The W.A.I. Family is Growing

I suppose we’ve been working toward this moment for a long time. I’ve known Jon Fisher for many years now, though we’ve never (yet) met in person. Jon and I became acquainted through an Ebert and Roeper Facebook group, and began networking our movie blogs. His delightful website, The Film Brief, has gone through many phases, looks, styles, functions. My own has gone through more. From ‘Go See a Movie’, to ‘Ghost on Screen’, and now as ‘Wide Angle Iris’, we have frequently sampled each others’ reviews, recorded podcasts debating our divergent opinions and convened annually for three years now to compile our Pantheon of the greatest films of all time. We linked to each others work on social media and grew each others’ web presence. We were two college kids on opposite ends of the world with a love of great film and a passion for the conversations they elicit. But over the years life has made the upkeep of our respective sites more difficult and inconvenient. Full time jobs and the burden of adult responsibilities post-graduation have slowed our output. And so it is with great pleasure now, that I announce that Jon and will be combining our efforts to maintain a single site, right here at WAI.

Roger Ebert Remembered

Roger Ebert (1942 - 2013)

"Thank You." Roger Ebert opened his last blog entry this way, a gesture of gratitude and reflection that hinted ominously at tragedy. Ebert went on to confess that he would be dialing back the near superhuman output of reviews, blogs, and other writings he had maintained for years. He is not as he was, he told us, but he would continue on at a pace more befitting a man of 70 with recurrent cancer. Two days ago he wrote this. And now, today, while at work, a friend of mine texted me the news. Roger Ebert was dead.

The Golden Iris Awards

I confess that my time spent at the movies has dwindled in the last year, the cinema having now to share valuable downtime with an ambitious fiction project. But make it to the movies I did, and though I didn't see enough great films to constitute a top ten list, I'll present a simple top three, in medal form, below.

The Golden Iris Awards - Including the Best Films of 2011

Best of 2011

1. Take Shelter

Directed by Jeff Nichols

"Take Shelter" embodies a moment in time, a period in American history when honest, hardworking people, who have done what the proverbial American dream has dictated they must do to succeed, have been stricken with the ominous premonition that something beyond their control threatens to come along and wash away everything they've worked for, the lives they've built for themselves. As a character study, it is intimate and candid, and Michael Shannon was more deserving of an Oscar nomination for his performance here than any other actor I saw in 2011. As a profile in paranoid schizophrenia it is accurate and heartbreaking. But as an allegory for the economic recession it is inventive and harrowing and very, very powerful. Jeff Nichols' "Take Shelter" has tapped into a national mood. With any discernible degree of cosmic justice, time will endow this film with historical significance. "Take Shelter" is the best movie of the year.

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.

Sorry for the Delay, Folks

It's been a while, no?

Perhaps I should have shared this earlier, but I've taken up arms as a contributing critic for efilmcritic.com. I'll be directing you to them here as they go up, which should be about once a week. My sole review so far has been "Take Shelter", available here, which was among the very best 2011 has had to offer me. Like our Facebook page for quick links to my eFilmCritic reviews.

With my formal criticism headed to a more prominent outlet, the format of this blog will likely undergo something of a change. Hopefully, chief among these changes will be a more consistent output. Me and Jon will still compile our annual Pantheon in the summer. I will engage more in the kind of 'first impression' criticism that one might find at, say, Richard Brody's "The Front Row" blog at the New Yorker. Keep an eye out for sporadic observations of any old film I happen to see. Keep an eye out also for my spontaneous "DVD of the Moment" segments. Finally, I'm in my year-end movie binge, catching up on all the movies of acclaim the year had to offer. My annual top 10 list will go up during Oscars week, along with some commentary on the myriad ways the Academy fouled up this year. For now though, because I'm behind I'm going to resort to the frantic method of micro-review clusters my esteemed colleague Jon employs over at The Film Brief.

All the best,
R

I Got Your Ballot. Right Here...

Best Ensemble Performance of the Year - The Kids are All Right
Five of these performers are mentioned below.

The nominees for the 83rd Annual Academy Awards have been announced. A full list of them can be found here. I'll comment more on them as the Oscars draw nearer. For now, just for fun. Here's what my ballot would have looked like for the six major categories (Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress).

The Best Films of 2010: or The Year of the Woman

Could it be that the movies have finally figured out how to tell stories with fully realized female leads? Hollywood has a long and embarrassing history of portraying women either as cardboard cutouts or as completely disposable characters altogether, leaving the interesting personalities, heroics, and complications to male characters. But this year saw two lesbian mothers (Annette Benning and Julianne Moore in Lisa Cholodenko's "The Kids are Alright") raise their two children and respond to life's obstacles with wit and wisdom and gravitas and without the help of men. A paranoid schizophrenic ballerina dancer (Natalie Portman in Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan"), in obsessive pursuit of the perfect performance, embodies all of the pains and trials and sacrifices of art, regardless of gender. 


