Blue Valentine (4/5 Stars)

You always hurt the one you love,

The one you shouldn’t hurt at all.

You always take the sweetest rose

And crush it till the petals fall.

You always break the kindest heart,

With a hasty word you can’t recall.

And if I broke

Your heart last night,

It’s because

…I love you…

Most

Of

All

One of the most memorable descriptions of divorce I’ve heard is that it’s like a death in the family. The twist is that it’s you who has died. All the memories, all the moments, they are all part of some past life distantly remembered. You’re dead and the one you loved has moved on.

“Blue Valentine,” documents the death of the marriage between Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cynthia (Michelle Williams) over a particularly blue weekend. This is interspersed with poignant scenes from their early love six years before. Little by little things are revealed, stuff is said, and mistakes are made until finally it’s all over. Both Dean and Cynthia are decent people so it is fair to ask why this isn’t working. They ask themselves the same question. The structure of the story has many layers. At times we like one person more than the other. Than something happens. We switch sides. Something else happens. We oscillate back and forth. And then finally there are just so many things that it becomes impossible to tell who exactly is at fault. In the end, everybody and nobody is to blame. It’s just sad, that’s all. 

The Writer and Director of “Blue Valentine,” is Derek Cianfrance. This is his debut feature film. He has a talent for natural yet articulate dialogue. The movie tends to enter Terrence Malick territory at times. The words sound like things that people would ordinarily say but at times they float above the scenes, the sounds and mouths don’t exactly match, creating this ethereal poetic quality. At times the movie is more a meditation on love than a story about it. And then at other times the realism is truly cutting. Fights between parents are inherently disturbing. Cianfrance presents them at a distance usually behind windows, doors, and shades, almost as if the camera is a child who is afraid to watch. There is a particularly perfect scene that should be instantly recognizable. It contains the sort of argument where the people endlessly repeat themselves at successively higher volumes. The problems aren’t getting worked out. They’re just sort of exploding everywhere. Thankfully there are other moments that take place in the past which are just as nice as the bad things are bad. At one point Dean serenades Cynthia with the above song. (An odd song choice but still a good one.) And at another time Cynthia has a particularly good joke about a child molester and a kid who go for a walk in the woods. There’s a discussion over whether it is funny or not. I thought it was.

The performances by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams are both great and equally matched. They are two of the best actors of their generation. Michelle Williams in particular is always interesting to watch. She is one of the most tragic actresses out there. I don’t believe I’ve seen her in a movie without some sort of unrequited love going on. (Shutter Island, Synecdoche New York, I’m Not There, Brokeback Mountain). This goes all the way back to “Dick” when she had the misfortune of developing a major crush on Richard Nixon. Talk about a curse. It’s been over a decade and her characters haven’t seemed able to ever get over it yet. Congrats on the Oscar Nomination. What with this movie and “Shutter Island," earlier in the year, she has earned it. 

p.s. The fact that this movie initially got an NC-17 rating I find rather insulting. Sure there are sex scenes but it should be obvious to anybody with a working sense of empathy that they are neither intended to be nor in actuality are prurient. Logically, you would think the rating system for movies would have something to do with morality, but really it seems to be based solely on mathematical measurements of the amount of skin showing or seconds of heavy breathing. This is decidedly not pornography. It is a genuine and sincere movie about a serious subject and everyone involved deserves an apology. 

  

Buried (4/5 Stars)

Six Feet Under the Ground and Dealing with a Bureaucracy. The Horror.

The first thing we see is nothing. Just a black screen and some breathing. It sounds like a person sleeping. Then it sounds like that person has waken up. And then the person seems confused. And then very worried. And then frantic. And then finally terrified. Then a glimmer of light from a Zippo Lighter is set off and we see a close-up of Ryan Reynolds face. He is bound, gagged, and bleeding. Worse, he has been encased in a box of wood with no latch or lid. Nobody can hear his screams. He has been buried alive. Why? We aren’t sure yet. We know only as much as Reynolds knows, and right now, he doesn’t know anything. This movie, directed by Rodrigo Cortes, is told entirely within the point of view of the prisoner. There is no score. There are no scenes that take place above ground. There isn’t even any lighting. When the Zippo lighter goes out, the screen goes entirely black. For all intents and purposes, Ryan Reynolds is the only cast member. The movie is 95 minutes long and played in real time. What this means is that we, the audience, are essentially stuck in the box with Reynolds for the entire movie with absolutely no distractions. If you’re claustrophobic then maybe you should skip this one. Unless of course you’re claustrophobic but also like to get the shit scared out of you. Than this is a must see. It sort of proves the old maxim that the better a horror movie is made the less enjoyable it is to watch. This is a very good horror movie. Having said that and I don’t ever want to see it again.

