Love and Mercy (4/5 Stars)

(This has got to be some kind of record for me. I saw this movie a month ago and am only now writing the review. It is lapse of time that does not do the movie justice as I may have simply forgotten much of the movie. I do not think I have but of course if I had forgotten it how would I know I had?)

“Love and Mercy,” is a biopic of the musician and composer Brian Wilson of the “Beach Boys.” The musical biopic has become its own subgenre by now with Ray, Johnny Cash, James Brown, and even N.W.A. amongst others getting their own movie. The formula became so cliche that it was notably parodied in “Walk Hard” with John C. Reilly playing a fake musician called Dewey Cox who, like all the other musicians, struggles with childhood tragedy, crafts a big hit that makes him famous and pulls him out of the poverty, becomes addicted to drugs and overcomes his addiction, and has a back and forth relationship with the woman he will finally come to marry and love. “Love and Mercy” is a welcome innovation to this genre. We are spared the rote genre storylines and instead are presented with two stories that interweave with each other. The first is Brian Wilson’s studio creation of his masterpiece “Pet Sounds,” and his subsequent fall into mental illness amidst the hallucinogenic drugs of the sixties. The second is about how the love of a good woman saved a domineered and overmedicated Brian Wilson from a corrupt psychiatrist.

It is a tribute to this movie that the second story is in ways more interesting than the first even though Brian Wilson is not composing or performing any music in it. It is an odd unsettling scenario of the lash between an overly sensitive musical prodigy and the wildness of the counterculture. I bet the case of Brian Wilson, gone mad after one genius album, was a cautionary tale to the entire industry. The two stories inform each other nicely in a way good times/bad times way until the third act when it turns into bad times/bad times for awhile before settling into a satisfying conclusion of bad times/good times.

Young Brian Wilson is played by Paul Dano. It is an interesting choice given that Dano does not have a classically good voice. However his acting skills aptly demonstrate the notion that emotional control counts more than versatile skill in delivering the goods. The movie, directed by Bill Pohlad, presents the music in an educational way. He does not merely play the hits, he goes into the studio and has the individual musicians play their parts by themselves. Thus the many layered orchestrations of Brian Wilson are deconstructed in a way that better shows their genius. The best example of this is when Dano plays and sings “God Only Knows” on the piano by himself. That song has a really counterintuitive chord progression that I never noticed until now.  Interestingly “Pet Sounds” was composed entirely Brian Wilson in a studio with a studio band called “The Wrecking Crew” while the other Beach Boys were on tour in Japan. So besides the voices of the other Wilson brothers, the actual Beach Boys weren’t really there for it. Which may have been a good thing as Wilson was sensitive and introspective and simply not ready for the craziness that came with the rock band experience. This reality hits home hard when the story cuts to a future Brian Wilson broken down, isolated, and misdiagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

John Cusack plays old Brian Wilson. It is a fine unshowy performance which is perfect for a character that is defined by being under the influence of larger characters. That would be his doctor Eugene Landy who is played by Paul Giamatti, a consummate character actor if there ever was one. Landy is at once sweet and then conniving and then very scary. Giamatti is particularly good at all of those things. Against Landy is a Cadillac saleswoman named Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) whom Brian Wilson meets one day as he shops for a new car. The movie hinges on this character. She is presented with a very delicate situation. Brian Wilson asks her out on several dates and they hit it off. She is particularly attracted to his kind and humble manner. And then as the story progresses she slowly realizes that he is being abused in a very real way by his psychiatrist. And so she has a choice. Is she going to insert her life into this other person’s troubles? What exactly is her responsibility here?

