The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a mesmerizing meditation on an American myth. Filmed with an eye for the haunting beauty of shadow and sparse, lush light, Jesse James radiates off the screen with a gorgeous visual glow that serves its story as much as it stands alone as its own worthy attraction. The sight of the film alone devastates, but when paired with the timeless tale of renegade cowboy and complex criminal mind Jesse James, it becomes one of the most visually and intellectually luminous American films of this or any year.

Here James (a brilliantly restrained Brad Pitt) is captured with a strange mix of cunning, cruelty, and devout kindness. He’s a decent minded family man who happens to rob banks and trains. He kills people. He doesn’t mind the deed. But there’s something eerily hateless to his idea of murder. It’s a fact of his life. It is not the extraordinary act other people see it to be. And in this way, simply through the distortion of his perception in comparison to most of society, the film reveals James to be the kind of monster that doesn’t necessarily evoke our immediate condemnation. He’s brilliantly fascinating, perhaps depressed for reasons even he doesn’t understand, and most of all, he actually seems to want to like and trust the people around him. He’s been through more than a few gang members in his time, and yet the film seems to suggest that he probably liked them all. He liked them even up until the moment he shot them dead out of necessity to his operation. What’s brilliant here, more so than any of the fabulous scenery or fun western plot points, is the sheer potency of the film’s look at the enigmatic James. It fills in blanks, makes some suggestions, and provides detail enough to nudge us in the right direction. What it doesn’t do is spell out his nature for us, crudely deducing by its own standards who he was and how he felt. We get the broad stroke portrait through narration and the like, but the details are laid on blank canvas, waiting for us to put together the pieces. The film is more squarely set in the mindset of Robert Ford (a soulful Casey Affleck at his fidgety best), the eventual assassin of the strangely beloved Wild West cowboy whose life was full of far less mystery and which, in turn, extracted no passionate interest from his peers as that of James did. We see James mostly as Ford sees him, a man looming in shadows and sitting by himself on back porches. He’s nice at times and terrifying at times. Sometimes he even cries, though we’re not sure why. For all the humanity the film brings to the story of James, the heavy historical background and the true to date sets and costumes, it cannot help but let him escape the film as more than a question mark than ever before. No matter how much information is known about him, no one can seem to pin down exactly who he was and the film justifiably concedes that it can bring us no closer to the answers we seek.

Grade: A

Into the Wild

Sean Penn’s adventure spirited Into the Wild is a long haul by all means, a 160 minute adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s novel of the same name chronicling the exodus from luxury made by a real life young man named Christopher McCandless (played here by Emile Hirsch). Following his graduation from Emory College, McCandless burns all his personal documents, donates his life savings to charity, and sets out penniless on a journey into the uncertainty of a hitchhiking lifestyle. His goal is to make his way to Alaska and immerse himself in its beautiful natural landscapes. Along the way he runs into a number of different characters (Catherine Keener, Kristen Stewart, and Vince Vaughn among others), picks up a number of small jobs here and there, and experiences the hardships of what he determines to be “a real life” unlike the life of comfortable lies he accuses his parents of forcing upon him.

The psychology of McCandless is never quite settled here. And maybe it shouldn’t be. What would drive anyone to undergo such a radical self-transformation could probably never be articulated by any words other than their own, and even then it would probably fall short of whatever clearly powerful internal experience they were having. The only shortcoming of this nature in the film is that McCandless comes off as hardly more than a brat for a brief time in the film. Eventually, his selfless behavior and all-around charming spirit warm him up, but in the early stages of his journey as he’s essentially laying the blame of all his woes on his well-intentioned, affectionate parents, who did mislead him and perhaps hurt him but never seem to have done anything to elicit such hatred, we sympathize more with them than him. But after all, this if a film about coming of age, and doing so in extreme ways. It’s Christopher McCandless’ experiences that grow him into a person we care for and in his concluding moments he reaches a mature realization that reminds us just how far he’s come from the snotty devil may care kid of the opening frames.

Penn’s got a steady hand in the delicate balance of time and place here. The film is edited with McCandless’ fate spelled out for us, leaving flashbacks to give us the details as to how he arrived in the Alaskan wilderness of his dreams. Much is done in montage, registering smaller points in mere flashes. Even with all this shorthand, the film still feels a bit long. But there’s no doubt it’s a visually arresting film with stunning nature photography. When the story stalls, there’s certainly more than enough visual style to admire. Besides, even in the dullest moment it’s almost impossible to take your eyes off of Hirsch, an actor who has seemingly been “the next big thing” for years and counting. He’s found his best, role yet in McCandless and he delivers a fearless, subtly affecting performance that resonates with “a star is born” charisma.

