Awards Coverage: Indie Spirit Awards

Film Independent has announced the nominees for this year’s Independent Spirit Awards, which exclusively honor artistically unique low budget cinema. It’s a fine batch of nominees that will most likely prove more satisfying than the inevitably snoozy Oscar roster due out in a few months. I’ve not seen some of these films due mostly to a lack of theatrical release or limited availability, but I can’t find an undeserving name to my knowledge. The show will be broadcast live on IFC Saturday, February 24th with Sarah Silverman returning as host. As I’ve said before, I’m a huge supporter of unconventional and independent filmmaking and I encourage everyone to tune in to the show and check out the nominated films. Many of these are available on DVD (or soon will be) and several will be released in the next month or so during Oscar season. Here are some key categories to sample. Got to http://filmindependent.org/spiritawards for the full list of nominees.

BEST FEATURE
American Gun
The Dead Girl
Half Nelson
Little Miss Sunshine
Pan's Labyrinth

BEST DIRECTOR
Robert Altman - A Prairie Home Companion
Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris - Little Miss Sunshine
Ryan Fleck - Half Nelson
Karen Moncrieff - The Dead Girl
Steven Soderbergh – Bubble

BEST SCREENPLAY
Neil Burger - The Illusionist
Nicole Holofcener - Friends with Money
Ron Nyswaner - The Painted Veil
Jason Reitman - Thank You For Smoking
Jeff Stanzler - Sorry, Haters

BEST FEMALE LEAD
Shareeka Epps - Half Nelson
Catherine O'Hara - For Your Consideration
Elizabeth Reaser - Sweet Land
Michelle Williams - Land of Plenty
Robin Wright Penn - Sorry, Haters

BEST MALE LEAD
Aaron Eckhart - Thank You For Smoking
Ryan Gosling - Half Nelson
Edward Norton - The Painted Veil
Ahmad Razvi Man – Man Push Cart
Forest Whitaker - American Gun

BEST SUPPORTING FEMALE
Melonie Diaz - A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
Marcia Gay Harden - American Gun
Mary Beth Hurt - The Dead Girl
Frances McDormand - Friends with Money
Amber Tamblyn - Stephanie Daley

BEST SUPPORTING MALE
Alan Arkin - Little Miss Sunshine
Raymond J. Barry - Steel City
Daniel Craig - Infamous
Paul Dano - Little Miss Sunshine
Channing Tatum - A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

DVD of the Week: Clerks II

Kevin Smith takes his most iconic characters, Dante (Brian O’Halloran) and Randal, (Jeff Anderson) from the Quick Stop grocery store to Mooby’s burger joint in this unexpected sequel to his decade old slacker comedy. Along the way, Smith transfers to color film and recruits Rosario Dawson for a supporting role. This is not quite the low key savvy cinema that the original Clerks. embodied, but it’s still a fun comic free-for-all that can’t help but be entertaining. In many ways it’s an homage to Smith’s classic films. Not only does it revive the Jay & Silent Bob characters Smith had claimed to put to rest, but it also rehashes some classic Smith moments and utilizes the talents of Smith veterans like Ben Affleck and Jason Lee in winking cameos. As it turns out fast food workers are just as hopeless as store clerks and Smith crafts a totally loopy and irreverent tour de force to cap off his screwy and surprisingly sincere slacker period (Jersey Girl be damned).

Casino Royale

With more than 20 films to his credit, Ian Fleming’s James Bond character has become one of the most prolific and iconic action heroes of our time. The buzz about director Martin Campbell’s latest incarnation of the classic British spy is twofold: 1) Bond is played by yet another actor (Daniel Craig) and 2) it relaunches and literally retells the Bond story from its beginning as if the decades worth of previous films had never happened at all. The notion of recreating Bond comes well after he’d already been driven into utter creative oblivion with Die Another Day, a film whose climax involved an invisible car speeding through a fortress made of ice that was being melted by a laser beam from outer space. Casino Royale reestablishes Bond in a surrealistic but never overly ludicrous world of espionage that has its fair share of high speed chases and adrenaline pumping acion sequences, but still finds some time to tend to the creative elements of the characters behind the guns.

New Bond Daniel Craig is a nice fit for the role, bringing a sense of brooding and a muted excitement to a character that otherwise appears to be a stone-faced cad. He’s more than matched by the charismatic Eva Green who here plays Vesper Lynd, the latest in a long line of Bond beauties. Green (who made her stunning debut in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers) is an extraordinary actress who molds a smart, charming, and mysterious character. Her entrance into the film breathes new life into the story and creates a much needed dynamic with the Bond character.

My greatest complaint about this film is its length and its occasional bouts with incoherence. After its wonderfully vicious opening sequence, the film dallies in a tedious and overly explosive setup before finally making its way to the titular casino and introducing us to Vesper Lynd. The casino game and the violence and drama that surround it really make up the core of the film. It’s in this setting that we get to see the reckless fun and painful consequences that really come with life as James Bond. However, once this midsection of the film has concluded, the movie once again gets swept off its feet and ends up sprinting endlessly from one conclusion to another. There’s such vagueness to its plot that the film lacks a clear sense of progression. It tends to exist in the moment without an entirely clear sense of what is really happening and why the characters should want it to happen in the first place. The characters are so believable and sympathetic at times (mostly during that casino bit), but once we lose our grip on who they are and what they’re after they become unrelatable and a tad cartoonish. Despite its efforts to have real drama amidst the mayhem, the characters do inevitably become somewhat drowned out by a meandering plot and over the top action sequences.

