Where the Andersons diverge

Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson have had strikingly similar career arcs for their first four films. Their first films (Hard Eight and Bottle Rocket) were little-seen, but anyone who did catch them knew to expect great things from their directors. Their second films (Boogie Nights and Rushmore) were more stylish and ambitious than their debuts, and both are more often than not considered each man's masterpiece. Their third films (Magnolia and The Royal Tenenbaums) are their real masterpieces - each combined the directors' unique talents with a an ambitious emotional landscape. Their fourth films (Punch-Drunk Love and The Life Aquatic) are stylistic exercises that have managed to alienate the public at large while being embraced by each director's rabid cult audience. (At this point, I should confess that while both directors will continue to be a pleasure to watch for the next few decades, I am wholeheartedly in love with the work of Paul Thomas Anderson). Punch-Drunk Love had an internal logic for all its strageness. The audience was made to feel as disconnected and strange as the protagonist does. This is where the difference between the two directors is most obvious. Wes Anderson has not managed to that with The Life Aquatic. He has failed, for the first time, to come up with an engaging story. The audience spends the entire two hour running time of the movie waiting for something to happen, but very little does. The film is little more than a collection of very precisely framed shots, and quirky behavior that does not resonate because no context has been established for why the characters act this way and no reason for the audience to care about these characters is put forth. I will defend Punch-Drunk Love - while admitting it is a difficult film to embrace - for the rest of my life, but The Life Aquatic will stand as the most disappointing film of 2004. That said, it will be fascinating to see where Wes Anderson goes from here.

Ill-conceived Fokkers

The first thirty minutes of Meet the Parents, everything trough the destruction of the urn, makes for a fabulous short film. The audience feels Greg Fokker's discomfort thanks to Ben Stiller's perfectly timed stammering and Robert De Niro's intimidating presence (it's still, aside from Midnight Run, his best work in a comedy). That basic conflict made for a great half-hour of comedy - enough to sustain the feature length film even if it never equals its strong opening. Meet the Fokkers, however, falls apart quickly because of its basic premise. If the film had De Niro's character being made as uncomfortable by Dustin Hoffman's and Barbra Streisand's aging-hippies as De Niro made Stiller feel in the first film, the comedy would play better. The problem is that De Niro's character has no desire to win over the Fokkers so nothing is at stake. There is no dramatic (or comedic) tension. Sure there are moments that are funny - and Dustin Hoffman seems game for anything these days - but the film takes every opportunity to shower embarrassment on its characters without laying down the foundation to make the audience care for the characters. Yes lazy set-up can never quite be overcome no matter how many outrageous swearing babies, taser-happy cops, and sexual secrets show up.

Flying High

The first hour of The Aviator sure feels like Martin Scorsese having a total blast. Scorsese's recreation of Howard Hughes' difficulties making Hell's Angels to his (Hughes') exacting standards is probably the closest to a biographical depiction of Scorsese himself at work that Scorsese will ever create. This section of The Aviator is joyous fun - a sensation that I haven't felt in a Marty film since Casino. While I thought Gangs of New York was easily the best film of 2002, I freely admit that Scorsese lived with the material for a tad too long. That film did not have the passion that this one does, but The Aviator lacks the weight of that previous film. After all, most people who complained about Gangs felt it should have been longer, while The Aviator feels as if it could have a few minutes trimmed here and there. But never once does it stop cold or disappoint - thanks in large part to a truly excellent performance by Leonardo DiCaprio. He communicates Hughes' passion (and indirectly Scorsese's) with an intensity that is contagious. Be it for aviation, filmmaking, engineering, or women (or total mental collapse) - the intensity of Hughes' feelings can be seen in DiCaprio's determined blue eyes. Later in the film when the man is suffering from a variety of health problems, DiCaprio gets the physical aspects of the symptoms perfectly. When Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner pushes a frail Hughes down during a fight, he falls with the slow-motion awkwardness that in lesser hands would play as unintentional comedy. DiCaprio's only on-screen foil is the spooky talented Cate Blanchett (as I wrote before about Peter Sarsgaard - is there anything she can't do?) who embodies Katharine Hepburn without ever impersonating her. Her lust for life matches Hughes' and their courtship - which the film covers right after the Hell's Angels sequences makes for one of the most entertaining love stories of the year. The Aviator is a rousing entertainment that does not shy away from the dark truth and horrors of Hughes' life. The film follows the familiar pattern set forth for biopics from the beginning of the genre's history, but it ends on a minor chord - not flinching from the essential horror of what will occur. The end is Marty's tribute to Apocalypse Now.