Grade: A-

DVD of the Week: Knocked Up

The fun never stops in Judd Apatow's career solidifying follow-up to The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up. Seth Rogen (Virgin, "Freaks and Geeks") plays a likable stoner who is all too happy to spend an evening with an out of his league television correspondent (Katherine Heigl) who ultimately changes his life with an entirely unexpected pregnancy. The two butt heads over conflicting lifestyles and dual hesitations, but strive to learn to like each other in spite of their differences. The result is as lovingly goofy and slyly sophisticated a relationship comedy as there has been all year. Also keep an out for the scene-stealing supporting cast, including Paul Rudd, Leslie Mann, Jason Segel, Jonah Hill, Jay Baruchel, Martin Starr, Alan Tudyk, and Kristen Wiig.

King Of California

Michael Douglas and Evan Rachel Wood play a dicey father/daughter duo in King of California, an offbeat comedy from first-time writer/director Michael Cahill that fits a certain modern Sundance prototype for films that are quirky but not too inaccessible and full of troubled characters with flaring crises of little to no real consequence. That’s not to say it’s bad. Or even that it’s unoriginal. The story is something I’ve never seen before, a weird cross between juvenile adventure and dysfunctional family comedy. It’s the tone, that very familiar, unchallenging bounce between featherweight comedy and featherweight drama with no real bite to either one, that rubs me the wrong way. There’s nothing really bold and exciting about this film. It all just rolls out easily with pleasant twists and turns and enjoyable characters, but nothing that’ll shake you to your core or lift you to a truly brighter frame of mind. It’s nice enough but nothing special.

Douglas does a daffy take on bipolar disorder here as Charlie, a recently released mental patient with the cutest little mental disorder you’ve ever seen. He’s mostly just unfettered and outspoken, particularly with his frustrated daughter Miranda (Wood), who’s been minding herself for the years Charlie was put away. Their dynamic is fun, sitcom-y banter mostly brightened by the role reversal of a responsible teen trying to reason with a spontaneous and short-tempered parent. There are some sweet moments between the two and some sad flashbacks to a more challenging time in both their lives that’s washed over here with all too much ease. Charlie has that very special brand of movie made mental illness where the greatest danger he poses to himself or his daughter is just some unwanted attention and embarrassment. It works in the context of this light comedy, but when you think about the situation of an unstable dad and a neglected young girl, you start wondering how the makers of this film let the conflict melt away so easily, with just a few sad beats in the midst of a screwball romp of pseudo-child abuse.

What’s mostly winning (and what saves the film) is that Wood and Douglas are each so good in their respective roles. They carry with them a level of commitment and sincerity that makes the whole film tick. Once Charlie has taken to the notion that there’s buried treasure beneath the nearest Costco (another delusion perhaps), the film settles into a nicely paced adventure with the two unlikely protagonists leading the charge to nab the Costco shielded stash. Charlie really believes that he’ll find the treasure, which he insists was left behind by the Spanish in the 16th century. Miranda wants to believe, but wants even more to have faith in her father and spend some time bonding with him after all these years. Their journey is fun to watch, sometimes mildly moving and very often a bit of a surprise. Even the dark moments here tread lightly, but sometimes a light touch and an easy to swallow film aren’t necessarily bad things.

Grade: B

DVD of the Week: Death Proof

It's a shame that the Rodriguez/Tarantino retro camp doublefeature Grindhouse will probably never make it to DVD in its original, 3 hour theatrical format. In theaters, it was more than even just two films. It was a time warp movie experience unlike anything ever released before, complete with fictitious "management" slides and faux trailers. If there's any benefit to the DVD split, though, it's that Tarantino's Death Proof now stands a chance at getting the respect it deserves. When placed after Robert Rodriguez's more outrageous and honest-to-goodness fun action flick Planet Terror (complete with Rose McGowan's now iconic machine gun appendage wearing stripper, Cherry) it felt like slow moving dud, especially since it didn't even begin to roll until almost 90 minutes into the "Grindhouse experience." As its own, separate feature Tarantino's more slow building, dialogue heavy film will hopefully not be seen as nothing more than a lethargic second course. It's the best, most adrenaline pumping chase film in years with great performances by a string of truly talented female actresses (Rosario Dawson, Vanessa Ferlito, Tracie Thoms, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, Mary-Elizabeth Winstead, Rose McGowan, and the truly unbelievable Zoe Bell doing real-life bone chilling stunt work) and a great, mustache twirling villainous turn by Kurt Russell as an evil stunt man who gets his jollies torturing poor girls with his "death proof" car. This is just a juicy, intense, and gleefully brutal chase/revenge flick that's leagues beyond the less addictive, sanitized special effects film of the modern action genre.

