Certified Copy - 2010 - 4 Stars

Actors: Juliette Binoche, William Shimell

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Certified Copy is a look at the genuine - a difficult thing to do through the lens of film, which is already artificial, and arguably more artificial than say, a novel. What's more genuine - our memories of the past, which are ostensibly fixed, or our experience of the present, which features changes of all sorts, changes which we may be only truly aware of when we examine the past?

In short, I can't spoil this film's plot at all, but it's heady stuff. There are recent films which have a similar theme, but compared to this they're inorganic, ungenuine, and artificial.

Limitless - 2011 - 3 Stars

Actors: Bradley Cooper, Robert DeNiro

Director: Neil Burger

How many high-concept films become total letdowns in the final 20 minutes? I don't know, but add Limitless to that list. Limitless feels like a film that had a different ending until some studio or focus group or something nixed the original. Still, it's (somewhat) visually inventive, has a solid hook, and decent performances - it's worth seeing if you want a movie that, ironically enough, turns most of your brain off.

The Puffy Chair - 2005 - 3 Stars

Actors: Mark Duplass, Katheryn Asleton

Director: Jay Duplass

The Puffy Chair seems to be a throwback to 70s films like The Last Detail or The King of Marvin Gardens - characters loosely drawn by what they do, adrift in a post-something state. There's emotional discussions, discussions where characters reveal more by what they don't say, and the like. There's also a fair amount of humor, but not humor in the arch Wes Anderson style that one might expect. Hardly essential viewing, but The Puffy Chair has a nice handmade aesthetic and avoids becoming a shaggy-dog story.

Masculin Feminin - 1966 - 4 Stars

Actors: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Chantal Goya

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Ah, now that's much better. My last foray into Godard was his terrifically annoying Week End, which seemed to be a giant middle finger to everything. Masculin Feminin is like a quick middle finger - blink and you might miss it. It's prankish rather than openly hostile.

Masculin Feminin is made up of 15 vignettes that largely revolve around a left-wing journalist and his interactions with his girlfriend and her friends. It's chock-full of 60s talk - Socialism, birth control, music, advertising, the 'bourgeois' - but Godard doesn't let this sort of thing overwhelm the picture. The central vignettes are (to me) three conversations between a man and a woman. Godard lets the camera stay on one participant in these conversations for a long time - it's a very intimate thing to get to look at a close-up of someone's face when they're listening instead of when they're talking. He makes it clear that generally each person in these conversations is looking at the other, heightening the sense of intimacy, even though the two are not romantically involved.

Videodrome - 1983 - 4 Stars

Actors: James Woods, Sonja Smits

Director: David Cronenberg

There's not much separating Videodrome from a film ripe for Mystery Science Theater 3000. In fact, maybe there's nothing at all, except that Videodrome is fascinating and the movies shown on MST3K are terrible. Still, Videodrome has many of the hallmarks of the B-picture - homemade special effects, outlandish sci-fi, and a loose grip on the way people actually think and act. Regardless, David Cronenberg has total confidence in his vision of a paranoid cable TV executive who sees potential profit in an underground movie, and the consequences that follow therefrom. It's difficult not to respect an auteur's vision when he's clearly made exactly what he set out to do.

Elephant - 2003 - 4½ Stars, 2½ Stars

Actors: Alex Frost, Eric Deulen

Director: Gus Van Sant

I decided to give Elephant two ratings - its cinematography and direction is unbelievable. However, I do have to confess that I am a giant fan of Van Sant's aesthetic, even if I'm not sure he does all that much with it. A single tragic day at a high school is a perfect place for his Satantango-style examination of crossing paths and sad confluences.

The second rating is for shallowness in character - Elephant almost expects you to invest its characters with your own memories or perceptions of high school, because whatever work it does is largely image-based. This works in some instances, but falls terribly short in others.

Trainspotting - 1996 - 3 Stars

Actors: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner

Director: Danny Boyle

Trainspotting gets filed under the list of 'Films I Should've Seen 10 Years Ago", a style-over-substance film that launched Danny Boyle and Ewan McGregor's careers. It's provocative and creates some unforgettable images, but does so at the expense of any character development or sense of plot. There's also the seemingly standard mid 90s post-Tarantino deconstruction of some pop culture item - is this still a thing in movies now? It might blend in seamlessly in newer movies, but here it feels self-conscious and largely uninteresting. There's also that late 90s English movie thing where someone speaks with such a deep accent that it's impossible to understand half of what they say - I'm glad I don't see any movies like that anymore.

