Crazy Heart

First time director Scott Cooper brings to life the novel by Thomas Cobb with a central performance by Jeff Bridges as washed up country star Bad Blake that is rightfully garnering the veteran actor a great deal of Oscar buzz. Bridges is a hulking, soulful mess in the film, balancing the passion of musical performance with the jaded edge of a star past his prime. Maggie Gyllenhaal also does fine work as Jean Craddock, a local reporter enamored of Bad who quickly falls for the singer's rough charms. Crazy Heart charts the couples growing relationship, Bad's failing career and lifelong addictions, and the road to redemption ahead of him. Colin Farrell and Robery Duvall round out the cast in modest performances as Bad's former guitarist turned country superstar Tommy Sweet and Bad's longtime friend and bar owner respectively.

Crazy Heart is by definition a small film. It's built around conversations and life choices. Characters get in a room together and we observe their interactions. It's brilliantly done and so simple and authentic it would be easy to overlook the power of its skillful writing and winning performances. It's no small feat to compose such fully realized characters and craft a compelling narrative out of their simple interactions. Crazy Heart is a compelling, whiskey-drenched story of love and loss that is as bittersweet as reality and as easy to settle into as ordinary life.

The movie is also backed by a strong set of bluesy country rock songs penned by T Bone Burnett and Stephen Bruton. The duo create an extensive and impressive back catalog for Bad Blake's live shows that's wholly believable as the roster for an iconic country superstar. The film also features a moving theme, "The Weary Kind," penned by Burnett and Ryan Bingham. Bridges is incredibly adept at performing on stage both in voice and in presence. He gives the impression of being an old pro so easily that the performance becomes an entrancing act of artificial reality. Farrell too nicely handles the musical side of the film as a believably slick modern country crooner. The music only adds to the atmosphere of the already strongly rendered dramatic portions of the film, making this one of the strongest musical features of the year.

Grade: A-

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

Director Terry Gilliam brings us yet another oddball tale of fantasy and morality in a very neat, visually exciting package. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus tells the tale of the weary and immortal Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), a disciple of imagination and storytelling in a century's long battle with the devil (Tom Waits) who has come to claim the soul of his daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole), on her 16th birthday (the price of one of their many wagers). To avoid losing his daughter, Parnassus agrees to yet another wager. He takes his flagging, dilapidated travelling show on the road along with companions Percy (Verne Troyer) and Anton (Andrew Garfield) on a quest to gather up righteous souls through the use of his enchanted magical mirror. The first to five souls wins. Along the way, the crew picks up the mysterious Tony (Heath Ledger in his final role) who upsets the long established traditions of the imaginarium and may have ulterior motives of his own.

Gilliam presents a fast-moving, fun-loving, "put on a show" type energy throughout most of the film which makes up for some of the rickety narrative components. It is, after all, a fantasy and a little botched logic is of no consequence. What's ever present is the weird charm of the imaginarium and its ragtag collection of characters. It's a form of entertainment so dated and desperate that you can't help but feel misplaced nostalgia for the weird sideshow antics they perform. The "behind the mirror" sequences of surreal fantasy are uneven but mostly fun. They're actually more interesting for what they bring out in the characters than for the colorful visuals which are more playful and silly than uniquely captivating. One of the most interesting and oddly seamless devices is the replacement of Ledger (who died mid filming) with a trio of peers when his character Tony slips into the world of imagination. Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell all pick up where Ledger leaves off with great class, honoring the actor with great performances which compliment his work perfectly. The process also stresses the two-faced quality of the shifty Tony and brings to the forefront his desires to be someone else entirely.

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is a lively, inventive, fun romp which carries on with great energy up to a fairly predictable but nonetheless satisfying conclusion. It's not Gilliam's best film but it offers a concentrated dose of some of the qualities which have made him such an admirable pioneer in years past.