Later: A review of Meet the Fokkers and a few words about the independent film this year that least deserved its comparatively massive success.

A Beautiful Mind meets The People vs. Larry Flynt

Kinsey is one of the best films of the year. Bill Condon's superb screenplay manages to capture science, psychology, sex, love, humor, academic life, social movements, and two touching family stories while never being anything less than entertaining. The marvelously structured screenplay manages to show how Kinsey's controversial work affected the society at large, while simultaneously showing how the research affects him and the three men who were his assistants (as well as their wives). This may be the most politically on point film of the year. Through it all Condon keeps the characters interesting and engaging. His shadings of Kinsey's psychological issues are subtle, but always present - turning a seemingly standoffish character into an three-dimensional person. This is an entertaining film; a movie that utlilizes classical story structure and obeys it just enough to keep the viewer with the characters wherever he takes them. The cast is uniformly excellent with Peter Sarsgaard (is there anything he can't do), Laura Linney, and Liam Neeson deserving of year end praise. Condon has taken controversial subject matter, and fashioned a film that addresses the controversy without alienating anyone. If only our politicians had the same skill. Last year Gus Van Sant's Elephant, though not seen nearly enough, provided a starting point for people who wanted to have a reasonable discussion about school (and by extension cultural) violence. This film does the same for sex education, and it also works as a worthy example of Hollywood entertainment.

Communication Breakdown

I have always found it easier to write about films I dislike rather than films I like. That said, composing a review for Spanglish has been the most difficult piece of writing I've attempted all year. The film is overloaded with moments, and while these individual moments all "work" (more or less) the overall effect does not. The film is about miscommunication, and in the end James L. Brooks ends up miscommunicating with his audience. While the relationship between Flor (Paz Vega) and her daughter should be the focus of the film, Brooks becomes sidetracked by the Clasky family. The slowly disintegrating marriage between John (Adam Sandler) and Deborah (Tea Leoni) is established economically and humorously. But then Brooks does something he never has done before, he passes judgment. He turns the high-strung Deborah into such a monster that the audience has no choice but to either hate the character or feel sorry for the very game Tea Leoni. Flor exists for no other reason that to show the audience how great a guy John is and how horrible Deborah is. The film collapses in the third act when Brooks believes he can leave the Clasky story mostly unresolved on a note of very mild redemption for Deborah, and that the ending will satisfy his audiences. He then fumbles the ending between Flor and her daughter by making it highly dramatic when, for the most part, he has abandoned their story to focus on the Clasky's. Brooks wanted to make a film about interpersonal miscommunication, and ends up miscommunicating with the audience.

Reading the Tea Leaves part 1 of 3857

Well since every critics group in the country has declared Alexander Payne's good but not great Sideways as the year's best film it has most certainly locked up nominations in all of the major Oscar categories (except supporting actress). It will face some competition from Million Dollar Baby, by all accounts another small film. Neither of these films are the kind of bait Oscar usually bites at, which leaves Martin Scorsese's The Aviator as the third contender that must be seriously considered. At this point it is a dead heat, but strong box office for Aviator will help that film. It will be very interesting to see how much the box office jumps for Sideways this weekend coming off a week better than they could have imagined as far as awards and year-end accolades go.


Hopefully next week will begin with reviews of Kinsey and Spanglish.

I've been name checked by one of the best

David Edelstein is one of my five favorite critics working today. He writes regularly for Slate and appears regularly on Fresh Air. He held a contest to pick the worst line ever in a biopic. Yours truly got a mention at the very end thanks to my submission. This has officially made my month.

Soderbergh's Players

The Player ended with Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts spoofing their status as the biggest movie stars in Hollywood. The last half hour or so of Ocean's Twelve takes that concept and runs with it, using the same two performers to spoof what it means to be a celebrity in today's culture. And the best surprise is that it works. This is easily the most disposable film of Soderbergh's career, but it is entertaining. Watching George Clooney's Danny Ocean and Brad Pitt's Rusty watch an episode of Happy Days dubbed into Italian makes for one of the biggest laughs of the year. When the cast is just sitting around and gabbing the film has a buzz to it - this is one of those rare cases where the actors obviously had a blast making that movie and those good vibes actually carry over into the audience. The actual plot in the film makes little sense and often the narrative threads that are established turn out to be intricate red herrings. But as I said before, this is a disposable piece of entertainment. Luckily it was made by people who know how to entertain.

