56 Up

It sounds odd to say so, but I recently went to a family reunion of sorts—at a movie theater.  I mean to say I saw “56 Up,” the latest episode in Michael Apted’s Up Series.  In 1964 a handful of British seven-year-olds from different backgrounds were asked, on camera, their views on life.  Originally the program’s point was to see if the seismic shifts of the sixties meant changes for Britain’s class system as well. 

We check back in with them every seven years.  Those kids we saw dancing happily to the new beat music at the end of “7 Up” are now 56.  For the most part, they have had a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift. 

Funny, when you watch the Up movies you’re also watching yourself, in a way.  In 1999, Apted filmed the Uppers at age 42.  Since I’ve now arrived at that age myself, I watched the clips from “42” folded into “56” with renewed interest. 

When the Uppers were younger, there were great changes every seven years.  There are fewer surprises now.  At 56, they’ve settled in; their personalities are fully formed.  Yet they’re still trying new things.  One surprise: Peter is back.  He bowed out after his sarcastic comments about Thatcher-era Britain got him into trouble in “28” back in 1985.  Now he’s back, mainly to build a wider audience for his Americana band, The Good Intentions. 

The Up Series is about the moments that make up a life.  I think of Tony the cabbie, the East End kid who wanted to be a jockey, and who once had a “photo finish” in a race against the famous jockey Lester Piggott.  I think of Sue in her 30s singing karaoke in a pub: a moment of happiness.    

Many of the funniest moments are still from “7,” and we see them again.  When asked about girlfriends, Andrew tells the camera that while he does have one, he doesn’t think much of her.  Asked a similar question, young Nick, who grew up to teach engineering in Wisconsin, burns the camera down with a look before proclaiming, “I don’t answer questions like that.” (“Still the most sensible answer,” says 21-year-old Nick with a smile.)  Seven-year-old John one-ups Andrew: he not only reads the Financial Times, but the Observer as well.

The film’s structure is captured poetically in the famous image of Jackie, Lynn and Sue together, holding a picture of their younger selves gathered around a picture of their younger selves, and so on.  (Apted doesn’t gather them together in “56”).  Though of course the British feel just as strongly as anyone, the film’s surface, its voice and montage, is too British (i.e., objective, unemotional) to be expressive, exactly.  The effect is more like that of the years accumulating softly like snow.      

Over the years, one thing the Up Series has become about is love.  Words from the poet come to mind.  “Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks within his bending sickle's compass come.  Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.” 

As in prior installments, in “56” Andrew is interviewed with his wife, who memorably described herself in her 20s when she said that Andrew hadn’t married a “haughty deb” but a “good Yorkshire lass.”  My own baby, Karolyn, got a kick out of Symon’s wife.  (She’s strong-willed, high-spirited and good-humored, just like my baby.)  Paul is still happy in Australia with his wife of many years.     

There’s beautiful footage of the rolling green countryside of Scotland, where we catch up with Jackie, and the dales of North West England, where we find Neil, still representing his village on the council.  The years have made Jackie’s face appear a bit sad and tired, but she is unbowed. 

Neil is the only one of the Uppers for whom the happy child he once was seems completely lost to him.  In fact, the ghost of his childhood is haunting.  That’s why it does our hearts good to see that even in his solitude he has found a measure of happiness and community, if not exactly serenity. 

As always, we end with the children’s day out in London and the recitation of the Jesuit maxim, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man.”

In his segment of “56,” Paul admits sheepishly that he never had much ambition in life.  Maybe what the Up Series finally shows us about life is that it’s not necessarily about that, at the end of the day.  It’s about being happy.  Lynn grew up to be a librarian and, until her program was cut, read stories to special-needs children.  What work could be more important than that? 

Once upon a time I had an idea: I thought that the real subject of the Up Series is time.  Now I think that it is happiness.    

Rating: *****

--March 1, 2013

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

Zero Dark Thirty

It took a long time to get him.  Ten years is a very long time.  “Zero Dark Thirty” tells a "truth-based" story of a person who stayed on the hunt for Osama Bin Laden all down the years of the “War on Terror,” a young CIA agent named Maya (Jessica Chastain). 

After 9/11 I suppose it was possible for an idealistic young person to aspire to join the CIA.  Lefties of my generation, we pretty much associate the CIA with drug-running and even less savory activities.

