Movie Views from Seattle
Kate Mara and Miles TellerEven among the legions of characters in long underwear, the Fantastic Four have always stood apart, both for their squabbling family dynamics and an endearingly retro squareness. The latest attempt to move the team to the big screen captures, well, exactly neither of those aspects, with results that are too bloody and dour for kids (heads start popping off toward the end, GWAR-style), too laissez faire for continuity geeks, and too uninspired for everybody else.
Welcome 2015 with one last look back at the best releases of 2014, as seen by the contributors to Parallax View and a few notable Seattle-based film critics.
My list this year is light on foreign movies, largely because I didn’t get out to as many festival screenings as I have in past years, and because many of the foreign language films placing highly on other lists have not opened in this corner of the world.
1. Boyhood (Richard Linkater, US)
2. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, US)
3. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, US)
4. Gone Girl (David Fincher, US)
5. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, UK)
6. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, US)
7. Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski)
8. Manuscripts Don’t Burn (Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran)
9. The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, Australia)
10. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, Iran/US)
And because this film turns it up to 11. Snowpiercer (Bong Joon Ho, US / South Korea / France / Czech Republic) – high concept science fiction thrillers are always best when serving as metaphors for sociopolitical commentary. Amiright?
More honorable mentions (in alphabetical order: Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund, Sweden), The Homesman (Tommy Lee Jones, US), The Immigrant (James Gray, US), John Wick (Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, US), Locke (Steven Knight, UK), A Most Violent Year (J.C. Chandor, US), Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, US), Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt, US), The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher, Germany), We Are the Best! (Lukas Moodyson, Sweden), What Now? Remind Me (Joaquin Pinto, Portugal)
Other published Top Ten Lists: Village Voice Film Poll, Keyframe
Also: Best of 2014 on Blu-ray and DVD
(as published in Village Voice)
1. Birdman
2. Foxcatcher
3. Mr. Turner
4. The Immigrant
5. Two Days, One Night
6. Leviathan
7. Nightcrawler
8. Force Majeure
9. Get on Up
10. Winter Sleep
(as presented at Frye Art Museum Critics Wrap)
1. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)
2. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch)
3. Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski)
4. Calvary (John Michael McDonaugh)
5. The Homesman (Tommy Lee Jones)
6. The Babadook (Jennifer Kent)
7. Happy Valley (Amir Bar-Lev)
8. Gone Girl (David Fincher)
9. The Immigrant (James Gray)
In a realm of its own, circling above the calendar year considerations: A Summer’s Tale (Eric Rohmer, 1995; first US release, 2014)
(as published in Seattle Weekly)
1. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)
2. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch)
3. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)
4. Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
5. Boyhood (Richard Linklater)
6. Blue Ruin (Jeremy Saulnier) and The Rover (David Michôd) (tie)
8. Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund)
9. The Homesman (Tommy Lee Jones)
10. Edge of Tomorrow (Doug Liman)
Other published Top Ten Lists: Frye Art Museum Critics Wrap
1. Under the Skin
2. Only Lovers Left Alive
3. The Grand Budapest Hotel
4. The Homesman
5. Two Days, One Night
6. American Sniper
7. Birdman
8. Mr. Turner
9. Ida
10. The Better Angels
(as published on Fandor)
1. Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard)
2. A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (Ben Russell and Ben Rivers)
3. Jealousy (Philippe Garrel)
4. The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher)
5. Boyhood (Richard Linklater)
6. Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski)
7. Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne)
8. Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
9. Story of My Death (Albert Serra)
10. Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie)
11. Like Father, Like Son (Kore-Eda Hirokazu)
(as published in The Seattle Times)
(in alphabetical order)
Birdman
Boyhood
Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen
Gone Girl
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Life Itself
Like Father, Like Son
Love Is Strange
Mood Indigo
Selma
(as published in Seattle Weekly)
1. Birdman
2. Boyhood
3. Ida
4. Whiplash
5. Frank
6. The Grand Budapest Hotel
7. Force Majeure / Gone Girl (tie)
8. National Gallery
9. Snowpiercer
