Oscar-Nominated Shorts

I have capsule reviews for each of the animated and live-action shorts nominated for this year's Oscars at Spectrum Culture. They are mostly a wan bunch, lacking the spark of the best short-form artistry and in some cases feeling like mere fragments where a good short feels as if it contains the world. Even so, a few here and there piqued my curiosity, and some even entertained me.

The post with capsules is up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Baytown Outlaws (Barry Battles, 2012)

I have no sensitivity to seeing the South depicted as a caricature, but the caricature in The Baytown Outlaws is so thin I kept wishing Billy Bob Thornton's drug lord would break character so the actor (also the scribe of several great films set in and tied to the South, most notably One False Move) could go behind the camera, do extensive rewrites, and start from the top. But then, who could be mad a film for failing to capture its milieu when it so quickly moves into a Road Warrior-esque travesty? Better to attack that plot development for its poor direction, lifeless action and insipid humor. Baytown slipped quietly through some festivals for a modest limited release, and it will be forgotten as quickly as it passed under everyone's radar.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Promised Land (Gus Van Sant, 2012)

All I gotta say is, when I get around to Elephant this year, it better undo a lot of the damage of Van Sant's last decade. I still haven't seen his largely ignored 2011 effort Restless, but it cannot possibly be worse than Promised Land, a smug liberal tract about going green financed in part by oil. For a brief time, it almost works, setting up the arrogant, manipulative natural gas company rep with an equally officious and pushy environmentalist, until a twist derails its vague hints of intelligence to set up a truly embarrassing, back-patting speech that may be the worst monologue of last year. Heinous.

My full review is up now at Movie Mezzanine.

The Best FIlms of 2012

This new decade continues to offer up dozens of films that directly refute the seemingly endless cottage industry of “thinkpieces” devoted to cinema’s death. Directors who proudly stick with film until it is ripped from their hands are joined by inventive users of digital, be they up-and-comers or adaptive old masters, people forging new possibilities of visual language with a new format. And for the film viewer, access has never been so open, closed as it may still sometimes seem. Like last year, 2012 offered up an embarrassment of riches, so much so that narrowing down selections proved even more arduous than in 2011. Not only were the movies themselves great, many contained parallels with each other. As such, I arranged my picks for the best the year had to offer as a series of double (and one triple) features that link up thematically, stylistically, or both.

Life Without Principle/ Haywire

“The motive is always money.” That is the justification Ewan McGregor’s defense contractor offers for putting out a hit on his ex-lover in Haywire, and the ethos that drives both Steven Soderbergh’s and Johnnie To’s jazzy anti-thrillers. To stays on the ground level of the financial collapse, sitting in with the bank employees driven to sell sell sell no matter the consequences until the monster they wrought but cannot even see for being so low on the ladder consumes everything. Even criminals get caught up in the matters, dispelling the notion that they live in their own world when their assets suffer as much as the average punter’s. Haywire does not feel the pinch so much because its characters exist in one of the few utterly safe zones, the ever-funded military industrial complex. But it too eats its own, and the petty personal issues that put Gina Carano’s Mallory at risk look even more abhorrent when carried out with the support and means of government and commerce.

Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning/Resident Evil: Retribution 

John Hyams’ and Paul W.S. Anderson’s respective breakthroughs deconstruct the video game aesthetics that have crept into action filmmaking by probing the medium’s moral, metaphysical and existential implications. Anderson, with his love of vast but contained spaces, crafts a series of game levels where the foes get exponentially stronger and players respawn to be fed back into the grinder. Hyams, on the other hand, sets those players free, only to find that a character programmed to be a conduit for death can only plod on with mindless violence. And yet, neither film lets its fount of ideas get in the way of thrilling genre filmmaking. Anderson’s slo-mo and clever 3D usage let every moment linger, stressing the beauty of the composition and the cheeky critiques embedded within them, while the long-take carnage that caps Universal Soldier is the most thrilling (and, ultimately, horrific) of its kind since the famed long take in John Woo’s Hard Boiled that rose to and fell from a jolting moment of friendly fire.

Consuming Spirits/It’s Such a Beautiful Day

Chris Sullivan’s long-gestating labor of love is an outsider art vision of loneliness and proof that ennui and restlessness affect those out in the sticks as much as they do the upper-middle-class of the world’s cities. Sullivan’s mixture of animation styles allows him to cross lines of memory and deceit (of others and self) as the full extent of his characters’ abuse, regrets and longing are revealed. Of course, memory is denied to Bill, the protagonist of Don Hertzfeldt’s final volume of a trilogy of existential short films (also edited together into a feature-length film of the same title), and Hertzfeldt’s animation often plays out in isolated, ragged bubbles set against a black void. Sense-overloading bursts of avant-garde techniques visualize Bill’s mental illness with shocking clarity, and the fourth-wall breaking reversal of fortunes that concludes the film takes The Last Laugh’s fate-altering coda to new heights and beyond, until the happy ending becomes darker than its original, logical conclusion.

Anna Karenina/Magic Mike

A film about a dying aristocracy trapped in constantly changing but still singular sphere and one about the dissolution of the myth of meritocracy, still wrapped in its plastic to up the resell value. One is a freewheeling adaptation of one of the most revered works of literature, and the other is a movie about male strippers. Both films operate musically, Wright’s with the elegant, classical movement of ostentatious balls, Soderbergh’s with the stuttering, unmasked sexuality of club music. And both, in their own ways, point out the double standards of gender in society. Wright formalizes the female objectification Tolstoy exposed, not only using stylistic flourishes to isolate Anna in the frame but treating Keira Knightley herself as part of the mise-en-scène to be ordered. The double-standard is deepened with Magic Mike, which Joe Manganiello, one of the film’s stars, has rightly said proves that men cannot be objectified.

Barbara/The Deep Blue Sea

Terence Davies' humid melodrama might be more obviously paired with Anna Karenina, as in many ways it is the more faithful adaptation of the same narrative and thematic arcs than Joe Wright’s free-for-all. Yet the mood of its tortured love triangle, where furtive glances and an attempt to batten down swirling emotions, vaguely links with the surveillance-heavy paranoia of Christian Petzold’s more austere East German moral thriller, Barbara. Barbara’s own feelings for the mostly off-screen, wealthy West German lover who beckons her through danger to his arms and the warm but ideologically loyal East German doctor for whom she works fit with Hester’s relationship to the passionate but unstable lover and loving but unphysical husband. Neither women finds all the answers in either, and they face, respectively, political and social repercussions for whatever choice they make. It is interesting which of those proves most unbearable for the chooser.

Killer Joe/Twixt

Two masters at work on genre fare. The difference, of course, is that William Friedkin is well-versed in the exploitation cinema he hones to its sharpest point in his Coen-esque Killer Joe, while the bombastic prestige of Francis Ford Coppola seems so oddly matched for his low-key, oddball Gothic romance. Yet both men make some of their finest films in years, paying homage to old-school grindhouse and horror filmmaking while updating it by either taking the genre to new levels of frankness or by propelling it forward with new technology. Friedkin’s chicken-fried chamber horror is so well-acted it almost achieves a veneer of class, while Coppola effaces himself (and the frame’s image, which he slyly links to his own fall) to get at his own demons. And in their final, deftest strokes, both films reveal themselves to be superb comedies.

Bernie/Girl Walk//All Day

One of the forefathers of modern American independent film joined with a movie that crystallizes the possibilities of new revenue streams for the next wave of independent filmmaking.The latter is the latest city symphony for America’s greatest metropolis (and one that at times recalls the freewheeling, anything goes energy of one of its first, Paul Fejos’ recently revived Lonesome. This New York must slowly warm to the individualistic outburst of Anne Marsen’s spastic, ecstatic dancing, and so much of the film’s joy comes from its disruption of how millions of people simply get on in the same space. The opposite is true of Bernie’s view of small-town Texas, where the real community thrives so vitally on the scruples of individuals they well know that they intrude upon a dramatized recreation to tell their gossip. There is also an inverse of expectations, where the big, cynical city produces a genuinely guileless burst of energy like Marsen and Carthage conjures up a false shade of that same innocence revealed to be a sinister huckster. Inexplicably, Linklater nevertheless shows as much affection for his milieu as Krupnick does for his.

