School for Scoundrels

School for Scoundrels is a mostly tepid and only mildly entertaining comedy. It gets by on meager charm, but lacks the sort of wit necessary to make a comedy of this sort worth watching. Todd Phillips (Old School) directs Napoleon Dynamite’s Jon Heder as Roger, a loser with a heart of gold who joins a secret school designed to turn nice guys into manipulative womanizers. Classes are run by Dr. P (Billy Bob Thornton) and his assistant Lesher (Michael Clarke Duncan in top scene stealing form). The film focuses on the class sessions briefly and later settles into a story about Dr. P’s battle to outdo the newly suave Roger in his attempts to woo his charming neighbor, Amanda (Jacinda Barrett). Most of the comedy here is derived from cheap sight gags and mild violence (Duncan in a dress, vicious paint ball games, etc.). The film dabbles in dark comedy with jokes about rape and murder, but its limited PG-13 perspective prevents it from crafting any truly biting humor. Similarly, its occasional stabs at romantic comedy are thwarted by its insistence in shading every scene with a wholly unbelievable and usually unnecessary sense of brutality. This film clearly believes itself to be in the vein of its Frat Pack predecessors or Thornton’s other, more wonderfully morose black comedies. Unfortunately, this is an underwhelming and very tired retread of those precursors. It should also be noted that the film is loosely based on the 1960 British comedy School for Scoundrels or How to Win Without Actually Cheating!, which was an adaptation itself (the material was borrowed from books by Stephen Potter). Clearly, School for Scoundrels is by no means a work of originality, but its ultimate failure is that it’s simply not funny.

Grade: C-

The Guardian

In parts, The Guardian is an efficient if unchallenging feature. It successfully mines the Coast Guard rescue swimmer training program for some semiserious drama involving a teacher (Kevin Costner) and his student (Ashton Kutcher) who share a dark past and a tough exterior. Both Kutcher and Costner give solid performances and with the help of a predominantly smart script, they create two really compelling characters.

Unfortunately, The Guardian does not settle for being a charming film about some rah-rah training program. Instead it plods endlessly through a 135 minute runtime that extends beyond graduation and into an unnecessary action sequence with an even more unnecessary romance tacked on at the very end. These overdevelop the film’s clichéd action movie attributes rather than focusing on its more engaging emotional depth. Though action and emotion seem meant to collide in the film’s climax, it’s such a stupidly melodramatic finale that the whole movie becomes reduced to a laughable retread of even lamer tragic hero tales of the past. Plus, the part about Kevin Costner being “one with the ocean” could get a giggle out of almost anyone.

Had the film ended about 30 minutes sooner then it actually did, it would have been a nicely paced and thoroughly enjoyable action drama. However, this is a poorly handled film that loses its luster long before the credits roll and stumbles into utter and complete foolishness.

Grade: C+

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

Writer/director Dito Montiel’s autobiographical film A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (based on his book of the same name) is a bittersweet bit of nostalgic storytelling. It juxtaposes the past and present by giving the past a decidedly warmer and more sincere feel. It also uses a surreal style that keeps the past obscured in a way that replicates real human recollection. Some dialogue gets lost or duplicated here and there. Other times there’s nothing but disorienting flashes of images to be seen.

Robert Downey Jr. stars as contemporary Dito reflecting on his experiences growing up in Queens during the1980s as he returns home to visit his seriously ill father (the amazingly intense Chazz Palminteri). Dito (played in the memory sequences by Shia LaBeouf) had a fairly reckless childhood and many of his decisions haunt him as he prepares to once again confront his family and friends.

There’s an aggressive authenticity to the scenes set in 80s Queens where Dito and his ragtag bunch of friends get into gang wars over graffiti and girls. Many of the young characters succumb to tragic circumstances in a truly brutal recounting of the lives of kids in a bad neighborhood. It’s these tragedies of his young life which lead Dito to flee to California and abandon his past.

Most of the film’s flaws appear in the contemporary scenes. While the sequences set in the past are resonant and softly sentimental, the present day material tends to come across as melodramatic and too blatantly emotional. Much of the film’s remarkable nuance seems lost here. Yet, the contemporary story is such a great framework for the movie that I can forgive it for being a little too obvious.