In the Valley of Elah

With In the Valley of Elah, Paul Haggis delivers a simmering melodrama that demonstrates a level of quiet intensity and perfectly restrained writing that many protested were lacking from his Oscar winning upset film, Crash. It’s likely to go less noticed, probably for that reason. It’s not a broadly painted crisis film with “oh, wow” moments of overlapping, connect the dots fun. It’s a disparate, grisly film of very raw emotion captured in note-perfect detail. There are certainly bigger picture social implications here, but they exist beyond the film, in conclusions made from its powerful story not lessons the film itself seems determined to teach.

Tommy Lee Jones gives yet another outstanding performance here as Hank Deerfield, the deeply unnerved yet eternally gruff father of an AWOL soldier who went missing sometime soon after returning from Iraq. Being a former military police officer, Deerfield takes it upon himself to investigate his son’s mysterious disappearance on his own, taking quite quickly outsmarting the surprisingly secretive military presence on the case and coercing a police detective (Charlize Theron as Det. Emily Sanders) to taking the case on as a civilian investigation. Living out of hotels, separate from his grieving wife back home (Susan Sarandon), Hank become something of a renegade loner haunted by memories of his son and aggressively pursuing his whereabouts.

The greatest strength to this film, and the clear product of Haggis and Jones’ superb collaboration, is the murky psychological explorations of Hank, his motives, and his emotional limits. He’s stoic, but endlessly captivating with rage and sadness just beneath the surface. It’s a riveting character study, a compelling mystery, and a timely story about the consequences of war on the psyches of its soldiers and the nation they represent.

Grade: A

Across the Universe

Across the Universe is not a film made for all audiences. Quite contrarily, it’s the sort of film made almost exclusively for imaginative, pleased to be indulged folk with no holdups over narrative inconsistencies or fatally contrived plot devices as long as its all done in the name of no holds barred adventurous song and dance spectacle. I absolutely loved every strange, enthralling, and beautiful frame of this film but even that didn’t blindside me enough to wipe clean the fact that there’s really just a certain notch of perfection absent from this movie. As great as it is, it never quite pulls together all of its overwhelmingly potential-filled elements into the flawless, note-perfect musical of a generation it longs to be. I really wish it did, but it simply doesn’t.

What it does do is revive, recycle, and reinvent some of the most iconic Beatles music and set each within a loose love story narrative and even more importantly, the time period from which the music emerged. In this new format, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” plays as the paean of a doe-eyed fifties teen, “Let It Be” is a sorrowful yet optimistic civil rights anthem, and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” becomes the cry of Uncle Sam for more and more young men to draft into the throws of the Vietnam War. The music is performed entirely by the primary cast with added input from special guests Bono, Joe Cocker, Eddie Izzard, and Salma Hayek (in a brief cameo). Jim Sturgess stars as the angel-voice Limey, Jude, who comes to America in search of his long lost father and immediately gets swept up into the fun loving antics of a rebellious young Princeton student named Max (Joe Anderson) and falls instantly for Max’s sister, Lucy, (Evan Rachel Wood). These 3 characters become like pawns driven across the country and through endless desperation in an effort to make them symbolic of the “Beatles generation” who grew from sweetheart teens into impassioned anti-war renegades and finally tripped through the psychedelic seventies with enough mental clarity to conclude that “All You Need Is Love.”

Despite the fact that these highly manipulated characters can sometimes feel like stiff cogs in a ravishing machine, they have enough humanity to make us care about them generally. The film itself is a whirling, fantastical journey through the sensory playland of director Julie Taymor’s whimsical and stunning visual style as voiced by the most timeless music catalogue of a century. Where genuine humanity fits into it, I’m not really sure. What I can say is that its spirit is moving in spite of its flaws (and perhaps even a little bit because of them). What it lacks in narrative structure is overcome by a raw creative energy that keeps you interested and intoxicated even when all logic has ceased. It operates in grand swells and mood movements, tugging and tearing at its audience until its created the gut reaction it desires. Anyone with a hope of seeing a cohesive, pristine narrative need not apply. Anyone seeking an unforgettably unique cinematic experience is very much encouraged to take the plunge.

Grade: A-

Trailers: Juno

Jason Reitman has seriously arrived. His debut, Thank You For Smoking , was one of the most inspired first-time efforts in years and now his second outing behind the director's chair, Juno, is stealing all the buzz at the Toronto Film Festival away from the stuffy period flicks and Oscar-bait. Opening in the the midst of all the major studio's bigtime award hopefuls (December 14th), Juno threatens to steal away some major prizes from more typically somber Oscar fare. Ellen Page (Hard Candy) stars as the titular teen who gets knocked up by Superbad's Michael Cera. Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman play potential adoptive parent's for Juno's baby in what looks like it will be another perfectly calibrated comedy from Reitman with perhaps a slightly softer touch despite a trailer that makes pretty clear that he has certainly not lost his cynical edge.

Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4vKs4pGsnM

Trailers: Southland Tales

Richard Kelly's endlessly delayed but highly anticipated follow up to the breakout cult hit Donnie Darko is finally coming to theaters on November 9th. It's been a rocky road to the big screen with the film sustaining a crushing blow of disapproval from audiences at Cannes and being subsequently trimmed and restructured by the self-admittedly frustrated Kelly who has been working to get this film off the ground for 5 years now. It's been preceded by a trilogy of absurd sci-fi meets pop art graphic novels (set conspicuously in the "near future" of 2008 with important, alternate history events occurring as early as 2005 - one of the most obvious reasons why delays have compromised the tales a bit) and while those haven't exactly sold me on the already heavily criticized film, nor does this trailer, I can't help but root for Kelly to pull out another cult crowd pleasing showstopper. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Sean William Scott star along with Darko alums Holmes Osborne and Beth Grant and a sprawling cast of recognizable names and faces.

Trailer
http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809233751/video/4164037/

The Hunting Party

Director Richard Shephard (The Matador) has found a fun niche with his lampoonish, rascally take on the action-thriller. With an assured, creatively frantic style, Shepherd turns assassins and criminals of war into part of a fun world of murder, adventure, and fabulously silly intrigue. He manages to keep his films sharp enough that they still grip us with the fear of violent consequences as the best action movies do, and yet we’re also left occasionally at ease, aware that sometimes it’s all just one big cataclysmic gag. The very best moments come when the two worlds collide and we’re left stunned where we’d thought we’d be laughing and chuckling where we expected to be repulsed. It’s a great, fresh world of ingenious storytelling and The Hunting Party is yet another fun ride made in this style.

Richard Gere stars as the fearless renegade journalist Simon Hunt, known best for his courageous and sometimes outright moronic desire to get right in the middle of some of the world’s most terrible and dangerous news stories. In spite of his impressive reputation, Simon washes out following a career-killing on-air meltdown in which he berates the network news anchor and launches into a personal tirade. Years later, Simon has become something of a myth, showing up independently with personal film crews at major events, some people claiming to have seen him, others insisting he’s dead. He doesn’t turn up for sure again until 2000 when former partner Duck (Terrence Howard) runs into him unexpectedly while covering the 5th anniversary of the end of the Bosnian civil war with an inexperienced son of a network exec (Jesse Eisenberg). Hunt makes a tantalizing proposition: he knows where the infamous war criminal “The Fox” is hiding and he wants to sniff him out despite the failings of the United Nations and CIA to do the same. Soon enough the three ragtag journalists have formed their own comically under prepared search party and what they discover will shock even them.

Shephard has crafted a hilarious and engaging political satire that takes major world organizations to task and still manages to let us have a good time. As chronicled in the New York Magazine article on which the film is based, the actions of the UN, NATO, and other alliances to thoroughly pursue war criminals in Bosnia left much to be desired. Perhaps the most enjoyable flourish in the film is a coda that clarifies for us which characters and events in the film were true and which were added embellishments for the sake of the narrative. As the film confesses in its first frame, “Only the most ridiculous parts of this story are true.”

Grade: B+

Eastern Promises

A crime thriller by nature but an enigma in execution, Eastern Promises picks up the pieces of David Cronenberg’s scattershot A History of Violence and solidifies the auteur’s transition into the hard-boiled crime genre with vision and panache. It’s a more consistent, universally powerful feature than Violence and while Cronenberg never seems to narrow down the field of thematic strands into one singular message, it cannot be denied that Promises is a real thrill, unlike the more tepid contemporary thrillers that we’ve seen in the past year.

You can kind of deduce where Eastern Promises is going just by looking at it. The major “revelations” feel more like moments in which the film confirms certain inevitable truths. It’s trying to be a shocking, shape-shifting mystery of sorts and, I’m sad to say, in that respect it fails. But I’d also never say I was let down by a single development. They may be guessable but there are all splendidly done. There’s perhaps not as many real twists here as there are thrusts of harrowing excitement. It’s a jolt of a film that in spite of some foreseeable reversals of fortune, delivers chills and excitement with some truly original cinematic moments of ruthless, maddeningly intense violence.