Before Sunset - 2004 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

Director: Richard Linklater

Note: Very Minor Spoilers

It can be difficult to make a film about memory. We've seen lots of 'great' films about it - Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Inception - but it's not easy to capture the feeling of a person being in one place and time while thinking (and feeling) about another. The characters in Before Sunset are in two places - in the film's present, and nine years ago, during the events of Before Sunrise. Other than a brief montage of the earlier film, we don't see images from there - the film brilliantly manages to rely on our memory of the previous movie, and I think it succeeds no matter how much of the original film the viewer actually remembers.

The film also manages to turn on the fact that what we say, how we act, and what we're thinking can be three different things - the tension is created by the fact that one character may or may not betray what they're thinking either by how they act or what they say.

Moneyball - 2011 - 3 Stars

Actors: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill

Director: Bennett Miller

I've read Moneyball, and reading books before seeing the filmed adaptation of the book is usually a way to dislike the movie. I'm not aggrieved at what was cut out of the film - in fact, this is a rather excellent adaptation of the work. I think the writing was strong. I think the performances throughout were strong. I'm just not sure that a film could've gotten to the heart of Moneyball and its central character Oakland GM Billy Beane.

Beane is driven to win, and that's a difficult thing to portray on screen - yes, there are some thrown chairs, smashed stereos, and angry speeches made at a losing team. Yes, he's incapable of watching his own team play, because he gets too worked up about it. But the film has a hard time letting us into Beane's head - perhaps it never really wanted to go there, but it never ends up there. Well-made, worth seeing, but ultimately forgettable.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore - 1974 - 4 Stars

Actors: Ellen Burstyn, Kris Kristofferson

Director: Martin Scorsese

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is a classic '70s' film - it's a slow-moving character study about a largely regular person. Do we even have movies about poor people anymore, or just movies about poor people who become rich? Alice struggles to find employment after her husband's death, as she goes on the road with her 12 year old son with the hope of eventually returning to her hometown to live.

Knowing what I knew about this movie going in (very little), I joked to myself that Scorsese would have all sorts of fast camera zooms and 'Sympathy For the Devil' on the soundtrack. Not quite - but the film is laid out with the vision of a master. A lot of these 70s talkfests stick the camera in one place, or they'll start a scene in an interesting place but not finish anywhere interesting. This film is clearly made by someone who thinks visually first and foremost.

Crank 2: High Voltage - 2009 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Jason Statham, Amy Smart

Directors: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor

Is there anything sillier than the Crank movies? Probably not. Anything more awesome? Probably lots of things. Still, the lengths to which the Crank films go to entertain is quite something - no act is too foul or too violent, and no camera movement is too stylized.

Crank 2 revolves around a protagonist whose artificial heart has only an internal battery - the only way it can be charged is if Jason Statham exposes himself to electricity. This video-game style premise permeates the entire film. The only downside is that this video game gets slightly repetitive - even at 85 minutes, a film this constantly amped up gets tiresome, especially when we know our protagonist is in no real danger. I'm not sure I would watch a Crank 3.

Southern Comfort - 1981 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Keith Carradine, Powers Boothe

Director: Walter Hill

Thanks, A.V. Club and the death of Walter Hill, for making me aware of this film. A chilling look at what happens when a routine military exercise goes awry for National Guardsmen, this movie is both suspenseful and meaningful. Hill manages some amazing shots and coaxes great performances out of a who's who of 'that guys' - Powers Boothe is particularly great as 'the new guy'.

The movie invites obvious comparisons to Deliverance, but eschews Deliverance's shock value for a subtler aesthetic. It's a shame this movie is not even available on DVD - it should be much more widely known.

The Red And The White - 1970 - 4 Stars

Actors: Jozsef Madaras, Tibor Molnar

Director: Miklos Jansco

The Red and the White is about the battle between the upstart Bolshevik forces and the tsarist White forces. In retrospect it's obvious who's who, but I spent the entire first half of The Red And The White trying to figure out who were the Red and who were the White. I suspect this is part of the point - ultimately it's not that important, as war tears apart towns, cities, and nations.

The Red and the White features a number of stunning long takes, which help keep the viewer in the moment - the camera pans around during a climactic scene, unsure what to focus on, trying to take in the entirety of the moment and failing. At one point, we see a person about to be executed, the camera moves away, and when it moves back, he's no longer there. Such must be the horrors of war.

Saboteur - 1942 - 3 Stars

Actors: Priscilla Lane, Robert Cummings

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Saboteur is the weakest effort I've seen from Hitchcock. Most of Hitchcock's plots don't make a damn bit of sense when you stop and think about them for 2 seconds, but Saboteur's is especially convoluted. Throw in strange characterizations, propagandizing, and an awkward scene with circus freaks, and it's a mess. The film, like North by Northwest, manages to breeze from a factory in California to a climactic confrontation at the Statue of Liberty with surprising ease, but aside from an interesting, albeit mustache-twirling, villain, there's not much here that's must-see.