cannot save themselves. it's that basic tenet that forces me to accept my own Christianity. i know the magnitude of my own degradation, and it is absolute, and the only thing that can give me new life is for absolute purity, absolute wholeness and light, to sacrifice itself on my part. absolute purity does not exist within man; how these films can spend two hours depicting that truth and yet somehow ignore it at the same time is beyond me.

Todd Field makes surprisingly moral films. with In the Bedroom, he attacked murder, violence, hate. with Little Children, it's sexual deviancy and adultery that bear the brut of his ire. he attempts to paint the reality of these issues (few cinematic murders have as much impact as the one in In the Bedroom), but there's an undeniable moralist bent that determines the plot and the actions of his characters. In the Bedroom, when all is said and done, is not a great film. it's a short story bloated to feature length, and its structure is a little suspect, but it felt singular in its attention to acting details (Field himself an actor) and in its willingness to let key scenes really breathe. however, in that the film condemns its characters actions without clearly offering an alternative (a shot of a town steeple almost seems incidental), it's a serious movie that feels a little too dour. and i'm not saying that these characters must turn to God, but they turn to themselves and find nothing. which, i guess, is a truthful conclusion in its own right, even if it won't be winning any feel-good awards.

unfortunately, contrivances overwhelm authenticity on Field's follow-up. with all kinds of cute storytelling gimmicks and a narrator that sounds straight out of NFL's Greatest Games, Little Children plays less like the meticulously rendered modern chamber drama that was In The Bedroom and more like Desperate Housewives for the art house crowd -- or the biggest (anti)spiritual successor to American Beauty yet. again, the movie runs long, and this time with some completely unnecessary story tangents. it's fairly entertaining and involving for being your run-of-the-mill infidelithriller pulp, and i admire the way Field treats sexual deviancy and adultery as, at their cores, being immoral not because of their illegality in the eyes of state or social mores, but because they are behaviors which often hurt "the ones we love" and are mindful only of self-gratification. unlike the more ambiguous In the Bedroom, though, these characters manage to shake themselves out of their wayward mindsets. in almost every case, their epiphanies are less than satisfying. one character changes because he receives a note that tells him to "be a good boy." Kate Winslet's character realizes she should love her daughter more. a neighborhood watchdog/ex-cop feels guilty about the death of an elderly woman. Patrick Wilson goes skateboarding. again, it's refreshing how Field treats the idea of "love" as a decision that his characters must actively make in order to redeem themselves, but to my mind divine love, agape love, is the only thing that could affect these reactions in characters who are so entrenched in what they feel and want. of course, agape love could be manifest through the events that the film depicts, but it doesn't add up that way, especially not when Wilson's character apparently only needed some kind of thrill trip to make him feel vital and alive again.

far more aesthetically impressive and viscerally gripping, Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men is no less disappointing in terms of what it promises and yet how trapped it is by adhering to humanism, by carefully avoiding.the idea that salvation must come from something which is external to humanity. the title itself almost feels like a riff on the idea that Jesus was son of God and son of Man. for Cuaron and novelist P.D. James, all that's needed is the latter, the sons and daughters of Man, the hope that future mankind will improve upon its present self. i've heard some of the film's defenders among the Christian left state that the film's filled with religious imagery, but it seems clear to me that Cuaron is appropriating that imagery for the purpose of imbuing the film's humanism with the sort of mythic import and grandeur found naturally in religious mysticism while at the same time making a mockery of that which it emulates. the pregnant girl in Children of Men tells Theo (Clive Owen) that she's a virgin, Theo gapes for a moment, and then she says she's just kidding and the audience enjoys a laugh at the thought of such a thing as an immaculate conception. this, however, doesn't stop Cuaron from romanticizing and stain-glassing his own humanist worldview, even in the face of all the terrible things he shows humans doing to each other. P.S. i haven't seen anyone argue that the name of Clive's character has any allegory to it, probably because they realize the implications that'd have for Malcolm Jamal Warner. but if you do want to take his name as allegorical, let's consider the function his character fulfills in the film and what happens to him in the end. yeeeahhh.

i'm gonna go ahead and indulge in some more standard criticism here, for i do want to recommend that all of you check out at least a matinee of Children of Men. it needs to be seen in the theater. and why? well...

