THE GREEN HORNET

Dir. Michel Gondry US 2011

This movie had a lot working against it now that I think about it. It's based on a comic book character that most people under 50 have never heard of. It was coming out in the middle of a nearly decade-long glut of superhero movies. It had been in development for about 15 years, before finally being handed to Michel Gondry, an acclaimed indie filmmaker with no previous experience directing action. Coupled with potential Seth Rogen backlash and a co-star with a questionable grasp on the English language, this is not a movie I would have bet on (and I guess I technically didn't, since I didn't see it in theatres). It was not really surprising when Green Hornet opened to mostly negative reviews and middling box office. What DID surprise me when I finally got around to watching it was how goddamn good it was.

The Green Hornet is the story of Britt Reid (Seth Rogen), the drunken, hard-partying slacker son of a major newspaper publisher in Los Angeles (the always excellent Tom Wilkinson). Following his father's sudden death, Britt befriends his personal assistant, a mysterious, multi-skilled man named Kato (Jay Chou). Moved to action by the passing of his crusading father and a crime wave perpetrated by a maniacal drug kingpin (Christoph Waltz), Britt marshals Kato's martial arts and engineering skills to turn himself into an underworld scourge known as the Green Hornet.

Michel Gondry got his start in music videos, most famously the visually striking "Fell in Love with a Girl" and "Hardest Button to Button" videos for The White Stripes, and made his major film debut with 2004's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In addition to his off-kilter camera work and whimsical, low-tech special effects, Gondry brings something else to this film that sets it apart from other superhero films: a shaggy, loose sense of plotting that opts for the characters screwing around and hanging out rather than sacrificing such moments for the sake of steamrolling the plot forward. This is also a testament to the skills of Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg (there last script, Superbad, displays a similar inclination to chuck its characters into random situations and see what happens, rather than push them through a narrative), who keep the film consistently funny and clever, while also hitting all the necessary beats for a buddy action-comedy. At two hours, the film feels a little long, but it never wears out its welcome.

For a guy with no previous action cred, Gondry puts together some pretty interesting sequences for this movie. The slo-mo "Kato-vision" is a little trite on the surface, like so many other derivatives of bullet-time, but the weird camera effects and creative choreography keep the fights fresh and engaging. The finale is a combination car-chase/shoot-out/martial arts blowout that ranks as one of the most fun action scenes I've seen in a long time. My favorite though, comes at the end of the second act, where Britt and Kato have their obligatory "falling out before they can team-up for the ending" argument, which manifests as a clumsy, creative fight through Britt's mansion with some pretty hilarious choreography and appropriation of household items as weapons.

I can't really call the character Seth Rogen plays here that much of a risk for him, given his predilection toward irresponsible, caustic louts, but Britt does seem like a twisted extreme of his previous performances. Whereas Rogen's characters in Knocked Up and Pineapple Express ultimately learn valuable life lessons and grow as people, Britt plunges through this film with the enthusiasm and arrested development of an old Looney Tunes character. He is narcissistic to the point of delusion, utterly selfish and mostly incompetent. Yet his reaction to all the craziness around him mirrors the amused reactions of the audience and so you feel as though he's watching the movie along side you and commenting, rather than acting as the idiotic impetus for everything that's happening. Jay Chou's Kato, despite being hyper-competent and highly skilled at basically everything, is only slightly more responsible than Britt, which is to say, not really at all. The film takes some brief time out at points to contemplate the extremely skewed morals of its two leads, but never really condemns them for it, another factor that probably contributed to the films poor reviews.

Cameron Diaz is in this movie as well, ostensibly as the love interest, but the film has the good sense (unlike the film I previously reviewed, Ironclad) to realize that no one usually cares about the male/female relationships in these films and instead chooses to focus on the bond between Britt and Kato, while simultaneously ridiculing it with tons of gay innuendo. Diaz doesn't show up until about 40 minutes but, to her credit, plays a fun straight man to Britt and Kato's wackiness. The true MVP of this film though, is Christoph Waltz. Best known for stealing the show as refined SS officer Hans Landa in Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds, plays another quirky villain here, the self-obsessed but hilariously insecure Chudnofsky. Waltz still possesses that same irrepressible charm that he displayed as Landa, but he paints Chudnofsky with broader strokes, with goofy asides and a strangely adorable sense of self doubt that makes for a highly entertaining villain. His jealously of the Green Hornet's fame and his attempts to replicate his success gets more and more hysterical as the movie goes on, and his showdown with an uncredited cameo (who is amazing, but I won't spoil who it is) in the first few minutes is possibly the best scene in the movie.

