The setting is pretty amazing - and the cinematography is among the best of the year - but the morality play it centers around (its blind attempt at "The Mousetrap", we'll say) never transcends its melodramatic trappings. DeFoe's, um, "accent" is nothing if not distracting; Brian Cox does some seriously broad scenery chewing in a move that feels like a huge step backward for this brilliant actor. Bettany manages to eek across the finish line without tarnishing himself. After Gangster No. 1, it just seems like a drab, almost offensive move for a McGuigan to make something this base.

Wow. Here's a movie that expects you to believe its main character is sleazy while, on the surface, Jude Law seems to have been instructed to do just the opposite. By the time he starts learning lessons, you're almost shocked at how dumb he really is (the word definition page-a-day calendar starts this ball rolling): It's as if he's been muscled into maturing beyond his womanizing tendencies rather than gradually understanding the error of his ways. Nothing of any value aside from the sleek, surface values, most of them just Jude Law and beautiful women interacting (which, despite the banality of their actual interactions, is hard to decry completely).
 

I'm probably being mighty subjective here (my gut says C+), but this was escapist entertainment in just the right dose at just the right moment. Sure, it's basically a youth-set Britcom with all the trimmings that come with it - but it also made me smile unconsciously more than once. And I acknowldege it.

The great, dreamy atmosphere is often marred by the film's obsession with serendipity, and the morality of its characters: It bites off so much more than it can chew, that if it only put its mood at the front of its consciousness, it would probably have been the best film of the year. The sequence where he's on the phone, unraveling the previous night's activities, is probably the best piece in the film. Constructionwise, the whole thing is much less interesting than it seems (it all adds up to blind instinct but, really, not saying much more than coincidence, coincidence, coincidence).

Randy's right about it containing a lot of great shots of "people smoking in the snow". Rarely has a title been this dead-on about its tone, which sort of underlines problem: Anything dealing with actual text or character interaction is in direct opposition to how bare and brilliant the aesthetic is. Environment is a pretty big part of the thing (despite Ebert's claim that it's universal, I think the film rises and falls by its travelogue trappings); I enjoyed the characterization, but found a number of Ceylan's plot points too quirky and sentimentalized. It had that wan lining that foreign films do, begging a clarity to the vague ponderance: "Is it me or just the translation?" I'd sit through it again, though, just to be sure...

Portrayal of life in postwar Great Britain is much more interesting than the treatise on abortion; Probably my least favorite of Leigh's films, it makes the fatal mistake of sliding its entire second half on a downhill slant of crying close-ups and sober flashes of reality. The great, bracing transition (when the cops show up at the engagement dinner) that was meant to link the two halves is the last breath of anything remotely Leigh-esque. Even though All or Nothing felt somewhat stalled, the promise of greatness again is all the more sour when diminished by a naked expose on Being True to Yourself. The Imelda Staunton performance, much like Jaime Foxx's, is more bells and whistles than great acting (for my money). The relatively high grade, in the face such complaints, is a marker of just how freshly a film cut of a different cloth falls in your lap - warts and all.

Szabo has this uncanny way of catering to our hungry-for-justice side without being utterly obvious about it; As in Taking Sides, we're pretty much enthralled to watch evildoers get theirs (in this case, a no talent-hack actress and a manipulative kept man she stole from the 40ish primadonna). Annette Bening is just as good as her "status" nod (she the only nomination for this film) might imply. In fact, despite how corny is sounds, her naked embodiment of a fortysomething (it's never left for pondering minds to uncover that she's aging) is probably as dead-on as you'd imagine, were you a believer that the Academy Awards had 'ought to do with merit. That said, the film never takes its dryness to any place more colorful, really, maintaining a pretty modest tone from tip to top.

It's length and a hope-will-find-away ending punch large holes in a film that needs to give the appearance of credibility in order to work, in my opinion. There are some great causes listed, you get angry and then the movie heals you - as if it's rounding a symmetrical narrative curve rather than summating the general, worldwide problem of corporate corruption.

