Husbands - 1970 - 2 Stars

Actors: Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, John Cassavetes

Director: John Cassavetes

People are often split into two distinct camps when it comes to an artist's intent - either an artist can fully account for everything that goes into his art, or else he's basically spurred into action by the Muses - he knows not what he paints, sculpts, writes, or in this case directs. I think no director gives a better argument for the latter than John Cassavetes, who seems to care very little about whether or not an audience will find a particular scene interesting. He finds it interesting, and if you don't, well, that's life.

Husbands starts off intriguing, but quickly becomes mired in a 30 minute scene at a bar with people around a table singing songs. While this scene very accurately replicates the feeling of being sober around a bunch of drunks, that feeling is incredibly agitating. I haven't felt this annoyed in a film since Godard's 'Traffic Jam' scene in Week End. Too many of the scenes seem like performances only - 'In this scene, what if you acted this way?' - and our protagonists are merely sketches.

Husbands is, somehow, 141 minutes long - this film could've easily been much better at 100 minutes. Cassavetes seems to be an actor's director, and he can't bear to waste a good performance; unfortunately, that's all this movie is good for.

Cedar Rapids - 2011 - 2 Stars

Actors: Ed Helms, John C. Reilly

Director: Miguel Arteta

The state of film comedy today is decidedly a sad one. Why does a film like Cedar Rapids feel so heavily focus-grouped? It's a small movie with Ed Helms as its star. The performances in this film are excellent, and it's a who's who of solid character actors, but nothing that happens in this movie makes sense in a comedy or really otherwise. Things happen because they have to.

Cedar Rapids could've been an actual character study of a man from a small town blown away by the 'bright lights' of the eponymous city, or it could have been a very broad comedy about the same. Instead the film tries to be both and ends up being neither. It's totally dead on arrival until John C. Reilly shows up playing a smaller, insurance-selling version of his character from Walk Hard.

The worst part is that there seems to have been some sort of religious satire in this movie, but it's been so defanged and watered down that it becomes a red herring. I'm sure this film got a lot of people walking out of the theater at the end saying 'Yeah, that was okay', but unfortunately too often that's what the film industry is shooting for these days.

Drive - 2011 - 4 Stars

Actors: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan

Director: Nicholas Winding Refn

I was tempted to do this review in the style of the protagonist from Drive: 'I liked it. Good movie. I liked the cars.' But that would be pretty boring. I've been watching so many overly talky movies lately that it's difficult to adjust to Drive's incredibly laconic protagonist.

It's also tempting for me to downgrade Drive because it borrows so liberally from The Driver and Le Samourai, among other films. I don't like this attitude, however - no one but film buffs are going to expose themselves to those movies, and repurposing unseen movies for a wider audience is one of the great cinematic traditions. Drive is, at heart, an exercise in style, but sometimes those can be massive fun - especially when it's as well-shot and well-plotted as this one.

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.