It's nice to be reminded that reviews aren't always right. I'll probably get more rewatch value out of Green Hornet than Kick-Ass or any of the other self-aware superhero movies popping up now. Good stuff.

UP NEXT: Attack The Block

IRONCLAD

Dir. Jonathan English UK/USA 2011

I'm happy to live in an era where even low-budget films have the means to make history look and feel realistic. This is the primary saving grace of Ironclad, a film with a solid premise and a fun cast that manages to never really gel.

Set in England shortly after John I (the evil Robin Hood king, for those of you who learn history via other movies) signed the Magna Carta, the film deals with the First Barons' War, which erupted after John tried to reclaim control of the country from the newly empowered nobles. Specifically, Ironclad is a siege film, depicting the pivotal Siege of Rochester during the winter of 1215. Leading the cast is James Purefoy as Marshall, a Templar Knight who finds himself adrift after the Crusades and seeking vengeance for his fellow knights who were slain by the king. John is played by Paul Giamatti, who has plenty of fun turning him into a snarling, bitter megalomaniac. Also on hand are the always great Brian Cox as a rebel lord and British character actors Jason Flemyng and Mackenzie Crook as some of the rag-tag peasants assembled to defend the castle.

Now, I'm a big sucker for siege movies, so I was pretty excited about this going in. And if you go into this movie knowing what's good and and what's bad, it could actually be pretty enjoyable. The director opts for the shaky-cam, Bourne-style shooting when it comes to the action scenes, which isn't too bad when you've got guys fighting hand-to-hand. The editing is a little sloppy at points, but overall, it works. The violence itself is the highlight of the film. You will find no gory discretion shots here. The film is adamant about showing you exactly what a mace or an ax will do to somebody's face. Some of the blood sprays were definitely CGI, but all of the injuries were done with very impressive prosthetics and practical effects. If you're in it for the action alone, I'd say it delivers.

The rest... gets a little spotty. The gaping hole of lameness in this film is the relationship between James Purefoy's character and the Lady of Rochester, played by Kate Mara. Now, love stories generally feel superfluous from the start in action/war movies, but if the acting and writing are strong, they can be made interesting. Not so here. I haven't seen Kate Mara in much else, but she's extremely flat in this film, and what little chemistry she has with James Purefoy is kind of awkward and weird. The worst part is that SO MUCH TIME is devoted to their relationship, and I can't imagine that anyone watching this movie would care about it. Especially since the film already feels a bit too long with its 2 hour run time, I do not understand why they didn't trim this plot down, if not jettison it all together. If they wanted to keep the long runtime, I'd've much preferred it spent on building the relationships between the men defending the castle.

The rest of the cast is pretty solid, but the writing does them a disservice by not really fleshing out their characters to the degree that it should. James Purefoy, badass as he is, seems somewhat miscast as a silent, brooding Templar, especially given the affable villainy he brought to the role of Mark Antony in HBO's Rome. Paul Giamatti is the performance that makes the movie, playing King John as a Napoleonic super-villain. He's got a giant rant about two-thirds of the way through the movie that he completely knocks out of the park. He manages to seem like he's taking the role very seriously while also seeming like he's having the time of his life. And even though his character was extremely stock, I was rooting for Aneurin Barnard as Guy the squire, the idealistic young kid who wants to fight for honor and democracy. As I said, the character is stock, and his modern ideas about democracy are very anachronistic, but I thought his relationship with Marshall was one of the better ones in the film. That being said, this movie does go the Braveheart/Gladiator route of giving the good guys all these lofty ideals about freedom and democracy that wouldn't have been common nearly a millennia ago. It's not as egregious as the religious views of some of the characters in Kingdom of Heaven, which positions its characters to the left of most modern Americans, but it's still a little annoying.

Ultimately, if you're looking for some vicious Medieval action, I'd say Ironclad is well worth your time. Just maybe fast forward through any scene that just has James Purefoy and Kate Mara.