Viggo Mortensen is a stoic revelation as Nokalai, a driver and entry level member of the vory v zakone, a Russian gang whose London division is headed by Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and his delinquent alcoholic son, Kirill (Vincent Cassel). When a young doctor named Anna (Naomi Watts) discovers that a 14 year-old girl who died during childbirth had ties to the gang, she begins her own amateurish investigation, at first innocently and unknowingly approaching the vory v zakone’s restaurant hangout simply because its name appeared on a business card found in the girl’s diary. Following this uncomfortable initial encounter, her suspicions become raised and she makes it her personal business to translate the young girl’s diary and get to the bottom of this twisted story.

Eastern Promises is a real pleasure to watch. It unfolds with a flawless ease, excellently written, directed, and performed all around. Save for a few moments of over-explanatory closure near the film’s end that feel awfully sentimental and contrived for someone as bold as Cronenberg, this is a standout feature that should set trends for more complacent gangster garbage.

Grade: A-

Silk

There is a great difference between films with actual depth and those that simply ape the attributes of sincere filmmaking. Sadly, Silk falls into the latter category. Adapted from Alessandro Baricco’s novel of the same name, Silk tells the story of a military officer named Herve (Michael Pitt) who, under orders from a wealthy French merchant (Alfred Molina), makes the arduous journey to Japan to trade for silk eggs suitable for replacing the incurably diseased French supply of silkworms. Once he reaches Japan, he becomes intoxicated with its many attractions, most notably one particular young concubine (Sei Ashina) who threatens to topple his blissful marriage to Helene (Keira Knightley).

If there is any joy to this film it is certainly in its visual splendor. Baricco’s work provides elegant period details and multiple international settings which are perfectly suited to be captured in stunning tableaus. From the lush lives of French aristocrats to the more barren side of Japanese tradesmen, the film creates beautiful, portrait-like scenes of extreme beauty. Director François Girard (The Red Violin) has a dramatic flair for filming landscapes and intricately dressed sets with atmospheric grace. This is, no doubt, a pretty film to look at.

This, of course, makes it especially sad to note that despite its loveliness, the film is an outright snoozer. There is not even the faintest trace of believable emotion in any of these characters. It rings false from start to finish with disappointingly flat performances from the talented cast. Pitt and Knightley could easily rank in anyone’s top 10 picks for the best of young Hollywood, but here they both deliver their lines with a dullness akin to a bad high school production of a classic text. Herve’s love for Helene is grounded in nothing more than a narration by Herve telling us he loves her. We see them smile and we see them making small talk together. What we never see is a scene in which the connection between the two is illuminated to a satisfying extent, something to make us feel the pangs of disappointment when Herve betrays his beloved wife while lingering in Japan with his concubine. Though, that’s not to say that this second relationship is made to seem any more sensible. For someone so in love with his wife, Herve seems to have no remorse in almost instantaneously bedding his new female obsession. And it’s not a particularly scintillating love affair either. The film is, in every respect, passionless, a vacantly beautiful mess that makes no coherent sense. It feels often like a mixed up jumble of crisscrossing plots and emotions, sort of like reading the Cliffs Notes to a novel that’s too grand and complex to be reduced to a barebones storytelling vessel. Somewhere buried beneath the interminable monotony is the kernel of an idea for a much more impressive film but what exists here is merely a lovely exterior with absolutely no soul, the cinematic equivalent of fine china, pleasing to the eyes but not at all functional or remarkable beyond its general suggestion of sophisticated taste.

Grade: D+

DVD of the Week: Away from Her

Veteran screen actress Julie Christie shines in this heartbreaking debut feature from indie starlet turned writer/director Sarah Polley. Christie is absolutely radiant and irrefutably authentic as a woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Gordon Pinsent gives an equally impressive performance as her frustrated but eternally committed husband. He stands by his wife despite how distant she grows and how little of their life together she can remember. Its heartbreaking subject matter can make it difficult to watch at times but Away from Her is truly a character drama of the highest caliber.

3:10 to Yuma

James Mangold’s take on the 1957 Western classic 3:10 to Yuma, both adapted from the same Elmore Leonard story, proves to be a satisfyingly mounted modernization of the timeless Western tale. Russell Crowe takes over as the nefarious, suspiciously charming renegade thief Ben Wade. Christian Bale steps into the shoes of Dan Evans, a kindly down on his luck rancher. The two cross paths under less than ideal circumstances and soon Evans, desperate for cash to save his family’s farm, takes the dangerous gig of escorting Wade to the prison train that will take him to Yuma. The difficulty being that Wade is a much respected figure amongst crooks and thieves and his truly psychopathic band of followers are not likely to let him go without a messy fight.

