So let's try to put some life back into this hospital ward.
The third annual Onion AV Club Reader's Poll
was posted yesterday. Got one quote in this year, which is less than previous years, but the competition appears to have been much stiffer. So I'm not complaining. If you're interested, though, here's my full ballot.
(BONUS: Of these five capsules, I despise one of them. See if you can guess which one!)
1) Considering how many fine films were released in 2007, it seems unusual that the most emotionally and aesthetically fulfilling movie of the year should be a cartoon about a hungry rat. But it seems appropriate for the delightful
Ratatouille, considering its claim that genius can come from anywhere. Leave it to Brad Bird and the Pixar team, the latter setting themselves right after the noisy debacle of
Cars, to take an unappetizing premise (rat! in the kitchen! ew!) and invest it with enough heart, soul, energy and visual beauty to make it a richly satisfying experience -- a souffle with substance. The defense of careful, quality work in a world overrun and cheapened by cash-grab mediocrity is stirring, as it's obviously a subject close to the hearts of its makers (one can imagine Skinner as a surrogate for Jeffery Katzenberg, trading on the cache of experience in the house of a master to kickstart a career peddling bland, empty-calorie crud); what impresses most, though, is the way that Bird uses the American perception of animation as kid stuff to his thematic advantage. With food as his metaphor and Anton Ego as his vessel, Bird puts forth a consideration of the simple loves that start many of us on the road to cinephilia.
2) "Directed by Ben Affleck." The phrase on first blush sounds like a ready-made punchline, a Hollywood version of "Take my wife... please!" You mean somebody gave money to Ben Affleck, the guy who smirked his way through
Jersey Girl,
Armageddon and a host of other embarrassments, and let him stand behind a camera telling other people how to act? It is to laugh. But on the evidence of the terrific, devastating
Gone Baby Gone, the last laugh belongs to Ben. He's no Kubrick, but his direction is confident and unobtrusive, with his main asset being a willingness to stay out of the way of the material. And what material! The screenplay, from the novel by Dennis Lehane, starts as a blue-collar noir gloss but deepens and evolves into something much thornier. In the lead, Ben's brother Casey uses his natural boyish vulnerability to suggest a man used to being underestimated and used to surprising people with his spine of steel. Amy Ryan, as the world's worst mother, deserves all the accolades she's been getting, but Affleck the Younger has the toughest role -- a model of moral certitude in a world where certitude is useless and the right answer can still be the wrong answer -- and he's just as stellar. So Ben Affleck directed a film. And that's a good thing.
3) Presumably, Amir Bar-Lev had no idea what he was getting into when he started filming the Olmstead family. He just wanted a solid, likeable film about a child prodigy that maybe got people thinking about the function and meaning of abstract art. Instead, he ended up with
My Kid Could Paint That, a fascinating, troubling portrait of media frenzy and the desire for narrative in everyday life. When it comes out that 4-year-old sensation Marla Olmstead may not be the sole author of her work, the film explodes in a dozen different directions. What was a feel-good fluff story becomes a war between embattled parents desperate to prove themselves and a hungry media beast that is perfectly willing to send these people up the river if it means a story. Bar-Lev gets caught in the middle as both a friend and a filmmaker (journalistic distance goes out the window), and there comes a point when it's made clear that he's contributing to the misery just as much as everyone else. In the thicket of denials and accusations rings out the question: Why do we poke and prod at seemingly innocent things, why do we invade? What's to be gained from tearing apart a kid? The answer: We need to have our stories, and the guys who feed them to us need to find ways to keep us interested. It's a hellish vicious cycle, and Bar-Lev is there to capture a textbook example.
4) It's such a perfect marriage that I wonder why it was never conjured up before: the gore film and the musical, together at last! Both genres revel in their own artificiality, and they're both similarly hyperbolic in regards to big production setpieces. What I mean to say is that it was only a matter of time before we got a film like
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I know nothing of Sondheim's original stage play, but I do know that Tim Burton's adaptation of said stage play is a rip-roaring exercise in bombastic Grand Guignol. The cast doesn't have the most adept singing voices (especially you, Alan Rickman... sorry), but they sell the emotions with ease. Johnnie Depp in particular gives a strange and compelling performance that engenders bits of sympathy for the psychotic Todd even as I recognize there's not much sympathetic about him. (Revenge is fine and dandy, but taking it bit far, aren't we?) Meanwhile, Burton's tendencies towards extravagance and atmosphere at the expense of narrative are used all for good this time around -- he's got existing material to work with, and instead of tinkering with the source, he merely built a world around it. The threatening vertical compositions of the sets and the grimy color scheme, all grays and blacks occasionally ripped asunder by fonts of crimson, make the London of
Todd feel less like a city and more like a stopover on the way to Hell. Most important, though, is that unlike some other stage-to-screen transpositions,
Todd feels like a goddamned movie. A mad, bloody, dank, funny and ferociously entertaining movie, no less. The wait? So worth it.
5) What does it mean to sacrifice everything for a cause? Julia Loktev's disturbingly intimate drama
Day Night Day Night traces the path of a nameless young woman, played by Luisa Williams in the year's best performance, as she prepares to become a suicide bomber in Times Square. Loktev builds tension and discomfort through creative use of sound and screen space; her framing is tight (some early tracking shots feel like the camera is trying to climb over the back of Williams's head), yet she leaves enough screen space to emphasize the isolation of her subject relative to those around her and the world at large. The situation she's conjured is horrifying, yet Loktev utilizes stillness as a way into a character who is ready to do something most of us would never consider. It's a striking feat of direction, but it wouldn't be half as effective without Williams, whose performance is like a master class in minimalism. She accomplishes more with an unwavering stare than most actors can do with reams of dialogue. In preparation for the mission, her character sheds personal attachments, possessions and her own identity (it's no coincidence that her handlers are all hooded, rendering them literally faceless), yet Williams lets us catch glimpses of the tremulous doubt beneath the placid, accepting exterior. (Key line: "Would you please eat with me? I don't want to eat alone.") The ending, as hard a kick in the gut as any film packed this year, asks us to consider if giving up everything might also entail losing things that were never meant to be lost. Solitude's a motherfucker.