Moonrise Kingdom/Tabu

The new creative peaks for established American aesthete Wes Anderson and upstart Portuguese young master Miguel Gomes both employ, in part or whole, 16mm film stock in their journeys through the wild. The grainy stock helps Anderson dismantle and critique his solipsist dollhouse worlds by following its dissatisfied characters outside the normal bounds of bourgeois comfort as they find ways to bend the wild to that comfort. Gomes goes one step further, using the 16mm, silent second half of Tabu to trace modern Western ennui to its wistful nostalgia for imperial superiority and colonial exoticism. The white privilege of Tabu’s first half and Moonrise’s whole is both perpetuated by characters and undone by the promised chaos of labor unrest in the former and the turbulence and restlessness of youth in the latter.

The Color Wheel/The Comedy

The year’s two funniest films are also two of the most wrenching. Rick Alverson’s The Comedy depicts a man hollowed out by irony, working menial jobs just because he need not worry about money and deliberately provoking others just to see what a genuine reaction to something looks like. But underneath Tim Heidecker’s dead, shark eyes (and the cheap-chic sunglasses that frequently obscure them) is a person screaming for release, making connections the only way he knows how, which is by driving people away. Then there’s Alex Ross Perry’s feature, in which the vicious bickering of two siblings is gradually revealed to be nothing more than sparring matches that prepare both to face even harsher verbal treatment from the outside world. A loneliness links the two films, though The Color Wheel proves both more optimistic and more perverse for staging its emotional breakthrough as its most twisted punchline and, wildly, its most touching moment.

Holy Motors/This Is Not a Film

I’ve seen both of these films twice, and good thing too. The surreal vignettes of Leos Carax’s return to feature-length filmmaking and the political dissidence of Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s un-film could very well have been one-off pleasures, an intense and singular experience that waned once the surprise vanished. Yet both stand proudly as complex, probing films on the nature of art and, more importantly, how art can inform life. Denis Lavant’s tour of personae each has has something to say about the way we get along in the world, from the faces we wear in public to the way life can shift so abruptly. Panahi, under house arrest and filmming a sketch of what he will never be allowed to film properly, winds up with something that strongly resembles the thematic content, even the narrative arcs, of his fictive work that he occasionally shows on his TV. Both filmmakers lament the death of artistic freedom, be it for capitalistic or political reasons, yet both films revitalize cinema for its own sake and in relation to the world outside theater doors.

Romancing in Thin Air/The Day He Arrives

Johnnie To’s undistributed melodrama (one of the best films of this young decade, and handily available as a Region-A import Blu-Ray from Hong Kong) links with Hong Sang-soo’s film in a myriad of ways. Both concern filmmakers who flee their craft, only to find that the more they attempt to retreat from their work, the more life around them begins to resemble a movie. The director within Hong’s film rails against film's promotion of falsity, yet his pining for a waitress who looks like an ex and the temporal confusion of his repetitious arc (which could take place over several days, just one, or a dream) are purely cinematic. The repeated movements and crucial variations that calmly propel Hong’s film are reflected in To’s, in which a jilted, alcoholic actor is revived by a woman harboring a secret obsession with him now compounded by the indirect but overwhelming connection the man has to her and her late husband. The world turns to cinema and cinema takes on the world and reworks it for a better outcome.

4:44 The Last Day on Earth/The Turin Horse /Cosmopolis

The apocalypse has been in for a few years now, but this trio of films each finds new paths to explore how the world falls apart. Abel Ferrara, auteur of a canon of autocritical exploitation, turns in a surprisingly sweet chamber drama, one that suggests that people may rediscover their humanity when money loses all value. David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s book, on the other hand, sees the loss of monetary value as precisely the catalyst for the end of days. The technology that brings people together in the former reminds humans of their obsolescence in the latter, and one is left wondering whether mankind can evolve with its creations to survive a cataclysm of our own making. Béla Tarr’s purported film is, apropos of its Nietzschean inspiration, beyond such trivialities altogether. Space and time slowly reverse over its arduously long shots, morality having been sucked away well before the first of them. All that is left is to have a few last, measly meals and take one last swig of bad brandy before the void swallows the last dregs of existence.

Honorable Mentions: Lincoln (Steven Spielberg), Detention (Joseph Kahn), End of Watch (David Ayer), Alps (Yorgos Lanthimos), Sleepless Night (Frédéric Jardin)

Films I've yet to see: The Grey, Amour, Neighboring Sounds, Life of Pi

Ordered top 25:

1. Romancing in Thin Air
2. This Is Not a Film
3. The Color Wheel
4. Cosmopolis
5. It’s Such a Beautiful Day
6. Moonrise Kingdom
7. Holy Motors
8. The Turin Horse
9. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
10. Bernie
11. The Day He Arrives
12. The Comedy
13. Tabu
14. Magic Mike
15. Resident Evil: Retribution
16. Twixt
17. Killer Joe
18. Anna Karenina
19. Haywire
20. Girl Walk // All Day
21. 4:44: The Last Day on Earth
22. The Deep Blue Sea
23. Barbara
24. Consuming Spirits
25. Life Without Principle

Capsule Reviews: Girl Walk//All Day, Sound of Noise, Sound of My Voice

Girl Walk//All Day (Jacob Krupnick, 2012)

Watching Jacob Krupnick’s Girl Walk//All Day, my focus was initially drawn less to Anne Marsen’s wide-smiling, unashamed dancer than the parade of awkward smiles and uncomfortable glances of the real pedestrians of New York among whom she leaps and twirls and slams. But what would a portrait of New York City be without some crazy person making the average person on the street alternately amused and anxious? Girl Walk//All Day gradually builds as it wears on, Marsen’s infectious energy spreading among other dancers who intermittently pop up and, occasionally, random bystanders who get caught up in her rhythm. Admittedly, the filmmaking isn’t nearly as inventive as the soundtrack that inspired it, but the energy builds and builds throughout until I found myself more entertained than I had been all year. The film’s only exchange of dialogue (delivered in subtitles as the music continues to dominate the soundtrack, almost recalls The Red Shoes’ “Why do you dance?” dialogue. A Hasidic Jew asks Marsen, “Why are you dancing?” with a look of mild discomfort and genuine curiosity. “Because I’m happy,” she cheerfully replies, still bouncing. The man smiles. “You should always be happy.” Grade: B+

Sound of Noise (Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson, 2012)

Stomp made into an anarchic hunt for unshackled music, Sound of Noise is, by turns, a caper and a romantic comedy, pulsing with its unorthodox percussion and tittering with its makeshift cymbals and blocks. A metronome becomes the equivalent of a bomb detonator for a group of anarchist drummers who make the world into music, thus rendering it soundless for the tone-deaf policeman who chases them. It is a great conceit and routinely funny in execution, but what the film is not is the city symphony for Malmö it feels as if it will become at nearly every moment before falling short. Its ingenious street compositions are thrown off by routine plot mechanics that not only puts too much dead air between performances but often interrupt the few bits of music we get. The film is still enjoyable, but it feels like so much untapped potential. Grade: C+

Sound of My Voice (Zal Batmanglij, 2012)

The Sound of My Voice recalls other recent films about cults—Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Master—not merely in its subject matter but in its strengths and weaknesses. In all three films, the actor playing the cult leader does an exceptional job of capturing the ambiguous tone between someone projecting freewheeling improvisation and eerie omniscience. But Brit Marling’s excellent performance, all soothing but firm suggestions that crucially stop just short of direct commands, is undercut by everything around her. All cults are thinly sketched (the aforementioned cult movies even make this a key aspect of their observed sects), but rarely are the people they comprise so vague as well. Sound of My Voice offers no sense of how or why anyone ever gravitated toward Marling’s Maggie, much less how they developed the fanatical loyalty necessary to overlook her obvious fakery. Oh, but is it fakery, dear reader, for the film contains a twist! Admittedly, it does go to the trouble of laying track toward the climactic revelation, but the twist still feels like a lazy counter to everything the film had been saying to that point. Grade: C-