10. The Homesman
1. Under the Skin
2. Only Lovers Left Alive
3. The Grand Budapest Hotel
4. The Homesman
5. Ida
6. Mr. Turner
7. American Sniper
8. Two Days, One Night
9. A Most Violent Year
10. Force Majeure
Other published Top Ten Lists: Frye Art Museum Critics Wrap
1. Snowpiercer (Joon-ho Bong)
2. Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)
3. The Babadook (Jennifer Kent)
4. Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch)
5. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves)
6. Boyhood (Richard Linklater)
7. Two Days, One Night (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
8. Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski)
9. Whiplash (Damien Chazelle)
10. Cold in July (Jim Mickle)
Village Voice (poll and lists)
Roger Ebert.com
Keyframe Best Feature Films of 2014
Keyframe Daily Lists and Award 2014 Index
Polls
Film Comment
Indiewire Poll
Keyframe
Roger Ebert.com
Sight and Sound
Time Out London
Other lists
2014 additions to the National Film Registry
Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s Ten Best Films of … 1924
New York Times Year in Culture
Liam NeesonAmid the gumshoed masses of fictional detectives, author Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder looms large and wounded, an unlicensed private eye who continually takes the weight of the world on his shoulders in an attempt to quiet his inner demons. Adapting the 10th book in Block’s Scudder series, A Walk Among the Tombstones nails the mournful cynicism of the source material. If the sight of a man in a trenchcoat doggedly chasing down leads dings your particular pleasure centers, get to the theater as soon as you can.
Beginning with a tragic flashback, the story follows Scudder (Liam Neeson), an ex-cop who divvies up his time between doing paid favors for acquaintances and attending AA meetings.
Continue reading at The Portland Mercury
Michael ParksKevin Smith’s 1994 debut Clerks found the filmmaker already firmly intertwined with his narrative, with the movie’s hilarity bolstered by the writer/director’s profane stories about his struggles getting the damn thing made in the first place. What first seemed like charming promotion quickly grew into a canny empire, as each subsequent project emerged accompanied by increased flurries of merchandising, Twitter rants, and self-referential Easter eggs. All of which is fine, unless you just kind of want to watch a movie.
Judged strictly by what’s on the screen, Smith’s Tusk is a bit of a hot mess: an initially creepy slice of body horror that repeatedly fritters away its mounting bad vibes through shoe-horned flashbacks and lengthy improv digressions. When taken as a part in the ever-evolving chronicle of All Things Kevin, however, it becomes something more interesting.
This year contributors to Parallax View will convene at not one but two separate free events to discuss the films of 2013.
Thursday, December 19 at 7pm at the Frye Museum:
For the ninth straight year, a congenial if idiosyncratic coven of Seattle film critics—Robert Horton, Andrew Wright, Jim Emerson and Kathleen Murphy—convenes at the Frye Museum, 7 pm, December 19, to thrash out what were the best, most loved, and/or criminally overlooked movies in 2013. The audience is invited to join in the gentle fray with its own cinematic winners and losers. Admission is free, but tickets go fast.
Free tickets may be picked up at the Information Desk one hour prior to the start of the program. There is no late seating, so please arrive early.
As a special benefit, Frye members may reserve free tickets in advance to guarantee seating. To reserve, call 206 432 8289 or email rsvp@fryemuseum.org at least two days prior to the event. Each member may reserve two tickets and must claim their tickets at the Information Desk fifteen minutes prior to the start of the program.
And on Friday, December 20 at 6pm at Northwest Film Forum:
Join us for a free, lively monthly discussion led by long-time Seattle film critics (and occasional guests) who have much to say on the subject of cinephilia past, present and future. The December conversation includes former Film Comment editor Richard Jameson, Everett Herald/KUOW critic Robert Horton, MSN.com critic Kathleen Murphy and freelance critic Bruce Reid.
From the critic’s chair for December:
“The rumors are true: once again all four Framing Pictures regulars will form up, CinemaScope-style, at the front of the Northwest Film Forum cinema. Two of them, Horton and Murphy, will have been doing the Ten Best thing at the Frye on the 19th; they may turn around and denounce their selections. . . Then again, Framing Pictures’ agenda won’t focus solely on Ten Best tilting. We expect—and yes, that “we” also includes Jameson and Reid—to talk about things and people we valued, things we admired (or dissed) about 2013 as a film year, and what, if any, shape it had. Plus who knows what you dear interlopers will have to throw into the mix. Please do interlope.”