Because the movie’s limited pov basically constrains the suspense to come solely from plot development, an extensive review of the plot will essentially ruin the movie. Therefore, I will only briefly describe things that are in the first fifteen minutes. The Ryan Reynolds character finds a cell phone (not his) that was placed in the coffin with him. He starts calling people up and informs them that he was a truck driver working for a contractor in Iraq delivering kitchen equipment when insurgents attacked his convoy. He was knocked unconscious and woke up in the coffin. He doesn’t know where he is or whether there are any other survivors. Then the bad guys call him up and demand ransom money by a certain time or they will leave him to rot there. Without giving too much up, here are also three general things I learned. First, navigating a government bureaucracy in order to get in contact with the appropriate rescue personnel is a lot more aggravating than usual when you are buried alive. Being put on hold and having to listen to elevator music doesn’t help. Second, depending on the context, trick answering machine messages are not as funny as people think they are. Third, even if you happen to be buried alive, things can always get worse. Much. Worse.

In many ways this is a stunt movie. The makers are betting that they can realistically tell a feature length story completely within a coffin without the audience getting restless or bored. It’s a pretty big leap of faith (the upside is that there was probably a very low budget), which essentially relies entirely on a creative screenplay which gives the prisoner logical and creative things to do for the entire running time and a performance good enough to pull off what is essentially a one man show. It works. Chris Sparling wrote a watertight screenplay and Ryan Reynolds has never been better. Normally you would think a role like this should get a lot more award buzz than it has. The reason it hasn’t probably has to do with the fact that James Franco plays a very similar type of role in “127 Hours,” and he is getting the entirety of the buzz instead.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that James Franco did a better job. They both did very good jobs. When it comes to this sort of thing you really start to see the subjectivity of an awards season. For instance people may feel that only one “stuck and unable to move for the entire movie,” performance should be nominated in a given year even if they think both are worthy. Or they may take into consideration that Franco has had very good performances before (Pineapple Express, Milk) and Reynolds, best known for “Van Wilder,” and “The Proposal,” hasn’t and conclude that Reynolds can wait until next time. Or it could have simply been because Franco’s performance is more memorable because “127 Hours” is a better movie. In that case some of the credit for Franco’s superiority should be attributed to the director Danny Boyle and crew and all the special effect they employed to help the story along. As far as I know there aren’t any complicated special effects in “Buried.” (There are always some performances that get nominated simply because the movie is good, not because the performances are all that great. What’s the name of that one woman who was nominated for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Oh that’s right, I didn’t bother to remember her name.) It’s too bad. This role looked like it must have been a very rough thing to pull off what with the whole being buried alive thing. That sucks. I'm sorry Paul, I'm sorry.

True Grit (4/5 Stars)

Papa Ross must have been one hell of a man.

It’s a good thing. Joel and Ethan Coen have now made four movies in as many years. Earlier in their career it always took them two or three years to string together a movie. This was because they always insisted on Creative Control and made movies that never made a lot of money. But that has changed. The word has gotten out that the Coens make good movies. They may be oddball at times but always good. I would suspect that people going to see True Grit (which is the Coens highest grossing movie ever) aren’t going because they fondly remember the original 1969 version or the book it was based upon or even the stars (Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon). I would suspect they are interested because it is a Coen Brothers movie. There are some filmmakers that plain don’t suck. The Coen Brothers are a couple of them.