Grade: B

DVD Pick: Jennifer's Body

In hindsight, Jennifer's Body never really could have been anything more than a cult hit, which hopefully it one day will be. Body is a rare thing: a horror film with a female perspective. Best friends Jennifer (Megan Fox) and Needy (Amanda Seyfried) are pinned against one another in the aftermath of Jennifer's abduction by renegade emo rockers and eventual sacrifice to the devil (to the tune of "867-5309/Jenny," no less). The result being a succubus possessed Jen who feeds on the bodies of teenage boys. Consider it Heathers with The Exorcist spiked in for good measure. Writer Diablo Cody and director Karyn Kusama have crafted a nifty piece of pop horror with underlying wit and smarts, painting one high school girl's descent into darkness with broad horror overtones that grab at the Twilight generation without losing the core allegory for abuse and subsequent destruction.

Nine

Daniel Day-Lewis, the unstoppable master of all things thespian, somehow manages to transition from transformative character actor to leading man of a movie musical in Nine. Granted, his Guido Contini is a tortured genius film director with fantastical musical memories and not exactly a Fred Astaire-type song and dance man. Still, the two-time Oscar winner shows off yet another layer of depth here as he brushes off a pleasant singing voice and some modest hoofing skills in director Robert Marshall's largely theatrical movie about the cinema. Though Nine is being adapted for the screen, Marshall envisions it as something like a stage show mixed with visual snippets of story and information. Footage of actual narrative blends with basic soundstage dance numbers rather than integrated song and dance. The results are mixed but mostly charming based on the sheer force and energy of each song's delivery.

Guido is also matched by an ensemble of extraordinary Hollywood women doing some of their best, most playful work. Throughout the film, Guido, a womanizing, self-destructive cad, juggles visions of his wife (Marion Cotillard), his mistress (Penelope Cruz), his muse (Nicole Kidman), his saucy friend and colleague (Judi Dench), a flirtatious reporter (Kate Hudson), his childhood seductress (Fergie), and his dead mother (Sophia Loren). Each of the 7 women get their chance to shine in a fiery solo and together they present a map of Guido's darkly self-serving mind.

It would be fair to criticize Rob Marshall's Nine as an indulgent, over-the-top collection of disconnected musical moments. The narrative (based on the Broadway musical of the same name which itself is based on 8 1/2) flies free and only casually touches on key plot points. And while the "musical fantasy" format worked perfectly in Marshall's breakthrough Chicago, the performance numbers here (also imagined) mix less neatly with the narrative dialogue scenes. All of this is true and yet the performances by the massive big-name ensemble are so wonderful and Marshall's visual style as a stage director is so strong that the film still works far better than it logically should. By film's end, Marshall's odd visual rhythms start to feel precise and the unhummable, melodramatic score (written by Maury Yeston) starts to fully develop its charms. This is a transporting effort which, if resisted, will be grating but when indulged can be a wholly satisfying visual and musical spectacle.

Grade: B+

The Lovely Bones

Director Peter Jackson's well-intentioned adaptation of The Lovely Bones, the popular novel by Alice Sebold, is a visual treat but an emotional dud. The film depicts the tragic death and afterlife of young Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) who is stalked and killed by an eerie neighbor (Stanley Tucci). While her parents, played by Mark Wahlberg and Rachel Weisz, try to uncover the truth of what happened to their daughter, Susie explores a magical world in between our earth and her future heaven. She observes and interacts, in small ways, with her grieving family as both parties learn to cope with what has transpired.

The first third or so of the film is a very stunning and well-acted tale of foreboding obsession, leading to a chilling end. It's in the latter part of the film that Jackson desperately loses his way. Splitting the narrative between Susie's dream-like, CGI rendered other world and the very grim real world, the film becomes a disjointed mess. Character motivations become questionable, style takes over from substance, and the eventual resolution is an unsatisfying, inconsequential throwaway complete with creepy possessed teenager makeout sessions and an afterthought punishment of Tucci's sinister villain that offers no closure. The tone skips all over from a teen fantasy, to a goofy Grandma Lynn montage (starring a boozy Susan Sarandon), to a dangerous murder mystery. Thankfully, the cast remains game in spite of all the missteps, namely 15 year-old Ronan who carries the film with aplomb and the versatile Stanley Tucci who gives a chilling performance that grounds the film with vivid and believable terror. Despite the fact that several sequences in this film are utterly breathtaking, the overall picture is a mixed bag that only gets worse as it goes on until none of the characters or the story really matter anymore.