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by the journalist Mark Shoals, this is the new picture from the team that brought us that pulse-pounder, “The Hurt Locker.”  The narrative hangs a thread between September 11, 2001, represented powerfully by a dark screen and voices of people who died, and the raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in 2011, played out in a bravura sequence of sight and sound and cutting.

I last saw Chastain moving through a very different movie experience, Terrence Malick’s numinous “The Tree of Life.”  There she played an embodiment of feminine warmth.  As the ginger Maya, she is a curious mix of feminine and flinty, soft and steely, cool-headed and fiery.   The story of a driven woman making it in a testosterone-soaked culture must surely have personal resonance for Bigelow.  That the point of view of “Zero Dark Thirty” is female is crucial.

Maya is always surrounded by burly men who invariably refer to her as a “girl.”  (I’m not quite sure how old Maya is meant to be in the film, although we learn that she was recruited right out of high school.  Jessica Chastain is in her mid-30s, though I would have pegged her as a decade younger.)  At one point Maya refers to herself as a “motherfucker,” just to shake the guys up, including James Gandolfini as a Leon Panetta stand-in.  She butts heads with her superiors, including Kyle Chandler as the eventually-outed head of CIA operations in Islamabad.  (As an aside, Chandler struck both Karolyn and me as a dead ringer for Karolyn’s brother, Mike.)

But Chastain is essentially playing a cipher.  We’re kept at a certain distance from Maya.  Similarly, while “Zero” is an absorbing suspense film, there’s something about its tone, its surfaces, that is cool.  The pace is methodical, which seems right for what is basically a procedural. 

Of course the controversy raging over the film is, does it endorse torture or expose it?  The truth, I think, lies somewhere in between.  In the scene where a detainee (Reda Kateb) is waterboarded, Maya is our surrogate.  We can see by her expression that she shares our revulsion.  Still, she does not voice any concerns. 

Some of the film’s critics on the left seem to be upset at it for accurately portraying the way certain U.S. operatives thought.  I mean, I agree that it's laughable to be indignant that the unlucky souls languishing in the depths of Guantanamo are “lawyering up,” as one official sardonically remarks.  Still, this is probably an accurate representation of their contempt for the very idea that detainees should have rights.

Much was done in the name of the “War on Terror” that was vile, including right up to this day with the drone strikes.  That's the whole point, Bigelow might say.  And yet as played by Jason Clark, the “interrogator” (torturer) is a “bro” who might have wandered over from a Judd Apatow movie.  And the movie stacks the deck by removing any doubt of the detainee’s guilt.  (He turns out to be a link to the courier (Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti) who would eventually lead the U.S. to Bin Laden’s doorstep.)

That said, the fact is Bigelow’s pictures are pretty apolitical.  Or else they’re political only in the sense that they render a life-or-death situation with as much immediacy as possible.  They put you in the shoes of the people on the ground, for whom it’s not about politics so much as it is about surviving until the next day. 

And she’s trying to make the movie work as an entertainment, first and foremost.  In fact, that fact might just be the nub of the problem her critics have with her.   

So the film puts us in a van circling the chaotic streets of Pakistan, trying to pick up the signal of that fateful courier.  We feel an adrenaline surge when our van is blocked by armed men.  Likewise in a scene where Maya’s friend (Jennifer Ehle), a fellow agent far too eager, after so many failed leads, to believe in her new contact, waits for him to appear for their rendezvous at a military compound in Afghanistan. So glad is she when that he finally shows that she impatiently radios security to wave him through.  As his car wends its way through the maze of concrete security walls, getting closer and closer, we become increasingly sure that something is not right.  Bigelow is a brilliant suspense director.  She knows how to use waiting to build suspense: tension and release.

Then there is that bravura final sequence.  After we’ve seen it, we’ve been along on the raid.  We’ve been in that helicopter with the Navy SEAL Team 6 on that night flight into Abbottabad.  (Joel Edgerton plays the squadron leader.)  She uses all the tricks of cinema to put us in their shoes: night-vision goggles, a hushed nighttime soundscape broken by boots scuffling on the ground. 

To Bigelow’s eternal credit, the shooting of Bin Laden is not played for cheers.  In fact, at no point is there anything triumphant about “Zero Dark Thirty.”  In fact, what I remember most about the raid is the scared children.   

The ending reminded me of nothing so much as “Straw Dogs,” another film that was controversial for its violence.  Sitting alone in the bay of a jet, the pilot asks Maya where she wants to go next?  She does not reply.  Like the “hero” of the Peckinpah picture, it’s as if she does not know where she could possibly go from here.  A tear slides down her cheek.  Was it all worth it?  In that moment the distance is broken. 