It’s genuinely hard to critique something like this for crimes against realism or for partaking in overindulgence. Isn’t indulgence the greatest trademark of the whole Bond franchise? What I like about this film is that it gives you enough of a mixed bag that you will most likely be satisfied to some extent no matter what style of movie you prefer. To call it a thinking man’s spectacle would be an overstatement, but it is something along those lines. You can experience it as exciting popcorn munching fun or think heavily and haughtily about the Bond character in terms of his relationships and his never ending defensiveness. The film is like a blueprint for a character we already know and it really goes through the appreciable trouble of planting the seeds for the Bond that will someday probably be once again in an ice fortress with an invisible car. Cherish the fact that right now the producers of these films care enough about quality to give this character decent treatment and a grounded (although notably unrealistic and unclear) story. Casino Royale is not a brilliant film, but it is carefully calculated madcap fun and should be both enjoyed and pondered. It offers sheer excitement and a keen insight into a character that has been an enduring part of world culture for nearly half a century.

Grade: B

The Fountain

Casual movie goers in pursuit of minor entertainment should be forewarned that The Fountain is by no means a conventional movie going experience. Despite having recognizable stars and a sizable budget, this is truly an art film that is only likely to please a very narrow audience of thinkers and cinephiles. What Requiem for a Dream auteur Darren Aronofsky has crafted here is an indulgent, passionate, and fairly abstract meditation on life, love, and man’s eternal quest for immortality. It’s much more of a visual tone poem than it is a cohesive narrative.

I’ll admit that its artful, lavish style can feel tedious at first, but once you get sucked into its careful rhythms and quiet melancholy it really takes hold and becomes an absolutely riveting film of unguarded beauty and emotion. Aronofsky is clearly shedding any sense of self editing here and ridding himself of any kind of calculated measure. This is just lush and sumptuous visuals layered over utterly melodramatic scenes about romance and love. It’s to be absolutely avoided if you feel no desire to experience an inexplicable, but thought provoking and wholly affective film (think the first time you saw Donnie Darko and had no idea what happened but loved it anyway). However, if you really want to see something moving, audacious, and evocative, I cannot think of a better movie in theaters now for you to see.

Hugh Jackman has never been more soulful than he is here as the brokenhearted Tommy, husband to a withering wife stricken with illness, Izzi (Rachel Weisz). Weisz is an absolutely stunning actress with both a sense of loveliness and tragedy about her. She makes Izzi’s suffering all the more graceful and painful to witness. It’s really the humanity of their performances that harnesses the visual and lyrical madness of this shapeless film. The honesty of the characters makes you believe (or want to believe) this story despite whatever inherent silliness comes with some of its odder moments.

The details of what these moments are and what the actual plot of the film is really fail to matter as this is not something meant to be instantly understood. It’s a movie that’s meant to be felt more than comprehended and it works on such an emotionally visceral level that I really didn’t care to question the logic of its dreamy century hopping love story. Besides the central, present day story, we also see Weisz and Jackman playing characters in 16th century Spain and floating through space sometime in the future. These threads stem from a book written by the dying Izzi that is meant to be finished by Tommy and given the proper ending (i.e. posing the question, “How does our story end?”). Her book reflects their lives and frames their tale with elaborate, almost literary imagery and metaphor. Stories and characters all blend and bleed together. Nothing here is clear, but every second of it is absolutely wonderful.

Grade: A+

The History Boys

The History Boys (based on the play of the same name) is adapted for the screen by its playwright Allan Bennett and features performances by the original Broadway cast. It’s a nice change from the often mutilating stage to screen process that preserves as much theatrical integrity as possible. As a film, it’s a wise and lively production that blends smart dialogue and heavy drama with a never ending sense of whimsy. Its greatest strength is that it’s such a spitfire of a movie that you can’t help but be charmed. This enjoyable energy doesn’t quite survive the full runtime, though. There are some honestly bland moments and a hovering sense of intense intellectualism that sometimes rips the warmth right out of a scene and replaces it with a calculated “gobbet.” I’d wish it to be even messier and more casual in shape and tone, but it’s still undeniably enjoyable even with its flaws.

The general premise revolves around a group of students in the 80s striving for acceptance into prestige schools such as Oxford and Cambridge while being taught by the unconventional and somewhat inappropriate Mr. Hector (Richard Griffiths). The school’s bumbling headmaster (Clive Merrison) elects to phase out Hector’s “life lessons” and replace him with an Oxford grad named Mr. Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore). Irwin brings with him a more modern, test oriented approach to education. The film tosses about all kinds of plot threads stemming from this central story. It touches on youthful angst and adult misconduct as well as the nature of learning. It’s fairly sloppy, but endearingly so.

The cast of young men is a great mix of very honest and authentic looking actors that fit so naturally into their parts that the movie feels slightly like a documentary at times. Frances de la Tour’s performance as Mrs. Lintott, a fellow teacher and confidant to Hector, is also quite brilliant and dryly funny. It’s this rich and beautifully natural sense of humor that flows throughout the film which gives it so much fresh life. Its most sour note is an overly sentimental ending that undercuts the generally unstrained feeling of the drama in movie.