Barbara (Christian Petzold, 2012)

This wonderful German drama feels like a thriller that draws all of its suspense from the moral quandaries that flash across Nina Hoss' focused eyes in an instant, a world of possibilities (most of them dismal) processed in a second. Petzold's camera proves that subjective shots not only do not require handheld shaky-cam but are often foiled by it. His calm, level gazes produce an intense feeling of always being watched, save for when Barbara retreats to areas of howling, microphone-drowning wind. One of the year's best.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Color Wheel (Alex Ross Perry, 2012)

It is both immediately apparent and hard to believe that Alex Ross Perry’s second feature, The Color Wheel, is entirely scripted as the director claims. The flesh-peeling barbs that Ross Perry and co-writer Caren Altman lob at each other as warring siblings Colin and J.R., respectively, are so deft and precision-targeted that the broader strokes of improv responses seem inadequate for producing them, yet the speed and rhythm with which they deflect and parry feels so spontaneous, not at all memorized and practiced. The dialogue is as separated from the prevailing status quo of American comedy as it separates the characters from each other, from the sardonically drawled “Nice shirt” that opens the film to a multi-front war the siblings open between themselves and everyone around them.

Likewise, Ross Perry’s direction serves to radically break the film from modern trends of American independent filmmaking. Instead of being shot on affordable, slick, color DV, Ross Perry and cinematographer Sean Price Williams use black-and-white, gloriously grainy 16mm film stock. The choice of filming material is the film’s first and best-sustained joke, its anachronism an ironic reminder that its format used to be the preferred method of filming “realism” but now looks like artistic license. What was shorthand for real now looks decidedly the opposite when stacked against HD video, and it makes one wonder when that, too, shall be seen as almost classical. And though the film concerns two twentysomethings in the grip of anomie and stagnation, the 16mm removes The Color Wheel from even the most stretched definition of “mumblecore,” a nebulous term carelessly used by all (including this writer). Nothing about this is Sundance fare, but that only further defines it as a true independent work of art.

Compared to the shallow focus blurs that have announced protagonists’ insularity for the last few years, Ross Perry and Williams favor deep focus shots of alternating distances. The characters of this film are certainly solipsistic, but Ross Perry ably communicates that through starker, more distanced shots, using the sense of space rather than suffocating proximity to capture his characters’ loneliness. The camera also adds a visual element to some punchlines, such as when J.R. makes dark jokes about her brother being molested and Ross Perry cuts to a brief insert shot (possibly in J.R.’s POV) of a close-up on Colin’s crotch. In another instance, Ross Perry revitalizes the tired smash-cut punchline of someone insisting he or she will not do something and then suddenly there they are, doing that very thing. Ross Perry himself starts the complaint when J.R. insists Colin buy some new clothes, but the director had himself cut off in the editing bay, placing the abrupt cut not at the end of his refusal but before it even finishes. Shot patterns tend to move from farther away to close as a scene wears on, the squabbles between J.R. and Colin and the pair of them against others segmenting people from each other via the confines of the frame.

This movement of big to small is reversed by the dialogue, which starts with astonishing bluntness and gradually spirals out into more abstract jabs. Conversations between the siblings play as if rewinded, the passive-aggressiveness typically saved for deeper into the chat as the more withering remarks are dispensed with first. It is as if they acknowledge the easiness of a frontal assault and thus make it the first level of their game and save the more complex, oblique snips for the challenge of sustaining a battle. The pair’s interactions with other people, though, are less linear. Around others, they turn their singles game into a kind of doubles, and the rules shift to reward the sibling for getting the closest to directly attacking someone else without getting caught.

This can be seen most playfully near the start of the film, when the brother and sister stop at a motel on their way to J.R.’s ex-boyfriend to collect her belongings. The motel is run by an arch-conservative loon so committed to only allowing married couples to share the same room that he will not even allow siblings to share one. Thus, he prompts a quick battery of sarcasm from Colin and J.R. as they pretend to be husband and wife and see just how obvious they can make their scorn without being noticed. (Even so, the manager gets his revenge in a portent of plot developments to come.) The other third parties with whom they come into contact, however, bring their own ammunition. J.R.’s ex, her former professor, greets J.R. with his new student squeeze hanging on his arm and proceeds to taunt her as viciously as Colin. Likewise, a later party that sees Colin and J.R. tricking each other (and themselves) into attending a party with old high school friends where everyone gets in on the one-upmanship as everyone lies about their status in life and sets about forcing another to tell the truth. Whomever breaks first, loses.

Ross Perry introduces Colin and J.R. as such loathsome creatures that it can be a shock to be confronted by the outside elements, who are even worse. Instead of wallowing in his protagonists’ mutual loathing, he gradually, subtly brings them together, even bringing a certain level of empathy to these hyperbolically alienating people. J.R. needs to be told to grow up, but when such lines come out of the mouth of a professor who blithely sleeps with his students and talks as childishly and venomously as the leads, the lines refract back onto his own personality. Similarly, the party sequence masterfully dismantles the urge to gloat over old classmates, as any attempt to display intellectual and material superiority will only paradoxically revert the contenders back to high school, where they were all equally unimportant. In both cases, J.R. is reduced even further to childishness as her vain attempts to verbally destroy her targets push her closer to desperation.

Perhaps that is why J.R. and Colin slowly grow closer: they snipe at each other as hard as they do for anyone else, but neither has any sliver of superiority that makes their lonely anger useless in toppling a foe. Ross Perry regularly lays tracks toward the film’s climax from the start, undercutting the shock of its twist but better staging it as the final punchline, albeit one as unexpectedly sweet as it is transgressive. The Color Wheel emerges, wildy, brazenly and unorthodoxically, as a perverse fable, a mad visualization of the line that exasperated parents try to tell their bickering tots, “You’ll be there for each other when no one else will.” In a film that shows off such incredible camerawork and such dark but uproarious dialogue, the carefully set up moral plotting is almost icing on a cake, albeit one that confirms this film, and its maker, as one of the most exciting things to hit American indie filmmaking in some time.

Capsule Reviews: End of Watch, Flight, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

End of Watch (David Ayer, 2012)

Whether the cops in End of Watch talk like cops matters less than the joy of them talking like actual human beings. Jake Gyllenhaal and partner Michael Peña enjoy a natural chemistry that works with Ayer’s hyperactive, disjunctive direction to give the impression of normal police work on L.A. streets even as the calls to which they respond are not only blatantly cinematic on an individual basis but also link up in a building narrative arc. That frenetic direction is the result of handheld cameras, most of which appear diegetically, toted by cop and criminal alike as their colleagues attempt to dissuade the would be filmmakers from carrying around evidence against them. It figures: the one time these characters are spared the weight of allegorical importance, they strive to be symbolic stars of their own movies. Admittedly, the sheer frantic collision of shots holds the film back, but it also pays off in some nearly surreal setpieces, especially during a rescue effort in a burning house that actually manages to communicate the terror of heat forming physical barriers and exits being lost behind smokescreens at a second’s notice. Besides, the technique cannot be too distancing, as End of Watch creates an immediacy of emotional connection rare to cop films. Grade: B+

Flight (Robert Zemeckis, 2012)