Rating: ****

--January 27, 2013

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

Amour

Something startling happens near the end of Michael Haneke’s “Amour” (“Love”).  While I won't give it away, I have the rare urge to advise you not to read any further until you’ve seen the film.  It’s just that I’m quite grateful I didn’t read any reviews before going in.  I will only say that while Haneke’s pictures are always tricky, the trickiness here is that he makes a part of you long for that startling thing to happen. 

"Amour" is the story of an elderly Parisian couple, Georges and Anne (Jean-Louis Trintigant and Emmanuelle Riva) and how they cope with the end of the woman’s life.  It is the kind of end we all hope to avoid.  The couple is enjoying their winter years together until a scary moment when Anne suddenly zones out at the table.  Later she suffers a stroke, and she deteriorates rapidly.  She suffers physically, psychically.  Georges cares for her from home after she says she can't bear to go back to the hospital.  

Whereas Haneke’s work usually explores pain--the human capacity to inflict it, to bear it--“Amour” is an unflinching look at the limits of what someone will do to take away the pain from a loved one.  Wouldn’t you do anything? 

He give us one of his trademark long shots of a crowd, a view from the stage as an audience waits expectantly for a piano recital to begin.  (This will be the one time in the film when we are outside the couple’s apartment.)  Instead of cutting, Haneke permits our eye to roam the image as it will.  Eventually we find our couple.  Haneke has placed them just off center, gently drawing our eye to them. 

But if his style harnesses cinema's power of ambiguity, so too does he harness the medium's essentially direct nature.  Only the finest of novelists could equal the power of the simple fact of Riva’s twisted, helpless face.  Haneke is a master of technique on the level of Hitchcock, even if his technique amounts to just giving you the facts.  (There is no score to tell us how to feel, either).  Each camera setup in the apartment is purposeful.  Sometimes we see from the point of view of Georges’s favorite chair.  

The apartment is the couple's natural habitat.  It's funny: we only see it as an “old people's apartment” when younger people visit and we see the place through their eyes, surrounded in the slightly formal sitting room by photographs, books, a piano, the artifacts of a long, shared life.  Anne is a retired piano teacher,and one of her visitors is a former student (Alexander Tharaud), a slightly callow young man who's become a big success as a pianist.  (It was his recital the couple attended.)  His reaction to her condition inadvertently wounds her.  He finds her sad.  It's the one way she can’t bear to see herself. 

There is also Georges and Anne's adult daughter, played by Isabelle Huppert.  In a moving moment she confides to her father that as a child she found the sound of their lovemaking comforting.  She grows increasingly worried about her father’s ability to care for her mother.  At one point he resorts to hiding what’s become of Anne from her eyes.   

“Amour” is a very rare movie experience: intense, shocking, tender, brave, deeply compassionate towards its subjects, finally gorgeous.  It’s not like I expected a Haneke picture to leave me unscathed, but there were moments here when my jaw just dropped.  I know I won’t see any braver performances this year than Emmanuelle Riva’s and Jean-Louis Trintigant’s.  

 

Above all, it’s honest.  Georges is endlessly patient with Anne, except when he’s not.  He’s tender, except when he's mean in a moment of helplessness and frustration.  Shuffling through the rooms of the apartment, Trintigant--the onetime heartthrob, now heavy with years--makes you feel this man’s helplessness as his wife’s condition deteriorates.     

And yet “Amour” is about the beauty of life, too.  It’s there in Anne’s favorite paintings: at one point Haneke fills his frame with them.  And it’s there in the ending as well, somehow.  It's an ending I never would have expected from a director as unsparing as Haneke, and I think it’s touched by grace.  In a very, very understated (indeed, almost offhand) way, it suggests a hope and comfort beyond the hopelessness we’ve just seen.         

There is a lot to admire on a technical level about “Amour.”  What a pure distillation of theme.  What a fine sense of structure.  And yet what humbles us, finally, is how toweringly human it is.  It is as intimate and personal as I can imagine, yet its power comes from the universality of the situation--of aging and dying.  In “Amour,” a man does everything he can to hold onto the woman he loves, to cradle something that needs to fly away.  He holds on, until it becomes time to love her in a different kind of way.

