| 13 December 2009
Gabourey Sidibe in Precious.
As a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association as well as the Florida Film Critics Circle, I have spent the last few weeks watching new movies about to be released that the studios made available either at special screenings or -- even better -- on “For Your Consideration” DVDs that arrived at my home almost daily from FedEx or UPS.
Why? Because we vote on year-end awards, so the studios want to make sure we have seen their best 2009 releases and even some of their marginal product. (The Proposal? Sherlock Holmes?)
Anyway, here is a look at my SEFCA ballot, which is due in at noon today, as a way of wrapping up the year in film.
10 Best Films of 2009
1. Up in the Air -- Director/co-writer Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking, Juno) again delivers a smart comedy about a frequent flier points-obsessed executive who travels the country firing people. The film is up-to-the-minute in putting a face on our economic woes and playing it for laughs.
2. Nine -- An artful film adaptation of the Broadway musical based on Federico Fellini’s 8½, about an Italian movie director with writer’s block, featuring a masterful lead performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, a bevy of Oscar-winning women and direction by Ron Marshall (Chicago) that is full of Fellini-esque touches.
3. (500) Days of Summer -- An inventive romantic comedy that stands the genre on its ear with a anti-chronological structure and an ending that is anything but the Hollywood norm. Marc Webb announces himself as a director to reckon with and stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel just might be the new Tracy and Hepburn.
Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man.
4. A Serious Man -- The Coen Brothers turn their cameras on their own ethnic heritage in a wry fable about a hapless math professor (the deadpan Michael Stuhlbarg) who is a contemporary version of Job, suffering through all manner of tribulations for which his local rabbis offer no usable help or comfort.
5. Every Little Step -- A documentary on the history of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Chorus Line and the auditions for the recent Broadway revival. The result illustrates the show’s theme of what these “gypsy” dancers go through for their profession, and the competition for these coveted roles feels like a television reality show.
6. Precious -- The movies have never dealt with a character quite like the morbidly obese, illiterate, sexually abused and pregnant again African-American woman played by newcomer Gabourey Sidibe, whose dead-end life eventually gains a glimmer of hope. Director Lee Daniels never blinks from the harshness of this story and stand-up comic Mo’Nique astonishes as Precious’s out-of-control mom.
7. Avatar -- Director-writer James Cameron proves there is life after Titanic with this eye-popping, effects-heavy science fiction tale of the far-off planet Pandora, where an American space mission heads in search of valuable minerals, raping the environment and warring against a blue-skinned race to do so. The story is simplistic, but the visuals are jaw-dropping.
8. Tetro -- It is hard not to root for a return to top form for director-writer Francis Coppola, who spins a tale -- his first original script since 1974’s The Conversation -- of two brothers reunited in Buenos Aires, where the older one has relocated for mysterious reasons. Forced to self-finance his film, Coppola’s simple, but mesmerizing storytelling puts him back in control.
A scene from The Princess and the Frog.
9. The Princess and the Frog -- Just as hand-drawn animation is being declared dead, knocked off by the wonders of computer-generated 3-D, Disney studios reaches back in time to create an exquisitely retro feature with a solid screenplay about an African-American heroine in pre-Katrina New Orleans who kisses a frog, without the desired results. And it is a very effective musical, thanks to the score by Randy Newman.
10. The Road -- Bottomlessly bleak is this apocalyptic tale based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel about a father (Viggo Mortensen) and son who walk the land past desolate, deserted vistas, trying to survive, but for what reason? Not your basic escapist fare, but muscular filmmaking by director John Hillcoat.
BEST ACTOR
1. George Clooney, Up in the Air
2. Daniel Day-Lewis, Nine
3. Michael Stuhlbarg, A Serious Man
BEST ACTRESS
1. Gabourey Sidibe, Precious
2. Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia
3. Carey Mulligan, An Education
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
1. Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds
2. Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones
3. Christian McKay, Me & Orson Welles
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
1. Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air
2. Marion Cotillard, Nine
3. Mo’Nique, Precious
BEST DIRECTOR
1. Jason Reitman, Up in the Air
2. Ron Marshall, Nine
3. The Coen Brothers, A Serious Man
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
1. Summer Hours
2. Coco Before Chanel
3. Hello, Goodbye
BEST DOCUMENTARY
1. Every Little Step
2. Herb & Dorothy
3. Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
BEST ANIMATED FILM
1. The Princess and the Frog
2. Fantastic Mr. Fox
3. Up
Next week, after the ballots have been totaled, I will report on the Association’s collective choices, to show how far outside the critical mainstream I am.
Anna Kendrick and George Clooney in Up in the Air.
| 04 December 2009
Mirta Bogdasarian in La Cámara Oscura.
