Up In The Air - 2009 - 3½ Stars

Actors: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga
Director: Jason Reitman

Up In The Air, and this may sound absurd, could have been a really great film. It has a solid hook, it's ostensibly about Our Time and the way We Live and Should We Go On Living This Way, but unfortunately it suffers from one problem: it's (probably) a big budget film. This requires the director to pander to his audience - what could have been a film that explores one man's story and at the same time suggests all of our stories is instead bracketed with footage of real-life people discussing how it is to live in Our Time.

My high praise for the film is that even though it is populated with archetypes, those archetypes felt 'true'.

Greenberg - 2010 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Ben Stiller, Greta Gerwig
Director: Noah Baumbach

Film, as compared to literature or any other medium, seems best disposed to show the workings of the narcissist. Unlike literature, in (most) film we never get any internal reflections - we are working only with what a person says and does. Ben Stiller's Greenberg in the film of the same name is such a person - intractably self-regarding, lost in the past, unable to enjoy any part of life. Things happen to him in the film; will he change? You'll have to see it to find out.

The film is very much in the Woody Allen vein - at least in Woody Allen films, there's his constant one-liners that brighten the misery. There's humor here, but little of it is joyous laughter. In Greenberg, it feels like the laughs are being wrenched out of us. It's a well-made film, but it deals with parts of our psyche that we'd all like to deny - it's often difficult to enjoy experiencing that.

The Cruise - 1998 - 3½ Stars

Director: Bennett Miller

The Cruise follows Timothy 'Speed' Levitch, a notable weirdo and part-time New York City bus tour guide, through his reflections about New York, architecture, love, and life. Levitch's continuous extemporaneous rants, despite his irritating voice and seemingly unbearable self-regard, are inspired and interesting. Weaker are the poems or prepared statements he reads, and 76 minutes is quite long enough with Levitch, but he is full of information on the history of New York as well as a fascinating, oblique take on existence.

The Long Goodbye - 1973 - 3 Stars

Actors: Elliot Gould, Nina Van Pallandt
Director: Robert Altman

When I see a mediocre noir film like The Long Goodbye, it makes me appreciate the great noirs all the more. Obviously this isn't a true noir - it's been Altman-ized and updated for 1970s Los Angeles - but being based off a Raymond Chandler novel and featuring Gould as Philip Marlowe makes it a de facto noir.

Noir plots are supposed to have lots of twists and turns, but this film really doesn't. The Altman-ized characters are a touch too eccentric, and Gould's habit of muttering to himself makes him more nebbish-y than noir heroes, whose appeal is always being one step ahead of the audience in terms of figuring out what the hell is actually going on. We get the sense that Marlowe is just as lost as we are. As a comment on noir films and their relevance to actual life, perhaps this is interesting, but it doesn't make for a great movie.

Deliverance - 1972 - 4 Stars

Actors: Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds
Director: John Boorman

Even though Deliverance is both terrifying and insulting, I enjoyed it nonetheless. It's terrifying because it successfully evokes how close we are to our bestial nature, without jamming it down our throats. It's insulting because its evocation of terror is based on our natural fear of bestial hillbillies, who steal and threaten and (spoiler alert) sodomize. So if it does cast the rural South as an uneducated, lawless lot, it manages to grant all the other characters realistic qualities and temperaments.

There's especially great use of cinematography - we know from other films when the camera is 'within' the eyes of a character, the camera moves in the way a person's head and sight does - Deliverance tricks us into thinking someone's watching. Or are they? The feeling of dread is multiplied.

Shutter Island - 2010 - 4 Stars

Actors: Leonardo Dicaprio, Ben Kingsley
Director: Martin Scorsese

In baseball, a 300-win pitcher is considered historically great. Sportswriters try to trumpet the next 300 game winner when a phenomenal young pitcher puts together 2 or 3 great seasons at the beginning of his career. As it turns out, 300 game winners are not defined by the start of their career, but by the end of it - 300 game winners, in the modern era, are pitchers who pitch very well between the ages of 35 and 40, and perhaps even beyond that.