Rating: *****

--January 23, 2013

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

Django Unchained

At one point during “Django Unchained” I leaned over to Karolyn and whispered, “Only Tarantino has the guts to tell the truth about America.”  Which, in retrospect, seems like an odd thing to say.  After all, there are many truths about America.  What’s more, the film is another one of the aging “enfant terrible’s” provocative re-imaginings of history, this time set in antebellum America instead of the Nazi-era Europe of “Inglourious Basterds.”  Still, fiction though it is, I can’t recall another film that conveys so viscerally the brutal truths of slavery: the whippings, the hot box, the man torn apart by dogs. 

As always with Tarantino, “Django Unchained” is as much about movie love as it is about anything else, including American slavery. The idea here is to remix all sorts of pop things in a very provocative, hip-hop kind of way: Blaxploitation pictures, Spaghetti Westerns, revenge movies, damsel-in-distress fairy tales, Godard, Hawks, even the myth of Brunhilde.  Toss in some fun cameos (Don Johnson, Tom Wopat and one I’m not gonna give away) and a soundtrack featuring the great Ennio Morricone, James Brown and 2Pac, even Jim Croce.   

Though I’m not entirely without reservations about the results, as a longtime fan I mainly think about “Django Unchained” what I always do about his work.  It kicks life into cinema when things threaten to become too staid.  His pictures are exemplars of the creative process: take what you love and make your own thing out of it. 

And, crucially, he always wants to give you something fun. 

If he’s no longer playing with structure like he used to, he’s still playing with forms.  This is his first Western.  There's a creation here that pleases me as much as anything he's ever done: Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German in America in 1858.  (Did we really need that title letting us know that it’s “two years before the Civil War”?)  As an outsider, Schultz sees clearly the evil of slavery.  He’s a good instance of wit and intelligence up against stupidity, unfailingly polite even as he blows his opponents away.  Tarantino’s emphatically a writer-director, and Christoph Waltz delights in the music of his language.  

A dentist turned bounty hunter, Schultz rolls out of the dark on his wagon as a chain-gang of slaves makes its way through the night.  He's come to bust a slave named Django free.  He needs Django to identify a man on his kill list.  Django’s never seen anything like Schultz before, but they become unlikely buddies and mutual admirers.  As Django, Jamie Foxx lets us see the slave's latent intelligence, recognized by his mentor Schultz.  He goes from shuddering like a beaten animal to Superfly in chaps.  The friends set out to rescue Django’s enslaved wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). 

Once they enter the state of Mississippi (screen-high letters act as a portal), it’s as though we’ve entered a demented Hell, presided over by Leonardo DiCaprio as a kind of Satan.  A man of wealth and taste, he’s the gleefully sadistic Calvin Candie, the patriarch of the “Candyland” plantation, deeply committed to white supremacy.  DiCaprio keeps getting more and more interesting as an actor.  This is one of my favorite things he’s done.  Here he seems to be channeling Orson Welles as Kane in a twisted way, knit brow over slanting, laughing blue eyes.  It is a devilish performance (and maybe a surrogate for the devilish Tarantino).        

There’s a wicked-smart performance by Samuel L. Jackson as the “house nigger” Mr. Stephens, all exaggerated mugging and scraping and crowing.  There’s a great shot in which Stephens stands over Candie’s shoulder, cackling bug-eyed at his master’s “bon mots” as he regales his guests.  Tarantino holds the shot, as if to say, look how insane this is, how evil.  And the great cinematographer Robert Richardson, whom Tarantino shares with Scorsese, gives the Victorian interiors of Candyland a vivid, almost surreal quality, a comic book look that heightens the madness.

In a way, Jackson’s performance slyly embodies the brutality of slavery all by itself, but on a psychic level.  Look how debased Mr. Stephens had to be.  Still, Jackson plays Stephens in a way that also encompasses this man’s agency and cunning as an individual. 

(And the obsessive use of the word “nigger” in the film speaks to America’s overriding, abiding obsessions: race and white supremacy.  It should also be pointed out that the word is a Blaxploitation trope.)      

This brings me to my objections.  We want to see Tarantino’s characters as human beings, but he doesn’t always extend them the same courtesy.  And so he starts giving us the John Woo moves, with all the balletic carnage, as Django careens through the halls of Candyland gunning people down and blowing things up.  In fact, in films that are full of violence but almost never sex, Tarantino’s explosions of gunplay often feel like a (very male) kind of release. 

Guns and explosions are great movie thrills, of course, always have been.  And to see the halls of a plantation dripping with blood certainly carries a powerful symbolic frisson in America.  Still, it winds up feeling like a betrayal of our good faith.  “Jackie Brown” is still the only thing he’s done that had much humanity.    