Only a few of the 20th annual Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival’s entries were made available for advance reviews, but here are a few of them worth at least partial attention:
* Hello, Goodbye (France, 99 min., Sat., Dec. 5, 7:20 pm, Cobb Dowtown) -- For many Israel is an idealized promised land, but director Graham Guit puckishly examines the details of that promise in his amusing, if formulaic fish-out-of-water comedy starring two French cinema icons, Gerard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant.
Depardieu is a successful gynecologist in Paris who is Jewish, but with no connection to the religion or the culture. To cheer up his wife, who faces an empty nest after their son marries, he suggests a vacation trip, but is taken aback when she insists she yearns to go to Israel. There her mood brightens, they have satisfying sex, a job seems to fall in his lap, a condominium deal sounds too good to pass up, so they decide to pack up their belongings and move to Tel Aviv.
Of course, they know no Hebrew, are used to the creature comforts of Paris and the Jewish version of Murphy’s Law goes into effect, as everything that can go wrong does. A mountainous Depardieu and a soulful-eyed Ardant are truly “strangers in a strange land,” enduring calamities that rock the foundation of their marriage. The woes of Job will come to mind, but the actors and Guit handle it all with a pleasantly light touch.
* The Gift to Stalin (Kazakhstan, 107 min., Tues., Dec. 8, 1:20 pm, Regal Delray) -- As the festival’s first-ever film from Kazakhstan, this sweeping epic fable of a young Jewish boy adopted by a rural village in post-World War II Soviet Union has some curious story threads, but is redeemed by footage of the vast, barren landscape and by the affecting performances by the authentic, largely amateur cast.
The time is 1949, when Stalin is purging Jews from Russia, sending them by train to the hinterlands, a journey that inevitably kills many of them along the way. A small orphaned Jewish boy named Sashka (Dalen Shintemirov) is saved from the corpse pile by a one-eyed, hulking rail switch worker, Kasym (Nurjuman Ikhtimbayev), and raised in the alien Muslim ways of the Kazakh people.
The film, directed by Rustem Abdrashev, is quite episodic. It meanders among the boy’s harrowing adventures with a gang of ragamuffins, the melodrama of a woman named Vera who is sexually taken by force by the local policeman, her grasp for romantic happiness with the community’s well-meaning doctor, Sashka’s efforts to gather an appropriate tribute gift for the title Soviet leader and an abrupt climax resulting from a nearby atomic test.
Each in its own way intrigues, but the collective results seem shapeless, and are not helped by a few fleeting flash-forwards to the grown Sashka in modern-day Jerusalem.
* La Cámara Oscura (Argentina, 86 min., Sat., Dec. 12, 7:20 p.m., Regal Delray) -- Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but ugliness is often met with invisibility. Just ask Gertrudis, a female of unsurpassing plainness, who comes into the world, is quickly assessed to be a “meeskite” and lives a life of embarrassed shame, running from cameras, turning her face from the world.
Yet in Maria Victoria Menis’s wry little film, it is Gertrudis’s shy indifference to a wealthy suitor that attracts him to her and in an abrupt 20-year transition, she is married with grown children, settled in her unassuming world. Ironically, it is the arrival of a traveling photographer that her husband has hired to take family portraits on their plantation that transforms her self-image.
As Gertrudis, Mirta Bogdasarian gives an exquisitely subtle performance that draws an audience into her esteem quandary. Director Menis manages to re-create 19th century Argentina on a relatively small budget and she adds touches of whimsy with some tangential animation, but the film overall tends to be glacially slow.
20TH ANNUAL PALM BEACH JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL, Cobb Downtown 16, Palm Beach Gardens; Regal Delray, Delray Beach; Wellington Reel World Cinema 8. Through Sunday, Dec.. 13. Tickets: $8- $12, except opening night ($18). Call: (561) 712-5201. See the full schedule here.
| 03 December 2009
Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brothers.
The release date couldn’t be more fortuitous. Hitting theaters nationwide the week Barack Obama announced his plans to send an additional 34,000 troops to secure Afghanistan, Jim Sheridan’s family drama Brothers is at once timely and transcendent.
An explosive and sobering reminder of the emotional and mental cost of war at home and abroad – and particularly this war, in its myriad complexities – Brothers presents a story in which virtually every character is a tragic one, each caught in a corrosive, Shakespearean spiral of filial guilt and trauma.
The brothers of the title are Sam (Tobey Maguire), an admirable Marine embarking on his fourth tour of duty in Afghanistan, and Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal), a wayward delinquent just released from prison. When Sam’s Black Hawk helicopter is shot down over Afghan mountains, he and his squadron are presumed dead. The news devastates his wife Grace (Natalie Portman) and two daughters (Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare), who, over the next few months, form a fatherly bond with the gradually reformed Tommy.