This is a nicely directed, smartly written debut for Montiel. It’s such a precise and harrowing tale that one cannot help but be shaken by the very real and very disturbing occurrences in young Dito’s life. It’s a perfectly honest story that gets to the heart of very simple tragedies.

Grade: A-

Mutual Appreciation

Andrew Bujalski is quickly becoming one of my very favorite directors. His debut, Funny Ha Ha, was one of my favorite movies of last year and his latest, Mutual Appreciation, seems destined to be one of my favorites from this year.

Bujalski makes intelligent films that mix the freeform talk of Richard Linklater at his best (Before Sunset, Tape, SubUrbi@) with the layered ensemble naturalism of Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts, and most recently A Prairie Home Companion). They’re deceptively simple movies with limited story that focus primarily on the emotionality of contemporary relationships in as much awkward and messy detail as the young writer/director can manage. Characters often lose their train of thought or experience a moment of confusion over what to say next. They backtrack and correct themselves apologetically. An awkward pause or two seems essential to every scene in addition to an “I mean…” or an “It’s like…” It’s a beautifully fabricated sloppiness in which characters actually do feel as though they are real people.

The main story here involves a complicated situation between three friends: Alan, (Justin Rice) Ellie, (Rachel Clift) and Lawrence (Bujalski). As Alan struggles to get his music career on track, (Justin Rice’s real life brilliant band Bishop Allen provides his music) Ellie and Lawrence are slowly entering into a relationship rut. All of this becomes even more problematic when Alan and Ellie confess to a longstanding “appreciation” of one another that threatens to completely destroy the friendship between all three. Subtlety is the film’s ultimate brilliance. Bujalski gives such emotionally limited material to the actors that practically every development in these characters’ lives comes from minor nuance. The characters hardly ever say what they truly mean, but everything they mean to say comes across in the superb performances and through Bujalski’s wonderful choices as a minimalist director. This is a very unique and astoundingly effective film.

Grade: A+

DVD of the Week: Down In The Valley

My rental pick this week is Down in the Valley starring Edward Norton (Fight Club) and Evan Rachel Wood (Thirteen). In this odd but remarkable film writer/director David Jacobson masterfully creates a visually arresting, genre hopping, cross generational romance. Norton stars as Harlan, a drifter with a passion for the old fashioned “wild west” code of conduct. When he meets Tobe, (Wood) a teenage girl with an old soul, he becomes immediately infatuated with her. What proceeds is an alternately charming and eerie relationship that leads to progressively more perilous situations and ultimately finds itself literally inhabiting the world of its faux cowboy protagonist. It’s a fascinating and unexpected ride that shifts from drama to thriller with such subtlety that even the most surreal action that follows feels like a sincerely dramatic turn. This is also worth seeing for its brilliant cast which includes Norton and Wood in top form alongside the equally talented David Morse and the littlest Culkin, Rory, continuing to have the sort of career Macaulay probably dreamed of as a child.

All The King's Men

Steven Zaillian’s version of All the King’s Men is a tedious exercise in fabricated prestige. The film’s dialogue sounds full of classically written quotable phrases, but almost none of them seem to actually mean anything. Maybe they provided some insight in the original novel where there was an opportunity for closer inspection, but here they simply dangle in the air like charmless decorations. They’re just pretty words in a pretty film that’s so overdone that not a single moment appears to be an earnest piece of storytelling. The characters feel like soulless talking heads whose unspecified motivations and bad southern accents victimize the audience as it endures a ridiculous 141 minutes worth of stuffy, self-righteous gibberish of which only about 30 minutes manages to not be completely boring.

Though the film assembled an award winning cast, almost none of them seem right for their parts. Sean Penn’s much hyped performance approximates the demeanor of a manic politico, but I honestly did not care or feel for such a shallow, finger waving man. It sadly falls into the category of flat out caricature in which everything looks and sounds as it should, but no depth exists to make it sincere.

Such is the case with this entire film. It walks and talks like an Oscarworthy epic, but it has none of emotional richness that makes those films great works of art.

Grade: D

The Science of Sleep

The last time Michel Gondry directed a film (excluding last year’s Dave Chappelle concert detour) he made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. So, I think it’s safe to say that I both wanted and expected to enjoy this movie from the moment its Death Cab For Cutie tinged trailer broke out online. Though this is not quite as brilliant as Eternal Sunshine, it is still one of the most engaging, inventive, and exciting features of the year.