Still, "Django Unchained" thrills as the anti-"Birth of a Nation," a film that might make the great D.W. Griffith blanch as white as a Klansman’s sheet.

Of course you’ll never find a Tarantino film where revenge is presented as anything other than a glorious thing.  He loves revenge movies.  Crucially, he’s not saying it’s a good thing in real life.  In fact, I think the most interesting thing about what he’s doing these days is exploring the limits of catharsis in art, the power of fictional revenge and fantasy to “right” some of history’s greatest wrongs.

Rating: ***1/2

--January 11, 2013

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)

Top 11 Films, 2012

Looking over my year-end list, I sometimes hope to tease out a theme.  It’s always kind of a willful projection.  I do see that this was a fine year for children’s performances, and for films about fathers and kids.  What strikes me this year, though (and it must be true every year), is that the true subject of the movies—sometimes hidden, sometimes coming right out with it—is love.  This may also be a reflection of my own heart.  (This was, after all, the year I found love.)  But perhaps that’s okay as well.  After all, that’s something else movies do: when we look into them, they look back into us. 

Caveat: I have yet to see “Amore” or “Zero Dark Thirty” or “Django Unchained” or even "Footnote."  In fact there’s tons of interesting films this year with which I'm scrambling to catch up.  It is always thus. 

1.  Beasts of the Southern Wild

  

Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar’s picture is the story of Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), an intrepid little girl who lives down in the bayou.  It tells of her adventures when a Biblical flood hits “The Bathtub,” where people live off the grid and by their own rules.  The lifestyle is celebratory, but it’s the flipside of having nothing.  She must confront and care for her daddy (Dwight Henry), a force of nature.  There’s a fierce love between father and daughter.  He rages at his dying, rages to give her the strength and skills she will need to survive.  Prehistoric beasts who once trampled this land have reawakened: they storm towards her.  “Beasts” is an ecstatic sensory experience and an emotional wrecking ball.  A small being radiating something huge, Ms. Wallis exhibits a preternatural sense of her place in the natural order, of her own story at the level of myth.  The life energies shoot through her, and through this movie.

2.  Moonrise Kingdom

  Sam and Suzy were my favorite couple of the year.  Anderson, who co-wrote with Roman Coppola, has said that he conceived of this movie as something that his young heroine, 12-year-old bookworm Suzy (Kara Haward) could put in her suitcase alongside her other fantasy books.  She’s packed her bags to run away with Sam (Jared Gilman), a bespectacled, precocious Khaki scout.  They are in love, you see.  The picture features a community-theatre troupe of movie stars led by Bill Murray, whose deadpan is so well-suited to Anderson’s droll style.  Anderson is fully himself here.  For all of its almost autistic quirkiness, you wouldn’t call this film ironic.  It’s too deeply, oddly felt. 

3.  Lincoln

 

Steven Spielberg, Daniel Day-Lewis and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski took us back to 1865, to the time and place when history and legend collide.  It’s a nation torn, with a civilized structure—of law, of architecture—on top of a culture of raw lawlessness, where everything still feels up for grabs.  Day-Lewis plays Lincoln as a man who spends most of his time in his own head.  Thoughtful, gentle, folksy, weary in his bones, he has a steely core and an implacable will that is nothing short of gangster.  He is the adroit chess player in the battle to get the 13th Amendment through the House.  This cast makes the players blood and flesh, in all their irascibility, irrationality and ideology.  When words are the rapiers, you will need a screenplay as smart as Tony Kushner’s.      

4.  Silver Linings Playbook

 

How often do we get real, messy, damaged people on screen?  Smart performances from Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence.  He’s trying to recover from a breakdown, she’s a cop’s young widow.  She sees in him someone who will not take advantage; the movie is similarly good-hearted and non-exploitative.  In Lawrence we have a duckling become a swan.  As the couple learns to dance, David O. Russell’s camera admires her now-womanly curves without leering: she’s celebrating her own growing confidence.  They’ve both got zero social skills, and it’s fun to watch their inappropriate, no-filter interactions.  With her no-BS persona, Lawrence could be a hero for women here.  (My baby cheered her line about embracing the sloppy and dirty parts of yourself.)  It makes much comic hay out of all types of crazy, including Robert De Niro in a moving performance as Cooper’s numbers-running, Eagles-fanatic dad.  Russell brings an eye and ear for the culture of these Philadelphia neighborhoods.  His camera executes elaborate pirouettes and ecstatic zooms around his couple, intoxicated by their love.   