The History Boys has some flaws and some hard to grasp linguistic flares, but there really is some undeniable chemistry amongst the cast and within this story that really makes this a magical film. There’s nothing too extraordinary or ambitious about this movie, but it does what it aspires to do with a great deal of skill and efficiency.

Grade: B

Déjà Vu

Déjà Vu is quite a frustrating film to behold. It’s clearly a more interesting and creative thriller than the general run of the mill genre pictures of late, but it’s just so sporadic, uneven, and ultimately illogical to really be completely recommendable. I actually enjoyed the first half of the film quite a bit. Denzel Washington is a formidable lead in a film like this and he gives a great, kind of offbeat performance here. Tony Scott is also a very talented director who keeps this elaborate sci-fi movie feeling visually fresh and intense from start to finish. More importantly, this is an inventive concept that philosophizes and poses questions not common to lesser contemporary thrillers.

The general plot focuses on a mysterious time bridge that allows the government to look back into the past. Washington is recruited to help find a mass murder using this technique. The film goes to great lengths to set the rules and boundaries of this time bending program. For much of the movie it seems as though it will smartly adhere to the more practical and rigid possibilities outlined in act one. However, like all disappointing thrillers, the film dips at the end. It pretty much goes against everything that has come before and opts for a truly dissatisfying conclusion that seems specifically designed to create a happy ending despite logical inconsistencies. In a film like this, I really expect that the producers take care to uphold the ideology of time travel put forth at the start, but this one just goes off course and quite suddenly starts rewriting the book on what can and cannot be done in the past.

Not since The Village has a film started so promisingly and ended so ridiculously. I can only give this a very hesitant recommendation because it gave me a great feeling of disappointment in the end. I cannot deny that it begins quite thrillingly and with a genuine sense of mystery and intrigue, but this all dissipates in time. Despite its unsatisfying conclusion, this is a movie with a brain and great sense of storytelling. There are so many great quirks and twists in its first half that are really quite refreshing takes on thriller clichés. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a car chase happen through two different temporal folds before. The movie also builds strong characters and an emotionally investing story, but by the end of the film logic has been abused so badly that everything within the story just loses credibility. Maybe if you try not to think too hard about the details, this might be enjoyable for you. Sadly, I could only really appreciate parts of it.

Grade: B-

R.I.P. Robert Altman

I have just learned that Robert Altman has passed away. This news genuinely saddens me as both a person and a cinephile. He was a brilliant director and a passionate artist. His films remain some of the finest and most influential of the last few decades. These include M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player, and Short Cuts among others. Altman recently directed A Prairie Home Companion, which I recommended just last month when it was released on DVD. It’s a fine film and a beautiful swan song for this very special man.

DVD of the Week: Scoop

This is Woody Allen’s latest movie and the second in his series of London based films. It’s in many ways a return to form after the more intensely dramatic Match Point. Here Allen reteams with Point ingénue Scarlett Johansson (a surprisingly gifted screwball comedienne) and reclaims his title as the master of intellectual shtick. This may not be Allen’s best, but he is still a refreshing voice in the contemporary comedy landscape. Unlike most current comedy scribes, Allen still makes an effort to craft comedic lines and clever wordplays instead of merely scripting pratfalls and cheap sight gags. Scoop is a bright and funny film that captures perfectly some of Allen’s wonderful silliness and creative comedy stylings. The plot involves a murder, a magician, a ghost, and a blonde. What more do you need to know?

Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation is Richard Linklater’s sprawling adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s best selling book of the same name (dubbed “the dark side of the all-American meal”). Instead of simply cribbing the facts from Schlosser’s nonfiction source material, Linklater squeezes them surreptitiously into this fictional dramedy about the lives affected by the fast food industry. It’s a huge ensemble of great actors (and some not so great ones doing unexpectedly solid work) that centers around Greg Kinnear as a marketing agent for Mickey’s, a McDonald’s type fast food chain, as he investigates rumors that the packing plant which ships the Mickey’s meat is unclean and abusive to both animals and employees. This extends the story to the Mexican immigrants who work in the plant (a subdivision of the cast led by Catalina Sandino Moreno and Wilmer Valderamma). Also at the center of the story are Amber (Ashley Johnson) and Brian (Paul Dano) who work as teenage burger pushers in a small town Mickey’s. The cast is so large and the story is so crowded that Fast Food Nation sort of feels like Syriana with burger sales replacing international oil trade. It’s so exceedingly involved that it frequently becomes exhausting and sloppy, making this an interesting but troubled film.

This is also not really a film that will change people’s minds or their eating habits. Linklater clearly has a passion for this issue, but Fast Food Nation is not the incendiary muckraking cinema that he seems to think that he’s making. It attacks mostly obvious truths and doesn’t do much to shed new light on the subject of fast food indecency. Does anyone really deny that immigrant workers are treated badly or that the slaughter of cows is unpleasant? Do we really need to see a cow disemboweled just to double check this fact? There probably is a lot of information that could make people rethink their Big Mac, but hardly any of it seems to be in this movie. Its strengths are its flare for drama and its fun comedy coating, but even these aren’t enough to make it completely recommendable.

