Goon - 2011 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Seann William Scott, Jay Baruchel
Director:  Michael Dowse

It's ballsy to make a hockey comedy - it's inevitable that the film will be compared to the industry standard, Slap Shot.  Despite the reverence that film has from the hockey community, Slap Shot is not just a raunchy comedy revolving around the game. Smuggled inside all the slapstick is a 70s-type character study about a guy whose way of life is becoming outdated and the hockey wives and girlfriends that put up with 'living the dream' in the minor leagues.  I was genuinely surprised how slow the film is compared to modern comedies of the same stripe (and as compared to its august rep - one which I imagine is cemented as the film is a rite of passage among young teenage hockey players).  So when I saw Goon, I expected it to abandon the character beats of its forerunner in favor of wall-to-wall humor, but strangely it didn't.

I could easily write 1500 words on the morality or sense of hockey teams' practice of having a player who is generally terrible at the game and whose only job is to fight and throw body checks - i.e. a Goon.  The film nicely deals with this conundrum by at least presenting it as one.  There's also some solid laughs, although Jay Baruchel's character seems to be a parody of bawdy sidekicks, as he is almost unbearably filthy.  This seems strange to say, but Seann William Scott is excellent in this movie - any hockey fan should recognize in his performance the simple and taciturn nature of most players.

Compliance - 2012 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker
Director:  Craig Zobel

Compliance is so strange that I don't even think I can discuss it without adding a jump.  After the jump, YOU WILL BE SPOILED.

The Queen of Versailles - 2012 - 4½ Stars

Subject:  Jacqueline Siegel, wife and co-owner of the largest house in the United States, and her family's life
Director:  Lauren Greenfield

The best documentaries feel accidental, and this is because documentaries are unpredictable.  Sometimes they take many years to complete, and your subjects (assuming they are people) can change.  The best example is of course, Hoop Dreams, which began as a trifling look at how young high school basketball players are recruited out of inner city Chicago, and ended up examining poverty, race, sports, and the way life shapes your dreams.  The Queen of Versailles examines the opposite condition - on how life lived as a dream can return to reality - but is nearly as poignant.  I don't even think I can say any more without soiling the potential experience, but this tale is Shakespearean at bottom and as old as accumulated wealth is in human history.

High And Low - 1963 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai
Director:  Akira Kurosawa

What could have been!  High and Low starts out with an excellent premise and is both well-acted and well-shot.  After the first hour, I had it ranked in the pantheon with all the other Kurosawa films, marveling at his range - this is, after all, not a historical epic.  The second half of the film is almost something else entirely, and while it's still interesting, it is much more uneven.  Premises set up in the first half are not really paid off in the second, and the stakes go way down.  Still, it's almost fun to see Kurosawa direct a botched, imperfect film - he manages to comes up with some fascinating shots.

Topkapi - 1964 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Melina Mercouri, Peter Ustinov
Director:  Jules Dassin

My brother does not get cable, and thus subsists on over-the-air television (and stolen cable TV shows).  While he's revealed that he will watch TMZ and other odious programming of this sort, he also gets a TV channel called This! that shows exclusively movies.  We've dubbed This!'s programming '[Grandpop] movies' because it shows mostly films of the 60s through the 80s of medium to poor quality - thrillers, Westerns, courtroom dramas, etc; the sort of films our grandfather seemed to watch endlessly on AMC in our youth.

Topkapi seems like a film for my grandfather's generation - it's almost a full-length advertisement for Mediterranean cruises.  It features exotic locales, exotic accents, an undercurrent of sexuality, and goofy farce, and it's all pretty kinda stupid and laborious at bottom.  However, Topkapi is also a heist film, and while the rest of the movie is forgettable, the heist sequence is among the best I've seen, redeeming the entire affair.

Horrible Bosses - 2011 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Jason Bateman, Charlie Day
Director:  Seth Gordon

Would that I wrote for something like Cahiers Du Cinema or the Village Voice - Horrible Bosses is begging to be evaluated from a Marxist perspective.  Alienation from labor, bourgeois discontent, product placement,  and an ending which relies on bourgeois technology.  It's got it all.  Plus, it's a mainstream Hollywood film.

Big Hollywood comedies are rarely 'warts-and-all' - this film feels like it has been focus grouped a thousand times.  It appeals to a certain demographic - both in terms of the plot, the humor, and the actors it employs.  But it made me laugh, and Kevin Spacey gets to chew on scenery with a twisted take on his character from Glengarry Glen Ross.  I just wonder if studio comedies always felt so un-free; even if there does appear to be some improvisation in this film, nothing in this film feels shaggy or makes one ask the question 'Why is that scene in the movie?'  And sometimes those scenes are the most fun.

Following - 1998 - 4 Stars

Actors:  Jeremy Theobald, Alex Haw
Director:  Christopher Nolan

Note: Minor spoilers for this film and Inception

It's very easy to read the first film in Christopher Nolan's career in terms of all the ones that have come after, and certainly  thematically it's all here.  It's perhaps even easier to compare Nolan to Hitchcock only that Nolan's characters reside a more solipsistic world, and that more than Hitchcock, Nolan uses our knowledge of conventional film plotting against us.  Easier still is to read this as a meta-film whereby the protagonist, obsessed with 'following strangers', is a man just looking for the same thrills that a film would provide, and he is provided with them by a 'director'.  Nothing annoyed me more about Inception that the trite revelation that at bottom, it's about the experience of going to a movie theater - I know what that's like, I've done it quite a lot, I go to the movies to see past my own navel, engrossing though it is.

But let's can all that rot - Following is a great little Rube Goldberg of a film.  Had I known nothing about Nolan, the second half of the film would have caught me more by surprise, but the way it all turns out is quite surprising nonetheless.  It's tempting to dismiss Nolan's later films as mere reworkings of this plot, and indeed, having seen 4 of his movies, I am now bearish on his future as a maker of great films.  Still, even if he keeps making the same movie over with more bells and whistles, it figures to (maybe) be interesting.