Chronicling the Year-End Binge

This time of year, in regions (like here in Nebraska) where most of the year's films don't make it to town until very late - if at all - anyone plotting to compile a list of the year's best must consume an inhuman number of films in a mercilessly narrow time frame, this amounts to raiding the local art house theater, where films like Steve McQueen's "Shame", which just opened here, saw the bulk of its reviews hit the papers in late November. To Netflix, both on disc and instant watch, and to the lingering success of a few films that have found their way to the  local multiplex. The following is a brief rundown of what I've seen in the last 8 days. With any luck, I'll post micro-reviews of as many of these films as I can in the coming days.

Another Earth

Directed by Mike Cahill

One Star

"Another Earth" plays like the college thesis project of a B- film student. I survived about 45 minutes before giving up and shutting it off. It is a forceful reminder that we mustn't confuse the ingratiating "low-budget" with "amateur". To do so would be patronizing. "Another Earth" took home an award at Sundance. It boasts a 70% Top Critics rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert included it in his best of the year compilation. I find this baffling.

The Artist

Directed  by Michel Hazanavicious

Four Stars

A common misapprehension among critics is to declare a film a "movie for people who love movies". Isn't every film made for a demographic of people who enjoy film? Isn't every film made to be loved, and as a movie no less? What we should say, what is rare, indeed what is special, are movies made by people who love movies. "The Artist" is such a venture.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Directed by David Fincher

Three Stars

Fincher has placed his technical mastery of filmmaking in the service of topical and significant films in the past, most notably his previous effort, the exquisite "The Social Network", but he also captured the essence of the culture of unease and paranoia in post-9/11 America with "Zodiac" and attempted at least (before a disappointing finale) to illuminate masculine insecurity and chauvinism in "Fight Club". It is perhaps for this reason that "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" has a dutiful feel to it. Well made, technically proficient, and with stellar performances, the project simply feels too much like a film made for its convenient proximity to its director's reputable visual style. Fincher is running the risk of becoming a brand.

Meek's Cutoff

Directed by Kelly Reichardt

Three and One Half Stars

Kelly Reichardt's beautiful "Meek's Cutoff" is a vast and quiet naturalist western. It's aim is rhythm. The film follows a modest wagon train on the Oregon trail. Their chores occupy a great deal of our time. They are rituals. We come to understand what we may not have considered - that the pioneers' migration north was not made in a straight line, but was spent zig-zagging from one water supply to the next. The commodity grows more precious, more prescient, more pressing. A Native American is captured. His captors take him for a barbarian but they need too desperately for him to lead them to water. The unease and worry, out in these great and expansive plains, is crushingly claustrophobic.

Melancholia

Directed by Lars Von Trier

Three Stars

I sense that Lars Von Trier is compelled to make films in an effort to express and articulate his own fits of manic depression. To say he has a flare for destruction or chaos would be wrong. What Von Trier has a flare for is nihilism, and it plagues his films. destruction and chaos are but means to an end. "Melancholia" is a beautiful film. It is poetic and thoughtful, drawing on deep wells of feeling, and exposing on a grand and operatic scale that most basic human insecurity of perceived irrelevance in this great cosmos. Von Trier's relentlessly dogged dismay eventually borders on fetishism, but there's no resisting the awesome power of his imagery.

Moneyball

Directed by Bennett Miller

Four Stars

The screenplay for "Moneyball" was co-written by Aaron Sorkin, who also wrote Fincher's "The Social Network". The two films work marvelously as companion pieces. Here again is a film about the increasingly sophisticated codes with which we communicate.

Red Tails

Directed by Anthony Hemingway

Two Stars

Coincidentally, I have reviewed "Red Tails" in full. That can be found here.

A Separation

Directed by Asghar Farhadi

Four Stars

Asghar Farhadi's "A Separation" is an incredibly complex and powerful film, about divorce, about family illness, about honesty, about youth, about religion, about life. That it is Iranian only intensifies its potency, and indeed the political strife in that nation serves as an unspoken backdrop to the duress of a divorced couple, their frightened young daughter and the estranged husband's Alzheimer's-afflicted father. The tact with which this material is managed seems bottomless. This is one of the best films of the year.

Shame

Directed by Steve McQueen

Two and One Half Stars

With "Shame", director Steve McQueen succeeds in revealing almost nothing about anything for nearly two hours. The film is meant, I think (I hope), to illustrate the empty existence of a man who suffers from sex addiction. The addiction could be to anything. The man could be anyone. The movie wouldn't change much. Its opacity, in this instance, is a burden. McQueen suggests there may be details, a troubled history between Brandon (Michael Fassbender) and his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan), but we are not given the pieces to put these together. In an effort, I think, to make this film a universal parable, McQueen is deprived it of insight. In spite of a powerful performance by Fassbender, "Shame" is a porn in search of a purpose.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Directed by Tomas Alfredson

Four Stars

"Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy", more than a political mystery, is an observation of men at work. Its plot is obscenely labyrinthine and complex. As a mystery, while we are provided the information necessary to keep up, it would take half a dozen viewings to nail down the intricacies of the plot. But as an observation, Tomas Alfredson has assembled one of the most cinematic mysteries I've ever seen put to celluloid. I won't venture deep into the plot. One couldn't begin to without at least 500 words at his disposal. But I will note that I marveled at shot after shot in this wonderful film, moment after moment. It is impressively efficient, realizing very complex characters in spite of their perpetually guarded and private state of existence. And how satisfying it is, finally, to see a mystery played out wherein the culprit was actually a piece on the board the whole time, rather than the slumped janitor in the back-right of that one shot 20 minutes in and for 3 unacknowledged seconds. Oh how I hate that.