Linklater is a master of capturing charisma in close quarters. His gift as a writer is crafting playful and quietly powerful dialogue that conveys emotion through the simplest means possible. Fast Food Nation is uncharacteristically overblown and really stumbles when Linklater goes over the top and loses his subtlety and wit. When he gets Amber alone in a room with her mother (Patricia Arquette) and uncle (Ethan Hawke), the film suddenly feels intense and honest. It’s an almost nonexistent scene that doesn’t present any grandiose drama or staggering statistics. The scene just has Linklater writing a conversation between small town people about how fast food has impacted their lives and their town. That’s the sort of authentic and meaningful material that should appear more often here. Linklater duplicates the energy of this scene in many of his dramatic moments, but there are just too many scenes that fail for me to really be appreciative of his efforts. Plus, the movie is so shapeless and overextended that the really good moments end up feeling as though they are few and far between. Had he consolidated his story and sharpened his more explosive writing, Linklater might have properly grabbed the reins of this bumbler.

The absolute best scene comes when Amber rebels against her life of Mickey’s food service and joins an environmentalist group. This coalition of enthusiastic college students attempts to make a stand by cutting a hole in the local meat packer's fence in order to set the cattle free. Linklater brilliantly deflates their triumph by having the cows simply stand still and look confused. As it turns out, it’s much easier for the cows to mull around and eat the convenient food provided for them than it is to run free and fend for themselves. It says something strong about Amber and about society in general without any overdramatic incidents needed. For about 3 minutes the film is everything it wants to be: poignant, funny, and wholly unglamorous. If only there were more scenes like this one.

Grade: C+

A Good Year

The ingredients to A Good Year seem good enough. Ridley Scott is an amply talented director and Russell Crowe is a thoroughly engaging actor. You’d think reteaming them years after they dominated the Oscars together with the action epic Gladiator in a lighter, more comedic film would be a nice reunion and great bit of fun. If so, you would be really really wrong. This is such a paltry and uninspired offering and it’s made all the worse by the inherent expectations involved in seeing a film created by such talented people. It’s a clichéd story about a man who meets a pretty girl and rediscovers the joys of living his life to the fullest. The genre is more than tired by now, but many films can still pull the formula off with wit and charm (see everything Cameron Crowe has ever made). However talented Scott and Crowe are neither seems gifted with the ability to successfully enliven such lightweight material. The whole production feels cold, forced, and absent of anything other than lovely looking scenery and some nice performances by supporting actors. Essentially, it’s a Cameron Crowe movie with no soul and a shitty soundtrack.

That’s not to say that it’s a completely awful film. There is merit to its visual beauty and to some of its character dialogue here and there. However, most of the spoken words are so riddled with unnecessary intricacies and unbelievable amounts of premeditated wordiness that it’s hard to imagine anyone actually saying them spontaneously. It’s a film that’s drenched in words and visuals that are quite lush, but none of it really connects to any sense of truth. More importantly, the story is so obvious and so thin that it really would take a great deal of warmth and charm to muster any kind of enthusiasm from me. This was charmless and inauthentic. It’s pretty much a dud.

Grade: D+

For Your Consideration

Christopher Guest’s zany comic ensemble pieces have always been some of my very favorite comedies (see Waiting for Guffman, Best In Show, A Mighty Wind). Now added to that list is For Your Consideration, a whip smart parable about how the politics of Hollywood corrupt art and ruin artists’ passion for the work itself. In the film within the film, Home for Purim, a Jewish daughter is coming home to visit her dying mother on the little known Jewish holiday called Purim. On the set, kind hearted veteran actress Marilyn Hack (Catherine O’Hara) is reeling from the news that her performance as the dying mom in the film has earned a small amount of Oscar buzz on the internet. Soon the whole cast is murmuring rumors and everyone from the actors to the studio executives are making plays for media attention and awards consideration. Eventually, those involved in the production become bitter and manipulative while the film itself is butchered beyond recognition in order to “reach a wider audience.” By the end, everyone is a loser and it’s a sad state of affairs indeed.

More than plot, it’s the utter brilliance of the cast that carries these largely improvised films to hilarious heights. Truthfully, the whole cast is flawless. Guest’s troupe of comic masterminds never ceases to create memorable and excruciatingly funny characters. O’Hara in particular is a wonder to behold. Part bawdy comedienne and part soulful actress, she can make you laugh and break your heart all in the same scene. I have always insisted that she was robbed of an Oscar nomination for A Might Wind and she will probably be robbed of one again this year. Fellow lead actors Parker Posey and Harry Shearer also shine here as do supporting players such as Jennifer Coolidge, Eugene Levy, Jane Lynch, and Fred Willard. The latter two do a freakishly good parody of “Access Hollywood” and other trashy media programs. Lynch does especially well here, giving a dead on impersonation of the tone and posture of the hosts of such shows. It’s so precise and yet so ludicrous at the same time. I have no idea how she does it.

I can’t say that this is Guest’s best film. It’s not as outright funny as Best In Show or as surprisingly tender as A Mighty Wind. He also disowns the mockumentary style he helped pioneer and in the process loses some of the energy and spontaneity of his classic films. However, this is probably his most incisive and culturally relevant satire to date. Its laughs feel more painfully honest than the rest and its moments of sadness strike with a certain sharpness absent in the more outrageous films of his past. It all feels so possible and so truthful given what we know about how movies get marketed and how they get pimped out to Oscar voters come every December. As Oscar season gears up, this is a perfectly appropriate bit of self deprecation that should keep every self important movie minded individual (including myself) on their toes.