It's so silly, and so lame, and so Japanese Hollywood - so why did I dig it so damn much? Probablly the logistics of the cat and mouse game - more specifically, the fact that the film even bothered to underline the similiar positions of the undercover cop and the mole, but the way it didn't seem to care that it was acting as if no one had ever done it before. It's one of those films you can't believe is par for the people who made it, despite the fact that you actually enjoy watching it. (Great chance, by the way, for the remake to be better here: Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson being helmed by Martin Scorcese; i.e. - The Departed).

Before it grabs at you with both claws, sucking you into the twisted, convoluted machinations of greed and time travel, Primer is a curious thing in itself: A terrifically photographed breeze through the kind of thick, technical wherewithall as it is spouted by guys you obviously believe are really engineers who happen to be making a film instead of the pursuing the creation of their own time machine. As they construct their machines and yammer about things you couldn't possibly understand, it dawns on you: Shane Carruth really, really wants you to believe that his explanation of time travel would be relayed in formulas and equations rather than  stories about bumping one's head on one's toilet and dreaming of flux capacitors. I'm not sure I can even approximate whether I'd hit the mark in understanding the second half's unending and supremely convoluted game of switcheroo between past and present. It's puzzle tendencies serve to make a good thing even better, selling us very successfully an edge of genuine realism (oxymoron anyone?) and then showing us the staggering dimension of these characters. Also: I can't wait to see the thing again.

There's some great long takes, great camerawork (and Kidman is spot-on), but there's nothing in all of its one hundred forty-seven minutes that manages to transcend the borderline self-parody of its premise: A ten-year old thinks he is the dead husband of the well-to-do, soon-to-be-remarried widower. The only parts I believe are that he's ten years old and that she's a widower. All the stuff in between, where the joints tend to connect, is distracting in its hilarity. I really thought, after being floored by the open shot, that Glazer was going to stay as stylish and literate as he did in Sexy Beast. The music video director in him is an obnoxious foreground in Birth).

Dialogue is wifty as all get out, but watching Green expand the thrill of the accidental death sequence in George Washington into a feature length spin on The Night of the Hunter is the primary reason I really dug Undertow. The story is ridiculous beyond belief, but the filmmaking (that earns forgiveness with a Philip Glass score as co-pilot) is so gosh darn crisp (semi-indulgent zooms and great transitions without sound, continuing poetic construction); Undertow has the strangely ironic prestige of being more character/environment focused like George Washington, but possessing none of the sincerity or consistent quirk of All the Real Girls. In short: It fits right into his repertoir without much hesitation or question (particularly as Malick - or D.G. Green, Sr. for short - ponied up an executive producer credit), poising him for a masterpiece soon (I 'magine).

I'd have had a much better time enjoying the often-funny antics of Jim Carrey and the stunning art direction if only the story didn't feel grafted from something much larger that made much more sense. Imagine a Harry Potter film where everyone around him kept alluding to his parents in hushed tones but we never find out what has happened to them or why and you're close. Though the ending is anti-climactic to a fault, I couldn't help enjoying the way the film balanced its flaw against a fortysomething man marrying a fourteen year old, a Justice of the Peace being hornswaggled into doing it and the peril of a young boy hanging from the side of an old house. Memo to everyone involved: Aside from making a separate film about Olaf's acting troupe (which I'd gladly watch), perhaps give Luis Guzman something to say now and again. He's pretty good.