If there’s a major difference between this version of Yuma and its predecessor, it’s in the length and efficiency of telling the tale. To be honest, the newer version, despite amping up the action to unexpected new heights, can still seem a bit slow at times. It tangles itself in subplots and bit characters where the original was as sparse and clean a narrative as could be dreamed. Judging it fairly, and on its own merits, there’s no reason to really condemn the new version. As could be expected, Crowe and Bale are both stellar in their roles. Bale, in particular, takes Evans to a more desperate, passionate place than anticipated. And while both men keep the film sailing along wonderfully, it’s Mangold’s stellar eye that keeps this thing standing tall beyond the more stunning moments of performance from the two. Even in the slower parts, it’s an undeniably beautiful film to look at with dusty, small town landscapes captured in brilliantly vivid color detail that could not be matched technologically by the black and white original, stunning though it may be.

It’s reassuring to see that there’s at least some interesting alterations made in this new version. It thankfully doesn’t play like a beat by beat recapitulation of the original’s story. Not every new twist works, but the gut-wrench ruthless attitude it’s taken toward the previously more peaceable Western genre (a trend of modernization certainly not invented here but utilized well nonetheless) is just enough of a reinvention to keep this remake fresh. It’s a well-done entry into a intensely waning genre that seems due for a comeback.

Grade: B

I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With

Actor Jeff Garlin makes the transition to writer/director with a fun blend of shlubby average joe gags and more sophisticated comedy banter. One minute he’s making jokes about Aldous Huxley and Paddy Chayefsky and the next he’s slumming it with riffs on naked actresses and lewd sexual acts. It’s a high end/low brow mash up that’s much like a cross between the sensibilities of Woody Allen and Kevin Smith.

While Garlin’s style is a pleasantly fresh blend for the romantic comedy genre, the story of I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With is ultimately too thin to perfectly sustain itself for even its brief 80 minute runtime. Garlin plays an actor named James who may as well be named Jeff Garlin. He lives at home with his mother, binge eats nightly on junk food from a local convenience store, works days as an improv comic at Second City, and spends nights getting entangled in pleasant yet awkward romantic situations. The film’s title is a sweet lift from a scene in which James and his maybe-date ice cream scooper, Beth (Sarah Silverman), watch a couple eating cheese serenely at a picnic and together decide that they too want someone to picnic with. The problem is that Beth has many quirks and might even be slightly unhinged. Better to further scout Chicago for other women including a chance encounter turned into a potential fling with Stella (Bonnie Hunt). The biggest quest for James, though, isn’t the discovery of the perfect woman. He’s actively pursuing the title role in what he considers to be a wildly unnecessary remake of Marty and seeking to revolutionize his unhealthy way of life.

I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With is no masterpiece but is has its charms. Garlin’s got a great gift for creating surprisingly authentic moments for the funny yet emotionally wounded James. It’s a sharp, well-rounded character with great wit and warmth. I only with he had a fuller film to occupy. This is just too sparse and simple to hold Garlin’s greatly likable persona.

Grade: B-

Romance & Cigarettes

At this point, John Turturro’s long delayed indie musical Romance & Cigarettes is better known for its dilemmas than its content. Filmed in 2005 for a reported budget of $11 million and featuring and A-list cast, Turturro’s third outing as a director was poised to be his biggest film yet. Then some negative press emerged, Sony and United Artists got themselves caught up in a dispute over who had distribution rights following a messy consolidation, and suddenly the film fell off the radar. Now the movie is resurfacing in a very limited release at the hands of no studio at all, but through the will of Turturro alone who managed to acquire the rights for himself. Instead of being permanently shelved, it will now have a brief theatrical life. The news is good for those involved, who seem indisputably passionate about this experimental project, but perhaps not for audiences who may or may not take to its off the wall style and boldly outrageous musical numbers.

Near to the very start of Turturro’s hit-or-miss foul-mouthed musical comedy, Nick Murder (James Gandolfini) walks out of his house after splitting with his furious wife (Susan Sarandon) and begins to sing Englebert Humperdinck’s “A Man Without Love.” Not only does Gandolfini sing it. Soon the street cleaners and gardeners are singing and dancing behind him. The whole neighborhood bursts into ridiculous, nearly comical, pop music rapture. At that point, you’re either with this movie or you’ve called it quits. And even if you’re willing to stick with it and embrace the gimmicky nonsense Turturro has devised, it’d be hard to really love this film from start to finish. The musical numbers have a sort of clever, cheeky goodness to them. They’re winkingly outrageous and yet surprisingly efficient at encapsulating emotional expressions made by each character and linking together narrative threads from the many subplots at work. The real bummer here is that the film isn’t all one big down and dirty song and dance show. It’s also a turgid melodrama about a crumbling marriage and the ugliness of love. The dramatic material sinks the characters like stones, repeating the same tired arguments and turning them all into blubbering fools alternating between being lovesick and sick of love.