Doing press for this film, Robert Zemeckis objecting to an interviewer’s question about what it was like to return to live action, asserting that he had never left. Judging from this film, though, he’s still making cartoons. The opening plane crash sequence is one of the most thrilling sequences of the year, in which the tension of mechanical failure is compounded by the question of just how functioning an alcoholic Denzel Washington’s pilot is. Washington suits the role well, his mix of natural charm and the increasing droop of his hang-dog neutral expression preparing him for the task of facing the world with a dubiously believable smile while always standing on the brink of his self-control. But Zemeckis cannot let Washington’s subtleties sell the picture, instead relying on ridiculous side players (one woman’s brief “Praise Jesus” rivals the totality of John Goodman’s “Sympathy for the Devil”-scored entrances as a Brundlefly version of The Dude and Walter Sobchak) and thudding moral twists to put forward a message far blunter and more one-sided than the real ambiguity Washington suggests. And yet, for all the plodding obviousness of Zemeckis’ choices (not to mention the hilariously on-the-nose soundtrack), Washington’s performance stayed with me after watching it. Initial, mixed-to-negative thought slowly crawl toward a positive appreciation of the honesty that Washington, if not the film around him, brings to a subject that usually fares even worse than some of the eye-rolling clichés found within this uneven picture. Who knows, maybe after a revisit I will like it even more. That I want to revisit it at all places it on a level above Zemeckis’ motion-capture work. Grade: C+

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Peter Jackson, 2012)

Freed from the debate over its much-lambasted 48fps 3D presentation, the first of Peter Jackson’s strung-out Hobbit trilogy is a stupefyingly bad film in its own right. Jackson’s inconsistent direction of the Lord of the Rings films is compounded here by the general lack of tactility stemming from the transition from a mix of CGI and physical effects to all-digital wizardry. The results make for tacky, clearly fake production design, makeup and effects, all in service to a lugubrious story that takes pains to introduce a cast of characters for whom it does not care in any way. Even Martin Freeman’s natural comic timing does not get a chance to shine, and the host of dwarves he accompanies manage to be even more indiscriminate from one another than in Tolkien’s pages. It is disastrous filmmaking, its chaotic, incoherent action setpieces nothing more than the video that will play in the waiting line for whatever amusement park ride is made out of this travesty. Grade: D

Les Misérables (Tom Hooper, 2012)

When set against the experience of seeing a production of Les Misérables,Tom Hooper’s adaptation single-handedly disproves Chaplin’s notion that life is tragedy in close-up and comedy in long shot. Hooper is so fixated on the musical’s reputation as a tear-jerker that he has no sense for its epic sweep, and his camera is rarely more than inches from an actor’s face as he or she sings. At times, performers even lurch suddenly toward the lens in a disorientingly pop effect, a gesture of spontaneity that sometimes comes across as their way of saying, “Would you back the hell off?”

Based, of course, on Victor Hugo’s epic, social romance novel, Les Misérables is one of the few musicals ripe for the current fetish for “realism” (emphasis on the quotation marks). Hooper always makes sure each face is covered in grime just so, that the stars’ teeth are not sparkling but also not blackened like the extras or significant characters of disrepute. These details make the film seem more fake than a stage show, not less, though the camera does such a fine job of its own on that front that the relatively minor sin of aesthetically arranged grit. One might not even notice this if, again, Hooper could bear to mix up his agonizingly long close-ups with a medium or long shot that lasted more than a second.

Hooper’s awkward framing should be familiar to viewers of the John Adams miniseries, and I almost gave in to hope that the more freewheeling style afforded by the genre might give his distracting direction a stronger foothold to remotely reflect the content. But that reasoning is, of course, flawed: shoddy filmmaking on a vast scale can only be that much worse than the same lack of talent closer to the Earth. The wide-angle lenses, the haphazard editing, and the inability to ever be more than two shots away from a close-up rob nearly every song of its power by turning every performance into a mediocre music video.

And for someone who makes the camera more noticeable and prominent than any of the actors, Hooper also proves infuriatingly literal when it comes to adaptation. Some numbers feel tethered to the stage with too short a leash. Take, for example, the downturn of already low fortunes for Fantine (Anne Hathaway): on stage, the actress playing the character would necessarily have to move from a sewing job to prostitution in one movement to save time. On screen, though, the fast edits that track her descent ironically feel as if they pass in real time more than the unbroken movement of a live production. One makes allowances in suspension of disbelief for a tacitly agreed-upon pass of time in a theater, yet Fantine’s fall appears to occur within the span of, oh, about 90 minutes as Hooper presents it, turning her sad story into something more akin to self-aware comedy.

Even that cannot hold back Hathaway, however. Having already proved the most electrifying and focused aspect of the overstuffed and underwritten Dark Knight Rises, she gives an even better performance in a much worse film. She walks a balancing act as Fantine, mixing the broad naïveté and innocence necessary to give her woeful existence a shade of instant heartbreak with the believable weariness of someone with a much more realistic and frank knowledge of the world. The film peaks early with her showstopping rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream,” in which she turns Hooper’s banal style to her advantage with the tiniest shifts in her face as her wistful recollection turns slowly to full anguish. The subtleties she loads into her to-the-rafters expression also makes for the only payoff to the much-ballyhooed talk of the cast’s singing being recorded live. All the theoretical ups of this decision are displayed in her performance, where the ragged, low moan that chokes her voice attains a visceral power that elevates the gimmick from an overhyped brag of doing what stage players have done with the musical for decades now.

Sadly, no one else enjoys these benefits, and the actors’ talents are left to the mercy of the careening movement of the camera. Hugh Jackman, for example, can sing, but none of his performances convey anything of Valjean’s redemptive arc. On the other end of the spectrum, Russell Crowe’s dismal singing becomes oddly endearing as he goes one further than the speak-singing everyone employs and instead SHOUT!-sings every single line he has. In a film so drearily serious, a bit of accidental camp is a welcome relief, and his hilarious miscasting entertains more than any of the songs outside of “I Dreamed a Dream.”

That, fundamentally, is the film’s failing. For all Hooper’s irritating incompetence, he might be forgiven had he invested the numbers with any life. Instead, he takes bad songs like “Master of the House” to an all-new nadir and saps all of the energy out of rousing pieces like “Can You Hear the People Sing?” and “One Day More.” As the act-ending centerpiece that collects the melodies and lyrics of most of the songs that came before, “One Day More” is the best song of the production. By virtue of collecting pieces of all of Hooper’s treatment of the other numbers, though, this version stands out as the worst disappointment of the film, its clueless cutting between groups serving only to sever the cast from each other instead of uniting them. Les Misérables climaxes with a doomed revolution, but Hooper’s isolating close-ups leave one wondering how a rebellion ever got off the ground at all.

It's Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt, 2012)

Don Hertzfeldt brings a trilogy of short films about a psychologically impaired everyman named Bill to a close with It’s Such a Beautiful Day, his longest and most ambitious work to date. The 23-minute film is a tour de force for the filmmaker from its opening images, which flicker onto the screen and back into darkness with a literal gasp. Hertzfeldt’s prior two films, Everything Will Be O.K. and I Am So Proud of You, delved into Bill’s life with aesthetic subjectivity. The director’s mash-ups of forms, avant-garde collages of images, objects and lights, were never more prominent as he used them to visualize the poor protagonist’s slipping grasp on reality as his mind slowly rebelled against him.

Taken with those films, as a feature-length fusion of the three shorts now allows, It’s Such a Beautiful Day begins as a (relatively) logical continuation of the mounting visual instability. On its own, however, the Brakhagean intensity that ushers in this final chapter is radical in its immediate impact and only more powerful when the intellectual play of the construction is bent toward emotional communication. The foundation of Hertzfeldt’s wild compositions are deceptively simple pencil drawings, the sort where a single figure is always visibly shifting even when not moving as each frame shows contains an outline with subtly different shading.

Yet even this stable grounding can be subverted when Hertzfeldt blacks out the screen and animated in a hand-drawn, amorphous thought bubble. This creates a blank area around most of Bill’s life, broken up only by the myopic splotches of repetitious activity against a void a broken image of memory loss and the anchors of rote that keep him going, even though he does not know why he continues to perform these same actions. But then, can someone without mental and memory impairments answer that question any better?