It could have been made years ago (and fit into the Indie circuit very easily), but it seems to strive for renewal of the devastating pathos of Taxi Driver, a film I feel very uncomfortable even mentioning in the same breath as this one. There exists a great deal of that heavy tone that comes with a film that wants to dump the emotional burden in the audience's lap. The Assassination of Richard Nixon doesn't quite dump it - it strives for sympathy or, at the very least, pity - instead transferring the naive Bicke's neurotic ambition (emphasis on the -tic) to us; By simply absorbing Penn's frustrated jitter, you can tell that he's firing on all cylinders while the film is firing on roughly half that amount. Overshooting the mark in a turn both technically and literally reminiscent of his whiny I Am Sam extravaganza, everything he does seems to echo into a void, leaving a very pretty looking film (I have a non-sexual crush on Emmanuel Lubezki) to fall almost entirely flat on its face. That a Sean Penn performance, even one that gets under our skin (in more ways than one), could seem familiar (or pat), makes an already depressing affair downright miserable. The voice-over (read to Leonard Bernstein, in a detail too eccentric to bother explaining, I suppose), is just right for a piece this transparent: Even great scenes like Penn screaming at a television "It's about money, Dick!" is somehow inextricably tied to the film's embarrassingly obvious display of symbolism. It acts as if this is the first time anyone came up with the concept of killing the president to make a point about something.

[Nice to see Michael Wincott working again - if only in one scene.]

Reacting with my nose (at first) - the film stinks of cheese from the moment you realize its deviations make it stand out even more boldly as non-cinema than it naturally might have - I tossed around a slew of theorums on why Joel Schumacher's Andrew Lloyd Webber's Last Ditch Effort to Squeeze Cash Out Of 'The Phantom of the Opera', a musical I quite liked when I saw it, feels like even if it had followed the musical to the letter, using the original cast, it would probably still have fallen flat. First and foremost, I think it suffers from crap timing: The musical's popularity peaked and fell long ago, but it has yet to enter that stage where a revival might seem like a pleasant notion (or, for that matter, a good idea). And despite my plea that even its voices of origin would have sunk the thing (with blatant caveat that I don't really know what I'm talking about), Schumacher's version employs a raspy, sloppy (but not good sloppy) Phantom and a Christina who can't hit the Brightman notes (and seems to be on take two, rather than four or five most of the time). (To it's credit, Raoul is quite good and there's even a nifty Minnie Driver performance - subverting my expectation that she'd be sore thumbing it hardcore.) It gets to be so badly staged, that by the end, when Christina is supposed to be choosing between her lovers - in a scene that's supposed to be wrenching - we're laughing hysterically at the melodrama, slinging sarcastic contempt to the left and right of us. All of this is take-it-or-leave-it for audiences (I suppose), but you can't get past how unbendable the aesthetic of sitting in a opera-style theater while you watch the story unfold live before you is when compared to simply watching the story for what it is (i.e. - it relies on the narrative to carry the piece instead of the awe that comes with experiencing the invisible line between the setting in the world of the musical and your actual physical setting, exposing how slim and absurdly goofy the story really is).

I've spent about half of the pondering time (of which I often allow myself) debating how this film gets around being blatantly anti-Semitic (two reasons come to mind: A) it's a snapshot of a time period when people were casually and guiltlessly oppressive of Jewish people and, B) the characters must be that way in order that Shakespeare successfully portrays his leads as flawed men who believe they are merciful - but are, in fact, sadistic to one another). I spent the other half relishing Shakespeare's dialogue, particularly that of Shylock, whose obsessive ramblings about his "bond" show, again, an ironclad link between the Bard and David Mamet. As a sort of afterthought, The Merchant of Venice, where many recent productions find actors unable to properly render old English and directors unwilling to stay true to it (or updating it), Radford falters only in the borderline apologetic opening lead-in (explaining the politics of 1544 Venice as if he was personally responsible for them); Later on, he more than redeems himself, performing one of the best balancing acts in recent memory, blending difficult bedfellows airy, comedic flirtation and upsetting moral upheaval just perfectly. Also: Lynn Collins? Grown on an island in Indonesia.