I have had the pleasure of reviewing Elizabeth Banks many times in the past decade. I have seen many of her movies and written reviews for eight of them. In fact she was in the first movie I ever reviewed “The 40-Year Old Virgin” even though I did not mention her or much else in that review. This role is the best work yet and coming off her revelatory work in The Hunger Games franchise as Effie Trinket, a character that easily could be played much worse by lesser actresses, she is hitting a stride in her career. The career of Elizabeth Banks is a great example of miscasting and likewise a good example of the shallow amount of good roles for women in the movie industry as a whole. For much of her career, Elizabeth Banks minimum amount of comedic chops and her great looks got her miscast in a lot of comedic roles as neurotic losers or else as the mean/mature girlfriend playing straight man to whatever comedian got the interesting role. Like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson she is hard to write for because she escapes the cliché’s of the characters she looks like. She is a beautiful blonde but not vapid or conceited. And she can play subtlety, morality, and grace but roles exploring that side are generally lacking. So she is often seen as mean and exasperated or in the other direction lacking self-confidence neither of which give her the ability to show off her acting capacity. She has received much work (a lot of the time at the expense of not as good looking but better comedians) but very few ideal roles. I would confine those to 30 Rock’s Avery Jessup, Hunger Games Effie Trinket, and now this one. It is finely nuanced performance that never misses a beat and I think she should get an Oscar nomination for it. 

Love and Mercy is a fine movie. Interestingly it is the directorial debut of Bill Pohland but he is by no means a newcomer. He has produced many good movies before including ‘Into the Wild’ and ’12 Years a Slave.’ Apparently he thought he was qualified enough to hire himself this time. He was right.

12 Years a Slave (5/5 Stars)

“It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman.”

- Joseph Conrad, Hearts of Darkness

In Joseph Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness, a young British officer travels up the Congolese river to seek out a renegade Colonel named Kurtz. Africa, and this especially undeveloped part of it, was an entirely different world to the educated officer. It is a given in both the story’s authorial voice and in the character itself that the British with all their clothes and technology are superior to the hunter-gatherer savages of Africa. But as the officer contemplates the natives upon seeing them at the start of his journey he is overtaken with a strange discomfort. It isn’t a discomfort born from a sense of racism. No, on the contrary, he recognizes that there is no difference between him and the “savages.” They are obviously of the same species. And this brief acknowledgement of the native’s humanity unnerves him.   

12 Years a Slave, is the third feature by Director Steve McQueen having previously made Hunger and Shame, both collaborations with actor Michael Fassbender. Fassbender in a DVD Bonus feature once referred to McQueen as a man of great empathy. McQueen’s movies are a witness to the truth of that statement. One of the things that make 12 Years a Slave especially remarkable is its treatment of the white characters who are not portrayed as 100% nasty but are allowed brief moments like the one given to the British officer in Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness where they recognize the humanity of those they consider inferior. Apparently this is true not only of McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s autobiography 12 Years a Slave, but of the novel itself. Solomon, born a free man in New York, kidnapped, and sold into slavery, repeatedly put himself in the shoes of his slave masters in his account of the ordeal. (I have said before that Django Unchained treated its slave-owners like the Nazis in Indiana Jones. Here I would argue that 12 Years a Slave treats its slave-owners like the Nazis in Schindler’s List, particularly the Ralph Fiennes character, Amon Goeth) Counter intuitively, this does not make the slave owners look better. In fact, it makes them look far worse. In law, it would be the difference between crimes committed knowingly (like murder) as opposed to unknowingly (mere manslaughter). A character like Leonardo Dicaprio’s deluded and indulgent plantation owner in Django Unchained is not shown making moral choices. He considers only one way of doing things. Here, though, the slave-owners can sense what is morally correct if only in that Huck Finn way of feeling ‘something not quite right in the pit of my stomach.’ Then given the choice of whether or not to recognize the humanity that they sense, they choose not to do it. Their behavior comes off as especially cruel, unnatural, and evil. After all, even if they lived by the moral code of the South, Solomon Northup still deserved to be set free. All he had to do to be released was get a letter to his family back home telling them where he was so they could find him and show the local sheriff his free papers. Even in the South this was all the law needed. What stood in the way was the insidious nature of slavery; an institution that oppresses the slave but also warps the moral constitution of the master. It makes cowards of good men as well as enabling the worst impulses of the evil ones.