My elaborate and clunky sports analogy is a setup to discuss Martin Scorsese's place in the film canon. As I see it, many of the truly great artists are like those 300 game winners - people like Beethoven, Kurosawa, Dostoyevsky, and Shakespeare were still pushing artistic boundaries right up to their death; their 'greatest' works came in old age. I wonder if Shutter Island is a step in that direction - as a mindfuck, it's top notch, but mindfucks don't always make great films. In fact, I'd say they never do (and yes, I am including Psycho). So while Shutter Island is a masterful construction, there's only so far a director can go with this sort of film. It's not a genre picture, and Scorsese is using his name to be able to push through a film whose commercial viability would be dubious with another director attached. I am still hoping for greater than this.

Henry Fool - 1997 - 4 Stars

Actors: Thomas Jay Ryan, James Urbaniak
Director: Hal Hartley

More films should be like Henry Fool, but Henry Fool itself is a giant, glorious mess. Concerning a garbageman steered towards writing poetry and the titular ex-con who's doing the steering, Henry Fool asks questions about art's purpose, its effect on those who experience it, and the unfortunate consequences of artistic success.

There's a great film trapped inside this movie - unfortunately Henry Fool veers into self-indulgence with its 137 minute length. However, the film manages to create an interesting little world - this film could have been even looser and longer. It also has the candor to not believe its own bullshit - while it's easy for me to say this film could've been done better, it also could have been done far worse.

Step Brothers - 2008 - 2½ Stars

Actors: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly
Director: Adam McKay

Spoilers, but c'mon.

Step Brothers seems to be the apotheosis of the man-child genre - I'd think that Ferrell and O'Reilly are too old to play man-children, but not so. Each plays the son of a parent getting re-married, and thus the title - Step Brothers.

The film climaxes at Ferrell and Reilly's bizarre rendition of Con te partiro which seems to indicate that we should be ourselves, and everyone will like us. I'm probably reading into the film too deeply. Sight gags abound - post-Something About Mary, it seems that filmmakers are convinced that showing something disgusting is inherently more humorous than leaving it to suggestion. I don't think this is true, but then again, comedy really doesn't have any boundaries anymore - we're living in an entertainment world where 'everything is suggested'.

As a side note, the man-child genre has to be put to bed - it's almost meta, since comedy is itself a 'boyish' pursuit - it's almost as embarrassing as writers writing novels about writers.

North By Northwest - 1959 - 4 Stars

Actors: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint
Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Note: Spoilers Ahead, but even if you haven't seen the film, you'll already know them

North By Northwest, like Psycho, is a film best seen without any awareness of what's about to happen. In our reference-obsessed culture, this is absolutely impossible - surely North By Northwest's two most iconic scenes are already ruined. In fact, they are ruined enough for us to question the plausibility of both of them, even as we watch them for the first time. The 'airplane' scene is rather incredible, but even our protagonist comments on its absurdity in a later scene. The climactic scene down Mount Rushmore falls prey to typical cinema convention - I was just waiting for the scene to wrap up so the film could end.

Regardless, it's an enjoyable film that asks a real simple question from the very beginning - what if a shadowy, powerful organization thought you were a spy? How could you go about proving that you weren't? It's a deeply paranoid film - sometimes I wonder how Hitchcock's works were so popular. However, the protagonist may as well be named John Everyman - he and everyone else are kept mostly traitless, as they continue deceiving one another.

The plot of the film is masterful overall, despite the scene where several characters nicely provide all of the exposition we need for the film - there's a lot of plot to carry, and a lot of off-screen drama we really cannot be privy to without making the exposition even more tedious. Hitchcock even throws in a MacGuffin, though he invests so little in it that I'm not even sure it's a successful usage of the practice.