Grade: C+

Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans

Eclectic director Werner Herzog makes a confounding detour with a loose remake of the 1992 Abel Ferrara film Bad Lieutenant starring Harvey Keitel. Set in a post-Katrina New Orleans, the new Lieutenant stars Nicolas Cage in a hammy, scenery chewing performance as Terence McDonagh, a coke addicted lieutenant with less than legitimate police procedures who is investigating the drug related murder of a family. The cast also features Val Kilmer as McDonagh's partner, Eva Mendes as his junkie prostitute girlfriend, rapper Xzibit as prime suspect Big Fate, and some small character work by talented actors such as Michael Shannon, Fairuza Balk, and Jennifer Coolidge.

Determining whether this is a good film or a bad film is a near impossibility. In so many respects it is an absolutely awful film. The film is manic, random, and fueled by a dark sense of chaos. Every actor is playing at the top of their crazy register. And there are several completely ridiculous scenes based on the central character's hallucinatory habits, including one with an unbearably long close-up of imaginary iguanas. Yet weirdly it is those same ludicrous qualities which might make Bad Lieutenant enjoyable for some viewers. The film is a pure pulp spectacle and seems to be consciously constructed as such. In other words, the kooky crime antics and nutso performance by Cage all play into a fairly consistent vision by Herzog which may captivate audiences with its weirdness. The spectacle just doesn't carry enough actual drama, humor, or suspense to make this worth seeing all that much. This is definitely a niche work for gunfight lovers and gritty cop gurus.

Grade: C

Up In The Air

Director Jason Reitman continues his mastery of the American comedy with yet another winning, mainstream, character-driven effort that is as timely as it is perfectly classic. George Clooney steps seamlessly into the Cary Grant-type dapper cad role he was born to play as Ryan Bingham, a carefree soul who fires people for a living and does a little part-time lecturing about the unnecessary baggage of a home and family. He strikes up a shallow flirtation with an equally commerce hungry woman named Alex (Vera Farmiga) and lives his life with no strings attached. His great ambition is to amass 10 million frequent flier miles and join an elite club of travel snobs to have done so. Plans go awry when whip smart Cornell grad Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick resurrecting essential and beautifully crass elements of her breakthrough character from Rocket Science) proposes a cost effective reformatting of the company that would take workers off the road and have them do their firing duties via web cam. Bingham's objections to the system, which would ground his loose and unburdened lifestyle, leads his boss (Jason Bateman) to stick him on the road with Keener in an attempt to give her the work experience necessary to address Bingham's own complaints.

The film is a savvy blend of comedy and drama, sentiment and snark. It's so elementary and yet it stands out among most modern comedies as one of the few to really invest in characters and story instead of perpetrating low grade stupidity and begging for cheap laughs. Reitman has managed a natural flow that both feels realistic and maintains a certain radiant sheen that makes this as strong an effort to wear it's Hollywood glamour on its sleeve all year. Reitman couldn't not have sensed 1940s Grant in the writing of Ryan Bingham or missed the neatly cynical way his incorporation of depressing "firing testimonials" mirrors Rob Reiner's "real couple testimonials" in the structure of When Harry Met Sally. Many decades worth of romance and comedy get wisely condensed in this fine feature which still undoubtedly adds its own sharp, unique and particularly unmissable spin on all the tropes it recycles. Up In The Air is a moving, funny, and highly enjoyable film that will hopefully become as much of a breakout hit as Reitman's previous comic wonder, Juno. With each of his 3 films, the director has surpassed expectations and proved that fast, feeling, and funny films are far from lost on modern film audiences.

Grade: A

Avatar

Avatar is a much-hype passion project for director James Cameron (Aliens, Terminator 2, Titanic) with roots that reportedly extend as far back as 20 years in the director's life and an astronomical budget which has been rumored to be in the hundreds of millions. Despite all that effort and all that money, the product is a straight dud. While Avatar is technically impressive, it fails as cinema.

