The Artist

   The Academy Awards are tonight so I decided to go see what The Artist is all about.  The theater was packed, the line for concessions was long and the movie was underwhelming.
   Every year, you see movies that contain that one 'Oscar Bait' scene that usually consists of a melodramatic exchange of yelling and/or crying.  I found The Artist to be nothing more than 100 minutes of Oscar bait.  It was universally impossible to dislike but just didn't do anything for me.

Oscars

I haven't seen a few of the big Oscar nominees*, but if I picked the winners:

Best Picture:  The Tree of Life
Best Director: Terrence Malick
Best Actress: Viola Davis
Best Supporting Actress:  Octavia Spencer
Best Actor: George Clooney
Best Supporting Actor: Nick Nolte
Biggest Snub: The Interrupters

* I have still yet to see My Week With Marilyn, The Iron Lady, Albert Nobbs, War Horse, and The Beginners

Frenzy

 1972

   Frenzy is the penultimate thriller from Hitchcock about a man who is falsely accused of being a serial strangler in London.  It clocks in at just under two hours, but it moves along very swiftly for a film with very few characters and a fairly simple plot.  Richard Blaney, a pub worker who has just lost his job and his home, is the main suspect in the necktie killings of several young women, one of whom is his ex-wife and another his current girlfriend.  Hitchcock shows us who the real killer is very early on in the movie, which allows us to sit back and enjoy watching the master work his magic - no red herrings here.  It is almost like he is setting up a challenge for himself - let's see if I can show the audience who the killer is and still put them on the edge of their seats.  Of course, the master succeeds.  The suspense is palpable throughout, particularly in a scene where the real killer is in the back of a moving potato truck trying desperately to dislodge a damning piece of evidence from the stiffened hand of his most recent victim.  I have only seen about 7 Hitchcock films, but that's enough to see that he truly was the Master of Suspense.  His camera seems like a character itself.  It comes alive when we follow the killer up to his apartment with his next victim in tow and then, just before he allows us inside, Hitchcock leaves them be and slowly backs down the stairwell and out into the street below.  The fact that this is shot backwards is what makes it so effective - as if we have seen something that we're not supposed to and we have to quietly tiptoe away from the scene.  The sound design is fantastic, going from the silent stairs to the bustling street.  He doesn't need to show us the rest.
   The sound decisions are evident again in a later scene where we are positioned right outside the courtroom as the judge is reading Blaney's verdict.  A man opens the door to the courtroom and we hear the judge ask the jury if they have reached a decision, then he shuts the door just as the judge is reading the verdict and the sound is completely cut out.  He reopens the door and we hear the judge in the middle of his sentence.  It is not the type of heavy door that would completely block out sound either, it is a thin, swinging door with windows.  It's a great scene.  

   There are, in typical Hitchcock style, moments of humor.  I laughed at the way he showed the dead women with their eyes wide open and their tongues hanging out to the side.  The lead inspector assigned to the case, played very well by Alec McCowen, has a hilarious obsession with simple foods and we watch him eat nearly an entire breakfast for lunch while he explains to his partner that people tend to over-complicate foods in England.  There are two really funny dinner scenes at his home with his wife cooking the most disgusting-looking 'fancy' foods (fish-head soup and pig feet roast, to name two).  The inspector plays up the gag by never actually eating any of the food, but instead dumping the soup back into its serving bowl while his wife isn't looking and then taking giant gulps of booze to mask the bad taste.  It reminded me of a child being forced to eat his peas and attempting to drink as much Kool-Aid as possible in order to make it more bearable.  In a second scene, she stands right above him while he takes a bite of pig feet but he never swallows it while he talks to her about the case he is investigating.  All the while, she is oblivious to his disdain for her cooking.  When his partner shows up with news about the case, she makes him a salted margarita instead of something simpler - he takes one sip and leaves.  I don't know how important this is to the story, but I mention it because I can't help but think this is Hitchcock, or the writers, commenting on their own personal misadventures with food.  I got a kick out of it. 

  Frenzy is a solid thriller that is streaming on Netflix until February 29th.  Since I have only seen a handful of other movies directed by Hitchcock, I don't have a more global understanding of where this film fits in with his many others.  I noticed that his previous movie, Topaz, was released in 1969, which was three years prior to Frenzy.  This was the longest span of time between movies, with the exception of the four years between this one and his final film, Family Plot.  Again, I don't know if there is any more significance to this other than the man was averaging a movie a year for five decades and was getting tired (his own failing health and the health problems of his wife probably contributed as well).  People with a much better understanding of his career will be able to speak on this much further.  I can say, however, that even as he aged into his 70s, Alfred Hitchcock remained at the top of his game.