Hertzfeldt alters this basic style in a myriad of ways, including live-action shots amid various tricks of light and three-dimensional objects. He creates a play of images overwhelming in their individual and even collective placement, objects that pass by so quickly that merely identifying them is a challenge in itself, much less what that object “means.” Of course, film is an object of motion, and what each piece of Hertzfeldt’s puzzle is and symbolizes (if anything) is secondary to its effect when combined with 23 other frames of action each second. The abstract imagery, then, has meaning only in what it conveys from second to second, and what it conveys (to me, at least) is an overwhelming sense of loss, confusion and anxiety. Some of Bill’s unexplained illness can feel vividly concrete and specific, yet Hertzfeldt’s wise decision to leave his protagonist’s issues unnamed permits a universality. Bill’s inability to get a handle on anything past his perfunctory routine, the feelings he cannot place when looking at a face that seems familiar but distant at the same time, these are exaggerated and visualized but still resonant takes on life itself. Life is chaotic, fleeting and overwhelming, and if Bill seems to have more downs than ups, sometimes it is hard to tell which is which until looking back in retrospect.

The greatest moment, however, occurs when the film appears to end, naturally, on a down note. Suddenly, Hertzfeldt’s own psyche shatters and wars with their Ur-self, demanding that Bill not suffer so sad a fate. Hertzfeldt then hits rewind, gradually moving back from the brink and then gaining speed as a mere aversion of fate becomes a total reversal of it. It is the most brazen ending since F.W. Murnau likewise changed the logical end of his character in The Last Laugh, only Hertzfeldt goes further than Murnau’s cheeky break in fortunes. As Bill goes from a mentally collapsing basket case to the smartest man who ever lived, Hertzfeldt fulfills all the greatest dreams we hold for the characters we love. But then, he keeps going, until Bill achieves an immortality that proves, in its own way, to be worse than death. It is a masterful piece of bravura filmmaking, and one that truly announces Hertzfeldt as not merely a gifted, absurdist delight but one of the finest filmmakers working in America today.

Consuming Spirits (Chris Sullivan, 2012)

A whopping 15 years in the making, Chris Sullivan's work of cross-format animation is not only a beautiful ode to outsider art but a deeply felt human drama on its own terms. Filled with uncomfortable humor and wrenching insights into its disturbed, lonely characters, Consuming Spirits is as powerful a reminder as any that ennui affects the poor and rural, not just the wealthy and urban. It is one of the great surprises of the year, and one of my favorites in a year that has given me nearly 30 contenders for placement in a top 10.

My full review is up now at Spectrum Culture.

Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012)

For the last decade, David Cronenberg has retreated from his body horror nightmares of modernity and moved into the traumas that inherently exist in life, well outside contemporary anxieties. The postwar kitchen sink drama cum shattered mental breakdown of Spider. The instinctual savagery of man displayed even in the title of A History of Violence. The histories made visible on bodies via gang tattoos in Eastern Promises. The formation, and potential inadequacies, of theories to explore the psychology of all of this in A Dangerous Method. The old monsters still remain, if they are not as visible. Where the mind tends to ooze out of suppurating wounds in prior Cronenberg films, the dynamic reverses in Spider to make the body horror internal as the body collapses into the mind. In A Dangerous Method, it is Keira Knightley herself, her jutting jaw and angular frame thrown into disarray as her illness complicates the work and professional relationship of its two psychiatrists.

Cosmopolis bridges the earlier, topical body horror with the abstract, unseen terrors of Cronenberg’s late period. Indeed, in this film, the monster may be the camera itself, an Arri Aflexa that renders a picture of undeniable ugliness. Black levels pool like ink, unreal colors bleed into each other, and attempts at old-school in-camera effects make some of Hitchcock’s laughable rear-projections look like location shoots in comparison. That this is all clearly deliberate does not, on the face of it, serve as a full defense of the garish unpleasantness of the frame, and those alienated from this alienating movie cannot be blamed much for pushing outside of it. Speaking for myself, though, Cosmopolis is just about the most enthralling film of the year, capable of sucking in a viewer into the same black hole that consumes the image and the strange (and even more strangely delivered) dialogue. Not explicitly an apocalypse movie nor a Death of Cinema picture, Cronenberg’s latest feels like both, as the sudden meaningless of money threatens to take the world (and film) with it.

The film focuses on Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a young business genius and head of his own mutli-billion-dollar corporation. With the president in town and sparking traffic and protests, Packer informs his head of security (Kevin Durand) that “we” would like a haircut, specifically one from a barber all the way across a gridlocked Manhattan. That, more or less is it, though the film’s draining power comes from the arduous slog of the limo’s creep through town and the strange, distanced conversations Packer has in and out of his vehicle.

Pattinson, of course, is known for playing a vampire in the Twilight pictures, and here he carries himself a bit like Count Dracula, at once dignified and animalistic. He has sex with his art dealer (Juliette Binoche, all feline slink) with his hands behind his back before casually telling her he wishes to buy the Rothko Chapel and put it in his flat. He views violence with dispassion, even a smirking sense of entertainment, as he does when he sees the head of the International Monetary Fund get gruesomely killed or when an Occupy-like protester immolates himself outside Packer’s limo. The billionaire looks upon the latter with such complete remove that he ends up arguing about the unoriginality of the act with his “head of theory” (Samantha Morton), debating the sight on its grounds as a statement and dismissing it for lacking sufficient relevance and that “new” quality.

Cronenberg clearly repositions DeLillo’s novel for the 99% era, and the film aestheticizes Packer’s separation from the world just outside his bulletproofed windows and cork-lined, noise-cancelling doors. Pattinson speaks in arch dialogue, his royal “we” one of the least insufferable, incomprehensible things to come out of his mouth. He manages to be both blunt and abstract, and his line readings hit disharmonies within the natural rhythms of speech to make his speech yet more jarring. Interactions with other members of his small world provide yet more alienating talk, be it Morton’s theoretical notion that “Money has lost its narrative value” or Sarah Gadon’s wonderfully chilly performance as Packer’s new, sex-averse bride. Her reading of the line, “I smell sex all over you,” is perfectly perched between reproach and apathy, as if some part of her feels angry over her (correct) assumption of his infidelity but the rest of her is beyond caring.

Complementing the detached dialogue is some of Cronenberg’s most subversive direction. Everything about the look of Cosmopolis serves to distance Packer from the audience as much as his limo acts as a barrier between himself and the mounting unrest outside. The aforementioned inkiness of Peter Suschitzky’s digital cinematography comes into play with the black leather of the limo interior, in which everything is made inhumanly slick. This feeling is compounded by the pale glow of electronics casting an eerie, unnatural light on faces. These are garish and subtly unnerving tricks that Cronenberg takes even further by the way he gradually tilts the direction of its axis, decentering the actors and using different focal lengths to warp the spatial properties of the frame. Heads hang away from their bodies with more sense of stereoscopic depth than 3D has yet produced, and a close-up of Binoche’s arm seductively reaching for Pattinson is stretched beyond reason until the shot resembles King Kong’s mighty paw groping for Fay Wray.

Cronenberg’s typical direction resembles a doctor noting his diagnosis into a tape recorder, a clinical observation of physical and psychological traumas disturbing in its remove. Here, his camera becomes a part of the story, its image altered by a collapsing system and, more personally, Packer’s mounting stress as his bet against the value of the Chinese yuan becomes more and more foolish. The positioning of Packer as an anthropomorphization of the economic crisis is obvious, but it is the way that the camera, rather than coldly document, subjectively becomes that disaster as well that the film achieves its true power. Funny, then, that this newfound intimacy should prove more divisive and repellent for many than the rest of Cronenberg’s filmography.

The central conflict, then, lies less within its comic depiction of the 1% watching the poor literally burn as the world falls apart than the struggle of humanity against these new, digitizing forces. Technology has its own text, with its various programming languages, and its own forms of visual communication, as seen through the off-putting cinematography. Yet if the film practically dares the audience to hate it, it also does not truly embrace its revulsion, and one is left with the sense that the issue is not that new technologies are edging out humanity but that humanity is dragging its feet on its own evolution.