Is there anything that Michael Fassbender would not do for Steve McQueen? It is a relationship between actor and director that can only be rivaled by the 70s relationship between De Niro and Scorsese. These are all especially hard performances and it speaks to the enormous amount of trust that Fassbender has in McQueen that he is willing to do them. Fassbender in 12 Years a Slave is taking on one of the most notorious of slave-owners, Edwin Epps, in this role. In a world of systematic cruelty, he somehow stood out as being notably more cruel than usual. One of things that 12 Years a Slave portrays that Django Unchained conveniently sidestepped is the subject of widespread rape. (Not to say Django Unchained was not a brave movie, it just seemed that rape was one too many things to consider. And thus Dicaprio lives with his sister, not a wife.) Rape would be one thing, but as Malcolm X liked to point out, most slave-owners were married. And boy how would you feel as a wife if your husband continually raped his slaves? Could you really bring yourself to think the adultery did not count because the women your husband repeatedly raped were black? And thus is set up the most horrific love triangle in the history of cinema between Master Epps, his wife played by Sarah Paulson, and the slave he is in love with Patsy played by newcomer Lupita Nyong’o.

Patsy is perhaps one of the more remarkable slaves in the world, picking an average rate of 500 pounds of cotton a day. Most men in the field pick around 200 pounds. This among other obvious things captures the attention of Epps, who absolutely hates himself for finding her attractive. He rewards her abilities by continually raping and beating her. His wife, fully aware of his philandering, demands that Epps sell her. He will not do so. The wife, who has no power herself in this ridgidly patriarchal society, responds by making Patsy’s life even more of a living hell. Among other things, she denies her soap for cleaning, cuts her rations, and throws a bottle of hard liquor at her face from point blank range. What can Patsy do about this? Commit suicide? That literally seems to be her only and best option.   

I think it would make sense to go ahead and include 12 Years a Slave within the genre of survival movie that is being exceedingly well represented this year with such movies as Gravity, Captain Phillips, and All is Lost. McQueen’s presentation of slavery Solomon Northup's situation absolutely akin to it. There is an extraordinary scene of Northup, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, being almost lynched by an overseer named Tibault, played by Paul Dano, after a mild disagreement. The lynching is in mid-swing when a second overseer stops Tibault not because, you know, it’s murder, but because Northup is property of a different man named Ford, played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Mr. Ford is summoned to make the decision himself. Meanwhile Northup waits all day on his tippy-toes, hands still fastened behind his back, neck still hanging in the noose. In the background all the other slaves go about their business, the situation being that if anybody helped Northup they might be killed as well. Northup may as well be in the middle of the ocean like Old Man Redford or up in space like Sandra Bullock. There is no human community bound by law and order here. All is savage, brutal, and uncaring. 

“Why don’t the black people just rise up and kill the whites?” asks Dicaprio in Django Unchained. Perhaps the fate of one of the newly kidnapped slaves, played by Michael K. Williams, in an ingenious choice of casting, may illustrate the answer to that. Michael K. Williams, best known as one of the more badass characters in TV history, Omar from The Wire, brings up the idea of revolt. He is killed within the space of a couple of minutes. If Omar would last only half a scene, how do you think you would fare? 

Looper (5/5 Stars)

“Time Machine” by Simon Rich:

As soon as my time machine was finished, I traveled back to 1890, so I could kill Hitler before he was old enough to commit any of his horrible crimes. It wasn’t as gratifying as I thought it would be.

           

-       Oh my God. You killed a baby.

-       Yes…but the baby was Hitler

-       Who?

-       Hitler. It’s…complicated.

-       Officer? This man just killed a baby

“Looper” written and directed by Rian Johnson and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis, is the rare movie that is far more interesting than its title or even its marketing campaign lets on. It is being sold as a movie about time travel in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a mob hit man named Joe. Joe lives in the year 2044. Time travel has not been invented yet, but thirty years later, it will have been. The mob in the future of 2074 uses time travel as a convenient way to get rid of people. They send them back in time to 2044 where Joe is waiting to kill them instantly in the middle of a Kansas cornfield. Joe is called a Looper. The odd name comes from the understanding that in order to get rid of all the evidence, the mob will one day send the future version of him back in time for Joe to kill. This is called “closing the loop” and is akin to being fired. Old Joe gets sent back with a bag over his head and his hands tied behind his back; Young Joe shoots himself and collects his severance package, many gold bars strapped to Old Joe’s back.