5.  Rampart

 

Woody Harrelson gave a multi-dimensional, memorable performance as a cop caught up in an investigation of corruption/brutality in the LAPD of 1992.  It’s all a joke to him: a joke that you would operate any other way than brutally in this game, a joke the hypocrisy of his critics in high places, a joke that people think he’s racist and sexist--until he finds the rules of the game changed when he’s no longer useful.  He has an unconventional, woman-led home life that’s almost bohemian.  He’s undone by his love for the women in his life—ex-wives and lovers, daughters—even as he repels them.  He would argue that he’s never really been brutal, not to anyone he loves, until he realizes too late that he’s torn their lives too.  He’s going down the drain, a man who’s realized too late the joke’s on him.  Oren Moverman observes it all with an eye open to shades of gray (not that kind) that is almost Altmanesque.

6.  The Kid With a Bike

  

The Dardenne brothers brought us the story of at-risk youth Cyril (Thomas Doret).  Ditched by his father, her literally pulls a stranger, Samantha (Cecile De France) into his life.  You can hold me, she says, just not so tightly.  Sullen, stubborn Cyril is a coiled ball of hurt.  When he breaks he lashes startlingly, and he hurts others.  Doret gives a remarkable performance: raw, natural, reminding us how keenly children feel.  Why would she take this boy in?  How could she be so forgiving?  De France’s performance manages to suggest all the reasons why for her those aren't even questions.   This is a story about love as redemption and forgiveness.  It has a good feel for work and play in this working-class neighborhood. 

7.  Argo 

 

Hollywood as a quintessentially American dream factory is the subtext of this thriller about a CIA man’s plot to shepherd Americans out of Tehran in the wake of the Islamic revolution.  The just-so-crazy-it-might-work idea is to disguise them as a film crew making a post-“Star Wars” sci-fi picture.  You’re innocent when you dream.  “Argo” is the kind of riveting night at the movies we always hope for but all too rarely get.  

 8.  Jiro Dreams of Sushi

 

A film about love for a job.  85-year-old Jiro has dedicated his life to being the best there is at what he does: making sushi.  The film sits us down at his 3-star Michelin rated sushi counter (Sukiyabashi Jiro) next to the lucky people who actually get to taste his creations.  He places the dish before them and then steps back, regarding his guests with a stately visage.  Were his expression not so completely impassive, it might as well be saying “Bam!  Deal with that!”  It’s also about fathers and sons.  We learn that the true Japanese master does not chafe at doing the exact same thing every day.  Indeed, this is the essence of his way.  And speaking of masters...

9.  The Master

 

Here we have a love/hate relationship between master (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and servant (Joaquin Phoenix).  Rage-aholic and lost soul Freddie Quell is another of Paul Thomas Anderson’s demented powder kegs.  The Master" is a curious, frustrating, exhilarating picture.  With two juicy leads, as well as Amy Adams as the woman behind the man, apple-cheeked but no innocent, it’s fun as an acting showcase.  Anderson is happy to leave us in bed with Freddie and a good-time gal, not knowing quite what to think.   

10.  The Deep Blue Sea

Love hurts.  This begins as a rhapsody: a woman in the London of the early 50s begins an extramarital affair set to gorgeous music (Samuel Barber).  It swoons for some time, and then it becomes the story of her surprise to find herself alive after trying to commit suicide.  As a woman utterly defenseless in the grip of something she cannot explain, Rachel Weiz gives a performance that leaves her soul on the screen.  Tom Hiddleston is the feckless young vet who can’t love her back.  Her uncomprehending, kind husband (Simon Russell Beale) struggles with her, trying to understand.  It’s absurd, after all.  But there can be no explanation.  My life is him, she offers, almost apologetically.  Based on the play by Terrence Ratigan.  Languid cigarette smoke fills still, close quarters and diffuse light falls through heavy curtains, suggesting her smothering.  Terrence Davies makes beautiful, sensuous films, though they’re not for all tastes.  Whenever I show my baby one of his films, she puts her head on my shoulder and has a nice nap.  I wouldn’t have it any other way. 

 11.  21 Jump Street

 

Oh, I dunno, I thought it was really funny.  And you know, I guess this one too is about love, now that I think of it.    

Honorable mentions:

The Cabin In the Woods, The Sessions, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, The Loneliest Planet, Rhino Season, Sinister, the bits in The Avengers with the Hulk

 --December 14, 2012