Technology (and the world it powers) now evolve so quickly that even Packer, in Pattinson’s 26-year-old body, admits he feels old and obsolete when confronted with an even younger whiz employee. Paul Giamatti appears at the film’s climax as a disgruntled ex-employee, the rat imagery used throughout the film finally made manifest in that most rat-like of character actors. Clammy and nervous, Giamatti’s Levin wants to kill Packer, less for revenge at being fired than as an outlet for his bewilderment at a world that now makes money by the nanosecond and thus requires constant calculations and communications faster than humans can process. When Packer confronts Levin and invites his “credible threat” to sit and discuss philosophy with him, both men almost betray a sense of relief that, despite the tension of their interaction, they can take a second just to get their bearings.

Giamatti’s shivering, despairing stalker helps visualize the fear and anguish Packer will not permit himself to show, save only for the most unexpected of triggers. The death of a favorite musician elicits his only tears, while the childhood barber he finally reaches near the end provides a level of comfort for him that no longer exists as his world changes. Where the digital focus of the film ties Cosmopolis to Cronenberg’s trendy technological horrors (think Videodrome and ExistenZ), these inklings of humanity help link the film to the director’s recent string of work. These films, either set in the past or, in the case of A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, bearing the scars of the past, set human pathology outside the modernity exhibited in his early work and in his typical style. Underneath its emotional detachment and spatial distortion, this is a human film, even if the humanity poised to perpetuate itself at the end does so in such a way that the ugliness of this new world may be preferable to what we have now.

Capsule Reviews: The Deep Blue Sea, Cloud Atlas, Rust and Bone

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2012)

Lit in a stuffy haze by Florian Hoffmeister, Terence Davies’ adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea continues the director’s penchant for visualizing the confining boundaries of conservative British upbringing. Ambiguities poke through, though, as they did for his masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives. Here, the cukolding love triangle of Rachel Weisz, lover Tim Hiddleston and elder husband Simon Russell Beale certainly exhibit melodramatic flourishes—“To the Impressionists!” is a boisterously funny outburst begging to join the ranks of a cinephile’s referential quotes. Yet the material also resembles a British take on Anna Karenina, where the cheated husband responds not with blustering, annihilating anger but a measured, conflicted tone of hurt and resignation. Weisz and Hiddleston face the negative consequences of passion, but it is Beale who grounds the film and threatens to steal the film as the person truly suffering in all this. His flicker of a smile and the pant of excitement in his voice when he notes Weisz still wears her wedding ring is so delicate the film threatens to blow away with the extra breath in his exhale, and his subsequent offer to help her transition away from him in any way he can is more poignant and heartbreaking than the subsequent travails Weisz faces with her impetuous new beau. Grade: B+

Cloud Atlas (Larry Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer, 2012)

The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer adapt David Mitchell’s novel by breaking up its Matryoshka doll structure into a cross-cut epic spanning time and space, yet the end result feels curiously unambitious. As with Mitchell’s book, each of the six stories is told in its own generic style, be it a corporate espionage thriller in the 1970s, a period melodrama of the early 20th century, a dystopic sci-fi social commentary in the not-too-distant future, and so on. But where Mitchell handles these transitions not simply with narrative adjustments but overhauls in prose, the direction across these separate stories is curiously homogenous despite some visibly different input between the chunk of segments primarily shot by the Wachowskis and those of Tkywer. Perhaps this was intended to keep the film stable, as it does not follow the novel’s structure but constantly leaps between each story. Nevertheless, this undermines each of the sub-films within the larger framework, for they lack direction unique to them, while the overarching themes of suffering and kindness echoed across each avatar lack the passion I expected. The remarked-upon race- and gender-bending of the cast members across the different stories brings to mind, of course, Lana Wachowski’s own violation of social binaries (a.k.a. that vile “natural order” bandied about by the villains who recur in different power positions throughout). Strange, then, and unfortunate, that the final film should feel so removed from its own earnest call for upending that system in favor of making a better, gentler world. The altered conclusion takes that quest literally, but that only makes the setting as removed as the tone, and indeed the hollow but sincere warmth the filmmakers find in the material can also feel like a capitulation to the order. Grade: D+

Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, 2012)

Two scenes in Rust and Bone bring Jacques Audiard’s direction in alignment with the complex, multitudinous emotions conjured by his actors. The first is Stéphanie’s (Marion Cotillard) return to water after an accident during her orca show at a sea park left her without legs. Cotillard’s face registers fear, nervousness, eagerness and, eventually, rhapsody as kickboxer Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) carries her into the ocean and she finds herself “home” again even as she struggles to adjust. The second, when the pair have sex for the first time, brings those same emotions back as Audiard playfully moves with Stéphanie’s preparations, holding on the removal of stockings and darting to trace her quick concealment of her prosthetic legs. The rest, tragically, betrays the subtleties the leads bring to the movie, with intrusive close-ups and ill-advised fade-outs to the soundtrack force emotions where Cotillard and Schoenaerts so deftly left matters without easy conclusions and invited the audience to truly engage with their characters. Grade: C

This Is 40 (Judd Apatow, 2012)

In Knocked Up, Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) played a side role to Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl’s unstably formed relationship. Mann played Heigl’s sister, and the rough patch of Pete and Debbie’s established bond ran parallel to the shaky formation of ties between the leads. Yet their arguments quickly crossed the line from the disruptions that test a relationship’s mettle to obvious, serious problems between two people clearly wrong for each other. Their eventual reconciliation is meant to show that Rogen and Heigl can and should make it too, but the desperate, artificial consolation left lingering fears of a futurish, even more nightmarish breakdown.

Enter This Is 40. Approaching their nearly simultaneous 40th birthdays, Pete and Debbie have regressed further in the last five years, their prickly resignation at spending the rest of their lives with each other now wholly removed of any evidence of true love save a few, futile lines of dialogue. In the Knocked Up DVD commentary, Apatow noted that Mann, his wife in real life, would never be able to stand Rudd’s lackadaisical, unserious approach to problems. This tension between the actual actors was visible in their supporting appearances in that film, and it seeps into every frame of this (over-)full-length examination of Pete and Debbie at a crossroads. The result is a terrifyingly toxic film in which the usual Apatow humor falls flat in the face of its nightmarish depiction of an entire family in freefall.

Amazingly, Pete and Debbie feel less developed now than they did as secondary characters, and what Apatow does establish of their relationship raises questions as to why they ever got together in the first place. This can be seen in minor incompatibilities—Pete’s rockist love of college rock classics is set against, in reductive and heteronormative Apatow fashion, Debbie’s “girly” enjoyment of dance music and Lady Gaga—and a larger, dysfunctional inability for the two to stand sharing the same space. Often, that is literally true: Pete hides out in the bathroom multiple times a day just to get away from his wife, playing iPad games in a clever recurring insight into his childishness.

This opens the door for cutting, probing black comedy in the mold of Elaine May (whom Apatow has routinely extolled up to and including featuring an interview with May and old partner Mike Nichols in his recent, guest-edited issue of Vanity Fair), but the director tackles the material with his usual style. The director’s over-reliance on contemporary pop culture has weighed down even his stronger features, but the recurring use of Lost as a plot device smacks of desperation and laziness and leaves the film instantly dated, as if the film were shot back in 2010 and only just now received distribution. But that is preferable to the sexist treatment of women, who speak only in screaming fits later explained by one of a choice of Women’s Troubles. (Well, that’s not true: Megan Fox, as Debbie’s possibly embezzling employee, is simply depicted as a whore.) There is even room for racism, such as when Pete and Debbie go to an “Eastern doctor” (Debbie’s words) and Pete mockingly imitates the man’s accent.

At all times, these two come off as if written by a 40-something who has forgotten his own age even as he blithely attempts to tackle issues nearer to it. When Debbie gets rid of the Wi-Fi in the house in some unexplained, asinine cleanse she forces onto the family, she and Pete encourage their kids (Apatow and Mann’s own daughters) to play with sticks and forts like they used to. This idiot was born in 1972; she was 10 when TRON came out, for God’s sake, and she acts like she grew up with the Joads. Apatow can barely process that oldness shifts with time, that the things that date a person culturally move with culture. It is also why this film, with the key role it gives the Lost finale, will date the movie horribly.