While this event is free, you must RSVP to guarantee entry. Get your free tickets reserved here.
Welcome 2012 with one last look back at the best releases of 2011, as seen by the contributors to Parallax View. Critics listed in reverse alphabetical order
Andrew Wright(as posted at Salt Lake Weekly)
1. Melancholia
2. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
3. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
4. 13 Assassins
5. Drive
6. The Tree of Life
7. Take Shelter
8. Hugo
9. The Descendants
10. Stake Land
1. World on a Wire: The gleaming surfaces and monotone bureaucrats are a dig at 2001. The eternally recurring reflections are Fassbinder’s own, Dietrich and gay hustlers and rapacious businessmen stalking a virtual Germany warped by funhouse mirrors. Giddy, heartbreaking, endlessly inventive, and (forget the copyright) absolutely of-the-moment.
2. Tree of Life: It’s not the brutal slaps of nature that birthed you, nor the ways of grace so ethereal they threaten to float away to the sky. It was both of them, and everything else. Malick’s illimitable camera summons grand and mysterious creative forges ranging from cosmic fires to a grandfather’s face.
3. Hugo: The first few reels (those gears; those pipes; the city so close you could reach out and feel its pulse) are so marvelously dense and rich they’re practically retraining you to see in a new way. Which I suspect is pretty close to Scorsese’s personal definition of cinema to begin with.
4. A Dangerous Method: In the past (Spider, Crash) Cronenberg has flung sperm at the camera; here he’s captured by the silky gleam of hymenal blood. Which is less feminism than a sign things have forever changed. A chronicle of dangerous plagues coming to ravage the 20th century: as new as Freud’s talking cure, as ancient as anti-Semitism.
5. Certified Copy: I’d always found something monstrous in Kiarostami’s serenity, a hint of disinterest so profound he could find driftwood as fascinating as people. This study of flowing identities, both playful and devastating, corrects my misapprehension; it’s the drift itself that captivates him, and how we’re all dragged along by the surf.
6. Take Shelter: The first great horror film of post-prosperity America, where job insecurity and HMOs and government therapists fuel the nightmare no less than the claps of thunder or the ominous skies. Almost the polar opposite—in style, in effect—from Nichols and Shannon’s previous collaboration; which suggests they’re capable of anything.
7. Mysteries of Lisbon: The best joke of the year is how the final revealed history in Ruiz’s delightful rebuff to stately period dramas bears no relation to the first, but was entirely dependant upon it all the same. One last labyrinth from the master, the paths this time laid out in human lives.
8. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Fincher’s breakneck pace has assumed a frictionless confidence that gives you a heady, almost comic charge to see. Which might seem entirely the wrong tone here, but brings a much-needed fleetness to the exposition while making the horrors ever more jarring.
9. Contagion: Its narrative propelled so breathtakingly by the actors plenty and Martinez’s score, Contagion’s emotional heft can be overlooked. But this is a shattering argument for grief as our overwhelming commonality, and a lovely salute to those brave enough to suit up against it when needed.
10. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: So guarded and chill you barely notice its beating heart. Till it surges, and wrecks nearly everyone forced to live lives so rigorously, ruthlessly compartmentalized.
Kathleen Murphy(as posted on MSN Movies)
1. Melancholia
2. The Artist
3. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
4. A Dangerous Method
5. The Tree of Life
6. Certified Copy
7. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
8. The Descendants
9. Drive
10. Meek’s Cutoff
See also MSN essay on A Dangerous Method
My list submitted to MSN.com on Dec. 9 could just as well have had some of these titles on it. In some cases their omission was chiefly a matter of my not having got round to a second viewing that likely would have put paid to any reservations I harbor. Worthy films all, and enough of them to make the year a better one than it felt like from week to week, month to month. Order here is random:
Melancholia
The Tree of Life
Le quattro volte
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
A Separation
Of Gods and Men
Midnight in Paris
Carnage
Stake Land / Small Town Murder Songs
Midnight in Paris is the only one I hadn’t seen by Dec. 9. Still haven’t seen Poetry, Mysteries of Lisbon, Film Socialisme, The Road to Nowhere….