Grade: A

Bobby

Emilio Estevez’s Bobby is a tapestry of struggling and marginalized individuals. It tells the tale of Robert F. Kennedy’s last day alive and details the activities of several fictitious patrons of the Ambassador Hotel leading up to his tragic assassination there. There’s such a pure spirit at work here as Estevez articulates through events of both fact and fiction Kennedy’s message of peace, brotherhood, and the power of forgiveness. This mantra seeps into the very core of the film. Estevez has made some bad career choices in the past, but he reemerges successfully here as the fearless leader of this wondrous production. He also generously extends plum roles to actors who have already seen their careers peak and wane (Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Christian Slater) as well as to members of the MTV generation desperate to launch serious acting careers despite media claims of meager talent and amateurish work habits (Shia LaBeouf, Nick Cannon, Ashton Kutcher, Lindsay Lohan). Together this ragtag crew has crafted one of the biggest surprises of the fall season. Bobby is a film of unabashed heart and raw emotion. It’s a charismatic piece of work with an endearingly messy passion for its stories and its characters. You could pick apart its flaws, but why would you want to? It’s just so beautiful inside and out.

If I was pushed to compare Estevez (who hasn’t directed a feature in 10 years) to a contemporary director, I would label him as a slightly less kind hearted Cameron Crowe. Not only does he scrape together an inspired 60s soundtrack (kudos especially for bringing fresh cinematic life to Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” in our current day post-Graduate society), but he also captures a nostalgic charm and an earnestness that makes Bobby feel comparable to a darker, more tragic Almost Famous.

The cast is universally strong, but the inner workings of their individual characters mostly serve as a sideshow. The main event is uniting them together in accordance with Kennedy’s dream and creating a momentary euphoria of hope for a better future. Bobby is primarily a film about the importance of unity and cooperation in times of turmoil. Its message is both timely and timeless. It speaks to America in 1968 as well as it speaks to America now and all people the world over. This is simply a wonderful film.

Grade: A+

The Return

Director Asif Kapadia makes a valiant effort to exceed the tired clichés of today’s redundant supernatural thrillers with The Return, a film full of “nice try” moments that at least imply the director had hoped to make this interesting. Unfortunately, it’s about as tired as every Grudge, Ring, and other paranormal whatnot in recent horror history. However, Kapadia gets points for not simply sending a little blonde schoolgirl into a big scary house. In Joanna Mills, (Sarah Michelle Gellar) he gives us a creatively distraught heroine full of morbid feelings and self destructive tendencies. She’s a tragic twentysomething on the run from her entire life who bounces around hotels and finds a lifelong battle with supposed hallucinations culminating unexpectedly during a business trip in Texas.

Gellar (a talented actress who is sadly shaping up to be little more than the supernatural Ashley Judd) gives her all to what little material there is for her to play, but we never really know enough about Joanna to like her or care about her. Kapadia admirably infuses some more moody character moments into the film to help give it a tinge of depth, but these are sprinkled so loosely throughout the film and so poorly elaborated upon that none of the characters really gets satisfactorily fleshed out for the audience. Instead of being a sympathetic heroine, Joanna comes off as a contrived approximation of a troubled young woman.

The greatest trouble here is that the film cannot decide whether it wants to be a supernatural character drama or a much more complacent horror schlock piece. In the end, it mixes cheap scares with daddy issues and gets its wires crosses somewhere in the mix of it all. Both the horror plot and the dramatic elements are underdeveloped while weird tangents such as an abusive ex-boyfriend and an annoyingly shallow depiction of self mutilation get screen time that would have been better spent developing the real core of the film. I appreciate The Return’s attempts to be a more thoughtful and reflective variation on a much covered genre, but it’s just not done nearly well enough to be recommendable.

Grade: C

DVD of the Week: Accepted

One of the beauties of the DVD format is that it provides counter seasonal selections for those tired of the latest go-round of cinema opportunities. It’s in the heart of autumn (the most pensive movie season of all) that we see the daffiest of summer comedies welcomed to rental locations everywhere. For anyone who is burned out from Oscar season think pieces (or those who simply don’t enjoy emotionally tumultuous films) I strongly recommend Accepted, a spirited comedy about a bunch of ragtag academic rejects that’s surely the brightest teen comedy in years. It’s not all that different than Animal House, Camp Nowhere, or more recent genre favorites such as American Pie, but this is still a wisecracking and shamefully funny silly movie. Its verbal blows against the cotemporary college system can be surprisingly sharp in their critiques, but really it’s the slapstick fun and the freewheeling energy that makes this a thoroughly enjoyable entry into the rebellious youth comedy canon.

Harsh Times

Training Day scribe David Ayer makes his directorial debut with this choppy and inconsistent thriller. Harsh Times drifts through genres and rips through logic too extensively to ever really be successful. It has its fair share of wise insights and great moments, but everything good is buried within a heap of convoluted plot. Christian Bale gives another good performance here as Jim Davis, a veteran whose moral conduct code and sense of responsibility have been warped by his brutal service time. Upon his return from battle, he meets up with old friend Mike (Freddy Rodriguez) and the two proceed to drive around Los Angeles drinking, smoking, and making recreation their personal profession. Both are looking for jobs (although not too hard), and they intend to savor their freedom while it lasts. The problem is that Jim has been so badly damaged by war that he is gradually becoming psychologically unhinged. This descent from playful through to shockingly intense is the core of the film and its best crafted story. Unfortunately, so many subplots clutter the movie that these developments are sadly underplayed. Besides, Ayer ultimately takes the film so far over the edge that we no longer believe in Jim and lose our concern for him as a character.