UP NEXT: The Green Hornet and Attack The Block.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER

Dir. Joe Johnston 2011 USA

So it seemed like 2011 was the make-or-break summer for superhero movies. You had four major releases in three months, including two run-ups to next year's The Avengers, a reboot of an old franchise and the first film in a potential new one. A lot of people felt like audiences might finally reach their breaking point this year and that one or more of these movies would tank.

With all four having been finally released, this does not seem to be the case. Kenneth Branagh's Thor has been the biggest success thus far, enjoying solid critical acclaim and a huge global box-office. Matthew Vaughn's X-Men: First Class had the lowest opening of any X-Men film yet, but still did well and enjoyed critical comparisons to Mad Men. Martin Campbell's Green Lantern was a critical disaster, but it still may break even at the global box office. And now, finally, Captain America seems to be on track to equal Thor, both critically and commercially. Three out of four ain't bad. And with three very promising tent-poles slated for next summer (Joss Whedon's The Avengers, Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises), I don't think superhero movies are going anywhere anytime soon.

If you're curious about my personal thoughts, I would rank these four films as follows: X-Men, Captain America, Thor and Green Lantern, with the first three being very, very close and Green Lantern being a distant, distant fourth. Sadly, I could have more or less predicted this before I saw any of the four. I can chalk this up to two major factors: a) the fact that Marvel has pretty much got the formula for their movies down to a predictable, but highly enjoyable science and b) the fact that (other than hiring Christopher Nolan to save Batman) DC has no goddamn idea what they're doing when it comes to turning their properties into films. It's unfortunate that Green Lantern sucked so hard, but if I had to pick one company to be firing on all cylinders, it would be Marvel. And hey, we're still getting good Batman movies.

So I'll try to provide some relatively quick hits on what I thought of the first three flicks and then talk about Captain America and how it sets up for next summer.

I came into Thor with a slight bias. I was never that invested in the character as a whole. I enjoy what he brings to The Avengers, but I was never that invested in the cosmic/mystical side of the Marvel Universe, and conveying that aspect to a movie-going audience was always the biggest obstacle this film had facing it. Kenneth Branagh wisely (if somewhat awkwardly) treats the film as two parts of a whole, combining a goofy fish-out-of-water story on Earth with magical Shakespearian action in Asgard. The story jumps between the two locals well, but for a film trying to convey such an epic scope, both worlds feel weirdly empty. The Earth story never leaves the sparsely populated town that Thor is banished to, and Asgard seems to consist of three rooms in a palace and one giant bridge.

The cast assembled for the film is impressive to the point of seeming like overkill. Chris Hemsworth is a hell of a find, imbuing Thor with the necessary gravitas and arrogance while also finding the humor and pathos in the character that make him work so well as part of an ensemble. Natalie Portman is charming as ever, but their relationship felt like more of a function of plot than any real chemistry between the two. Kat Dennings character was cute comic relief, but I feel as thought the movie would have been better served by more time spent between Hemsworth and Portman, since Thor's character arc (from arrogant god to humble human warrior) felt rushed and perfunctory. It was also fun to see Titus Pullo and Stringer Bell as Norse Gods.

X-Men: First Class, despite some glaring flaws, managed to be the best of the bunch on the basis of its style, ambition and the performances of the two leads. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender perfectly capture the spirit and presence of two iconic characters who have already been portrayed by extremely talented actors. It's a tough act to follow, but they pulled it off, all while being incredibly dashing and well dressed (seriously, the costume and set design in this movie is amazing). For a comic book movie, this film places a surprising amount of faith in the intelligence of its audience. Large portions of the film are subtitled, as the characters always speak the language they would logically be speaking, rather than accented English. The film is heavily steeped in international affairs that occurred forty years before its target audience was born. And the grey morality between Xavier's manipulative idealism and Magneto's righteous hatred plays out far better than it did in any of the previous X-films.

In addition to the two leads, the always reliable Kevin Bacon portrays villain Sebastian Shaw (who's nebulous powers they managed to convey very effectively) and Jennifer Lawrence and Nicholas Hoult generate an effective relationship as Mystique and Beast, despite the script giving them little to work with. Less effective were some of the characters selected to be in the film (I'm looking at you Havok and Angel), and January Jones does a terrible disservice to the wonderful character that is Emma Frost by choosing to play her as a stony ice queen and ignoring the wit and passion she displays in the comics. I guess that's also the writer's fault. Nonetheless, the film is sharply directed and completely commits to its vision of a past that manages to feel authentic and stylized at the same time (Captain America boasts a similar achievement).