There is a complication however when Old Joe comes back to be killed. He doesn’t have the bag over his head and he isn’t tied up. Young Joe recognizes himself (btw Joseph Gordon-Levitt with a prosthetic nose does a rather good Bruce Willis impression), hesitates, and Old Joe gets away. In the trailer they allude to a chase and this is about it. What this leaves out however are two very good questions and answers that make this seemingly normal run-of-the-mill action movie one of the best movies of the year. The first question is why does Young Joe want to kill Old Joe instead of just helping him escape? The second question is why has Old Joe come back to the past without a bag on his head or tied up? If he had gotten the best of his captors in the future, why would he send himself to the past at all if he knows that his younger self is waiting there to kill him?

The first question is answered within the first twenty minutes and so I will give away the entire thing. For demonstration purposes, a fellow Looper, played by Paul Dano, lets his old self get away. The mafia reacts by kidnapping Young Dano and holding his body parts for ransom. There is a truly terrifying scene where Old Dano is escaping on the outskirts of the city when all of sudden he experiences a scar being written on his arm. It states to be at a certain address in fifteen minutes. Then Old Dano’s fingers start disappearing just in case Old Dano didn’t get the point. Old Dano races back as he loses his fingers, toes, nose, feet, and arms. He gets to the address with basically just his torso. A door to a warehouse opens revealing the mob, a saw, quite a lot of blood, and what is left of Young Dano. Yes, young Joe is reasonably motivated to track down and kill Old Joe before the mob tracks him down and does the same thing to him.

The second question is what really sets this movie on a level of greatness. I won’t be giving away too much by simply stating the premise. Old Joe has come back on a Terminator-in-reverse style of mission. Armed with only a birth-date and a hospital, he is tracking down the five-year-old version of a future Hitler nicknamed “The Rainmaker.” His mission is to kill every child with that birth-date from that hospital in order to save his wife who was killed in the wake of many other untold deaths. Young Joe figures it out the plan and stakes out the last house on Old Joe's list. What a moral conundrum! Young Joe is a killer and drug addict and Old Joe is sober and reformed, but that does not allow one to forget the fact that Old Joe is going around killing children! How that turns out, well, you will just have to find out, but ask yourself this one question before you walk into the theater: How do you want it to turn out?

There is a tendency for movie critics to withhold praise from a movie when it reminds them of movies that they have already seen. For instance you can see the futuristic dystopia projected in “Looper” and be reminded of “Blade Runner.” Or you can see the parallels of the time travel mission in “The Terminator.” Or you can recognize the weird sensation of seeing an older version of yourself being killed from “Twelve Monkeys” (with Bruce Willis!) or if you wanted to go back even further, “Le Jetee.” In this way, critics tend to take away credit from movies that are made in our time in order to bolster the reputation of films of the old ones. I don’t want to detract from “Blade Runner,” “The Terminator,” or “Twelve Monkeys,” (I haven’t seen Le Jetee although lord knows it keeps getting mentioned when movies like these are made) but just because a movie that is made today that has some similarities it should not amplify the worth of a previous movie because now it is all “Influential.” In the same way the similarities should not detract from the current movie because it was all “Influenced." I guess what I’m saying is that “Looper” is better than “Blade Runner.” I’ve seen both and do not particularly care that the better one draws from the previous one. And there is plenty in “Looper” that is original enough that I would suggest that Rian Johnson get an Oscar Nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

Speaking of nominations, I think it is about time that Bruce Willis got one. This could be the year given he has had two great performances already, (I recommend the nomination for “Moonrise Kingdom.”) And Joseph Gordon-Levitt although perhaps not yet earning such a distinction, is fast becoming noticeable for his DiCaprio-esque ability to show up in a multitude of good to great movies. Look at IMDB and see where he will show up this year. “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Premium Rush,” “Looper,” “Lincoln,” “Django Unchained.” That is pretty impressive.  What can definitely be said about both of these actors is that they truly know how to share a screen. “Looper” is definitely an ensemble picture that engages the audience with multiple well-rounded characters. Paul Dano has an unforgettable part that lasts only about ten minutes. Then there is Jeff Daniels as “Abe” the mob boss from the future who instills a comedic been-there done-that fatalism to his persona. Finally there is boy Hitler, a five year old played by Pierce Gagnon, who can, dare I say, really act.