It is an unwritten rule of the Coens that each movie they do should be unlike any movie they’ve already done. “True Grit” is no exception. It is purely Coenesque in that it isn’t. Get it? It’s an outright Western. It stars Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross, a 14-year-old girl out to avenge the death of her father by the hands of an outlaw named Tom Chaney, played by Josh Brolin. She sets out to hire a U.S. Marshall to go after Chaney. Given a list of names, she decides upon the roughest one, a man by the name of Rooster Cogburn, played by Jeff Bridges. He is a man of True Grit, a whiskey guzzling grizzly bearded cantankerous itchy-trigger fingered old fool. A real character as they say. Jeff Bridges, aka The Dude aka the most comfortable actor in the world, is the perfect casting choice for the role. Also on the trail of Chaney for a completely different murder is a Texas Marshall named LeBeef, played by Matt Damon. Damon plays the role as if he's never seen a Western. Here, he’s striking surprised and neurotic nuances that rarely come from cowboys. Then again his character has to deal with Mattie Ross, one of the smartest and most confident girls ever to exist in a western. She’s throwing everyone for a loop here. That includes the bad guys too, both Tom Chaney and the Pepper Gang, led by none other than Mr. Pepper, played appropriately by Barry Pepper with the help of a really nasty set of dentures. Chaney by the way is one of this year’s stupidest sounding bad guys. Brolin plays the guy as if he’s more likely to use a book as toilet paper than read it. He murdered Papa Ross for the stupid sum of two gold pieces. There are no qualms about going to kill him.

“True Grit,” is true to its name in that it has a lot of grit, but let it be known that this movie is also very funny. It’s not a Comedy mind you, but most of the characters are what you would call witty and their different styles make conversation a minefield of quick insults and comedic insights. Cogburn is blunt, abrasive, and clumsy. Mattie is saracastic and a smart-aleck. Damon seems to have self-esteem problems, which regularly pokes holes into his Texas Ranger Pride. They spend most of the time on the trail arguing with each other. Mattie regularly gets the best of Damon. Damon picks on Cogburn. And Cogburn, well he’s got a bottle of whiskey and will not be ashamed.  All of this is done in 19^th Century Western talk, which is different but still decipherable if you listen closely.

Here’s a good question: Is the character Mattie Ross realistic? Forget that she’s a girl. What fourteen year old do you know, boy or girl, can intelligently discuss areas of the law with adults, negotiate deals with horse traders and bounty hunters, or have the confidence and wherewithal to hunt down their father’s killer upon their own initiative. What were you doing at the age of 14? Parents back then must have expected a bit more pluck and self-reliance from their kids, that and Papa Ross in particular must have been one of hell of a educator. Give credit to her church as well. Most of her righteous confidence comes straight from the Bible, which she quotes many times. Anyway, someone somewhere did something right.

“True Grit” isn’t one of the best movies of the year, but it is a good one and may get some Oscar nominations simply because it does an extremely competent job at being good. It would not surprise me if the Coen’s longtime cinematographer Roger Deakins got his 9^th Oscar nomination or if the movie itself got a Best Picture nomination. Don’t ask me if this is better than the original movie because I haven’t seen it.

Black Swan (5/5 Stars)

Excuse me while I catch my breath.

Suppose that you wanted to be perfect. What would it take? Nina Sayers, played by Natalie Portman, has just been cast as the Swan Queen in a NYC Lincoln Center’s production of Swan Lake. It’s an incredibly difficult role, one of the most challenging in ballet. The Swan Queen is simultaneously two characters at once, the innocent and pure White Swan and her evil twin the sensuous and seductive Black Swan. The story of Swan Lake is simple. An evil beast casts a spell on a woman that transforms her into a swan during the day. The spell can only be broken by true love. Her prince see her at night, learns her secret, falls in love, and promises to use his true love to break the spell. But before they elope, the evil beast presents the evil twin of the woman to the prince. The evil twin tricks the prince who pledges his love to her instead. Bereft of true love and left with no hope that the spell will ever be broken, the woman kills herself.

The only way I think to understand the horrific things that happen to Nina Sayers in this movie is through the prism of a performing technique called Method Acting. Method Acting is employed when an actor seeks a great performance by not acting at all. Instead of pretending to be character, they attempt to become that character. For example if an actor were to play a taxi driver, a method actor may actually get a license and drive a taxi for several months before the shoot (which is exactly what Robert De Niro did to prepare for his role “Taxi Driver.”) The most ridiculous preparer of all is perhaps Christian Bale, who was to play a thin person in “The Machinist,” and of his own initiative dropped his weight to an awfully unhealthy 110 pounds for the role. But lets say that you wanted to try Method Acting out for the role of the Swan Queen. Well, you would need two things. 1) You would need to be a Swan, and 2) You would need to be Split Personality Schizophrenic. How else are you going to be two people at once? And this is basically what happens to Nina Sayers. She goes insane. Nobody catches it in time because the deeper she descends into madness, the better a performer she becomes.