Soderbergh's career has gone in two, or arguably three, phases and this film feels like an end to this phase. He has reached the end of the line of using his stars for just their star power and commenting on that star power as he does that. I'm not saying he needs to stop his collaborations with Clooney - Out of Sight and especially Solaris might be an indication of where Soderbergh may go - I'm simply suggesting that creating slick Hollywood entertainment filled with commentary on the fact that you are creating slick Hollywood entertainment is a dead end for any artist and Soderbergh is bright enough to know this.

Important TV Listing

So we are lucky enough to live in this world at the same time as the greatest film director in history, Martin Scorsese. Tonight at 10 on TCM there is a new special about the director titled Scorsese on Scorsese. It is followed by a showing of Raging Bull. The Last Waltz is on before it. And at 3:30 in the AM (technically Wednesday) they are showing New York, New York (which from what I hear is getting a stellar DVD release in 2005 along with Raging Bull). I couldn't imagine a better way to prep for seeing The Aviator.

Later - the Ocean's 12 review and thoughts on the awards season now that it has begun in earnest.

Trailers that don't do their job

Coming up soon I will have a review of Ocean's Twelve, but until then I wanted to share the fact that I saw this teaser trailer in front of that film and I can't remember the last time I saw a teaser trailer that so turned me off of a film I was otherwise eager to see.

Yeah, but have you read the book?

Adapting John Irving is a tricky business. Irving is first and foremost a novelist and his writing is best in that forum. Most of his adaptations suffer because the screenwriters are unable to turn these characters into three-dimensional people. All of the symbolism and foreshadowing keeps the characters from being much more than the tools of the storytellers. The Door in the Floor is yet another example of this. Taken from the first third of Irving's A Widow for One Year, the film contains another in an ongoing series of truly fine performances by Jeff Bridges. But even with all of the remarkable skills that have made him arguably the most naturalistic actor currently working, his character still feels like a writer's creation and not a real person. If Bridges is unable to fully overcome the Irving problem, I'm not sure it can ever be solved. The Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp are the two best Irving adaptations and I think they work for similar reasons. Both of the films concentrate almost exclusively on the lead characters and the audience is allowed to see how fully-rounded they are. We accept the supporting characters as exactly that so we mind far less when they are underdeveloped. When Irving adaptations attempt to deal at length with more than one character (The Hotel New Hampshire, Door in the Floor) Irving's nearly perfect story structure is more apparent and the films come off as too schematic - a viewer can see the girders holding the whole story together.

None of this is a comment on the books themselves. Every Irving I have read has been very entertaining. I find it noteworthy that the only book he himself adapted, Cider House Rules, is one of the very best adaptations of his work. This indicates to me that he understands the pitfalls of adapting a novel for the screen. His discussion of this subject on the DVD of Door in the Floor offers an enlightening lesson on the topic.

Woody Allen's Best Work in Five Years

From The New Yorker. If you've been reading the transcripts and reports from the trial than this is about the funniest thing you'll read all month.

Later today: A Review of The Door in the Floor

Closer

Everybody has a different definition of what constitutes escapism. Some people like to watch things blow up; some people want to watch Jim Carrey talk out of his ass. I like to watch characters involved in relationships talk, have sex, cheat, and lie (to each other and themselves). These kinds of movies, when well-written, make me giddy with great talk and powerful acting. Closer is an outstanding entry in this genre. Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen, and Julia Roberts form a compelling (love-rectangle...no...hate-rectangle...no lets go with) sex-rectangle and the superb dialogue they get to speak along with their talent keep this film humming even when the characters occasionally engage in behavior that starts to make suspending disbelief much more difficult. I have said many many mean things about Julia Roberts over the last ten plus years. For at least the two hours this film plays I take all of it back. There is not an ounce of movie star in this performance, and her lack of self-consciousness is revelatory. I honestly thought she was incapable of a performance like this. It is with great pleasure that I declare I WAS WRONG. If she is serious about more or less retiring from moviemaking she could not have come up with a better swan song. But it is not her film alone. Jude Law's emotionally self-destructive character is played with such a lack of self-awareness that it made me realize how two-dimensional his Alfie was. Clive Owen is masterful as a man who quite honestly bellows during one argument, "I'm a caveman!" But it is Natalie Portman who should get the best press. This young woman has been a fascinating presence for almost ten years now. Although she will forever be the Star Wars Queen for a large faction of the moviegoing audience, she has given stellar performances in such varied films as Leon, Beautiful Girls, and Cold Mountain (also opposite Jude Law). This film is her coming out party as an actress of the highest caliber. She can play girlish but she is no longer a girl. Her command of her body is impressive - she knows how to use her physicality to communicate character (pay attention to the scene where Jude Law's character leaves her - and then reconsider that scene after the film is over to understand how smart an actress she is). Beautiful people in beautiful locations, doing horrible things to each other - yep that's my idea of escapist entertainment. And Closer fits that bill better than anything I've seen in a while. This is not necessarily a deep film (we all know that people cheat in relationships), but it is an engaging and compellingly watchabale one with great acting and first-rate dialogue that will keep you talking about the characters well after the film ends.