The best parts of Tarnation have more in common with music than cinema, clearly favoring the preference called out by many a seasoned listener: It sounds better as a whole album than in separate songs. Despite bookends that often juxtapose what feel like staged moments with the camera, Caouette manages to pour a lifetime's worth of dark tides into a creative outlet that all but bores a hole right through you. Alternately disturbing (outright frightening in spots) and bittersweet, a variety of personal, found footage (in Super-8, VHS, answering machine messages, photographs and recordings) is manipulated, embellishing its discoloration, subverting its rhythm, and generally positing its nature to mimic that of a schizophrenic fever dream. Imagine the foresight and unexpected depth of character in Capturing the Friedmans dipped in the well of Underground cinema, given to forcing lucidity in contrast to the naturally unfocused bent of Caouette's shock treatment and drug scarred mother, all poured without a filter of shame (to boot: It cleverly sidesteps narration, opting to guide us with matter of fact titles that we have to digest in our own, internal voice); Caouette's clearly touched a very specific nerve in me (that is, the desire to sculpt and craft, for universal viewing, the emotion recalled by our malleable home movies - a near impossible task given their subjective nature). There is an effortless vulnerability that comes only from the so-called Student Film (a label Tarnation also wears, wisely, without shame); Hyperbole alert! This may be the strongest strain I've witnessed to date.

The air of mundanity seems engineered to disable the melodrama, which it barely does; The worst thing, though, is how impotent it makes major turning points in Kinsey's life seem. Neeson is a terrific performer, now able to capably walk off with a movie; The best scenes find him passionately slogging away at his twin books on the male and female sexual experience. Condon is barely able to fuse these discoveries of academia to the discoveries of the flesh, making Kinsey's team seem like incidental swingers, casually giving themselves license to explore the nature of sex's impact on emotion simply because they spend all day being rigid and clinical. Though Saarsgard makes an impression and Linney sculpts a very palpable version of a deeply loyal woman (even when she's sleeping with Saarsgard, mind), the film blows its credibility with near-parody performances by Oliver Platt, Chris O'Donnell and especially (reprising his role as the oppressive preacher in Footloose), John Lithgow. In short: It seems to aim for the same territory as Condon's wildly brilliant Gods and Monsters, but divvies the focus too liberally to pull it off.

Despite trappings that highly resemble the slow burn of Funny Games, Time of the Wolf  becomes less and less interesting as it proceeds, delving into a fairly elementary study of social clashes between survivors of a recent cataclysmic event. Huppert's triumph (this time as a mother of two) seems just as wasted as it was in The Piano Teacher; She's all wild fluctuation between strong wits and helpless vulnerability, existing in Haneke's lukewarm world of predicatable tension posing in artfully vague non-specifics. But mostly, Haneke's a tease. The first twenty-five or thirty minutes (or, until they reach the train depot) feature some great beginnings (a classic Haneke jump moment, a scary sequence lit only by burning hay), but the rest feels unfocused, as if Haneke was unsure which direction to take and never resolved his uncertainty. Also: Three scenes of Oliver Gourmet's shady "leader" character? Huge demerits.)

Team America benefits, in part, from extreme underestimation; I, for one, couldn't believe I'd even rented it - let alone watched the damn thing. (I took it off of my netflix queue at one point, but was forced to put it back on when my younger brother's iPod demostration included a brilliant song from this film entitled "Montage".) The surprise isn't necessarily that it's funny (humor was in the realm of possibility, you see) but, in point of fact, in how absolutely dead-on it was as both a send-up of action films and as a powerfully refreshing shot in the arm of un-PC, bipartisan ribjabbing. (In other words: Fuck you Bruckheimer, Fuck you America, Fuck You Michael Moore and so on and so on and so on.) The puppets work, as both an symbolic choice and a cheap way to manipulate every facet of the modern American action movie experience (explosions and gunplay are overdramatized up the wazoo); The puppet sex, though an attention-getting boast at the top of the order, seems almost moot by the time it happens, a trend that shoots the film in the foot with the same ammunition that cut down Not Another Teen Movie: At some point, you feel the movie buying into the narrative it created to make fun of. It works better than the other three films they've made.