See also list on MSN, and essay on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
(as listed at The Herald)
1. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
2. Certified Copy
3. Melancholia
4. A Dangerous Mind
5. Meek’s Cutoff
6. Drive
7. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives
8. Poetry
9. Into Eternity
10. The Descendents / Le Havre
See also his list at indieWIRE
John HartlNot necessarily the best movie of 2011, but certainly the one that most memorably captured the pervasive sense that the planet is going to hell, was Jeff Nichols’s hauntingly ambiguous doomsday drama, Take Shelter. Michael Shannon gave another of his Cassandra-like performances as a distraught family man who has apocalyptic visions that may or may not be tied to reality. Duncan Jones’ Source Code used its Groundhog Day plot to imagine another kind of catastrophic future. J.C. Chandor’s brilliantly cast Wall Street tale, Margin Call, fictionalized the Lehmann Brothers disaster into a showdown between casually wicked Jeremy Irons and the only slightly less evil Kevin Spacey. John Sayles went back to the turn of the last century to reveal another form of duplicity in Amigo, his best work in years. Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death transformed the 1937-1938 Nanking massacre into an astonishingly reflective drama. Andrew Haigh’s Weekend used Brief Encounter as the inspiration for an affecting gay love story, while Chris Weitz’s A Better Life lifted the plot for The Bicycle Thief and set it in East Los Angeles. Alexander Payne’s The Descendants deftly transformed its Hawaiian setting into something less than paradise. Among the year’s most provocative documentaries were James Marsh’s Project Nim, about a chimpanzee raised (and sometimes enraged) by humans, and Kenneth Bowser’s carefully researched Phil Ochs: There But For Fortune, about the epoch-defining 1960s singer whose ambitious activism was ultimately overwhelmed by his self-destructiveness.
A Second 10: Arthur Christmas, The Artist, Incendies, Moneyball, Hugo, Beginners, Vito, Le Havre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and about two-thirds of The Tree of Life.
Award-winning movies that have yet to be shown in Seattle: The Iron Lady, A Separation, Carnage, Pariah, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Margaret, Coriolanus.
The first three films could swap spots without much anxiety on my part. In the arbitrary, often shifting border between aesthetic principle and personal appreciation, I choose to honor the passing of Raul Ruiz and favor my predilection for labyrinthine storytelling and cinematic weaves of character and narrative across time and space, which Ruiz accomplishes with such grace and beauty I find myself in awe of his art and his insight into human nature and the contradictions that define us.
Three of the films on my list I first saw in 2010, and I construct this list without having seen two films which, by all accounts, are among the year’s best: Margaret, which did not screen in Seattle and which did not play as the film festivals I attended, and A Separation, which screened for critics opposite an end-of-the-year deadline. The rest of the choices and absences are all on me.
1. Mysteries of Lisbon (Raul Ruiz)
2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
3. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami)
4. Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt)
5. Poetry (Lee Chang-dong)
6. The Descendents (Alexander Payne)
7. Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols)
8. Le quattro volte (Michelangelo Frammartino)
9. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick)
10. Hugo (Martin Scorsese)
Ten More (in alphabetical order): The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius), A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg), Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn), Le Havre (Aki Kaurismaki), Melancholia (Lars von Trier), Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvais), The Princess Of Montpensier (Bertrand Tavernier), Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman), The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodovar), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson)
I also very much appreciated a year of smart, well-crafted and clever genre films – Attack the Block (Joe Cornish), Limitless (Neil Burger), Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt), Source Code (Duncan Jones), Stake Land (Jim Mickle) – and one marvelous mess of a personal project: Sucker Punch (Zack Snyder).
See also lists on the MSN and Village Voice polls and essay on Certified Copy, plus a uniquely Seattle-centric survey of Top Ten cinematic events for Seattle Weekly.
Video: 2011 Film Critics Wrap at the Frye (Robert Horton, Jim Emerson, Kathleen Murphy, Andrew Wright)
Audio: Robert Horton, Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy discuss the movies of 2011 on KUOW.