Some nights the ratings were love

The ignominious run of McEnroe on CNBC has finally ended. Finally I can start going to sleep earlier.

From journalist Jon Friedman:
NEW YORK (CBS.MW) -- CNBC said Friday that John McEnroe's dismal
prime-time talk show will be canceled by the end of the year.
The viewer numbers for the show, which had its debut in July, were so
low at times that they failed to qualify for Nielsen's ratings reports.
It was drawing an average audiences of 75,000 a night, CNBC said.

If you are keeping score the worst talk shows of all time now stand as:
1. The Magic Hour
2. The Chevy Chase Show
3. McEnroe
4 (with a bullet). The Tony Danza Show
5. Later with Greg Kinnear

The Starter's Pistol

So awards season started for real yesterday with the release of the National Board of Review winners. I like that the NBR traditionally starts off this three month period because it consists of teachers and historians and students and while it can help a little film get some notice, they have almost zero influence on the Academy. Finding Neverland topped their list and that is right as the NBR tens to like literate period pieces. If the Oscar Best Picture nominees are the same as the NBR top 5 than this is going to be a very solid year for the Academy. Finding Neverland, The Aviator, Closer, Million Dollar Baby, and Sideways, although I have only seen two of them thusfar, would seem to be the most respectable set of Best Picture nominees in a very long time. The NBR gave Jamie Foxx their Best Actor award and although we can pretend that Giamatti, Liam Neeson, Johnny Depp, Kevin Bacon and maybe DiCaprio could give him a run for his money it isn't going to happen. Foxx has everything going for him and is the man to beat at Oscar time. Annette Benning was awarded Best Actress for Being Julia and the only thing that stands in her way is the fact that not many people are seeing the film. The screenplay awards went to Sideways and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - and it sure seems at this point like those two are heavy heavy favorites to win the Oscar. We are living in pretty good times when Alexander Payne and Charlie Kaufman win Oscars in the same year.

Although the Independent Spirit Award nominations were announced on Tuesday, I can work up little enthusiasm for them. I have a hunch Sideways is going to sweep them and then not win any Oscars except Best Adapted Screenplay which would be the exact same fate that met Lost in Translation last year. Although it is a crime, a shame, and a friggin' joke that the ISAs practically ignored Before Sunset.

A Strong Follow-Up from the Director of the Overrated Monster's Ball

Finding Neverland feels like a superior episode of Masterpiece Theater or a first-rate A&E production. That is not to belittle the movie, but simply to explain how modestly scaled this fine film is. Marc Forster has fashioned a film that very well could have been titled Barrie in Love, except that the film has more poignant moments of loss and grief than one might expect. Those sequences and moments are balanced perfectly by the flights of fancy Barrie shares with the boys in the film. These moments more often than not flow naturally out of realistic moments the film depicts - the boys start flying while Barrie watches them jumping on their beds. The single best shot in the film involves Barrie and his wife (who he becomes more and more emotionally estranged from as the film goes along) entering their individual bedrooms after a fight with each other. The shot is of their backs as they open different doors. Inside her room everything is exactly as one might expect, but inside Barrie's room is a bright blue sky. This simple image goes a long way towards showing how far apart these two are from each other. However, the wife is given her full due as a character. She starts off unlikable, which may be the only unfair ploy in the script, but she is allowed enough scenes that show how her husband's dreamy fantasy world negatively affects her. Forster does something interesting with this film, he manages to make a tearjerker that is not at all melodramatic. The actors emotions are reigned in - befitting the film's time period - and this allows all of the characters to remain human even when they are on spectacular pretend adventures. Johnny Depp is a fabulous actor who has often earned his best reviews for playing over the top characters (Captain Jack Sparrow, Hunter S. Thompson, Ed Wood) but in Finding Neverland he shows he can be just engaging in a more reserved mode. The only disturbing element of the film is that, as I understand it, it whitewashes the probable truth. From what I've been able to discern, it appears that the real Barrie was likely a pedophile. While that should not bother anyone's enjoyment of the film, I am concerned that in say one-hundred years somebody may make the same type of film, with the exact same title, about Michael Jackson. But that unnecessary concern aside, Finding Neverland, is a modest, well-acted film that is equally enchanting and sad, as well as magical and earthbound - giving those in the mood an opportunity for a cleansing cry.