Helping her through the downward spiral of perfection are several other people. The first is Nina’s mother, played by Barbara Hershey. She gave up her own ballerina career to have Nina and now lives vicariously through her daughter. She makes sure Nina’s life is ballet and only ballet. Nina eats grapefruits, takes the subway to Lincoln Center, practices all day, goes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep. It is a workaholic life bereft of all pleasure. Then there is her tough instructor played by Vincent Cassell. He mercilessly informs Nina that her dispassionate perfectionism is perfect for the White Swan but terrible for the Black Swan. She needs to let go and feel the music. His idea of the best way to help her achieve this is through sexual harassment, both psychological and physical. The harassment doesn’t seem to bother her as much as the fact that her instructor doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself while doing it. All she wants is to be perfect. A fellow ballerina named Lily, played by Mila Kunis, has a much more common sense way of going about it. She invites her to dinner, gets her drunk, gives her a rufi (which Nina sees being put into her drink), and takes her to one of those clubs where you can’t see or hear anything but strobe lights and a rhythmic pulse. This works. The result is well, ahem, the result is a sex scene between Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman. There is heavy breathing...among other things. Meanwhile Nina keeps seeing a doppelganger of herself dressed entirely in black pop up in the most inconvenient places. First on the subway, then on a city street, and then in the mirrors of her dance studio. Seriously scary shit. 

The Director of this picture is Darren Aronofsky. If you’ve seen any of his other movies like “Requiem for a Dream” or “The Wrestler,” you will notice that no other director is so artfully mean to his characters. The same is true of “Black Swan.” There are plenty of similar techniques from both of those previous movies. Like “The Wrestler,” this movie shows the real physical costs of a performance. Nina breaks a toenail in one scene. In another she has to pry her toes apart. Weird scars start forming on her shoulder blades. And like the drugs in “Requiem for a Dream,” the scenes of ballet are shown in spectacular fashion, hallucinations included. The score was done by Clint Mansell, the same person who composed the Requiem, and like “Requiem for a Dream,” the climax of this story (the performance of Swan Lake on opening night) matches incredible visuals and super-emotional acting with a very powerful piece of music (Tchiakovsky played very loudly) that goes on for about fifteen minutes and left me emotionally exhausted. Truth be told, my heart rate and breathing had actually accelerated so much that I had to wait through half the credits in order to calm myself down. If the Great Intellectual Experience of the year was “Inception,” than the Great Emotional Experience of the year is “Black Swan.” It should easily receive nominations for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography, Makeup, Costumes, Score, among other things. Natalie Portman, who trained for an entire year and did most of her own ballet, has pulled off the performance of a lifetime. She would be a lock for the Oscar in almost any other year that didn’t also have Lisbeth Salandar lurking around in the background.

One thing people repeatedly tell me when I recommend movies such as “Black Swan,” is that they aren’t in the mood for a “good movie.” They would much rather just unwind on the couch and watch junk. In the past the best I could do was simply persuade people to not watch anything at all. For instance, I would argue that if you don’t want to hear a good story or be affected in any way, why don’t you just stare at a blank wall or meditate. Better yet, if you’re too tired to watch a good movie, take a nap. But that line of reasoning only stops people from watching junk. So let me rephrase the argument in this way. Lets say you are at an amusement park. Junk TV is like the merry-go-round, the Tea Cups, the bumper cars, etc. “Black Swan,” is the highest roller coaster in the park. Now you have a choice: You can take your good money and precious time and spend it all day on the merry-go-round doing something you’ve done a thousand times before or you can stop being a wimp and go see the ballerina movie. True the height of the drops should make any reasonable person apprehensive and true it may be “hard to watch” as you are racing toward the bottom at very high speeds but, come on, everyone said it was fun (Black Swan has a 88% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and inside you know its just a movie. You will be exiting the ride alive and intact with but a sense of giddiness and awesome that is perfectly normal given the adrenaline rush. You may even want to experience something quite like that again. Perhaps skydiving next time. (Have you seen “Requiem for a Dream”?) If you’re embarrassed to be affected by something so deeply with other people around, I suggest you go and see the movie alone. And if it takes you awhile after the movie to compose yourself before exiting the theater, that’s fine too. That’s what the end credits of good movies are for.