Gondry takes over writing duties here for the first time in his impressive career and proves that he might be the only screenwriter working today whose brain is as zany as Eternal Sunshine scribe Charlie Kaufman. Why the two made magic together back in 2004 is immediately obvious as The Science of Sleep channels many of Eternal Sunshine’s twisty themes.

Sleep’s heavy eyed protagonist Stéphane (Gael García Bernal) is a sympathetic manchild who often confuses his dreams with reality. In a series of misunderstandings worthy of any traditional screwball comedy, Stéphane meets and falls in love with his equally imaginative and similarly named neighbor, Stéphanie, (Charlotte Gainsbourg). They proceed to have one of the most intensely realistic courtships that I can recall in recent film history. Yet, Sleep does not settle for merely painting a stunningly accurate portrait of a very real and messy romance, it also depicts the events as seen by the dreamy Stéphane whose juvenile mind causes constant conflict in the duo’s relationship. Though at first his oddball fantasy sequences feel recklessly wacky, the film grabs hold of this device at some point early in the film and finds a way to utilize them in order to place the audience inside the disillusioned mind of the movie’s offbeat hero. While Stéphanie remains hesitant to date her weird new neighbor, Stéphane proceeds to imagine the potential disaster that lay ahead if he continues to pursue the beautiful girl next door. As time goes on, the pair grows closer together and Stéphane’s dreams grow correspondingly warm and fuzzy until they end (as does the film) with a lovely but ambiguous suggestion of an uncertain ever after.

Gondry is an absolute maestro of charmingly quirky cinema. Here he blends gritty looking indie drama with a fairly low-tech stop motion animation technique that creates an elaborate fantasy landscape simple enough to keep within the tone of the low budget feature. He also gets the best out of Bernal and Gainsbourg who both deliver refreshingly organic interpretations of these peculiar individuals. Often eccentrics in film come of as farcical caricatures, but these feel like true to life people who happen to have certain distinctly nontraditional attributes. Both Bernal and Gainsbourg have been brilliant elsewhere, but there’s a comic lightness to the material that allows them both to unveil their ability to blend drama and slapstick with the utmost integrity.

There’s just simply not going to be another film this year with such miraculously simple insights developed with such exceedingly elaborate techniques. This is a one of a kind film experience with wild humor, mind bending fantasy, and utterly truthful drama. It’s a sly, low key masterpiece in its own right.

Grade: A

DVD of the Week: The Proposition

My pick for the most rentworthy movie new to DVD this week (for those of you who still slack in theater patronage) is this grisly Australian western from director John Hillcoat and screenwriter Nick Cave (who also lends his musical genius to the score). Guy Pearce (Memento) stars as Charlie Burns, a member of a malicious crime trio of brothers who finds himself in a dire situation when local authorities give him a vicious ultimatum. He must kill his older brother in exchange for the life of his younger one. Danny Huston (The Constant Gardener, 21 Grams) shines as Michael’s older, more ruthless sibling and so does Emily Watson (Punch-Drunk Love) as the local police captain’s fragile wife. Watson has the honor of delivering one of my favorites scenes in any movie this year. Watch closely as she quietly recounts her tragic nightmare without ever turning to face the camera. It’s brilliant. The entire production is an amazingly beautiful, but wickedly visceral creation. It’s most definitely one of my favorite films so far this year.

The Black Dahlia

One of the most immediately striking things about The Black Dahlia is that it feels like a movie made in another era. Based on the 1987 James Ellroy novel, and molded by Brian De Palma into a more grisly and volatile echo of 1940s film noir, Dahlia works a sort of weird over stylized magic that depends largely on the audience’s ability to embrace this admittedly theatrical interpretation of 40s crime.

The film is nowhere near a factual telling of the famous Elizabeth Short murder. It’s an adaptation that twists the story sideways and backward, contriving it into a sinfully dangerous tale of society’s seedy underbelly. It could (and has) been dismissed as an overly elaborate and carbon dated movie that feels more like camp than serious filmmaking. Truthfully, the hook of the movie comes long after its opening. It’s the sort of production whose visuals and dialogue differ so strongly from most contemporary films that the mind and eyes might need a good 15 to 20 minutes to adjust to the extreme mood and style. To dismiss it at the first sign of an awkward phrasing or a painfully fatuous plot turn would be to miss out on the dark fun of its full 2 hour runtime.

