Beginners

For many reasons, BEGINNERS shouldn't be as good a film as it is. It's got weird little sum-upances of the world, liberal jumps through time, and a few too many quirks. However, its still not bad, and in fact, it's pretty good. Probably due to the acting presence of Ewan McGregor, BEGINNERS' quirks come off more melancholy than they would have in the presence of any other actor. The story consider's McGregor's Oliver, a sad sack who endangers his own endeavors through fake senses of incompletion. The story jumps between his father's battle with cancer and simultaneous coming out of the closet, and Oliver's romantic pursuit of a frenchwoman named Anna (Melanie Laurent) months after his father's death. Here is the strength of the film though: everything that could have been grating is under a strong control by director Mike Mills. All of Oliver's quirks and over-explanations are sort of sad, so they aren't annoying. His father's (Christopher Plummer) exploration of his gayness isn't exploitive but also sort of depressing because he's exploring this side of himself briskly and he has little time to explore it because soon he'll die. This fleeting nature of Plummer's character strengthens the Oliver-Anna relationship because Oliver has the realization that he can't be fooling around with his desires. This simplicity is handled well. Furthermore, BEGINNERS has a wonderfully modern look about it: filled with all of the yellows and oranges and that have colorized 21st century films. If this film has a weakness, it exists within Melanie Laurent, who is underused and practically an emblem. If her character had been strengthened, and some of the quirks dialed down to the point of nonexistence, BEGINNERS would be a really great film. Instead it is flawed, but entertaining and occasionally beautiful.
Beginners: ★★★

Terri

TERRI is a largely successful film because it daringly tells a conventional story, but falls into none of the clichés or pitfalls that usually inhabit those types of films. Directed with real intelligence and honesty by Azazel Jacobs, TERRI tells of an obese fifteen year old named Terri (Jacob Wysocki) who doesn't really feel so diminutive in his secluded position, but really quite comfortable. Terri is called in by the vice principal Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly) one day for some minor offense, and Fitzgerald projects his own view of a loser-child upon Terri. The two develop a mutual understanding, but their friendship is mapped over by a few realizations of dependency. For, despite Terri's independence, he is still a little pathetic, and despite Mr. Fitzgerald's assumed solidarity, he's really just projecting a bunch of things he experienced as a child upon a group of students he's deemed as losers. Fitzgerald is compelling in this way, for he has in a way become a form of bully, especially by singling out kids he assumes to be outcasts. In this manner, Terri shows Fitzgerald his true intents. A lot of TERRI relies on the idea that people are always doing things for themselves. This also expresses itself in a complex and honest part of the story involving a hot fellow classmate of Terri's, who is fingered in science class and in danger of expulsion. Terri stands up for the girl, but she herself was implicit in the fingering, and uses Terri in subtle ways. TERRI is an honest film in its willingness to show us things that people usually shrug off about high school students. It's also a very good film.
Terri: ★★★1/2

The Joneses

Odd for a film like THE JONESES to be so transparent and simplistic in its title, which refers to the saying 'keeping up with the Joneses'. So facile a title would not reflect some of the real fun that exists within the film, but such an idiotic title is also reflective on the downfall of the film, which is that its expectations for itself were never set very high. The story, which is, of course, ludicrous, is about a company which sets up fake families of people in rich neighborhoods who are given all the new, hottest stuff to parade about and force sales up. This fake family, consisting of the nymphomaniac Amber Heard as the daughter, David Duchovny as the inexperienced "father", Demi Moore as the weathered and ambitious "mother" and Ben Hollingsworth as the closeted "son". At first, Steve (Duchovny) is doing horrifically in his sales, and for a while the film tracks his struggle and unlikely ascent. Some of the methods the Joneses go through are pretty funny, and the odd humanity the "family" finds resembles that same good, buried movie. How the film fails though, is that it becomes so simplistic as to become stupid. It has a message of how we don't need to be keeping up with the Joneses, and a neighbor even kills himself because he has bought so intensely into their ideology. Steve Jones feels terribly, as if this is his fault, but there is no fault put on the idiots who buy in, and they are here excused. This then humanizes the Joneses, who are really just idiotic hogs who bask in their new shit and whine about how their lives aren't perfect. Such half-notions about 'money doesn't make you happy' and you can't 'keep up with the Joneses' is what makes this such a simplistic drag.
The Joneses: ★1/2

The Strange Case of Angelica

I was a huge fan of last year's ECCENTRICITIES OF A BLONDE-HAIRED GIRL, which is by the same director as this film. The director, Manoel de Oliveira is not to ever be taken lightly. He will be 103 years old this year, and he is the second eldest film director ever behind George Abbott, who lived to be 107. ECCENTRICITIES was an introduction to Oliveira's work for me, and I expected a lot out of THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA, which is similar to ECCENTRICITIES in many ways. For one thing, the films both have a very similar look, for Oliveira re-used the cinematographer of the previous film for this one. The look is brilliant still, there's an old-world look to his modern city. In THE STRANGE CASE OF ANGELICA, just as languid a film as ECCENTRICITIES, a young photographer is beckoned to the estate of a rich family, whose daughter Angelica has just died. He is to photograph the corpse, and he is overwhelmed by Angelica's presence, even though she's dead. Angelica looks placid as she lies in brilliant yellow, and the photographer goes on to photograph men working across from his flat. His obsession deepens though, and he sees Angelica blinking in the photographs, and she finally separates him from his body and takes him through the sky. There is no ridiculousness here though, for Oliveira treats the tale as if it was an old folktale being retold through film. This is such a quiet and gorgeous film, and perhaps it does not deserve the 'not enough' feeling I harbor towards it considering how it came after my introduction to the director, and thus his style realized.
The Strange Case of Angelica: ★★★