Ayer is gifted at writing “guy talk” and at his best when exploring the gap between machismo and actual aggression. He personifies these reckless and violent men with really striking layers of depth behind their swagger. Had he narrowed his focus a bit and kept rewriting and revitalizing these emotional stories, this would have been a much better film. As it is now, it’s a sometimes worthwhile, often ridiculous, but never dull account of two men’s wild ride through L.A.

Grade: C+

Come Early Morning

90s “it girl” Joey Lauren Adams revives her slumbering career with this bittersweet dramedy starring Ashley Judd. Adams works as a writer/director for the first time and creates a low key gem of a film. It’s not an unpredictable affair. We know from the very first frame that Ashley Judd’s self destructive Lucille, an alcoholic prone to one night stands, will rediscover her confidence and self worth in the end. Its skill isn’t the turns it takes but the efficiency with which it takes them. Both Judd and Adams have endured their fair share of creaky romantic comedies. This seems designed to breathe a sense of earthiness and authenticity to the genre. Lucille isn’t just a pretty girl with an inexplicable ability to meet men. She is a character with a life and a past that haunts her. It’s refreshing to see a romantic lead be fleshed out so soulfully and with such unflinching sincerity. This imperfection carries over to the rest of the characters in the film. Rather than tell the tale of excessively expressive whiners, Adams gets more from her characters by burdening almost all of them with repressed emotions. She tells the story without drenching it in romantic language and false sounding declarations of love. The film is too honest and too good for things like that.

Perhaps the most honest thing here is Ashley Judd’s uncontrived and quite simple performance. Judd is a mesmerizing charmer despite her shaky film past. She’s an actress so misused in most movies that it’s easy to forget her talent. Come Early Morning utilizes her skills tremendously well. Here she is strong and willful while still retaining a magical sweetness that lets the audience forgive her for her many indiscretions. She’s relatable and lovable in spite of her baggage and it’s a testament to Judd that the character stays so true throughout the film. It’s a fairly narrow film with focus squarely on Lucille, making Judd’s portrayal of the character its heart and soul.

Whatever conventions the movie follows are more than justified by its warmth and wisdom. So many films claim to be heartwarming, feel good experiences, but so few actually live up to that description. This is one of the few.

Grade: B+

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

As indicated by its subtitle and some unnecessary title cards at the start of the film, director Steven Shainberg’s Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus is not a biopic of the iconic photographer or any sort of factual representation of her life and work. What Shainberg is interested in is crafting an emotionally truthful account of Arbus’ transformation from repressed housewife to visionary artist. He envisions her as a woman trapped behind the facade of a doting wife and mother. She wears conservative clothing and behaves politely save for a few outbursts and some “unsavory” behavior she’s made efforts to leave behind her. The arrival of a fur covered former circus performer named Lionel changes all this. He introduces her to his other circus friends and reawakens in her a passion for the strange and the damaged. He reminds her of a time when she believed that to be odd was to be brave and dares her to be brave once again. Soon enough, she’s skipping out on her family to spend time with Lionel and his unconventional friends. She chooses them as her first project in her new hobby of photography and so emerges the Arbus the world knows now.

Shainberg’s work as a director is audacious and beautiful. His film’s creep up on you, distracting you with elements of avant-garde and then layering beneath the eye catching sexual eccentricity a sense of authentic pain and longing. He bravely captures the delicate connections between freaks and outsiders much with the same loving eye as Arbus. He does not judge or pity these people for craving things seen as culturally unacceptable. He appreciates their candor and their openness and photographs them in as flattering a light as possible. His camera clearly favors the passionate and vulnerable love between Diane and Lionel over the neatly packaged social arrangement of Diane and her husband, Allan. Though Allan is quite kind, he can never really understand his wife or duplicate the honesty and the freedom that Diane and Lionel share.

As Arbus, Nicole Kidman captures a brilliant glimmer of hidden affection as she slowly opens up to Lionel and his world. She takes a quiet journey with her eyes from secretly squirming beneath the surface to finding complete peace in a guiltless acceptance of her true identity. Kidman makes Arbus an adorable wonder of acceptance whose warm smile toward the outcasts she meets reveals an endearing innocence and wonderful passion. Even hidden behind fur, Robert Downey Jr. manages to make something special out of Lionel. The fur is only a product of makeup and prosthetics, but the wounded eyes and celebratory boldness are genuine. This is a film that is driven by these performances and dependent upon the actors to make its unusual story feel as sincere and relatable as commonplace cinema subjects. The film’s sleek style can sometimes feel overly calculated, but with such earnest acting there is truth to every frame. Fur is a mysteriously elegant and emotionally moving experience like no other film I’ve seen this year.

Grade: A+

Stranger Than Fiction

Will Ferrell gives an impressively sedate performance in Stranger Than Fiction, a loopy romp of a film that feels like Charlie Kaufman lite. This point of comparison is probably its toughest challenge to overcome. It borders on being a meandering quirkfest at times and screenwriter Zach Helm is most definitely not Charlie Kaufman. There’s something painfully saccharine about these proceedings. However, it’s a thematically reflexive film that counters the audience’s critique by acknowledging objections to itself. This charmingly self aware attitude helps propel the film beyond its interesting premise and makes it an involving, literate, and unexpectedly tender comedy.