If there was an award for “Most Understated Title for  a Great Movie,” I think “Looper” would be a lock for that one as well.

Meek's Cutoff (3/5 Stars)

Day (???), Wagon Axel broke, LOST

Director Kelly Reichardt and star Michelle Williams, the team from “Wendy and Lucy,” are collaborating for the second time on the near perfect movie about a lost wagon train on the Oregon Trail in 1845 named “Meek’s Cutoff.” The star rating I gave and the words “near perfect” may confuse you. Let me explain. Star ratings aren’t really helpful in that it rates a movie good or not relative to all movies and not other in kind movies of a particular genre. For instance I gave “Sucker Punch,” a flawed movie, four stars mainly for its ambition. It tried for about 100 things and got fifty of them right. “Meek’s Cutoff,” a near perfect movie, gets three stars because it is small. It tried about 10 things and got nine of them right before ending on an ambiguous anti-climax that I didn’t really care for. Does that mean people should like “Sucker Punch” more than “Meek’s Cutoff” generally. No of course not. I just like a bigger movie, that’s all. What I’m trying to say I guess is that the reader is better off reading the review before deciding whether they want to see the movie or not. The mark of a superior reviewer is one that describes a movie well enough that someone interested in that type of movie will have their interest piqued whether or not the reviewer liked it himself (and vice versa). 

In describing Reichardt’s work one has to take out some pretty arty words. Words like “contemplative,” “aesthetic,” “serene,” “minimalist,” etc. Reichardt likes setting her places in Oregon. She likes lingering in long shots. She focuses in on minute details and treats conversations like she would the cinematography. Most of them are not entirely important and fit nicely into the background. I would be surprised if the budget for this movie went into seven figures. In a way, Reichardt works like the wagon train. She’s out there in the wilderness with very little crew or way of direction, trying out something original that almost nobody will see. Still the movie is very well made. The score gives the movie an unsettling tone. The acting is exceedingly natural. Over time, as the water runs out and tensions rise, suspense builds. The climax of the movie should be completely unexciting by any normal movie standard as it involves a situation that is often only the start of much larger action sequences. But here it still works because there is such a sense of reality that people pointing guns at each other feels very serious. It also helps that one is a woman who does so reluctantly. “Meek’s Cutoff” isn’t some sort of revisionist history. The Michelle Williams character, like the other women in the three wagon train, is of her time and place. She acts subordinate to her husband and men in general. But she also doesn’t want to die. And after wandering the desert being led by a braggart named Meek (played by Bruce Greenwood) who hasn’t the slightest idea of where he is going nor the slightest inclination to admit it, she becomes less and less enthusiastic about standing around waiting for the water to run out. Little by little she oversteps her bounds in the politest way possible until finally there is no more room for being polite.   

It was once said by William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) that the hardest thing about writing a Western was finding something interesting for the women to do while the men had fun shooting each other and what not. “Meek’s Cutoff” doesn’t necessarily give the women things to do that usually belong to the men, but it is told through the POV of the women. Normally this wouldn’t be so interesting as it involves them spending a good amount of screen time gathering brush, cleaning, and cooking. But here it serves the movie’s purpose in that it underscores the complete hopelessness of the journey. It’s one thing to have an argument over whether to go North or South in search of water, it’s another thing to have to silently stand around while the men argue over which way to go off in the distance. Things get more complicated when Meek captures a lone Indian. He has the bright idea to kill the heathen right then and there. Or perhaps they could ask the Indian to lead them to water. I guess you can say this is the Oregon Trail version of the modern cliché of a guy not wanting to ask for directions.

Bringing along paranoia and emotional wailing is another couple on the wagon train played by Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan. Every time I see Dano he is hanging out in an unforgiving desert (Little Miss Sunshine, There Will be Blood.) You would think at some point he would get a tan. Anyway he has been perfectly cast. Mr. Paleface does not belong here. He should not have come. Providing the movie with the necessary amount of historical racism is Shirley Henderson. She has a nice way of going about it, like for instance fearfully remarking that Indians are murderous non-beings and then subsequently backing up the statement with the words, “It’s a well documented fact.” On some level every truthful historical movie is going to have characters that are flawed in such a way. Almost everybody back then was what we would call racist and sexist today. Future generations will probably say similar things about us I’m sure, though for what I have no idea. 