Assuming you survive the initial leap into alternative style, there’s a roundabout but exciting mystery ahead that strings together considerably warped and violent elements to weave a story of murder, deception, betrayal, sex, and slaughter. The film focuses on the unfortunately named Bucky Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and his morally ambiguous partner, Lee Blanchard, (Aaron Eckhart) who both become enthralled in the case of Elizabeth Short, (Mia Kirshner) a young ingénue who suffers a particularly brutal murder. Their investigation of Short, leads them to a deeper well of sordid characters, including Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank) a wealthy woman with a taste for indecent proposals. In one standout scene we see Bucky’s introduction to the mysterious Linscott family entirely from his perspective.

The film also stars Scarlett Johansson as Kay Lake who garners the affections of both Bucky and Lee in an odd love triangle that often feels like an unnecessary tangent to the story of Short’s murder. While providing Bucky and Lee with emotional investments beyond finding a killer works well for humanizing the otherwise rigid antiheroes at the film’s forefront, it often sedates the straight up thrills of the “Black Dahlia” investigation. The relationship used to the best effect here is the complex friendship between Lee and Bucky who are as close as they are competitive and often find themselves in tense conflict with one another throughout the film. Their love/hate relationship works more functionally in the proceedings of their difficult investigation and provides an emotional struggle in the otherwise clinical police case.

The Black Dahlia is a wild and often nonsensical ride, but it’s such a loving homage and so passionately mischievous that it really does become a brutal, dark hearted joy to watch. Despite its flaws, it remains sharp, grueling, and eerie to the very end.

Grade: B+

The Last Kiss

The Last Kiss has two distinct hurdles to leap over from the moment it begins. Firstly, it’s an American adaptation of a beloved foreign feature (L’Ultimo Bacio). In the history of such adaptations, few have failed to infuriate the fans of the original work. Since I have not seen L’Ultimo Bacio, this particular hurdle is not applicable to my assessment. The second hurdle involves the film’s star Zach Braff who’s seen here in top sullen hipster form as Michael, an architect with a beautiful girlfriend and a baby on the way who still finds himself feeling unsatisfied. This being Braff’s first major screen role since wooing Natalie Portman to the sounds of The Shins in his directorial debut Garden State, there’s inevitable comparisons to be made. Braff himself acknowledges that Kiss might in some ways be seen as a slanted sequel to his feature. It chronicles what happens after a hipster of his stature has finally found “the one,” the so-called “quarter life crises” that surrounds 30 year olds frantic at the sight of oncoming adulthood. Fortunately, the film has a distinctly different tone than Garden State and comparisons feel instantly limited upon viewing the film. Sure, Braff collected a handful of indie pop heartbreakers to help director Tony Goldwyn set the mood (including several Garden State soundtrack alums) and might have confessed to tweaking Oscar winner Paul Haggis’ screenplay adaptation, but the two films have little in common. Kiss is a bit less of the sunny eyed girl-saves-boy routine, and really much more about troubled relationships in the modern age. There’s lots of fighting, divorce, and other terrible things....to the sound of Coldplay music, of course.

Aesthetically, it suffers from a super glossy visual style that does nothing to enrich the very authentic sounding dialogue. Though characters speak and relate with believably messy charm, they’re surrounded by a slick looking world that seems torn from some other, more saccharine romantic comedy. More attention should be paid to the words and the performances than to the shiny happy settings that surround them.

Braff does well in his first leading film role outside of the director’s chair. He has the appealing quality of not being ashamed of goofiness in the midst of serious drama. Like many people, his character wields his humor as a defensive tool in arguments and Braff delivers seriocomic lines like a pro. Jacinda Barrett (as Michael’s girlfriend, Jenna) is the film’s biggest surprise. Best known for whining her way through “The Real World” in London, Barrett’s partaken in only a few films since achieving reality TV fame and has never had such a challenging role in her past. She convincingly embodies the charms of “the perfect girl” without letting Jenna feel like some concocted male fantasy. Most importantly, she believably portrays the path of a woman who's been betrayed from anger through to acceptance without letting any movement toward reconciliation seem forced or inauthentic. Forgiveness does not come easily.