Director Marc Forster has always had the problem of being visually excessive and here he threatens to squash the film’s sincerity by adding silly little animations and other unnecessary visual flares. He’s a distracting character behind the camera with a great eye for most things, but a tendency to overstuff his frames. However, there’s only so much anyone can do to muss up such a cheeky little tale or ruin performances from talent like Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, and Maggie Gyllenhaal. This trio of supporting players is probably the film’s greatest strength. They’re endearing and prickly characters brought to life with a great deal of fun and passion. It’s really just a joy to watch these three at work. Thompson is pitch perfect here and Hoffman is droll as ever. Plus, Gyllenhaal successfully segues from brooding indie sweetheart to delightful comedienne.

For anyone who doesn’t already know, the plot involves a loner named Harold Crick (Ferrell) who mysteriously begins to have his life narrated by the voice of famed author Karen Eiffel (Thompson). Just as he begins dating a local baker, Ana Pascal, (Gyllenhaal) and feels his life is about to change, he’s informed by the narrator that his death is imminent. He then works with Professor Jules Hilbert (Hoffman) to save his life and convince Eiffel to change her ending. Despite being a key feature, the narration gimmick fades in and out of the story quite easily. The best bits here come from the simpler character moments. Gyllenhaal and Ferrell make for a weirdly wonderful on screen couple. It’s their chemistry and other simple human attributes that make this film so lovely. Stranger Than Fiction is a tasty slice of surrealism, but it is truly its characters' wit and warmth that make it such an enjoyable ride.

Grade: A-

Death of a President

Director Gabriel Range structures his speculative docudrama Death of a President with the utmost precision as not to overscript or overthink its events. He very directly recounts the events of George W. Bush’s shocking assassination in 2007 through interviews with staff and investigators as well as with news footage (both authentic and manipulated). His rigid commitment to documentary style can sometimes squander the film’s potential for insight and dramatic potency. It’s chock full of facts, but it’s quite light on passion and sentiment. Some faux interviewees provide a personal context for this trauma, but stylistically verisimilitude seems to trump all instances of emotion.

What the film does convey quite vividly is the growing epidemic of anti-Bush syndrome. It comments on the role of the president in the eyes of a scared and angry nation. People here are holding Bush solely responsible for a much greater state of despair in the world. Political disagreement has grown into social mutiny and the ruthless degradation of the president has become widely acceptable. Range wisely observes that assassination is the devastating but logical next step if this trend were to continue.

This is not an anti-Bush film. It’s a film that opposes hatred of all kinds and injustice by all people. Its greatest message is that hatred begets hatred. The events of Bush’s death create even more chaos and cruelty. It is the film’s intention to stand as cautionary tale of what could happen should unruly hatred exceed rational debate in our society. Range seems very committed to the notion that there is a threshold beyond which political dispute becomes dangerous aggression. He even goes as far as to designate the crossing of the police barrier by protestors in 2007 as the moment that enables the assassination and its awful aftermath. He rallies behind the idea that protesting war through violence will do nothing but further perpetuate the notion that violence is the best of all solutions.

Range is respectfully responsible in his minimalistic and unexploitive technique, but he’s also so committed to an unbiased film that he comes off as artistically dull. The death of a president seems too rife with emotional possibilities to be treated so coldly. Range seems intent on delivering a clinical study of the consequences of violence. For the most part it’s an interesting and engaging film, but his efforts can grow tedious at times. Even fake documentaries can feel oversaturated with information and lacking personality. It’s an original and admirable concept, but I wish there was more here to really explore and analyze.

Grade: B-

Volver

Pedro Almodóvar’s latest film, Volver, is a charming tapestry of strong female characters. At its center is the blackly comic tale of Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) who is dealing with murder, ghosts, cancer, cooking, cleaning and other types of tone shifting troubles. Details are best left unsaid as this is an unexpectedly twisty comedy that bleeds together humor, family drama, and mystery. The plot morphs more than once during the film, making what was previously unimportant suddenly vital and what had been the central plot merely an afterthought. This messiness of story is perhaps the movie’s only flaw. Yet, I doubt it is in any way an oversight on the part of Almodóvar. He is clearly more dedicated to the warm whimsy and undeniable strength of these women than counteracting potential loose ends.

Penélope Cruz displays an unforeseen amount of talent here after slumming in American action adventures for some time. She proves to be quite a comic spitfire as well as a riveting dramatic actress. Like most of the women in the film, Raimunda is dealing with problems greater than anyone could know. Cruz is excellent at making the character outwardly aggressive and charismatic but keeping pain always visible just behind her pleasant eyes. The same could be said for the entire cast of female actresses. They each express a beautifully subtle balance of strength and vulnerability

Volver is a fascinating portrait of ordinary women whose lives are deceptively simple. Almodóvar brilliantly places the film’s greatest violence in the kitchen and its most mysterious character in a housedress. It’s as if we’re seeing the challenges, the peril, and the strain of the every day lives of these nurturing female characters amplified to a level of brutality and danger that even the dullest viewer can recognize. The movie seems designed to stress that everyone has intense problems. However average or unremarkable a person may seem, there is surely something darker going on beneath the surface. These women have unknown pasts and dire life struggles, but they appear to be content and normal people. Their brilliance is that you’d never know the truth about them if you didn’t take a closer look.