It’s a unique cinematic vision, sporadically entertaining, and certainly never dull. Unfortunately, it’s also a sometimes unwatchable mess of film with wild, uneven pacing. It’s a concept so out there, that each scene is a new risk and only half or so of them really pay off. The biggest triumphs come from those starring Kate Winslet as Tula, Nick’s fiery red-headed mistress. Whether she’s singing along with wild glee to Connie Francis’ performance of “Scapricciatiello” or mouthing to the devastating wail of Ute Lemper’s version of Nick Cave’s “Little Water Song” (staged dramatically and quite literally as a an under water warble) she’s a force of nature in the somewhat underwritten part. All those who marveled at her unexpected edge in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind will be further stunned by her unabashed passion and filthy mouth here as Tula. It’s a real accomplishment for her as an actress to transcend the film’s lunacy and make us root for someone the film all but rules out as a sly and evil temptress. The greatest shame is that Tula, like most of the film’s characters, gets no great resolution. The last 20 minutes or so of this project are disgustingly sentimental and entirely unenjoyable, leading to a shamefully half-hearted reconciliation of sorts between Nick and his wife that’s motivated by tragedy and never really earned.

Grade: C+

News: "3:10 to Yuma" Featurettes

Here are some more sneak peeks at James Mangold's upcoming Western, 3:10 to Yuma. The film stars Christian Bale and Russell Crowe and hits theaters Friday. Below are links to some featurettes about the production of the film.

Featurette 1 – Story:
http://www.specialopsmedia.com/assets/Lionsgate/310ToYuma/Podcast_Story.zip

Featurette 2 – Ben and Dan:
http://www.specialopsmedia.com/assets/Lionsgate/310ToYuma/Ben_Wade_and_Dan_Evans.zip

News: "The Nines" Audio Commentary

John August is offering up a unique repeat viewing experience for fans of his new movie, The Nines. Anyone who's seen it knows that it's a trippy, complex story that absolutely demands a commentary explaining its many secrets. Well instead of waiting until the DVD release to offer this feature, John August and Ryan Reynolds have recorded a downloadable audio commentary that you can play on any portable music device while watching the film in theaters. So, once you've seen The Nines you can run back out and see it again with added information funnelling in through your headphones.

AUDIO COMMENTARY:
http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/the-nines-audio-commentary

DVD of the Week: Stephanie Daley

Amber Tamblyn and Tilda Swinton are superb in this intimate, heartbreaking drama about the darker aspects of pregnancy and motherhood. Swinton plays a pregnant forensic psychiatrist still mourning the memory of a child she never carried to term. She's investigating Stephanie Daley (Tamblyn), a local all-American teen girl who's been accused of murdering her child in a bathroom stall to avoid the social embarrassment of being a mother at sixteen. The film, consisting largely of long talks between the two, is a gripping and sometimes utterly devastating drama about life in all its stages.

The Top 10 Indies of Summer 2007 (Part 2)

5. Sunshine - Director Danny Boyle continues to expand his horizons with his latest feature, Sunshine. The film is an epic sc-fi odyssey chronicling the dramatic challenges standing in the way of a team of brilliant scientists on a mission to reignite the dying Sun and save Earth from certain doom. The enthralling measure of atmospheric brilliance that Boyle brings to this outer space thriller transforms a potentially hokey sci-fi setup into a metaphysical masterwork. The ultimate threat for these characters isn’t really any looming technological or biological disaster. It’s the devastating frailty of the human psyche. Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, and Michelle Yeoh star.

4. Rescue Dawn - Werner Herzog dipped back into his well of inspiring stories to make Rescue Dawn, readapting his documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly into a feature length narrative drama about prisoners of war in Laos during the early stages of the American conflict with Vietnam. Christian Bale stars as the resourceful, goodhearted Dieter, an American Navy pilot who crash lands during his very first mission. He eventually befriends his fellow prison inmates, including Jeremy Davies and Steve Zahn in the best performances of their respective careers, and begins hatching a plot to make an escape. Bale is the real standout here. He gives what is perhaps the greatest performance by any leading actor in a feature so far this year and along the way he reaffirms his status as one of the most versatile and committed actors of his generation

3. Rocket Science - You’ve just got to love Rocket Science. Jeffrey Blitz directs this tale of high school betrayals and debate team drama with a pitch-perfect seriocomic tone and a sharp eye for detail. In an age where teenage awkwardness is its own multi-million dollar brand, Rocket Science stands out as the most painfully honest look at misspent youth in at least the last decade. Credit is also due to its cast of brilliant young actors, including Reece Thompson as the unlikely, stuttering would-be debate champion and Anna Kendrick as his complex mentor with mysterious motives.