I'll admit that The Machinist has done better in my mind, where I can forget that it tells such a whiny, overtold Is-it-live-or-is-it-Memorex? tale. What's especially important about the film is not the skeleton flesh of Bale's one hundred twenty pound half-frame, but the decaying atmosphere of severe disturbance in a world of modern sterility and night time shadows. Moody as all get out, it matters so little when the film's ultimate revelation turns out to be exactly the one you predicted five minutes into it, directly following a sequence where blood oozes out of a refrigirator and it's exactly what it should be. Realizing I've tossed around the forgivable narrative excuse quite a bit lately, I'll submit this much: The Machinist is easy to follow, but its real pleasures reside right on the surface.

If you'd never seen Amelie, the argument could be made that these two films are interchangable; I probably wouldn't support the argument, though. Though it was comforting to read, somewhere, that even Jeunet got confused by the whole thing as he was making it, A Very Long Engagement aptly overstays its own welcome, cramming three movies' worth of information into just one (but not as deftly as Amelie did, unfortunately). Working better if you interpret it as something along the lines of a series of short films, Jeunet's tale of a long-obsessed war widow unraveling the fate of her beau is simultaneously mind-blowing, gorgeous, disturbing, greengoldandbrown, sexually charged, historically electrifying (France at the turn of the century!), and all of the things you'd expect from Jean-Pierre. Audrey Tatou continues to be one of the most talented (and beautiful) actresses working today.

The thesis is so confused and Alexander celebrated less for his achievements (argued here to be invasions as well as mercy missions), than defined by his parents and the people he chose to truck with. Ferrell is fine, with Leto as his life-long lover, Kilmer as his now-wicked, now wise father and Angelina Jolie, in a performance so miscalculated, you'll wonder if Stone simply instructed her to continue the trajectory from Girl, Interupted, only several years later (but not too many - she doesn't look like his mother even in a pinch). Battle and sex scenes trump the thing as a whole, with a trippy fight to take India bathed in the glow of red-tinged acid (fire magic in your head, man). In short: Stone is better at crafting these long, winding epics when they're about dead presidents, not dead conquerers.

Initially, I pegged it to the meditative film category (which it is, I suppose, to a certain extent); It's third act, however, which hoists a long, lonesome reserve of sorrow I previously suspected might go sans vindication, is a marvel of envelope pushing, ego celebrating, and confused moral wherewithal. Gallo plays Bud Clay, a motorcycle racer so sad, he can't seem to connect with anyone but his own windshield (and the bug remnants which adorn it). Driving across the country, he gets quite the notion that whatever is bothering him can be solved simply by plunging himself into Gordon Lightfoot songs and random encounters with ladies (at rest stops, on corners, in convenience stores). At one point he stops at the salt flats to stage picturesque frames that make Gerry look conservative by comparison. (Which is not to say that this moment is wrong, exactly - quite the contrary; I was simply curious as to why Gallo switches back and forth between unbroken takes, often framed as if caught on the fly, and formally composed motion paintings pre dreamed to the most minute of minute details.) When he finally hits his destination and finds himself engulfed in "the scene", a couple of things happen. The truth that's revealed is shocking and overwhelming - but fitting (which is what's important). His pecker (or "penis") and it's appearance on the screen (as it's worked by Chloe Sevigny, a good sport in a deeply thankless - bordering on masochistic - role) pretty much immediately announces iitself as a disturbance, given its place in context (it belongs to the flippin' director, an unwritten faux pas tantamount to a cinematographer editing his own footage), sending the scene into an unnecessary tailspin of sudden, uncontrollable self worship. In short: Gallo stops an otherwise moving scene to show you how big his cock is. Is The Brown Bunny still a good film? Absolutely. Following this blip, it picks up directly where it left off, and ends in a head space so far from our original impression, it's all we can do to remind ourselves how damned depressing the thing is in order to prevent ourselves from starting it over and rewatching the long, sad journey of a very well endowed film director/producer/actor/editor/composer.

[Or, as P. Greg put it, when my younger brother had planned to watch it with is then girlfriend: "[It's] the best date movie ever". He's also right when he points out that following Buffalo '66, The Brown Bunny is a 180' turn in the other direction.]