One of my favorite books, “The Education of Henry Adams” had the following quote in it that caught my eye:

“The study of history is useful to the historian in teaching him of his ignorance of women; and the mass of this ignorance crushes one who is familiar enough with what are called historical sources to realize how few women have ever been known. The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong, and excepting one or two like Mme. de Sevigne, no woman has pictured herself.” (1905)

Growing up in school you have this notion that all of world history is accessible simply by opening a book, but this isn’t the case. History is limited by memory and preserved only by the efforts of real people who take the time to write it down. It is a profound truth that the people who did write things down were mainly concerned with men and were almost never women. According to what I’ve rated on Netflix, I have seen 1,511 movies. I can count on one hand how many of these were stories about historical women told by a woman (In this, I am subscribing to the auteur theory of filmmaking by crediting the role of author to not the writer but the director of a movie. In either case, still one hand) Specifically, I have only seen two movies. One was Sofia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” and now this one. This isn’t simply me being not very broad in movie choices nor is it completely the fault of the Hollywood boy’s club (though admittedly they do a downright awful job of marketing their products to half the movie going public.) It represents a literal gap in our knowledge of the world. These stories are lost to history. “Meek’s Cutoff” is based on a true story. There was a guide on the Oregon Trail named Stephen Meek who led a wagon trail in 1845 off into an uninhabitable no-man’s land. He didn’t know where he was going. The train ran out of water. People died and the settlers mutinied. But there were thousands of wagons not just three. And the Michelle Williams character? She’s completely fictional. Certainly there were women there. Yes, they did all the work we see them do in this movie. But if they had any personalities at all, we have no way of knowing what they consisted of. Nobody bothered to record it.

Where the Wild Things Are (5/5 Stars) October 31, 2009

I’ll Eat You Up!
Yells the nine-year-old Max (newcomer Max Records) to his mother (Catherine Keener) in the feature film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book. That book had a measly ten sentences but plenty of good drawings. Director Spike Jonze has faithfully incorporated everything he could and like all great adaptors, has added on an incredible amount of depth, emotion, and cinematic scope. 
Max is a rambunctious little kid with the normal inclinations of a nine year old. By that I mean he’s impulsive, impotent, and often times stupid. (Too harsh? well imagine what you would think of Max's actions if he was forty.) In the first fifteen minutes, he tears up his sister’s room in revenge of a perceived slight; he rudely yells at his mother in the middle of her date, and he runs away from home in a fury. Then, like in the book, Max gets on a boat and sails to a far away island: the Land of the Wild Things. The Wild Things are a godless lot of beasties who have the emotional maturity of nine year olds. Max finds them in a familial crisis and arrogantly suggests that he can fix everything and keep the sadness away in the Wild Thing Kingdom. He even lies about having special powers like a sadness shield. The Wild Things crown Max as their king and Max declares the “wild rumpus to start!”

Jonze never expressly says anything but the Wild Things can be metaphorical on many levels. I took their current problem (One member has been spending more time with other things on the island) to mean any kind of familial strife. In this story it could pertain to Max’s sister abandoning him to play by himself, or it could refer to the divorce in Max’s family (He gets mad at his mother in the beginning because she has brought home Mark Ruffalo, a man who isn’t Max’s father). When the Wild Things entrust Max with the job of fixing everything, it is sort of like parents entrusting their own kid to fix their marriage. This is a job Max zealously accepts because he feels he knows best anyway. What makes this movie special is that the Wild Things take Max’s ideas seriously, carry them out, and expect them to work. And unlike any children’s movies I’ve ever seen, Max’s ideas are those a nine year old would come up with. What makes this movie especially sad is that they have the exact results they should have. 