The film tells the story of paralyzed war vet Jack Sully (Sam Worthington) who gets conveniently swept into a top secret mission to another planet when his genius twin brother is murdered, leaving him as the only person with the biological makeup to operate the required avatar machinery needed for the job. On the planet of Pandora, a species known as the Na'vi have been recently infiltrated by the human race. In an attempt to meld cultures, the humans create Na'vi bodies for themselves to virtually inhabit in order to better interact with the natives, a tribal society of nature loving warriors with an infinite connection to their home planet. The reckless Jack somehow manages to draw the attention of Na'vi princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and become accepted into the tribe. Eventually the humans' strictly commercial interests conflict with the Na'vi way of life and Jack must choose between his species and the new family he has discovered.

With a script more careful to overexplain made up traditions and languages than to make any sort of rational sense, Avatar plays like a very indulgent space fable designed by people with too much heart and not enough brains. Moreover, it's a very grotesquely simplified feature which pins the ultra pure and innocent native Na'vi against a vision of humanity so outrageously exaggerated and cartoonish that somehow an easy target such as American corporate greed somehow manages to not get a fair shake in this mess. Sigourney Weaver plays Grace, a rare good-hearted human who runs the scientific portion of the avatar program. Meanwhile, actors Giovanni Ribisi and Stephen Lang accept the task of playing an executive and a colonel respectively who are each so disgusting as to commit genocide without a thought. These are not nuanced, complex characters. Neither are the Na'vi in most respects. Certainly, Cameron crafted a very specific history and world for them to inhabit but they are largely interchangeable, dull and lacking motivation. There's no clear moment where Neytiri falls for Jack. She just does. In a montage. Because she's the female character in the movie and that's what the female characters does. Jack too is a bit of a blank slate who makes radical life choices on a near whim and then fights to the death in a battle that comes too late to really matter.

For all the fine craft of Cameron's visual wonderland, this is a clunky overlong narrative burdened by poor writing and a preachy tone so bombarding as to irritate even apolitical ears. Viewers may still find it worth the experience to witness what Cameron has done, but anyone expecting an effective and well-composed feature will be sadly disappointed.

Grade: D

A Single Man

Fashion designer Tom Ford delivers a very accomplished film debut in A Single Man which stars Colin Firth as George Falconer, a heartbroken college professor mourning the loss of his long time partner, Jim (Matthew Goode), in 1962 Los Angeles. A broken man, George proceeds to plan his own suicide and sets out to live his very last day. He gives a particularly passionate, unprofessional, and unjaded lecture in his college classroom and unintentionally inspires interest from the sexually ambiguous Kenny (Nicholas Hoult) who follows George after class to pick his brain and invite himself to coffee. Julianne Moore gives a playful performance as a lush drunk named Charley who is madly in love with George to no avail. They share a dance and a drink and contemplate their intertwining misguided lives. Whether George will go through with his plan remains a question mark as fresh elements of inspiration begin to shake him from the merciless pain of his grief.

Firth is utterly smashing in a very un-Collin Firth performance as a vulnerable soul with a posh exterior and cheeky underlying twist. He's charming by all counts during the lighter comic bits and even more effective in the film's quiet, meditative moments of which there are many more. Director Ford shapes the film into a moody, melancholic piece of nostalgia enamored of 60s culture and fashion yet equally drenched in the morose sentiments of a fading central figure. Ford's tone and style are exquisitely consistent yet perhaps distracting to some. He lends a heavy hand to the feature, using stylistic flourishes such as draining or filling his frames with color to suggest fluctuations between radiant joy and despairing pallor in the mind of the main character. A Single Man has the indubitable characteristic of being an "art film" and therefore will likely appeal only to a niche audience but willing spectators will be justly rewarded.