The supporting cast here is so vast that naming them all is somewhat difficult. Though, the film hinges on the relationship between Michael and Jenna, they are not alone on screen. Rachel Bilson ("The O.C.") makes her film debut playing a painfully sweet “other woman” who ultimately ends up as quite a victim in her own right. Blythe Danner and Tom Wilkinson (who both seem too superb to be confined to supporting material) shine brighter than their younger counterparts as a couple married for 30 years and finding themselves in a relationship crisis of their own. Also important are Michael’s other nearly 30 friends starting to panic about their futures: Casey Affleck, Eric Christian Olsen, and Michael Weston (all uniformly good in minimal roles).

Though, it’s a visually uninteresting feature that suffers occasionally from some failed humor or overwrought drama, it has a certain amount of earnest charm that makes it an enjoyable, if predictable and familiar feature. It’s rare to find a romantic comedy written with such intelligence and performed with such passion. This is a film that stands modestly on its own two feet.

Grade: B

Hollywoodland

Hollywoodland might just be the most competent failure I’ve ever had the pleasure to witness. There’s so much brilliance in it that one must feel mercy for it despite the fact that it turns quickly into a sloppy and poorly handled film.

The film stars Adrien Brody as a noir style detective looking into the mysterious death of TV Superman George Reeves (Ben Affleck). At the same time, a parallel narrative details Reeves’ affair with a studio executive’s wife (Diane Lane), his rise to fame, and eventual demise. The entire cast gives phenomenal performances (yes, even Affleck). Lane and Brody are both natural character actors. They seem to slip effortlessly into the roles of vintage noir archetypes while maintaining enough earnestness to humanize the clichés. Affleck is sincerely acceptable as the late Reeves and does his best work here as an actor with a sullied reputation (familiar territory for the often trashed actor).

The film has a beautifully simple authenticity that the cast, costumes, and settings all work toward achieving. Everything feels right for the period, but nothing is so dramatically antiquated that the film feels burdened by its era. First time feature director Allen Coulter delivers a visually rich and appropriately harsh template for his classic tale of Hollywood tragedy and corruption. The real problem here is that neither he nor screenwriter Paul Bernbaum seems to know exactly what type of story to tell. The decision to blend biopic and crime saga seems to be an attempt at letting one improve upon the other, but really they both get in each other’s way. The film feels overstuffed with Reeves’ career and romances standing beside the investigation of his death which also stands alongside the career and romances of the detective looking into his case. It’s a film so enrapt in its material that it seems to forget that people actually have to sit through the whole thing. It’s most certainly overlong and in need of some serious redirection. Had the flashbacks been minimized to better accentuate the noir tale, the film might feel less muddled. While they seem meant to emphasize the tragedy of Reeves’ death, they also take away half the film to sulk in his melodrama. For a moment when Affleck’s eyes meet Brody’s in a haunting fantasy near the film’s end, the two narrative cross paths in brilliant fashion, but at nearly every other moment in the film one seems to intrude upon the other. It’s an interesting stylistic device, but its use is almost always unfortunate.

Despite losing some sharpness due to length and poor editing decisions, the main stories (both of them separately) do work extraordinarily well for a film that leaves you with no overall sense of closure. It’s when the film ends and neither narrative has expounded upon the other with enough intensity to justify their pattern of interspersion that the weakness of the film seems apparent. It works as a biopic. It works as a noir. As both simultaneously, it can be quite a tedious experience.

Grade: B-

Sherrybaby

The focal point of writer/director Laurie Collyer’s film Sherrybaby is the performance by the recently ubiquitous Maggie Gyllenhaal as Sherry, a former addict recently released from prison who is trying to get her life on track. It seems that every year we get a film of this kind, a loosely plotted narrative given depth by the devastating work of an acclaimed leading lady. Last year we had Felicity Huffman in Transamerica, and before that Charlize Theron in Monster. This sort of film demands an extraordinary actress to carry the material as the performance is key to getting the audience interested enough to observe the central character for the duration of the film. This is most definitely a film about observation. There is no clear direction for the film to take as its main priority is watching Sherry closely as she confronts irresolvable emotional duress that will most likely haunt her well beyond the end of the film.