For example, Max’s first idea is to build an awesome fort. The Wild Things eagerly start working on it. They build the best fort ever, just the sight of it is something to behold. But it doesn’t work in uniting the Wild Things family. All the same problems continue. Next Max comes up with the idea of having a giant dirt clod fight. It’s a great fight, but as what happens with all fights, people get hurt and the same problems become even worse. Eventually the Wild Things become disillusioned and angry with Max. They blame all their problems on him. There is an especially sad scene where they ask Max if he has any powers at all. Max gets up and does a robot dance (this dance was seen earlier when he tried to cheer up his mom after she had gotten bad news at work). It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now. None of the Wild Things are impressed. This is the closest I’ve seen a movie get to portraying the helplessness a child must feel when their family is breaking up. Max knows something is wrong but can’t do anything about it because he’s only nine and all he is good at is building forts. 

The movie takes a dark turn near the end when the Wild Things, who are known to eat things up, turn on Max. This is probably the few scenes that left the children in the test audiences screaming and gave the producers enormous fits. Is it scary? You bet. Is this movie okay for children to watch? Let's just say I would take my kid to see it the day he turned nine. A movie isn’t great that doesn’t provoke its audience. What makes some movies better than others is how it does so. There are scary beasties in this movie, but they are handled responsibly. I doubt many kids will get nightmares. More likely they will get ideas for Halloween. 

This movie has guts. It is perhaps the only kid’s movie I’ve ever seen that deals with childhood guilt. Most other movies won’t even dare of suggesting that a kid could be culpable of something. But in this one, Max wrongs people. It is true that kids can be cruel, but often times they are cruel on accident. They don’t know any better. When a child does something bad impulsively and then learns the evil in the actions the emotional consequences may cover a vast arc from fear, injustice, anger, doubt, realization, guilt, sadness, fear of reprimand, and finally fear of loss of love. The depth of this movie is very rare indeed. 

This is not just a story about a kid tromping around in fantasy land realizing cliche life lessons. The problems in this movie can't be solved by a bake sale or science fair experiment prize money. Like problems in real life, they can't be solved at all by a nine year old. That's precisely what every other kid's movie gets completely wrong. They all sidestep the fact that being a kid is a helpless, impotent existence. This movie understands that perfectly. And although it is a complete fantasy it still feels more real than any other movie that has ever been concerned with the nature of being a stupid little kid. The movie ends after Max exhausts all of his rebelliousness on the island with a version of the book’s classic scene of atonement. Max returns home and is greeted by his worried mom with a hug, forgiveness, and his dinner still hot. Perfect.

There are some reviews I’ve read that call this movie dull in parts. I can understand that, but one should also keep in mind this: Max is just a kid. What may seem trivial to adults can mean a whole lot to a nine year old. Since this movie refuses to cater to an adult viewpoint and keeps everything at a child’s level, enjoying it is sometimes a test of empathy. Surely most adults have grown up past the age where forts are exciting, but imagine Max’s wonder as he explores his. Or imagine a kid’s comfort and security of sleeping in a big pile of Wild Things. Or simply the coolness of being able to play dirt clods with big people on an equal level at that age. I got a great kick out of all of it.

This is Max Records first movie. This is an incredible performance that is sort of akin to Tom Hanks’ performance in Castaway. Max is in every frame of the movie and he spent most of the time on the set acting with inanimate objects. Keep in mind the facial expressions and voices of the Wild Things were added in later. He carries the entire film. Max, the actor, is especially good at communicating subtle emotion through facial expressions. (Think the opposite of Macauley Culkin) Just consider his expression when a teacher tells him the sun is going to die someday or the look on his face when he sees his mother with Mark Ruffalo. This is the best child performance since Haley Joel Osment’s in “The Sixth Sense.” Like Haley, Max Records deserves a nomination for Best Actor. 

If I am being honest I will have to admit that this movie moved me to the point where my eyes watered. Yes technically I cried during this movie. It doesn’t happen often. (The last time was while watching “The Sixth Sense.”) But when it does it is imperative to admit it and reflect upon it because it suggests that the movie (though obviously fictitious and in this case not even attempting to be in the realms of reality) struck a nerve by portraying something I felt was not only emotionally raw and enormously empathetic, but above all, true. In this movie there is truth. It deserves nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and especially best Costumes or Makeup depending on whatever the Wild Things qualify as. I don’t believe that Where the Wild Things Are is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. It is the best movie I’ve seen this year. and I believe it is a movie that will last for years to come much like the book it was adapted from.