Around the time Mann was reduced to shrieking “Stop eating cupcakes!” at her physically fit husband, This Is 40 became truly intolerable. The moment should mark a warped kind of catharsis for Debbie, but there is no genuine pathos underneath her outburst, nor anywhere else in the film, for Apatow telegraphs his conservative need to uphold the family unit from the start. Because their eventual reconciliation is ordained, their caustic squabbles hold no weight, and the harsh, continuity-defying cuts between shots only compounds the feeling that the film is pointlessly bouncing around until it gets to its pre-accepted conclusion. To see the film that might have been, look no further than the performances given by Albert Brooks and John Lithgow as Pete’s and Debbie’s fathers, respectively. They manage to infuse their one-note roles with actual humanity, making even their thin sketches feel like people, a step up from the leads. Pete and Debbie struggle with issues outside Apatow’s demographic, but they are undone by having to still appeal to that younger group, leaving This Is 40 as stunted as its characters, unable to treat them lightly but equally incapable of handling their issues with any believable sincerity.

Capsule Reviews: The Day He Arrives, Bad 25, The Sessions

The Day He Arrives (Hong Sang-soo, 2012)

Hong Sang-soo’s The Day He Arrives begins with a man walking down a street and taking a left. It ends with him returning to that street and going right. This mirroring movement captures the film, so reflective that even the lead actor’s name, Yoo Jun-sang, is spat back out as the character Yoo Seong-jun, an ex-filmmaker who returns to Seoul to catch up with friends, pitifully attempt to rekindle an old flame, and idly philosophize. Hong’s subtle but pristine compositions and varied repetitions tease out character beliefs, hypocrisies and longings as Seong-jun’s rants against the lies of fate that cinema propounds even as he chases a waitress solely for resembling his ex. The repetitions also cinematize the life he feels is so separate from the artifice of movies, the distorted sense of time starting over until Seong-jun “gets it right” recalling a more poetic Groundhog Day. But it’s that poetry that makes all the differences, making even Hong’s cheeky (sometimes outright funny) reflexive details so human that they work not only as critical observations but affecting conduits for the character’s own feelings. Grade: A

Bad 25 (Spike Lee, 2012)

Going into Bad 25, I had fears of the banal, uninsightful visual monographs VH1 used to do (still does?) for classic albums. Happily, Spike Lee is no slouch documentarian, and Bad 25 goes far beyond the usual fluff pieces in the detailed technical accounts for each song. But it is the other areas Lee must probe, the interviews with business managers and, especially, music video—excuse me, short film—directors that deepens the film. The doc is a map of a carefully orchestrated, cross-media campaign to take over the world using the 11 songs contained in the album’s grooves. Thriller, of course, was the more dynamite success, but it caught even MJ by surprise. With Bad, he, and the team of talented people he attracted to help him, were ready. The only objection: for a film that pointedly leaves out the tabloid traumas that would corrupt so much of Jackson’s legacy, Lee includes an unsettlingly exploitative montage of friends and collaborators tearfully remembering where they were when they heard the news back in 2009, a rapid tour through tears complete with zoom-ins to make sure the camera picks up the glistening drops sliding down cheeks. A host of interview subjects offer a wealth of personal anecdotes, technical information and retrospective appraisal, but sadly it is that montage that remains in the head as much as a desire to revisit Bad. Grade: B-

The Sessions (Ben Lewin, 2012)

There is such great potential in The Sessions, starting with its forthright admission that the disabled have sexual urges, too. Too often, disabled people get pitied into a kind of dehumanizing sanctity, one that especially weighs on Mark O’Brien (John Hawkes) as a guilt-ridden Catholic. The film acknowledges the basic humanity of sex, and it even treats sex and nudity as mere facts of life. A shot resting casually on the exposed torsos of Mark and his sex surrogate, Cheryl (Helen Hunt), shows veins in the actress’ breasts that feels more beautiful and unvarnished than Hollywood’s coy, idealized treatment of nudity. Yet one can almost watch the film deflate in real time, its warm comedy tipping into trivialization as the frank treatment of its subject turns sheepish and deflecting. Hawkes does not get to grow and reflect with O’Brien, and his defensive humor never falters as Mark’s time with Cheryl introduces him to the realities, not the punishing self-perceptions, of his body. Numerous “Sundance” touches riddle this picture, from William H. Macy’s awkward Hip Priest to Levin’s banal direction being put toward a wan approximation of visual poetry, but nothing sums up how The Sessions squanders its assets like its approach to male nudity. Cheryl holds up a mirror to Mark’s naked body so he can finally see the real him, to see how normal he really is, but fear of the MPAA trumps honesty. Likewise, the denouement trades the somber, resigned reflection of the essay that inspired the movie for a treacly conclusion that rebuilds the pedestal that, ever so briefly, this film seemed primed to destroy. Grade: C-

Tabu (Miguel Gomes, 2012)

Miguel Gomes’ cinephilic tendencies are embedded into the very title of Tabu, taken from F.W. Murnau’s final film and modeled after its bifurcated structure. Black-and-white photography, visibly shot on film instead of digital, only exacerbate the cinematic artifice. Yet the Portuguese director’s aims go well beyond referential touches, and the one on-screen character linked to filmmaking in any way is described in narration as finding movies trivial. Tabu dabbles in trivial matters of its own, but they are played against themselves as Gomes traces the ennui and isolation of the first half back to surprisingly poltiical roots in the second.

A hint lies in an enigmatic prologue that precedes the two stories. A melancholic colonialist stands about idly with sad eyes as African servants labor around him. A Murnau-esque smooth track over hilly terrain speaks to the man’s detached boredom as a narrator (Gomes himself) talks of a lost love that tugs at his heart. The segment ends with the colonialist transformed into an equally sad crocodile, a strange image that will return in the film’s second half.

First, though, Gomes moves to present-day Lisbon, where a Catholic social activist, Pilar (Teresa Madruga), attends to a dementia-stricken woman named Aurora (Laura Soveral). Soveral plays the old woman like a mad specter of old wealth, clad in oversized, designer sunglasses and an ostentatious fur coat. Underneath her amusing caricature, however, are darker impulses, including a gambling addiction that has left her penniless and the racism that manifests itself openly and, in a dream about “talking monkeys,” obliquely. Gomes hones in on Aurora’s rapport with her Cape-Verdean maid Santa (Isabel Cardoso, who quietly seethes with terrifying intensity), using the old lady’s frustrations at her daughter abandoning her and leaving a stranger in her stead to bring out her bigotry. In one moment, Gomes even makes ironic commentary on Aurora’s privileged racism, plunging Santa into shadow to make her even darker as Aurora flips out on her in a two-shot and makes open reference to her maid’s race. Then the director cuts to follow Aurora as she exasperatedly walks out of frame, trapping her in a white sunbeam that subverts the stereotypical moral split of black and white by illuminating what a disgusting person she is.

But she is not the only target of criticism communicated through Rui Poças’ immaculate cinematgoraphy. The first half floats in soft focus, an obvious signifier of the characters’ isolation but meaningful in how broadly the focal lengths are used. Gomes does not simply film Aurora in shallow focus but Pilar as well, cutting the well-meaning righteousness from under her protests and prayers. An early shot in what appears to be one of those restaurants that revolves around a skyline makes for a surreal swirl of blurred, shifting blotches behind the medium-close-up of Aurora as she describes the aforementioned monkey dream, but reverse shots of Pilar only mildly dampen the effect of the background, trapping her in the same headspace. Later, Gomes plays a mild joke on the convictions of Pilar’s activism, framing a close-up on her laptop as she closes out browser tabs before going to sleep. With every click, an article with a provocative political headline on poverty or war is replaced by another. The last tab, though, is a game of solitaire, a reminder that a liberal activist in the West still has comforts and distractions from the Fight.