Vertigo

   1958

    I had never seen Vertigo in its entirety until this week and I was, of course, very pleased with it.  I didn't like it quite as much as Dial M For Murder, but I would be surprised if any Hitchcock can touch that one for me.  

 

The Vow

   I am not the target demographic, so my opinion of this movie doesn't really mean anything.  For the record, I thought it was pretty awful.  Channing Tatum is punch-worthy and his voice-over is laughably stupid.  Rachel McAdams is void of her usual charm.
   My girlfriend loved it though, which made me happy.

Rampart

   To say that I was excited when my friend invited me to join him at a screening of Rampart would be a vast understatement.  For months I've been hearing about Woody Harrelson's career performance as a corrupt L.A. cop in this gritty introspective drama.  Since it still has a very limited release in the United States, I was even more excited to get a look at this much-hyped movie here in Philadelphia.
  I will start by saying that I was mentally and emotionally taken out of this film every three or four minutes because I was surrounded by a tremendously annoying and discourteous audience.  And the major players seemed to all be seated in a two-row radius around us.  A man suffering from a persistent cough that could only be described as a deadly mix of pneumonia and emphysema; a caricature of a human being with an extremely loud laugh intended solely to inform everyone in earshot (which must have extended out into the concession area) that he was witty enough to pick up on the irony of the joke on screen; an aging woman wielding a cane who was seated directly in the center of a row near the front of the theater got up and left with the help of her husband about an hour and ten minutes into the film - which is fine, but as she was forcing everyone to her left to make room for her to get through, she was loudly apologizing and begging for forgiveness, which only made things more distracting; a middle-aged man's cell phone rang, prompting him to frantically search through the pockets of what seemed to be a caribou parka - he was ultimately unable to locate the phone and it went to voice mail.   Having said all of that, I thought the movie was great.
   Harrelson plays Dave Brown, an LAPD officer who lives and works by his own rules.  Brown has a long history of corruption, ranging from something as seemingly innocent as drinking on the job to the alleged murder of a date rapist about a decade before the film takes place.  The film opens with Brown serving as mentor and teacher to a female rookie cop who seems no older than 20.  Minutes before using brutal force to get information from a drug dealer, Brown tells the rookie that everything she has read in the academy handbook is complete bullshit.  We are quickly introduced to Dave Brown's world and given a fair taste of what he is willing to do in the name of justice.
  Brown is twice-divorced, to sisters, and has a child with each of them, making the children both half-sisters and cousins at the same time.  His relationships with the two ex-wives are made even more uncomfortable for us to watch when we discover that they all live together in a twisted web of dysfunction.  Brown clearly loves his daughters but has a difficult time showing it.  In fact, he has a difficult time dealing with every emotion that life has to offer.  Except anger.
  At times, Brown seems like the coolest cop I've ever seen on screen.  Most of the time, however, he is utterly pathetic and unlikeable.  He is a tragic character with flaws that run deep.  The film focuses on two incidents of violence: the first is a brutal beating that is caught on video and spread across news media; the second is the murder of two stick-up men after they attempt to rob a high-stakes card game.  It is the latter that Brown has a difficult time justifying.
  As the LAPD and FBI investigate the double murder, Brown's life spirals, and I mean spirals, out of control.  He loses his kids, his once-meaningful relationships with their mothers, his house, his friendship with a long-time friend and confidant, and most intriguingly, his sanity.  Brown's struggle to survive the storm is compelling on screen.  Director Oren Moverman (The Messenger) works with shaky cameras, quick scene-ending cuts, circling shots at conference tables, and other effects to enhance the tone of his scenes.  I can see how some would say that his style is gimmicky and heavy-handed, as if to say "Hey everybody, look how interesting and gritty I can make this look," but it worked for me.  I felt that it paralleled Brown's self-destruction and manic-depressive lifestyle.  The camera effects during a scene at a nightclub are particularly well done.  Rampart looks like every episode of The Shield, which, for me, is a very good thing.  I typed in the title of this film into IMDB.com and discovered that The Shield's working title was Rampart.  Although I am not certain, I would bet that the connections run even deeper than that.
   Harrelson is perfect in this role.  He is concurrently believable as a physically-imposing badass cop and as a desperate father who is watching his girls slip away.  Rage fills almost every facet of his life except with how he deals with his family.  In one particularly poignant scene where his family is finally kicking him out of the house, I was shocked that Brown didn't resort to violence to escape the situation.  Harrelson is very good at using his various tools as an actor to convey the many sides to Dave Brown.  He is brilliant with his usage of rhetoric while under interrogation by his superior officers.  I was buying that Brown possesses a vast mental catalog of court rulings and legal precedents that enable him to navigate his way through the department's official inquiries.  Conversely, I was also buying him as a man incapable of dealing with hardship without the aid of cigarettes, pills and alcohol.  The character would be, as my friend said, a perfect study for someone with a psychology degree. 
  Robin Wright, Sigourney Weaver, Ned Beatty, Ice Cube, Ben Foster, Anne Heche and Steve Buscemi all have small roles, but do not misunderstand - this is the Woody Harrelson show.  And despite the prevailing circumstances that surrounded me in the theater, I was able to come away with a very positive opinion of this movie. 