Oh, Green Lantern. Where do I even start? Can this segment be entirely questions? How do you spend $200 million on a movie (that's pre-marketing costs) and have the effects not look awesome and the action scenes be completely uninventive and uninspiring? How can you have unimaginative action scenes when your main character possesses a ring that allows him to turn his imagination into reality? How do you justify casting Mark Strong as Sinestro, a part which he knocks out of the park, and only allow him to be in the movie for about 8 minutes? How do you cast the admittedly-more-attractive-as-a-brunette Blake Lively as the feisty love interest when she seems to be clinically incapable of emoting? Sigh...I'm getting depressed. It was bad. Let's move on.

Captain America. For a movie that I enjoyed as much as I did, there's very little about this that stands out. The acting is serviceable, but not captivating. The characters are effective, but broad. The action is competent, but not incredible. But despite all this, it was the most fun I've had at the movies all summer (even more than X-Men; it never quite reached the same highs, but its flaws were much less upsetting). Like its main character, the film is very much a meat and potatoes kind of affair. Satisfying without being particularly remarkable.

Chris Evans was an interesting choice for Captain America, and not one I would have made. Having already played a Marvel hero (as the Human Torch in both Fantastic Four films), I kind of discounted him from the get-go, and would have been more excited to see Chris Pine or Jensen Ackles in the role. Evans seemed too snarky to me, too modern to embody the quiet, earnest determination necessary to portray Steve Rogers. Sometimes it's nice to be proved wrong. Not only does Evans look the part (both as a real-life slab of post-super-soldier muscle and as a CGI assisted pre-super-soldier weakling), he imbues Rogers with a boyish charm that the character has grown past in his modern comic book incarnation, but is totally appropriate when playing the character as a newly-minted hero. So good job casting directors and Chris Evans.

Joe Johnston also deserves some serious props for this movie. Showing early promise as a student of the Spielberg school of directing, with films like Honey, I Shrunk The Kids and The Rocketeer (which shares it's tone and setting with Captain America), he declined pretty sharply in the last decade or so with movies like Jurassic Park III and the completely awful Wolfman remake that came out last year. Here, Johnston shows an eye for detail makes the film seem like it was ripped from a World War II propaganda poster, but rather than giving the film a the stylized, modern sheen that Matthew Vaughn gave X-Men, Johnston utilizes practical effects and an even-handed tone to evoke both Raiders-era Spielberg as well as war films of the 1940's.

In terms of story, this film feels much truer to itself than Thor or even Iron Man 2, in that it can stand on its own without using its status as an Avengers prequel to fill out its universe. Despite the presence of the Cosmic Cube (as seen in the post-credits scene for Thor), Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark (Iron Man's father) and the modern day scenes that bookend the film, this movie very much feels as though it could stand on its own if none of these other films existed, which was both unexpected and impressive.

True to form, Marvel has put together a solid ensemble for this film, with an sharp eye toward potentially recurring characters. Tommy Lee Jones gets some of the best lines as the extremely familiar, but always welcome crusty old general who actually cares about his men. Sebastian Stan makes for a great Bucky, quickly establishing the necessary relationship between his character and Evans', to the point where I wished that the film had been more about their relationship than the one that Steve has with Peggy Carter. Hayley Atwell wears her costumes well and gets a few badass moments, but she's mostly sidelined in the latter half of the film (at least she never needs to be saved). Hugo Weaving was pretty much born to play the Red Skull. His absurd commitment to being so evil that even the Nazis don't want to associate with him, combined with some pretty effective make-up effects made me wish he'd had more screen time as well. Considering that it's just over two hours, this movie moves like clockwork. I'd be interested to see if there are any deleted scenes on the DVD.