Grade: A-

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Comedian Sacha Baron Cohen proves to be a fearless comic treat as Borat Sagdiyev. The character was first developed on his HBO series “Da Ali G Show” and is brought to life here in a whimsical full length feature. Borat, an affable anti-semitic misogynist from Kazakhstan, is on a mission to discover the secrets of American success for the betterment of his struggling country. On the way he has many misadventures (both scripted and unscripted) with Americans (both actors and nonactors). Had Cohen not made Borat into such a pleasant and ethnically generic character, the film may have come off as cruel. Even though Borat claims Kazakhstan as his home, he really just seems to be a hysterical confection of foreign stereotypes. As an audience we see him as a playful, mildly offensive but mostly harmless caricature of “the other” as seen by modern Americans. The primary joke of the film (and also its most shocking truth) is that the people Cohen encounters as Borat are almost always too unaware or too hateful to be in on the joke. When Borat asks a car salesman how fast his Hummer would have to go if he wanted to use it to kill a pack of gypsies, the car salesman proudly boasts about the lethalness of the vehicle saying, “With this baby, you probably only need to go 35 mph.”

At times Cohen can be brutally intrusive himself, forcing participants in the film to the brink of their ability to withhold frustration. Yet, however unpleasant the deed, he performs it with such a kindly demeanor that we forgive him. In truth, he seems to want a reaction. He goes around the country basically daring people to call him out as an impossible character who could never be an actual Kazakh reporter. Unfortunately, there seem to be no takers. Even more unfortunately, people seem to go happily along with Cohen’s faux hatred shtick. By gladly agreeing with even the most painfully malicious statements, Borat serves as a sort of enabler for those who might otherwise withhold certain hateful sentiments. Cohen somehow turns his raucous comedy into an utterly insightful look at whitewashed racism in American culture. When Borat speaks of women being men’s slaves, he’s told that women are equal to men in America. However, an incident with a bunch of rowdy frat boys reminds us that sexism is not as dead as people would like to think. Some might mistake the film as an exploitation of bigoted humor, but really it’s a masked expose on the prejudice we criticize in other countries that is still alive in our own. Sure, Cohen is going for his own share of gross out, jaw dropping, politically incorrect laughter, but he’s also asking us to question if political correctness makes sense when the hatred it’s meant to publicly eliminate is so prevalent beneath the surface.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is a joyously foolish and unexpectedly wise movie experience that breezes by, leaving you laughing, thinking, and stunned. It’s one of the brightest and most original comedies of the year.

Grade: A

Man of the Year

On his better days, Barry Levinson has masterminded classic comedies such as Rain Man and Wag the Dog. In his lesser moments, he’s been the culprit behind such schlock as Envy and most recently RV. Man of the Year is partly a return to form for the legendary Levinson. It toys with the sort of political satire that made Wag the Dog a masterpiece and hints at some of the emotional complexity that fueled Rain Man. Unfortunately, it mixes and mashes so many of these otherwise wonderful attributes that the film turns into a jumble of ideas and genres. It also has none of the bite or grip of Levinson’s earlier material. It’s a charming, funny but ultimately sour concoction that comes off as a toothless, softy rendition of Levinson’s greatest hits.

Nonetheless, Levinson is still leagues beyond most directors making contemporary mainstream comedies and his work here catches a wonderfully free spirited exuberance for much of its sadly overlong runtime. After oversulking in weird indies and going over the top in RV, Robin Williams finds himself in his first palatable comedy vehicle in some time. He brings a great mix of intelligence and zaniness to Tom Dobbs, the Jon Stewart-esque political comedian who becomes an unlikely presidential candidate. Williams' shtick carries the first half of the film briskly by as Dobbs leads a savvy anti-establishment campaign that hysterically disrupts the repressed conventional norms of today’s politics. When this routine wears thin, the film shifts into a sometimes functional but always off key conspiracy thriller storyline involving a voting scandal. It works mostly because its primary character, Eleanor Green, is played by the always brilliant Laura Linney who is able to make even the silliest things utterly convincing. Even though both the comedy and thriller plots do work briefly, neither storyline stays compelling for more than half the film. Plus, the anticlimactic finish uses an annoyingly neat and tidy montage to describe how everything turned out just fine. It’s a shameful waste of the good material that has come before it.

This is a mildly successful film that works well in some moments, but never pulls its interesting bits together in a way that feels satisfying to the viewer. It’s still one of the funnier and wiser comedies of recent months, particularly on this scale of release. Unfortunately, its jokes are just not sharp enough and its characters are just not deep enough. It’s good, but it’s not as good as it should have been.

Grade: B-

DVD of the Week: Down to the Bone

Vera Farmiga gives a searing performance in this low budget feature about a mother coping with drug addiction. It’s a thinly plotted gem that’s bolstered by the truthful performances and unglamorous camera work. The film really takes its viewers into the unpleasant world of drug addiction and eventually into the less than perfect rehabilitation system. It’s a very modestly tragic and honest film that follows the quiet unraveling of its vulnerable lead. Much like this year’s Sherrybaby, the story tells of a woman who simply cannot seem to fix her life despite her best efforts. In the end, it comes down to simply closing the door on bad influences.