2. The Nines - The Nines is the best mind bender in years, something of a mixture between the sensibilities of Donnie Darko and Adaptation with an even more elaborate, cheeky surreal world at stake and even richer philosophical questions at its hidden core. Ryan Reynolds and Hope Davis lead a troupe of actors playing 3 different characters in 3 different stories that each overlap and bleed into one another in surprising ways. Part L.A. satire and part puzzle box mystery, consider it David Lynch-lite or maybe a heavier, headier cousin to the work of Charlie Kaufman. What’s particularly satisfying is that the film forgoes some of the more frustrating inconclusiveness of both of those fine talents’ many works. It’s less of mood piece than a hindsight revelation. In the end, the core of the film is revealed and all the pieces come together. Everything that seemed inexplicable gets explained and all the ambiguity that existed before evolves into perfect clarity. It’s a conclusion that’s outrageous and unforeseeable but never feels like anything close to a cheat.

1. Once - Once is a breathtaking film of simple beauty that threatens to revolutionize an entire genre. The musical has long been the muse of those aspiring to spectacle productions and glamorous song and dance routines. Once is just the opposite. It’s a lovely little gem of almost no budget that features fairly ordinary musicians singing sparse songs in drab, authentic locales in and around the streets of Dublin. Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard of The Frames star as two street musicians who meet one another by chance and have a passionate musical fling in which they express increasingly more personal feelings to one another over several days of musical collaboration. It’s the movie musical reinvented for the modern culture of indie rock, iPods, and DIY filmmaking.

The Nines

John August’s directorial debut, The Nines, is probably the best and most unexpected mind bender since Richard Kelly’s explosive debut, Donnie Darko. It’s set in a world within a world that may or may not be real and may or may not be a parallel universe. It’s a difficult film to reasonably assess without giving away at least a few of its twisty transformations, so anyone wishing to savor its splendid ambiguities in all their glory might want to steer clear of all press materials just to be safe.

Ryan Reynolds stars as at least three different variations on one character: a Hollywood star under house arrest, a screenwriter working on a network pilot, and a game designer with a wife and child. He’s joined by Hope Davis, Melissa McCarthy, and Elle Fanning who also play multiple versions of similar characters. Each character, like each new narrative strand, mysteriously overlaps with elements from other parts of the film in captivating ways, making the movie something of a big jigsaw puzzle just waiting for all the pieces to come together. Thankfully, August delivers a final reveal that marvelously explains all the events that came before it. More importantly, he creates multiple engaging worlds, each with interlocking significances and very funny, interesting characters. Each scene works as just a scene between characters. The larger framework is just an added bonus. The greater level that all of the characters are operating on is not made clear for some time, but they never once feel like cogs in a machine. It’s a brilliantly realized vision from start to finish.

The Nines is a lot of things: a L.A. satire, multiple character dramas, a “big picture” mystery. And all of it links thematically to the notion of the supreme disillusionment of the creative process, getting involved in fiction (films, TV, video games), so completely that the real world and the virtual world bleed into one another. Be patient. Keep focused. Enjoy the ride.

Grade: A

Dedication

There’s not too much to hold against Dedication but there’s also not too much to distinguish it either. It’s quite a quintessential Sundance styled melancholy romance. Billy Crudup plays Henry, a neurotic, troubled children’s book writer with a nasty temper and a self-destructive impulse to push people away. Mandy Moore plays Lucy, the sweetheart who’s just goodhearted enough to chip away at Henry’s prickly persona and get him to open up. In this case, she’s being forced to work with him as an illustrator for his in-demand sequel to the children’s book The Christmas Dam about a rascally beaver named Marty. The conundrum is that Henry’s previous illustrator, the recently deceased Rudy (Tom Wilkinson), was also his only friend and the closest thing he’s ever had to a father figure, making Henry twice as defensive about anyone proposing to replace him.

The film starts off on the wrong note (with an extended setup of Henry and Rudy’s seedy misadventures), but eventually readjusts itself into a more suitably moody brooding boy meet girl romantic comedy. Those craving original characters and experimental filmmaking will scowl at the largely familiar character types here and their clichéd Garden State-esque dreary emotional problems. Anyone who’s not scared of a good indie cliché, though, will learn to see past the familiar façade and become fond of these likable characters. They are funny and sympathetic in ways that only characters in sweetheart romantic comedies ever really are, but that doesn’t stop them from being enjoyable. The screenplay has a lot of clever dialogue bolstered by great performances all around, particularly by Crudup who makes his cantankerous maniac lead character somehow seem sweet. At the very least, the movie features some great indie music (as every responsible Sundance fave seems to do lately), including memorable cues for songs by Deerhoof, Cat Power, and Joanna Newsom.

Grade: B