Project Nim

   Project Nim is a documentary about a chimpanzee named Nim, who was taken from his mother as an infant and raised as a human child by a Manhattan family in the 1970s.  This controversial experiment was designed to see if chimps were able to learn to use sign language to communicate with human beings.  This film, which was directed by James Marsh (Man on Wire), introduces you to a host of caretakers over a span of more than two decades.  Herb Terrace is the scientist who initiated the experiment and he is, like so many of the other people involved throughout the story, at times quite likeable and at other times fiercely loathsome.  The beauty of this documentary, which was one of the things I liked so much about the Oscar-winning Man on Wire, is that Marsh merely presents the facts of the case and lets us decide who is good and who is bad.  More importantly, he lets us decide if Nim is the beneficiary or the victim.  During a large part of the film, an argument can be made in either corner.  At the end, it is a bit easier to determine what to think about it all when we hear testimony from Terrace himself about how he believes Nim was nothing more than a cunning and clever chimp who merely mimicked the signs he saw from his handlers simply to get treats.  Terrace did not dispute that Nim knew a few signs, like hug and play, but he felt that it was not enough to conclude that Nim knew the language.  I suppose it is like when a dog responds to the phrase "roll over" because it knows it will be rewarded if it does so.  Terrace argued that Nim's behavior simply fell under the model of operant conditioning rather than a significant grasp of language as we understand it.
  As Nim is transferred from one set of caretakers to another to another, he becomes increasingly defiant and his tendency towards acting violently increases with each new 'owner.'  I couldn't help but think about the products of poor and/or inconsistent parenting that I witness every day in the classroom.  Nearly 100% of a child's behavior, whether it is good or bad, is a direct result of parenting.  The correlation is as clear with Nim as it is with school children. 
   I recently heard a James Solomon interview with Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt where he talked about how his fictional story was so closely connected to Project Nim.  Wyatt confirmed that his writers were very familiar with the story of Nim and said that the chimp protagonist Caesar was indeed modeled after Nim (and also Oliver, a 'missing-link humanzee' who was discovered by scientists in Africa in the 1960s and brought to America for testing and public exhibition).  In a separate Solomon interview with James Marsh, the Nim director similarly confirmed the connection between the two films and expressed excitement about being mentioned together as a pair. 
  Project Nim was both a zoological and sociological experiment that failed miserably, while Project Nim is both a fascinating and tragic bio-pic documentary that succeeds triumphantly.

(I would recommend seeing Nim and Rise together)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

  Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close stars child actor Thomas Horn as Oskar Schell, an eccentric ten-year old who lost his father in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks.  A year after the tragic day, Oskar finds a key in his father’s closet and decides to search all of New York City to find the lock that it opens.  He has only one clue: the word “Black” is written on the envelope that the key was in.  Oskar assumes that this is the last name of the person who owns the lock that the key will open, so he compiles a list of nearly 500 people with the last name Black and embarks on a journey to unlock the mystery of the key.  The key is a vehicle - it is Oskar's way of trying to hold on to the memories of his father.  