Little do they know that Sam has been surviving – barely – in a Taliban POW camp, where he is forced at gunpoint to commit a horrible act that will change his life irrevocably. Sam is eventually saved and returned home, a soulless shell of flesh and bone, a veritable monster whose displaced jealousy threatens to destroy the entire family.
If the story sounds familiar, it’s because Brothers is a loyal remake of Susanne Bier’s 2004 Danish drama of the same name. The original Brothers is a great film in itself; Bier is a successful protégé of Lars von Trier and his rigid, cult-like Dogme 95 movement, which aimed to strip movies of any hint of sentiment or artifice in a search for cinematic purity. Brothers is one of at least three films Bier has made – alongside Open Hearts and Things We Lost in the Fire – in which husbands become incapacitated and their wives form bonds with rival men.
Freed from this obsessively personal Bier trademark, Hollywood’s Brothers lives and breathes on its own; by the halfway point, I never gave a thought to the Danish film. It has a slicker studio sheen, of course, but it’s arguably more intense than its predecessor. Moreover, Brothers is properly updated to reflect the cultural and topographical landscape inhabited by the movie’s microcosm of the traditional, God-fearing American military family. To this point, screenwriter David Benioff (who also adapted The Kite Runner) adds the character of Hank (Sam Shepard), the brothers’ hardhat Vietnam-vet father for whom Sam is a hero and Tommy a deadbeat.
What’s really striking about this version is the directorial selection of Jim Sheridan, the scrappy Irish filmmaker whose stories about working-class people rising above adversity include My Left Foot, In America and Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Sheridan has always been good at what he does, but uncompromising antiwar dramas without silver linings were never part of his forte – until now.
For Tobey Maguire, it’s the most versatile performance of his life, matched superlatively by Portman’s dynamic, mature Grace and Gyllenhaal’s redemptive Tommy. Expect to see all three nominated for gold statuettes early next year. Ditto to Benioff for his adapted screenplay, with its profound understanding of grief, guilt and shame.
Because the central conflict of Brothers lies within the family, the film’s politics do not extend much beyond the impact of the home. But Brothers is proof that a film needn’t (and shouldn’t) be preachy to provoke change. Hollywood has always been the bleeding heart behind the politics of war, forever supporting the troops.
If there’s one movie Obama should have seen before committing thousands more of our soldiers to the Afghan morass, it’s this one.
John Thomason is a freelance writer based in South Florida.
BROTHERS. Distributor: Lionsgate; Director: Jim Sheridan; Cast: Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Sam Shepard, Clifton Collins Jr. and Mare Winningham; Rated: R; Opens: Friday; Venue: Most commercial houses
| 02 December 2009
Ran Danker and Zohar Strauss in Eyes Wide Open.
To paraphrase a line from Fiddler on the Roof: “So if the economy had a bad year, why should the Jewish Film Festival suffer?”
Beginning tonight and continuing through Sunday, Dec. 13, here comes the 20th anniversary Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival, slightly smaller due to belt-tightening by the sponsoring Jewish Community Centers of the Palm Beaches, but still artistically strong with some 35 feature films, documentaries and shorts from around the world, illuminating the Jewish experience.
“At least we’re fortunate in that although our budget has been cut, as have all festivals, we are still able to have the same quality, as well as quantity, of films,” says festival director Karen Davis. “It’s not quite 36 (films), but it’s still up there.”
She estimates the festival took a 12% budget cut this year. “Where we have had to cut back a little bit is in the marketing and also somewhat in the travel. We don’t have quite as many filmmakers coming this year. Air fares have just really gone up substantially.”
Still, lined up to appear and field questions in post-screening audience discussions will be:
* Leon Geller, co-director of The Heart of Jenin, an Israeli-German co-production about “a Palestinian father whose young son was accidentally killed by Israeli forces. He then decides to donate his son’s body organs to save as many lives of Israeli children as he can.” (Regal Delray, Tuesday, Dec. 8, 7:20 p.m.)
* Karin Albou, director of The Wedding Song, “a nostalgic look at life in Tunisia. Sort of a coming-of-age movie about two best girlfriends -- one Muslim, one Jewish -- who are looking forward to boys and marriage, but then the friendship dissipates because of politics during World War II.” (Cobb Downtown, Monday, Dec. 7, 7:20 p.m.; Regal Delray, Wednesday, Dec. 9, 7:20 p.m.)
* Igaal Hiddam, director of Brothers: “It’s a documentary about two separated brothers, one went to America and became an Orthodox lawyer, the other went to Israel and is secular, working on a kibbutz. They are reunited when the lawyer arrives in Israel to defend the rights of some Torah students. It is about a religious state versus a secular state, religious versus secular life. Very thought-provoking.” (Cobb Downtown, Wednesday, Dec. 9, 3:30 p.m.; Wellington Reel World, Saturday, Dec. 12, 7:20 p.m.)