There Will Be Blood 01/08/08

Will there actually be blood? The answer may surprise you. There is actually very little. And that scarceness of blood is magnified by the length of the movie (Three hours long.) This is unforgivable and though there were good moments in this film I cannot ignore the stretches when I was nervous and bored. Stretches where I found myself questioning writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson and what the hell he was doing.
The huge problem this film has is that it claims to be an epic. It isn't. The story isn't big enough. It's perfect for a normal sized movie about two hours long. But it is way two shallow for three hours. There is not enough happening. I swear, I could cut a half hour to forty minutes of this movie just in dramatic pauses and not lose a thing. This is how a usual scene would go: ten seconds of someone walking into the shot, they would speak a few lines, dramatic pause, someone else would say something, then they would stand around for awhile more. This movie is host to the most boring character I've seen all year. It's a man who claims to be the half-brother of the oil man Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis). There is nothing interesting about the guy and every line he speaks is said in this tired slow-motion. And in the background to all of this is the weirdest musical score I've ever heard in a western (It's quite ingenious actually and I really liked it.) It's frenzied, dramatic, and active. But It's completely out of place. They get the viewer all riled up and excited for a bunch of long slow shots of nothing. And I don't care if Westerns are supposed to be boring and slow. They don't have to be, and I would expect P.T. Anderson, one of our most exciting directors, to realize that. His second movie "Boogie Nights" fitted ten times as much story in the same amount of time. This movie, with a thirty minute trim, would be vastly superior than what it currently is.
The story this movie has, though shallow for its time length, is very good though. It has several great scenes and contains some memorable characters. The best and most original is Paul Dano's evangelical preacher Eli Sunday. Every scene with him is great. So much so that when he is not on the screen the movie suffers. I wish there were more of him. He is the only character in the story that can stand up to the very big character of Daniel Plainview. It is great to see the two together. One representing corporate greed, the other representing religious fanaticism. There is a competition amongst them, which by the end plays itself out in ways you wouldn't imagine. One would only hope that the story would be more about these two and not get sidetracked so much with subplots that take forever to resolve. Who could watch the baptism scene and not concede that this relationship is what the entire movie should have been about.

Little Miss Sunshine 11/17/06

This is the sweetest fucking movie I have seen this year. It might be the sweetest fucking movie I will see in my entire life. It is just so fucking sweet. and I don't say 'sweet' with any slang connotation. This is truly sweet. It is cheerful, it is cute, it captures all the joy and laughter that somehow peeks through the dreariness of mediocre lives. When one day you wake up and you feel like complete crap and you don't want to get out of bed and go to work but you do because you hate yourself and your so miserable but then you spot a child or just someone you know who is exceedingly cheerful because that's who they are and although you've been trying so hard to have the worst fucking day in your life this little ray of sunshine pierces your heart and melts all the fucking indifference in your system. All your problems turn into solutions and everything that looked so ugly suddenly looks beautiful and you want to stand up and clap and sing and dance and hug oh-so-tightly those you love. That's what this movie feels like. It's the fucking sweetest fucking movie I have ever seen in my entire life. God I love that kid. Everyone else in this movie, although they may be the most depressed people in the world, do too. She's beautiful and I'm not just saying that because of her brains and personality.

I'm not a fortune teller, but if I know anything, it's that the Academy loves giving out the Best Original Screenplay Oscar to this type of movie. Its the director's, Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Faris, and screenwriter's, Michael Arndt, first movie. It's very low budget and it's skillfully made although not expertly made. It's got the amateurish feel to it in that certain scenes may have been staged better or edited differently. It doesn't feel like an art house movie. It's a tiny independent movie, one of those you're glad to have seen because it feels like it could have easily been overlooked. There's a hell of a lot of potential here that makes me eagerly await their next film. One that will hopefully have as much heart, but also the little details that can only come from a good amount of helpful experience. Like I said, this movie isn't technically good enough to get huge awards attention only because so many other films look and feel superior. But it definitely will get a Original Screenplay nomination, and I wouldn't be surprised if it won.