What’s important to a film like this is giving the audience a glimpse into the life of a broken soul. It looks unflinchingly at the behavior of Sherry, a character with such piercing sincerity that every bad decision she makes stings. She's a girl who's been avoiding adulthood and turning every situation into an instance to reuse the girlish charms that once worked on her father (for various and disturbing reasons). She’s a perversely innocent woman whose journey toward adulthood has been stunted by a lifetime of unfortunate experiences.

The movie drags in parts, but watching Sherry unravel slowly and finally grow up a bit is a fascinating and emotional experience.

Grade: B+

Factotum

Factotum stars Matt Dillon at his prickly best as Henry Chinaski, a professional alcoholic who spends most of his time being hired and fired from menial jobs. The film is a minor piece of storytelling that extracts soft affection and hard laughs from a fairly inconsequential string of events. It follows Henry through a number of awful jobs and a pair troubled relationships with equally intoxicated women played wonderfully by Lili Taylor and Marisa Tomei.

The entire production remains beautifully low key. Every joke seems to stem from some slight glance or from a small bit of awkwardness and every striking dramatic development seems buried within a joke. The film works wonders through understatement, crafting characters so self deprecating and free of melodrama that we feel for them far more than those who whine. We love them for their wit and their honesty. Most importantly, we love that they maintain these attributes when so many other people would have already begun to pity themselves.

Grade: A-

The Illusionist

The events of Neil Burger’s The Illusionist begin with a love triangle between a magician named Eisenheim (Edward Norton), Crowned Prince Leopold (Rufus Sewell), and his future bride Sophie Von Teschen (Jessica Biel) and gradually expand to include murder, conspiracy, and political intrigue. It’s a weirdly hybridized feature of fascinating scope. The way it bounces around from soft lit love scenes to grim criminal investigations to fanciful exploits of magic and mystery plays such tricks on the eyes, that the whole film feels illusory.

In truth, it does have some of the elements of a “big twist” thriller, but to measure its value by the potency of the gut punch surprise conclusion (which I found to not be particularly punchy) would discount its various other, more interesting attributes. I don’t believe it works as a thriller. Any film with the ego to suppose that it has the ability to trick and deceive the audience needs some more audacious turns than this one provides.

The film’s real magic is its hazy romanticism. It beautifully depicts early 19th century Vienna in ornate detail and utilizes the setting to accentuate the soulful fairytale within. Deceit and old-fashioned villainy abound as Eisenheim finds him up against a corrupt leader prone to exploiting his people for his own personal benefit. The power struggle between Eisenheim and Leopold becomes more than just a war for Sophie’s affection. It is the catalyst for a political upheaval of sorts and leads to many a death and betrayal by the time the credits roll.

As Eisenheim, Norton transmits a muted sense of superiority as he quietly outwits everyone around him. He’s a character who represses vocal outburst in even the most pressing of situations and chooses instead to accomplish what he desires without the knowledge of his chosen target. Rufus Sewell is a truly wonderful villain. He conversely keeps his rage always at the surface with enough petty outbursts to truly evoke the audience’s disgust. The best work here is actually by Paul Giamatti playing an occasionally daft, but wholly sincere character who appears auxiliary at first, but turns out to be vital to the film’s final illusion.

Grade: B+

Half Nelson

Half Nelson is the kind of film that completely infatuates indie clichés like myself. It’s a low budget masterpiece with a stunningly simple plot that achieves greatness by breathing life into characters so earnest that the audience has no choice but to feel for them. With dialogue this true, cinematography this plainly beautiful, and performances this honest, it’s hard not to believe that these characters really exist. It’s disappointing that you cannot talk to them and give them advice of your own. Though, the truth is that these people probably DO exist. Not these exact characters (I’ve not reached hallucinations yet), but people living similar lives and making similar choices each and every day.

Those choices would involve drugs, family, relationships, and other complex subjects. The film stars Ryan Gosling (the man who should but inevitably won’t win the Best Actor statuette come Oscar night) as Dan Dunne, a history teacher at a Brooklyn public school. In the classroom, Mr. Dunne is an enthusiastic educator. Privately, he’s coping with a drug addiction while trying to navigate his relationships with family, friends, women, and students. The film deals primarily with one student in particular: Drey (newcomer Shareeka Epps who also lent her stoic maturity to the short film upon which this feature is based). Drey is more attentive than other kids at her school. She notices Mr. Dunne’s drowsy eyes in class and later finds him reeling from drug use in the girl’s bathroom. They form a thin and unexaggerated connection that endures despite frequent lapses in judgment by both individuals.