  I read some of Jonathan Safran Foer's novel but couldn't really get into it enough to finish it.  I did, however, read enough to get an idea of who Oskar was and what he was all about.  Although I don't feel that the screenplay captured him very well, Horn's stellar performance was enough to make up for it.  His scenes never lack a feeling of genuine emotion and believability.  Horn never hits one false note.  The same can not be said about Tom Hanks, who plays his father.  I was turned off by his over the top delivery.  It reminded me of when an actor goes on Sesame Street and teaches kids at home about the alphabet.  I did like Sandra Bullock in the role as Oskar's mother quite a bit.  Max Von Sydow did as well as he could have given the circumstances (his character doesn't speak).  I don't know what Viola Davis or John Goodman were doing in this movie - star power I guess.

  I found some of the 9/11 stuff pretty offensive - mainly the shots of Hanks falling through the air.  Capturing that on film was completely unnecessary and probably very hurtful to a lot of people.  That could have been conveyed in a much more subtle way, or taken out completely.  It offered zero to the sadness of him dying in the attacks.  It really took me out of the story.

  There were a lot of character traits about Oskar that were never really explained fully, and some not at all.  One was about him having "heavy boots" - in the book, Oskar says this a lot when he finds it tough to move.  In the movie, he says it twice and both times it felt very odd and out of place.  The movie never really explains why Oskar and the doorman (Goodman) use insults and profanity to communicate with one another.  It is strange to hear a grown man call a child, especially an eccentric child who most likely has autism or Asberger's, a retard.  Very offensive.  It is never really explained why Oskar dives into these incredibly quick, angry rants about people or things around him.  It just seemed strange.  And what about Oskar's dad saying that New York once had a 6th borough?  He tells his wife that he does it so Oskar will go out into Central Park and be forced to communicate with strangers in order to become more social.  But what parents would encourage, let alone force, their 10 year old son go out into NYC alone?  I don't get it.  Also, the title is never really explained.  From what I understand, there is something about birds and a downstairs neighbor. 

  Putting all of that aside, I can not deny that this movie did tug at my heartstrings.  At its core, it is the story of a young boy who is struggling mightily to understand why his father was taken from him.  It is about a mother who is devastated by the loss of her husband and fears that she is losing touch with her son more and more each day.   These are real stories; real emotions.  And they worked for me.  Especially in the few scenes when Oskar and his mother are alone in a room, forced to confront the emotional trauma that each one has gone through since "the worst day."  It was gut-wrenching to see a kid have to go through so much pain so early in life.  The messages that Oskar's dad left on the answering machine were horrifyingly sad.  The final phone conversation between Hanks and Bullock was tough to watch.  Anyone and everyone can put themselves in that position and feel the helplessness; the desperation.  

  I absolutely loved what Oskar said at the very end of the movie.  It is as inspirational as it gets to hear such a young boy say something that is filled with such maturity, acceptance and hope.  

The Guard

   The Guard is the impressive debut film by Irish director John Michael McDonagh starring Brendan Gleeson (Braveheart, Harry Potter, In Bruges) as Irish police officer Gerry Boyle, who shows sides of heroism, hilarity and corruption.  Boyle and FBI agent Wendell Everett, played by Don Cheadle, make an unlikely team in an effort to take down an international drug trafficking ring.  Gleeson is very funny in this role, even when I couldn't understand what he was saying (thank goodness for subtitles) but I didn't care for Cheadle's performance, which seemed ordinary and inauthentic, especially when the two men are drinking at a local pub.
   With the plot such as it is, this film's substance runs deeper than you might think and its multi-layered delivery helps move the story along quickly and efficiently.  McDonagh pokes fun at how people from Ireland view America and how Americans view Ireland.  He plays around with stereotypes that people from both nations have of one another.  For one, there are very few scenes that aren't absolutely drenched in green.  Boyle's office alone has green walls, green telephones, green lamps, green pens and green benches.  In most scenes, the actors faces are illuminated in green lighting.  At a diner, instead of yellow and red condiment bottles, they have dark green and bright green.  It is pretty unique.  The American phrase "good to go" is mocked.  One of the drug traffickers mentions how American police are less likely to take bribes than their Irish counterparts.  Classic American music is used at two key points in the movie.  In one diner scene, the characters are sitting around having a dialogue about how creepy Bobbie Gentry is when she says she is going to throw something, whatever the heck it is, off the Tallahatchie Bridge.  John Denver's Leaving on a Jet Plane blares over the closing credits.  It is very interesting to see elements like this get woven into an Irish film.
  It is certainly a fine debut film from director McDonagh.  Gleeson made me laugh quite a bit.  This film has sequel written all over it and I definitely look forward to one.