Village Voice / LA Weekly Film Poll
indieWIRE Critics Survey
Movie City News Top Ten List compilations
BFI 2011 Critics Poll
Senses of Cinema 2011 World Poll
Best Movie Posters of 2011 (Adrian Curry)
Last year’s lists: Parallax View’s Best of 2010
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Top Ten films of 1921
and the 25 Films chosen for the National Film Registry in 2011
Welcome 2011 with one last look back at the best releases of 2010, as seen by the contributors to Parallax View.
1. Carlos
2. Let Me In
3. The Social Network
4. White Material
5. Winter’s Bone
6. The Ghost Writer
7. Wild Grass
8. Eccentricities Of A Blond Haired Girl
9. Sweetgrass
10. Our Beloved Month of August
Runners up: Amer, The American, Alamar, Black Swan, Inception, Red Riding Trilogy, Somewhere, Vengeance
Best festival films I saw in 2010 without a 2010 theatrical release: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Poetry, Mysteries Of Lisbon
Best Unreleased film of 2007 finally getting an American release in 2010 (but still feels like a film from another era): Secret Sunshine
Most Impressive Resurrection/Restoration/Real Director’s Cut: Metropolis
Also see lists at MSN here and the Village Voice / LA Weekly poll. And the Best of DVD / Blu-ray 2010 is on Parallax View here.
A splendid year, in both quality and quantity. These were all shown for the first time in the Washington, DC area in 2010.
The best film is a tie:
Certified Copy-Kiarostami
Carlos-Assayas
The next seven, in roughly descending order:
A Prophet-Jacques Audiard
Somewhere-Coppola
The Social Network-Fincher
The Ghost Writer-Polanski
The Strange Case of Angelica-Oliviera
Red Riding Trilogy-in total, with James Marsh’s 1980 segment putting it on the list
The Kids are Alright-Cholodenko
And for the final entry, a pairing I couldn’t resist:
Police, Adjective-Poromboiu
Winter’s Bone-Debra Granik
Truth proved far stranger than fiction in many of 2010’s best films. My favorite was Craig Ferguson’s devastating documentary, Inside Job, which painstakingly demonstrates just how our economy was hijacked by greed and ideology. In Roman Polanski’s Ghost Writer, Pierce Brosnan gives a career-best performance as a politician clearly based on Tony Blair. In Doug Liman’s Fair Game, Naomi Watts is equally persuasive as Valerie Plame Wilson, a vulnerable spy whose marriage is nearly demolished in a political feud. James Franco wins this year’s versatility award for convincingly reincarnating two exceptionally different people: Allen Ginsberg in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s underrated Howl and a carefree rock climber in Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours. Jesse Eisenberg deftly captures the drive and insecurities of Facebook’s billionaire chief, Mark Zuckerberg, in David Fincher’s The Social Network. The shameless wartime exploitation of the late Pat Tillman’s heroism is the focus of Amir Bar-Lev’s The Tillman Story, an excellent documentary that goes behind the headlines to suggest the personal extent of that loss. Jim Carrey’s excesses are tapped and artfully used in I Love You Phillip Morris, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s mostly true comedy about a con artist who is locked away in prison, but for how long? More fictional, but still quite strange, are Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, a brave portrait of a mid-life washout played by Ben Stiller, and Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, with Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling daring to play the walking wounded in an impossible marriage.
A second 10: The King’s Speech, Animal Kingdom, Cairo Time, Life During Wartime, Toy Story 3, Never Let Me Go, Shutter Island, Restrepo, Cell 211, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.
Robert Horton1. A Prophet
2. Winter’s Bone
3. Four Lions
4. Sweetgrass
5. The Ghost Writer
6. Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl
7. Mid-August Lunch
8. True Grit
9. The Kids Are All Right
10. Greenberg
See also indieWIRE here and Best and Worst lists at The Everett Herald.
In chronological order seen, but the first two have landed in the right place and there’s a non-chronological tie at 10.
The Ghost Writer
Winter’s Bone
Please Give
The Kids Are All Right
Un Prophète
The Social Network
Hereafter
Let Me In
Sweetgrass
The American / White Material / True Grit
See also lists at MSN and Queen Anne News.