Children of Men is stunning stuff for various reasons, if not for the reasons that really count in the long run. Cuaron focuses so intensely on manufacturing a filmic social realism for the sci-fi setup, most everything else is neglected or communicated via the standard moments of levity or sappy score cues. the film's got detail, visual chutzpah, and versimilitude out the ass (and a fat fistful of pathos), it just has very little in the way of strong character development (almost all of it is delivered through expositional dialogue) or intricate storytelling (basically, it's a dystopian road movie) or engaging philosophy (amounts to a dictation: "have faith in humanity"). i'd like to think that Cuaron's balancing of hopelessness with hope works better than it does, but i can't assign too much import to moments like the one where the fighting resumes, because if i do, where does that leave the picture? it'd be rendered as conceptually indecisive as something like Munich.

this is, however, the best post-SPR Spielberg movie that Spielberg didn't make. for whatever's that worth.

the two major action takes, the car sequence and the climactic pursuit sequence, are awe-inspiring. both are marred by some minor glitches and factual errors (e.g. the way the car's windshield dissolves -- laminated glass doesn't behave like that), but are nonetheless an elevation of film manipulation techniques that started around the time of a seamless, unnoticeable digital edit job in Contact. to echo what others have said, this is what Spielberg could have done with his WotW car scene if he wasn't too busy showing off: using the advancements in film technology to suck the audience into a sense of reality in situations so intense the reality is heightened, becoming both dizzyingly dynamic and suffocatingly claustrophobic. Spielberg missed the mark because he went too flamboyant with the camera moves, swung us too far around the point of his characters' perspective, and so lost a grip on the presence of the scene. i mean, Saving Private Ryan isn't exactly a good movie, but it does have some very good scenes in it, and the greatness of the beach sequence lies in Spielberg coming up with a shooting method that turns a fantastically staged action setpiece into something more than that, something grueling, something that the viewer experiences. he did that by having the steadicam operator adopt a continuous perspective at the very center of the action, to the point where the action even affects the camera, but avoids the implication of a narrative first person (which would obstruct the first person of the audience) and the risk of the action becoming unintelligible chaos by using his established characters as spatial and emotional anchors. he tried to push that a step farther with the digital editing in WotW, but he went too far and the flashy camera became too loosely tethered to the characters. we didn't feel trapped with them. Cuaron avoids that mistake. he fixes us right there in the car, and he doesn't let us out until he lets Theo out.

the issue is, then, are we invested in the characters in these scenes because they are characters that deserve our investment, or are we invested because we're watching to see how they'll ever escape these hellish single takes? i'll tell you one thing, at least in the case of the character Miriam (atrociously acted by Pam Ferris), it's definitely the latter. and the whole time i was just rooting for her to bite the bullet. for a related aside: Little Children uses the digital editing trick in place of cross dissolves in a time passage montage. which is okay, i guess, because i hate cross dissolves, but this came off like something you'd see in a car commercial. filmmaking tools can't just be used well, they have to be used with purpose.

back to the philosophical rigamarole, one might say, "so, then, betz, what are you asking for? televangelism?"

of course not. i guess i just wish that artists wouldn't be afraid of their own inclination towards spirituality, because i think that inclination's very evident in films like Little Children and Children of Men, but these movies show Field and Cuaron fighting with that inclination every step of the way, or trying to create a new "spirituality" that abnegates the necessary role of the supernatural. so that's what it comes down to. and it comes down to Pan's Labyrinth not getting here soon enough.

Posted 1/13/2007 "

Jeffrey Overstreet Review of Zodiac

I came across this Jeffrey Overstreet review while doing research for The Open Frame Blog. He didn't gush about the movie as much as I did (he refers to Robert Downey Jr.'s performance as hamming it up). But he gives good insight into the film and provides some thought provoking questions at the end of the review.

Great Interview with Independent Filmmaker Allison Anders (Gas, Food, Lodging)

I have never seen an Allison Anders film before, but I came across this interview when looking for interview of female independent filmmakers for the open frame blog. Andrew suggested looking for interviews with Anders. She offers very insightful comments about the current state of independent film and hollywood movies as well as her own filmmaking experiences. Check out the interview here...

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Illuminating Hal Hartley Interview

I just read a wonderful interview with Hal Hartley when putting together some info for the Open Frame Blog. It's completely regarding his film Henry Fool. If you read my review of the film, you may recall that I had mixed emotion with the film, giving it the middle of the road rating of **1/2. The interview I read was completely drenched in "aha!" moments. I feel like i finally get the film and especially the characters. For anyone who has seen the movie, check out the interview at about.com. It just might change your mind.