Those who do not have that luxury can be seen after Aurora passes and an old lover, Ventura (Henrique Espírito Santo), returns to relate the story of how he and the departed met. Ventura sits with Pilar and Santa in a restaurant decked out in jungle décor, and as he starts his story, the film suddenly jumps across time, space, and film stock to settle back in Africa in 16mm as the young Aurora (Ana Moreira) settles in with her husband (Ivo Muller), only for Ventura (Carloto Cotta) to appear and cause havoc.

The second half represents a slyly comic high in anti-colonial critique. Silent but for Santo’s narration and some diegetic noise (added in such a way as to seem non-diegetic), this portion of the film, titled “Paradise” to complement the first half’s “Paradise Lost,” traces the Western, modernist ennui of the first half to the imperial superiority and colonial wistfulness that informs it. Containing echoes of details scattered throughout the first half, this section is as much a stylized version of Aurora’s backstory as a straightforward piece of context. Gomes even shoots the young lovers’ interactions like a classical silent movie, with faces you can read at 100 paces (especially now that the focus depth increases), wild gestures and melodramatic action.

Less stylized are the shots of the Africans around the white colonials, tending fields or even sharing the frame with the whites and contrasting their stoic, impassive faces with the flourishes of the love triangle. A revolt simmers among them for most of the film, fed by outrage at the ridiculous and destructive solipsism of the romantic drama around them and the climactic act of the triangle acts as the final straw for those who cannot bear to let themselves be ruled by such people any longer as Aurora retreats back to Portugal to eventually pour all of her racial obliviousness out onto one poor woman. Tabu ends in the past, but it offers a radical recontextualization of the present, one that provides understanding for its addled petit-bourgeois elder and complicated new levels of withering criticism of her, and the mood of nationalist regret expressed through her.

Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012)

Like so many modern movie titles, Lincoln is only one word, and as with so many other titles, this offers an oversimplified, even misleading idea of what the actual film contains. Though Steven Spielberg roped in perhaps the most noteworthy white elephant actor of our time, Daniel Day-Lewis, to portray the 16th president, Lincoln concerns the man only elliptically. He appears chiefly as a do-gooder who relies on Machiavellian practices, one of which is the use of others to do his dirty work. And though the film concentrates on the passage of the 13th Amendment, Lincoln’s most celebrated achievement and undoubtedly an act of great good, Lincoln reveals that the path to that moment was rough and dirty, indeed.

That filth can be seen in the film’s first shots, the only ones of the movie to take place on a battlefield, or at least the only one to do so during a battle rather than the still aftermath. In a few gruesomely intimate but stably mounted shots, Spielberg manages to top the false realism of Saving Private Ryan for sheer visceral repulsion. Unionists and Rebs have moved too close for musket fire, resorting to bayonet stabs, fistfights, even drowning foes in the rising rainwaters in trenches. It is brute savagery at its most chaotic and meaningless, and it hangs over the rest of the film as Lincoln alternately uses and is hindered by war developments in his quest to get slavery abolished. And as the footage is revealed to be the memories of black soldiers relating the battle to Lincoln, the pride they express in getting back at Confederates massacring all captured black soldiers hints at the tangle of racial strife that will only be compounded by the amendment, not solved by it.

That lays the foundation not for a Great Man tribute to Lincoln’s unimpeachable honesty and conviction but for the intense politicking one must employ to effect change on a federal level. If anything, the image of Honest Abe is cast asunder by Spielberg and Munich writer Tony Kushner, peeling back the noble but nevertheless Machiavellian schemes he used to get his way. Late in the film, Lincoln’s biggest misdirection and sin of omission is revealed to one of his most loyal supporters, and the man’s quivering, aghast declaration, “You lied to me,” could be the voice of all the disillusioned seeing how all-too-human the president could be. But that is one of the few times where Lincoln even comes into direct contact with his schemes; for the most part, Day-Lewis is relegated to the occasional appearance as the bulk of the movie moves with the friends in high and low places who charm members of the opposition as well as the disagreeable elements within the Republican party. Compromise, that most uncinematic of political “victories,” is the subject here, and it is valorized as much as it is called into question.

Admittedly, the moments in which the film lionizes the ends reached by such means ring the most hollow. The structuring of the final House vote on the 13th Amendment teases it as dramatic suspense, and the obvious passage is a joyous victory made more treacly by Janusz Kaminski’s trademark overlighting in a cutaway scene from the vote results to Lincoln standing by the window of the White House with his young son, Tad. Spielberg Faces abound, and Day-Lewis’ is always tilted downward, bowed by the weight of Lincoln’s responsibilities. There are also the requisite scenes of distracting comedy: James Spader’s sneaky Republican operative is shot at by a Democratic Congressman, then has time to flee, run back, and flee again before the man can reload. Likewise, ardently liberal Republican attack dog Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) gets moments to be sarcastic with the somewhat caricatured opposition, letting contemptuous syllables dart out in savage clips. These are moments that threaten to undo what the film accomplishes elsewhere, adding a doe-eyed, lightweight tone to the deflating elements.

Thankfully, Spielberg balances out most of the dubious moments with a look behind ostensible breakthroughs to reveal the inner (and outer) turmoil they create. If the film unwisely plays the vote for suspense, it successfully wrings much more believable drama out of the pressure to table, even abandon, the hope for abolition in order to bring about peace. By pursuing one goal, the Republicans must forsake another, and each issue could have chaotic historical ramifications if allowed to continue. Among the many issues Aaron Brady raises with the film in his article for Jacobin, one of the angriest concerns how Spielberg handles Stevens, whose extreme (if absolutely correct) views are cowed in a crucial moment on the House floor in order to cement moderate support. Brady calls Stevens demurral his “shining heroic moment,” and there is some discomfort to the way in which Stevens rallies and turns his instance of moral cowardice and compromise into a rousing, applause-filled rant that deflects from what principles were just sacrificed. But for a movie Brady accuses (not unfairly) of omissions, he makes one of his own by ignoring the scene that directly follows, in which Stevens sits outside the assembly hall, clearly grappling with what he just did and using a morose argument with another radical colleague to justify himself to himself as much as the other man.

And then, of course, there is Lincoln. So many movie Lincolns resemble James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a creature of unassailable innocence perhaps too good for the realm of politics but able, for however brief a time, to bring the system to his level. Day-Lewis’ Lincoln resembles more the Stewart of Anatomy of a Murder, a man who proves that someone can be streetwise even where the streets are but dirt paths. He is simultaneously disarming and infuriating, particularly when deflects mounting hostility with a disarming, folksy story that allows him to hook a crowd for a long divertissement that allows Lincoln to subsequently return to the argument from which he skillfully departed, only now he controls the angle of approach. These scenes show Lincoln at his most approachable but also his most shrewd, and one sympathizes with the mix of anxiety and anger in the voice of his secretary of war (the always great Bruce McGill) when he realizes another tale is coming and flees the room to spare himself.

If this Lincoln is inspiring, and he ultimately is, it is because this great compromiser still has just enough conviction preserved after four years of war and internal strife to risk everything for it. A reasonable alternate title for the film might have been The Last Temptation of Lincoln, wherein a return to the status quo looks painfully welcome after so much bloodshed, even if the status quo would keep millions subjugated and likely lead to another conflict down the road. An eerie dream sequence near the film’s start places Lincoln on a ship heading to unknown and foreboding territory, the voyage hopeful but terrifying in its unknowns. For Lincoln, the 13th Amendment became an endpoint only when he was shortly thereafter prevented from seeing through its consequences. Spielberg mercifully keeps the dramatic irony of that subject mostly away from the film, but when Lincoln humbly admits to his servant, “I don’t know you,” his own confession of human separation from the cause he champions casts a far more troubling pall over what the future will bring than the president’s weary, relieved walk to the carriage that will take him to the Ford Theatre.