A young girl in the Ozarks (Jennifer Lawrence in Debra Granik's "Winter's Bone") who, while caring for her two young siblings and vegetable mother, must track down her father, who listed the family's house for collateral on his bail and then no-showed at court. Another young girl (Hailee Steinfeld in Joel and Ethan Coen's "True Grit") sees the way the men of the West do business, and the way business should be done, and offers no compromise between the two. A CIA operative/Russian Spy/who-knows-anymore (Angelina Jolie in Phillip Noyce's "Salt") is allowed to make intelligent decisions provoked by emotion for what must be one of the first times in the history of the action movie. Raised for the sole purpose of donating her organs to those deemed more worthy of them, a young woman (Carrie Mulligan in Mark Romanek's "Never Let Me Go") maintains impossible posture as the love of her short life mistakenly buys into the seductions of an envious mutual friend.


And these are just American films. I could go on about the brilliant leads in Andrea Arnold's "Fish Tank" (Katie Jarvis) and Martin Provost's "Seraphine" (Yolande Moreau), and already this year we've seen Isabelle Huppert's heroic performance in Claire Denis' "White Material" (already an early favorite for best of the year). Many of these women characters are weak, but none are shallow, and just as many are stalwart figures in emotional torrents. This shift toward an equal female psychology, and the speed and scope by which it occurred, may prove to make 2010 one of the most encouraging years for movies I've seen in my lifetime.


As it were, it was just a terrific year for movies in general. Here are the top 25 films of 2010, having seen theatrical release dates in the state of Nebraska within the year. (Note: a few of these films made the rounds on critics' lists at the end of 2009, but didn't make it out to the plains until early the next year, which would explain why some of these films may seem to be old news)

Yes, Keaton Was Great, But Keaton Didn't Make "The Circus"

Note: I sent this letter to Roger Ebert in response to his Great Movies essay about Charlie Chaplin's "The Circus" (1928). It has since been published in the "Letters" section of rogerebert.com. To see it on Ebert's own site is much more glorious, but here is the letter in full anyway.

From Rollan Schott in Lincoln, Neb. 

This is reactionary, vitriolic, and probably ill-advised. Please forgive me.

I was thrilled to find Chaplin’s “The Circus” added to your Great Movies canon. I think it’s one of his best (certainly better than “The Great Dictator”, but that’s an argument for another day). Having previously read your comprehensive column on “The Works of Buster Keaton”, I assumed that a similar piece on the works of his mustached rival master had not yet been written, and would not be written, because A) Chaplin’s films are more lovingly restored and much more readily available as independent works, and B) Every film Chaplin made between “The Kid” and “Modern Times” (as well as “Monsieur Verdoux”) is worthy of its own essay, an astonishing run that combined universal box office success and acclaim with enduring artistic achievement like nobody before or since. Most of Keaton’s works are also worthy if individual recognition, though I think we’d agree his are more of a whole.

Huck Finn, D.W. Griffith, and the Re[Birth of a Nation]al Identity

Note: This is the project that more or less earned me my diploma earlier this month. It appeals to a more literature oriented audience, which accounts for "The Birth of a Nation" being summarized while a knowledge of the novel "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is assumed.

The evaluative debate over a distinctly “American style” in nineteenth century literature was largely reflected in the cinema at the dawn of the twentieth century. This essay will profile D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is commonly regarded as among the most prevalent literary works to carry the distinction of such a style, as suggested by its lengthy and secure presence in the canon of great American literature.

A Serious Man...Is That All There Is?

"Audaciously Funny, Original and Resonant!"

- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

"Defiantly Original!"

- Thelma Adams, US Weekly

These are the two critic blurbs on my new copy of Joel and Ethan Coens' "A Serious Man", one of the two or three best movies of last year, which I finally managed to sit down and watch again after seeing it in theaters several months ago.

I don't know. Maybe it's the exclamation points, almost certainly provided by the package distributor (As they always are - Critics don't use exclamation points), and suggesting some kind of superficial, giddy fanboy hyperbole that so thoroughly mis-characterizes the Coens' achievement. "Funny" and "Original"? Is that all there is to "A Serious Man"? Every comedy is "Funny". I know this because the critic blurbs told me so. Do critics think "A Serious Man" is merely "funny", or do the distributors only want us to think so? Why did critics regard as merely funny(!) a film I approach with quiet reverie? Are they not seeing everything there is to see, or am I seeing something that isn't there?

5 Remarkable Performances

"You can see now?"
Charlie Chaplin as the Little Tramp in "City Lights".

"Why?  Why?  Why?  Why?  Why?"
Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta in "Raging Bull".

"Will I be with you tonight in Paradise?"
Maria Falconetti as Joan in "The Passion of Joan of Arc".

"I am big.  It's the pictures that got small."
Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in "Sunset Blvd."

"Rosebud..."
Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane in "Citizen Kane".