Vernon, Florida - 1981 - 2½ Stars

Director: Errol Morris

I used to think that I would watch Errol Morris film a bunch of weirdos reading the phone book. That thought has been extinguished by Vernon, Florida, an extremely loose collection of interviews that Morris did in the Florida town. The film almost functions as an anthropological study of rural people - we see how they spend their leisure time, what they believe in, how they work, and so on.

Like Gates of Heaven, Morris's preceding film, there's something much deeper going on in Vernon, Florida, but I'll be damned if I actually want to find out what it is. Compounding the general inscrutability of the film are the subjects' thick accents, which make them near-incomprehensible at times. The film is also funny, but as a college-educated Northerner, I'd feel like a real asshole if I put on this film to laugh at the people in it. However, restricting my laughter just made viewing the film a tense experience. I don't think it was Morris's intent to make fun of these people, but with so many television shows featuring ill-informed people 'deserving' of our ridicule (e.g. Jerry Springer, the early incarnation of The Daily Show), it's unfortunately my impulse. Mercifully, the film is only 55 minutes long.

Dead Man - 1995 - 3 Stars

Actors: Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer
Director: Jim Jarmusch

Jim Jarmusch is cool. His films evoke a kind of cool even if they are often about losers. When it comes right down to it, I can imagine Jim Jarmusch making decisions about the content of his films based on exactly how cool it be. Wouldn't it be cool to have Robert Mitchum in my movie? Yes, it would - put him in. Iggy Pop likes acting, let's give him a role. Oh, and everyone should ask everyone if they have tobacco. Unfortunately, past all the coolness, there's not very much substance - things just kind of happen. I don't know why I'm so disposed to dislike these very open-ended, 'life-like' films - I suppose because we never really get a sense that Johnny Depp's character has anything to him at all. Also grating was Jarmusch's use of fades in and out to begin and end scenes, a technique that worked better in Stranger Than Paradise. The film is very cool, and that's cool - it strikes me as the sort of film that if the viewer is in the right mood, can seem excellent. Evidently I was not in the right mood.

Another 'cool' choice was having Neil Young do the soundtrack - a bunch of twanging, amelodic, distorted guitars that really seemed to add nothing. I suppose it was Young's interpretation of typical Western soundtracks.

The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant - 1972 - 3 Stars

Actors: Margit Carstensen, Hanna Schygulla
Director: Werner Fassbinder

Note: Minor Spoilers Ahead

Roger Ebert's review of Gerry mentions a quote from a film big-shot who told him, "Roger, if nothing has happened by the end of the first reel, nothing is going to happen." This is certainly true of The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, which is the stereotypical 'foreign film' - dialogue-loaded, action-light, meandering, and certainly dull (at times). After fifteen minutes, I had realized that the 'action' of the film had only taken place in a single room, and was convinced that the rest of the film would also take place there - spoiler alert, but I turned out to be correct.

Perhaps it's my gambling nature, but the film feels like a bet - can you have a 2 hour film whose action only takes place in one room, and still make it interesting? The answer is, 'Sort of', and I think Fassbinder would have a push with whomever he made the bet. Fassbinder does manage to make several interesting characters out of this non-action, including the titular Von Kant around whom the film revolves, but a movie that's only dialogue and in a single room had better accomplish that much. It's an intriguing experiment, no doubt, but the film just has too many scenes that lose our attention for me to rate it any higher than 3 stars.

Carnal Knowledge - 1971 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Jack Nicholson, Ann-Margret
Director: Mike Nichols

Note: Minor Spoilers Ahead

I was tempted to split Carnal Knowledge's ratings in two, since the film divides nicely that way. It concerns two college friends and their romantic escapades, from college until middle-age. The first part of the film is simple, straight-forward, and well-told - the second is, intentionally, an uneven mess. I suspect this is merely form following function; as our lives grow more complicated, our reasons for doing things become even more inscrutable - our protagonists' decisions reflect that.

The film feels French in its wandering narrative and use of long, dialogue-heavy scenes - the film was going more for shock value, as I've heard it's the first American film to use the 'fuck' word. Still, some of the director's choices seem pretentious and for their own sake.