It pleases more than I can say that I'm living through an era where movie studios are devoting hundreds of millions of dollars to recreate my childhood fantasies on screen. If anything, Captain America and Thor have allowed me to remain unabashedly optimistic about the enormous financial and critical risk that is The Avengers. I'd also very much enjoy a new trilogy of X-Men films with the sequels set in equally stylized versions of the 70's and 80's. And Green Lantern... Well, Warner Brothers seems set on a sequel. And the next logical story to cover would be The Sinestro Corps War. It really can't be that much worse.

I'm Back

Hey guys.

It's been a while, I know. I kind of overwhelmed myself back in April and then just panicked and quit. How lame of me. I've been feeling like I can get back in the groove though, so I'm tentatively restarting this bad boy in the hopes that, with a few tweaks and improvements, I can not puss out again. I plan on seeing Captain America tomorrow and I will use that review to also look back on the other superhero flicks that came out this summer, specifically Thor, X-Men: First Class and Green Lantern.

In the meantime, here on some super-brief thoughts on most of other shit I've watched since I quit back in April:

The Sword of Doom: An 1960's samurai flick, with a beautiful release via Criterion. If you're into existentialism and/or hardass anti-heros, this one is for you. A little slow at first, but the ending is more than worth it. Much darker than Kurosawa's samurai films.

Punisher: War Zone: I watched this for the novelty of Titus Pullo from Rome (Ray Stevenson) and Jimmy McNulty from The Wire (Dominic West) being in it. Holy shit is it bad. Parts of it are bad in a good way, but more than anything, I'd just call it grossly incompetent. Which is a same because Stevenson takes the role very seriously and would have been a great choice for a serious adaptation of the recent Punisher Max books.

Buried: This movie has a pretty interesting gimmick (the film is set entirely within the coffin in which the main character is trapped), and Ryan Reynolds gives the most visceral, emotional performance I've ever seen from him, but the ending is sort of a "Fuck you" to all the viewers tough enough to endure such a narrowly-focused, emotionally draining ride.

Piranha 3D: I was hoping that this would be bad in a good way, but other than a few chuckles, I thought it was a pretty big waste of 80 minutes. That being said, Adam Scott and Christopher Lloyd were awesome for the 10 minutes that they were in it.

Le Doulos: Another gem from Criterion. A moody, tragic French New Wave gangster flick from the early 60's, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo from Breathless as a classic morally questionable protagonist. Great imagery, great atmosphere, great outfits.

Cyrus: This got a limited release last year. It stars John C. Reilly as a depressed dude who falls for Marisa Tomei and has to contend with her emotionally manipulative, socially stunted son played by Jonah Hill. Although the premise makes it sound like a Judd Apatow movie, it's much more of an indie drama with a few good laughs. Jonah Hill shows some interesting range here, playing the title character as a non-homicidal, 21st century Norman Bates.

Machete: Robert Rodriguez's full length adaptation of the trailer he made for the Grindhouse movie he did with Quentin Tarantino. Although its kind of cool to watch a movie starring Danny Trejo, this movie just felt like watching 80 minutes of less interesting connective tissue while waiting for the 5 minutes of cool stuff you already saw in the trailer. In fact, you should probably just watch the trailer.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2: I kind of wish that they'd just sucked it up and released a three and a half hour cut of this and the first part. They would play much better as one film. This just feels like a two and a half hour climax with no time for the character beats of part one. Ultimately, displays all the same strengths and weaknesses of the last three films in the series. Great look, great action and a very cool cast, but no space for the world-building and character connections that make the books so great.

Super 8: Probably the most fun I've had in the theaters this year. If you thought it was cheesy, I see where you're coming from, but I loved every second of it. J.J. Abrams totally nailed the early Speilberg vibe he was going for. The movie is very much E.T. meets Jurassic Park. It also features some of the best child actors I've seen in a long time. Special props to Elle Fanning, who knocked my socks off.

Your Highness: If you'd told me before I saw this that a sword and sorcery spoof starring Danny McBride, James Franco and Natalie Portman was going to be one of the worst movies I'd ever seen, I'd've called you crazy. But you would have actually been totally right. I hope they had fun making this, because it was literally painful to watch.

Source Code: This movie definitely seemed to be riding the coattails of Inception (although it was made before Inception came out), and while it definitely had some problems in the third act, it's definitely an interesting and engaging sci-fi movie, which I'm always happy to support. Jake Gyllenhaal makes a pretty game action hero and the premise is a lot of fun. Definitely worth a look on DVD.