(as compiled for indieWIRE, originally published here)
1. Sweetgrass
2. White Material
3. Carlos
4. Everyone Else
5. The Strange Case of Angelica
6. Alamar
7. Change Nothing
8. Restrepo
9. The Anchorage
10. Daddy Longlegs
Kathleen Murphy(as originally presented at the Frye Art Museum Critics Wrap)
1. The Ghost Writer
2. Winter’s Bone
3. Let Me In
4. Sweetgrass
5. A Prophet
6. The Social Network
7. Please Give
8. The Kids Are All Right
9. White Material
10. Black Swan
(as originally presented at the Frye Art Museum Critics Wrap)
1. A Prophet
2. Inception
3. True Grit
4. Red Riding Trilogy
5. Winter’s Bone
6. Hausu
7. The Ghost Writer
8. Four Lions
9. Greenberg
10. Let Me In
More lists:
Village Voice / LA Weekly Poll (and individual lists here)
indieWIRE Critics Survey
Movie City News list compilations (individual lists are here)
BFI 2010 Critics Poll
And the year in review from select publications in print and on the web
New York Times Year in Review
Los Angeles Times Year in Review
SF360 Top Ten Lists and Year in Film
The Onion AV Club
Slant Magazine
MSN Movies
Dir: Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza
Easily bored/excessively nauseous audiences bemoaning the rise of shakycam scary movies were thrown a monster bone with 2007’s [REC], a relentlessly inspired mash-up which successfully married the slow burn hallmarks of the POV genre with the fast twitch scares of more traditional horror. (The American remake/carbon copy Quarantine was not nearly as resonant, despite the presence of an ingenious sequence where the camera itself is used as a bludgeon.) The effective, perhaps not entirely necessary sequel [REC] 2 is clearly following the Alien/Aliens model, ditching much of the Blair Witchian atmospherics in favor of a steady stream of pop-out-and-go-boo shocks. Jacked up as it is, though, it still manages to bring on the goosebumps.
Dir: Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud
Sincere Question: During this, Pixar’s Golden Age of Animation, is it somehow ungrateful to wish for an occasional decent deviation from Masterpiece after Masterpiece, in the way that Bugs Bunny and Co. served as a hellzapoppin’ corrective to Disney’s dignified heft? (Despite the repeated efforts of Dreamworks, the mere presence of pop culture references and ’70s songs on the soundtrack just doesn’t scratch the itch, somehow.) Call me Looney, but the more resonant and spectacular Pixar’s output becomes, the greater the risk of reducing the surface pleasures of watching drawings (or renderings or whatever) do things that real people can’t.
Despicable Me would likely be enjoyable on any terms, but in the wake of the heart-wrenching Toy Story 3, its emphasis on Rube Goldbergian pratfalls and spittakes seems almost heroic. Much like last year’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, it recognizes the virtues of letting a cartoon be, well, cartoony, no matter how newfangled the technology.
dir: Jon Favreau
Is there an actor alive who digs himself more than Robert Downey Jr.? (Ok, possibly Richard Gere, but that’s in more of a creepy, reptilian vein.) At a time when more and more actors are going Methody opaque, Downey’s lightspeed thought processes are gloriously external, finding hidden ironies in the material while simultaneously delivering his own commentary track. Too much of a good thing can sometimes be way too much of a good thing—the actor’s best performances tend to come when he’s bouncing off of a tight-reined director, ala David Fincher in Zodiac—but when he’s cooking, it’s hard to look away.
If you like watching Downey half as much as he evidently likes himself, Iron Man 2 might make for a reasonably diverting couple of hours. That doesn’t mean it’s not a major mess, though. Flabby, disjointed, and eschewing conflict for extended scenes of improv clowning, it’s the Superheroic equivalent of a Rat Pack film.
Picking up more or less directly where the first installment left off, the story finds billonaire playboy Tony Stark dealing with his decision to go public with his secret identity, while fending off threats both internal (radiation from the device that powers him up) and external, in the form of Sam Rockwell’s competing arms dealer and Mickey Rourke’s Russian inventor with a grudge. Stuff goes boom, but in nowhere near the quantities you’d expect. This may be the only superhero movie in existence where more time is spent lounging around the hero’s swingin’ pad instead of vrooming through the sky.