Anonymous

It's too bad that Roland Emmerich made ANONYMOUS. But it's also a great joy that he made it. Emmerich, the director to schlocky, idiotic, coherent dialogue sparse films like GODZILLA, THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, INDEPENDENCE DAY and 2012, would never have been expected in a million years to make a film about the Oxfordian Theory, but he did. This, I think, (his track record especially), has caused ANONYMOUS to be ridiculously and unfairly nit-picked, and even dismissed by many critics. That's a shame, for if Emmerich's name, and the allegory he places within the film that invigorates his worth were absent, ANONYMOUS would be revered across the board. Sure it's overcomplicated, and its been described even as muddled, but it adds to the fun. Emmerich crafts an extreme-version of the Elizabethan days perhaps because of the exaggerated nature of his disaster films. The film makes the case for (or entertains us with the idea that) William Shakespeare never actually wrote any of the plays attributed to him. Rather, the plays, poems, sonnets, were all the work of a nobleman named Edward de Veer. de Veer, the film exhibits, was a genius, and he is played as such in an Oscar worthy performance by Rhys Ifans. (Again, it's too bad such a performance will be overlooked because the film is made by Emmerich). Skipping around through his timeline with little to assist us but aging hair and a few different actors, Emmerich shows us a labyrinthian world. For ANONYMOUS is, in fact, so complicated and fun, ridiculous and overwrought, that it's affecting. de Veer is brilliant and captivating, and the political trials are so burdened with melodrama that it becomes fun rather than instructive or argumentative. I have one quibble though: would the works of Shakespeare really be so easily explained through the trivialities of de Veer in any grand scale? Of course not, and that's why the Oxfordian Theory is really, really stupid. But who cares, it makes for a pretty great movie: one of my favorites of the year in its unintentional pleasures, and its pure fun with words. Cronenberg once said that he didn't even see the difference between action in the form of violence and action in the form of talking. This is a film that embraces that idea.
Anonymous: ★★★1/2

Breaking Bad (S.4)

Season four of AMC's "Breaking Bad" is not only the best season of the show, but has about three episodes that deserve to be placed near the zenith of television perfection. Explored more, or perhaps just fully realized in the show's fourth season is the idea that middle class, timid white guy Walter White has the desire to be like what the low class, crude Jesse Pinkman is. "Breaking Bad" is a brilliant show, deserving of high praise and wider audiences.
Breaking Bad (S.4): ★★★★

Carrie

CARRIE is a problematic film, one that has a great beginning, great middle, and an end which is so atrocious, is repurposes the previously great segments, and ruins the film. Directed by the occasionally unwieldy, but talented Brian de Palma, CARRIE is a simple horror story, but its artful and creepy in its opening. de Palma begins with Carrie, an outcast at school and daughter to a religious nut, naked in the locker room at school. Many directors have started their films with blatant female nudity (see: PLEASE GIVE), but it acts as a pretentious precursor to a pretentious film. de Palma's decision to start the film this way is sort of brilliant though. Carrie looks like a naked animal, like a cat shaved and thrown in water. She's bony and creepy (played with real knowledge by Sissy Spacek), and while in the shower, she reaches down between her legs and her fingers come up blood tinged. Because of her idiot mother, Carrie (who is a senior in high school) doesn't even know about periods, and past the obvious creepiness of a stunted puberty, Carrie runs at her fellow seniors, bloody fingers outstretched like a mad creature. Her classmates laugh at her and humiliate her, and this sets up de Palma's world as an immoral creature itself. Even the teacher who pities Carrie is at heart just as disgusted with her, but acts towards her in kind gestures just to prove a point to herself. Then the horror bit sets in, and we discover that Carrie has the power of telekinesis. This changes her life, and she is even asked out by the only goodhearted person in the film to the prom as a pity-gesture. Despite these motives, de Palma creates a great sequence here, showing Carrie and the boy dancing round and round as his camera follows them round and round. There is a plot at work though, for the girls from earlier plan to humiliate Carrie by dousing her in pig's blood. Carrie is now beautiful at the Prom: her face is clean and scintillating, but we know that it will soon be stained by pig's blood. Then de Palma fucks up. In the last scenes of the movie, he throws all of these wonderful ideas out the window, Carrie goes batshit crazy, and we've lost any true beauty or true horror to pretentious camera tricks, confusing and unnecessary split screens, and yells. Any animalism that existed, and quasi-Cinderella horror story that de Palma set up is ruined. For me, CARRIE is one of the saddest failures I've ever seen, because it had so much potential. Turn off the film right when Carrie gets doused in blood and you've got a really fine film, but that is not the case, and as a whole, de Palma makes CARRIE not work. A real shame.
Carrie: ★★1/2