Grade: A-

DVD Pick: (500) Days Of Summer

Director Marc Webb's sly, classic in the making rom-com, (500) Days Of Summer, penned by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, does for 2009 what Annie Hall did for 1977: it takes the aging, unimaginative romantic comedy genre into a new era with wit, insight, and an awareness of all that has come before. The film drifts whimsically along through a scrambled timeline as it follows the 500 days of the on-again-off-again relationship between hopeless romantic Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and cynical commitment-phobe Summer (Zooey Deschanel). That those actors and this film so neatly fit into the sub-category of "indie" style can seem a mockable and trite quality but the film itself is a friend and foe to formula, weaving predictability hand-in-hand with nuance. The film re-enacts so many film patterns we have seen a million times before and then magnificently departs from them at precisely the right moments

Broken Embraces

Director Pedro Almodóvar returns with Broken Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos) a visually stunning homage to the classic works of Alfred Hitchcock. The film opens in present day Madrid with blind screenwriter Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar) coping with his disability and living as a "new man" under the pseudonym Harry Caine. In flashbacks we meet the stunning Lena (Penélope Cruz), the tragic mistress of fabulously wealthy mogul Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez) who monitors her every move. The jealous lover even goes as far as to employ his teenage son (Rubén Ochandiano) to film the set of Mateo's new film for fear that the director will fall for his new muse, Lena. Together the pair make the comedy Chicas y Maletas and fall madly in love in the process. What emerges is a vicious power struggle between the two men vying for the dazzling beauty's attention that leads to a very unfortunate end.

Despite the uniformly wonderful performances, the film is really a tag team effort between Penélope Cruz and her mentor Almodovar. Cruz gives a wonderful old Hollywood glamour performance that consciously echoes everything from beauty icons Audry Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe to the multi-layered complexity of Kim Novak in Vertigo with both camp and soul. Lena is a put upon starlet who acts her every effort in both in her life as a trophy mistress and on film as a beaming ingenue. Cruz manages to comfortably shoulder both the kitsch of the over the top wigs and the dark emotion of Lena's wounded soul and body. In return Almodovar films her with absolutely immodest passion. He constructs elaborate mise-en-scène which frames her in the shadow of still life portraits or at the mercy of painted guns and knifes. Her stasis and trauma are as much visually expressed through the camera as they are suggested in Cruz's quietly broken expressions. At its best, the piece touches pure cinema and yet it too often falls into folly and lackadaisical contrivance. This is most especially true in the present day framework which bungles the stirring magic of the Hitchcock-ian flashback. The film is so stunning as to be unmissable but also too sloppy to truly consider a masterpiece.

Grade: B+

The Road

Having directed the 2005 Western-styled Australian drama The Proposition, director John Hilcoat is no stranger to expressing a dark, dystopian portrait of ragtag renegade life. In The Road, he brings a similar unflinching eye and knack for visually elegant devestation to an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed novel. Viggo Mortensen gives a riveting and raw performance as the unnamed "Man" who travels a desolate post-apocalyptic Earth in search of food and clothing along with his young son, "The Boy" (relative newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee in a wise beyond his years breakthrough role). The plot is slim yet captivating. It encompasses a series of episodic encounters of increasing intensity in which father and son combat their inner demons as well as very real, devolving human cannibals who search the road for fresh prey. The ensemble includes exceptional work by a number of actors in small roles, including Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Molly Parker, Michael K. Williams, Garret Dillahunt, and Charlize Theron (as the family's deceased matriarch seen only in flashbacks).

The film is not a complete home run. It relies on generous, patient viewership and an openness to the opaque narrative. What is undeniable though is that the film builds itself beautifully into a collection of moments, some heartbreaking (the small joy of a post-apocalyptic Coca Cola), some inspiring ("The Boy" and his generous care for a lonely old traveler), some horrifying (Do you really want to know what's in a cannibal's basement?). There are sequences here that are truly unforgettable even if they fall very calmly into a lull of shifting, road tripping minimalism. The big picture is one of striking beauty and gripping intensity. It is a very brutal and unforgiving plunge into a not so unbelievable darkness which despite its distance from a modern society seems to call attention to a vile underside all too present even in the now. Still, McCarthy's story and Hilcoat's film hint also at a journey, one in which the peril faced along the road leads to a redemption (perhaps divine?) which serves as saving grace.

Grade: A-