Drey is slowly finding herself drawn by circumstance into the profession of drug dealing as Dunne continues to lose himself in his own addiction. Eventually, the two cross tragic paths in a chillingly powerful scenario of utter despair (scored brilliantly by fellow indie darlings Broken Social Scene). The results are not uplifting or life improving in any way. This is not an inspirational student/teacher movie in which the brilliant professor coaches a young diamond in the rough to great intellectual heights (for that see Akeelah and the Bee which is quite good in its own way). This is simply the very sincere story of two people in tight spots who form a small bond that’s big enough to ease them out a bit.

By film’s end, Dunne is still a juvenile loner seeking shallow sensations at ever turn and Drey is still a young girl in a difficult neighborhood who had to grow up much too fast. They do not necessarily get a happy ending, but they do get a second chance.

Grade: A+

Little Miss Sunshine

To dismissively group Little Miss Sunshine with the other American road trip comedies of the last decade (as some critics have) would be a monstrous disservice to the feature. This alternately twisted and precious comedy from music video veterans Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Farris (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins, etc.) is more than just another “family on the road” farce. It’s a passionate reinvention of the softheaded and hardhearted material seen in lesser films such as RV and Johnson Family Vacation, which pointlessly milked family bickering for cheap laughs. Unlike these precursors, Sunshine strives to articulate actual family discord and find meaningful resolution to the family’s journey.

In the film, first time screenwriter Michael Arndt tells the story of Olive Hoover (Abigail Breslin), a young girl who dreams of pageantry in spite of her unconventional shape and size (Breslin wears a “fat suit” to accentuate Olive’s innocent eyes). Unexpected circumstances provide Olive with the sudden opportunity to participate in a beauty contest called the Little Miss Sunshine Pageant. The catch is that due to various circumstances, the entire family must join Olive on the long drive to the contest.

Most of the fun in the movie comes from the hilarious, uncomfortable, and nerve wracking anxiety of observing Olive’s family in various scenes detailing their misadventures on the road. Though each relative comes with detailed baggage of some kind, the film expresses such sincerity and warmth for their struggles that even their comically exaggerated woes avoid feeling like clichés. It also helps that Breslin is joined by one of the most overwhelmingly brilliant ensemble casts in recent memory. Greg Kinnear, who has made a career out of playing uptight men who learn to loosen up, gives his very best performance here as just such a man (Olive’s father Richard). His onscreen wife, Toni Collette, gives an equally inspiring performance as the spirited family mother who is determined to help her daughter’s dream come true. Supporting players here include Steve Carell using his shtick to enliven a Proust scholar on the edge to brilliant effect and Alan Arkin as Olive’s charmingly profane and subtly profound grandpa. My personal favorite bit of acting is by up-and-comer Paul Dano who works for more than half the film using only his sullen eyes and perfectly deadpan expressions and later reveals even more layers of emotion when he finally speaks out.

In a summer full of absolutely awful comedies, this is a standout piece of engaging and hilarious material. Its slow expansion and growing success has been a personal joy to witness. Who knew people still actually went to see good movies anymore?

Grade: A

First Post

So, this is my first post on this experimental (and probably temporary) blog in which I will explore the potential conveniences of NOT having to repeatedly recite my personal movie opinions to everyone I know. In all fairness, I can only give out the same review about twice before the details start to slip and I begin to lose my enthusiasm. I always love to talk about movies. It’s the inane recitation of an almost identical analysis nearly 10 times per day that bores me. If you happened to be the 100th person to ask me what I thought about Superman Returns this summer, then you probably know what I’m talking about. I believe the last person to inquire received an agitated glare and nothing else.

In the interest of forward momentum, I won’t backtrack through all of 2006. I’ll begin with releases so far this September (and a few August essentials) and continue on from there. I don’t see every movie. So, I can’t provide running commentary on all the upcoming movie releases. However, I do see A LOT of movies and I’ll probably get to the ones anyone reading this would want to know about.