It is coincidental, but Davis point out that several of this year’s films concern brothers and their relationships, while most of the films are about family dynamics.
Per usual, Davis traveled this year to film festivals In Berlin and Jerusalem to scout movies for the Palm Beach festival. Like any good Jewish mother, she values all her children -- that is, all 35 films in the festival -- but when asked to single out three films as must-sees, she chose:
* Eyes Wide Open: “Because it is just a beautifully done film about a subject that’s rarely looked at and very worthwhile. It’s a gay film, about an Orthodox butcher who falls in love with a Yeshiva boy. We will have the first screening of it in this country, ahead of all the other Jewish Film festivals. (Cobb Downtown, Sunday Dec. 6, 7:20 p.m.)
* A History of Israeli Cinema: It’s a two-part film that from the early Zionist propaganda days of the ’20s and ’30s to the current day. It hits all the bases.” (Regal Delray, Friday. Dec. 12, 12;45 p.m.)
* The Heart of Jenin: “It’s political with good endings and that’s what I like. It doesn’t happen too often.”
Having survived the anguish of choosing three films, Davis quickly adds, “But I think all of them are wonderful, all of them are worthwhile.”
20TH ANNUAL PALM BEACH JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL, Cobb Downtown 16, Palm Beach Gardens; Regal Delray, Delray Beach; Wellington Reel World Cinema 8. Tonight through Sun., Dec.. 13. Tickets: $8- $12, except opening night ($18). Call: (561) 712-5201. Full schedule: http://palmbeachjewishfilm.org/schedule.html
Ismail Khatib in Heart of Jenin.
| 26 November 2009
Juliette Binoche and Romain Duris in Paris.
Reading the cliché-riddled description of Paris on the Website of the Lake Worth Playhouse, where the film opens Friday, you may want to roll your eyes.
This “valentine to the city of lights” is a “cinematic love letter to a city that seems to hide a story behind every shop window, small alley, street market or grand apartment building … the film explores the life and love possible only in Paris.”
Oh, please. You’d think you were entering the Paris of An American in Paris, all brightly colored cafes and picturesque strolls down the Champs-Elysées, nobody working and everybody happy. Paris is a much deeper movie than the idyllic travelogue this synopsis is apparently trying to sell.
Writer-director Cedric Klapisch’s (L’auberge espagnole) Paris is less like watching love burst forth from every corner market and apartment complex than it is about the lack of love; less a celebration of life than a meditation on death. Because in French cinema, nothing brings an estranged family together like impending death. Last year it was Catherine Deneuve in Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale; this year it’s Romain Duris as Pierre, a man waiting on a heart transplant to save his life. He uses the crisis to reconnect with his sister Elise (Juliette Binoche), a romantically frustrated social worker and single mother who looks about half her age.
Pierre uses his ailment to sulk, self-reflect and dig through his past (a call to a grade-school sweetheart leads to a tortured vomiting session), but mostly he spies on his neighbors, Rear Window-style, whose individual stories expand a multi-character mosaic.
There’s Roland (Fabrice Luchini), a professor and historian who deals with the trauma of his father’s recent death by anonymously texting bawdy Baudelaire poems to an attractive student; his brother Philippe (Francois Cluzet), an architect whose “perfect” life may be upset by the stress of his first child’s arrival; and a group of fishmongers at a local market dealing with their own romantic foibles. Everything is glued together by ping-pong editing that intercuts dual scenarios, urging us to draw our own connections.
Klapisch presents his flawed characters without judging them, lest the film run the risk of devolving into a redemptive morality tale. There are moments in Paris that are wildly off-base, like the juvenile, psychobabble dream sequence in which the happy cartoons from Pierre’s 3D renderings begin to complain about his designs, and a giant baby shows up at his worksite – if only his personal life was as perfectly calibrated as his buildings!
But mostly, Paris is a remarkable study of existential angst, with Death striking one character at random as another waits for his inevitable visit. It’s a film not without its lightness – Binoche’s clumsy striptease to a one-night-stand is an endearing and defining moment for her character – but its humor is most literally of the gallows variety.
Paris may be a multifaceted city of more than 2 million eclectic stories, and indeed many of them are the kind of shallow valentines to which the film’s synopsis alludes. But if that’s what you’re looking for, you might as well see Paris, je t’aime instead.
PARIS. Director: Cedric Klapisch; Distributor: IFC; Cast: Juliette Binoche, Romain Duris, Fabrice Luchini, Albert Dupontel, François Cluzet, Karin Viard, Gilles Lellouche; in French with English subtitles; Opens: Friday; Venue: Lake Worth Playhouse, 713 Lake Ave.