Whew. So yeah. It's good to be back. Like I said, Captain America with retroactive Thor, X-Men and Green Lantern reviews forthcoming.

SUPER / DEFENDOR

Dir. James Gunn USA 2010

Dir. Peter Stebbings CANADA 2009

I find it really strange that we live in a world where post-modern superhero films have become their own little sub-genre. I suppose it's inevitable that once any genre reaches a certain level of popularity, people who enjoy it will start commenting on it and making fun of it in their own works. Kick-Ass was the most successful of these films so far and given that their are still plenty of straight-forward superhero flicks coming out in the next few years, now would be the time to start riffing on them.

Super is far and away the more successful of the two films, but its far from perfect. Written and directed by James Gunn, (writer of the 2004 Dawn Of The Dead remake and writer/director of the 2006 horror/comedy Slither starring Nathan Fillion and Elizabeth Banks), Super cobbles together a bizarrely eclectic cast and a grusome, low-budget aesthetic into something that's occasionally stupid and frequently entertaining.

Rainn Wilson stars as Frank D'Arbo, a pathetically naive short-order cook who's two greatest achievements in life were marrying his beautiful wife Sarah (a surprisingly effective Liv Tyler) and this other time where he told a cop which way a mugger ran. When Sarah, a former junkie, suffers a serious relapse and runs off with an extremely affable drug dealer named Jacques (an extremely affable Kevin Bacon), Frank suffers a serious break with reality and becomes obsessed with righting all the wrongs he perceives in the world around him (which range from the understandable "drugs are bad" to the absurd "cutting in line"). With the help of a young comic book shop employee (Ellen Page), Frank adopts the guise of The Crimson Bolt and begins his one man war on crime.

I've gotten some pretty solid rewatch value out of Slither and I'd highly recommend it for it's fantastic balance of goofy humor and disgusting horror. Super attempts to walk a similar line, but it runs into some problems along the way. James Gunn spend the early part of his career working on Troma films, and their blood-soaked, DIY style comes through loud and clear in Super. It suits the premise of a thrift-store superhero very well, but is tonally all over the place and ends up making some pretty disturbing moral judgements that I'm not entirely sure were ironic.

I think the biggest problem I had with this movie is that I just don't like Rainn Wilson. I've never watched The Office so I'm pretty sure the only thing I'd seen him in prior to this was the opening scene of Juno. The part is broadly written and Wilson seems to take the role seriously, portraying Frank as a sweet, naive fuck-up with an dangerously poor grasp on morality and common sense. While I will always argue for real emotion grounding humor or horror in the abstract, I think Wilson could have injected a bit more humor into his performance. Granted, a lot of the humor is supposed to come from Frank's complete lack of awareness that what he's doing is idiotic, but a lot of it falls flat, especially at the beginning of the movie when the audience still isn't sure which way the movie is going to go. I guess it goes to show how well Wilson was cast as Dwight in The Office, but ultimately I feel like he's just way too off-putting and creepy to ever be truly sympathetic. Wow, that sounds really harsh when I re-read it.

The supporting cast is where this movie shines. Although I'm glad that they're getting work two of my favorite TV actors, Andre Royo (Bubs from The Wire!) and Linda Cardellini (Lindsey from Freaks and Geeks!) are criminally under-used here as minor characters who's parts feel like they could have been cut. Returning from Slither are Nathan Fillion, Michael Rooker and Gregg Henry, all of whom are always welcome. And as I said earlier, Liv Tyler and Kevin Bacon are both great. But three guesses who stole the movie for me?

OK, before you say anything, I know I'm operating with a bias here, which is the fact that I am totally enamored of Ellen Page. And while she doesn't steal this movie quite as much as Hit-Girl stole Kick-Ass, she was definitely the best thing in it. I will admit, when she was first introduced I was not convinced. She plays Libby, a snarky comic book store employee who guides Frank on his mission to create his own superhero identity and eventually talks him into letting her be his sidekick, Boltie. Initially, Page plays up both the snark as well as the shy, self-effacing manner one would expect from a nerdy female character, but the fact that she looks and dresses like Ellen Page makes it unbelievable that she wouldn't have every guy who walks into the store dying at her feet. It seemed a bit forced. At first. By the time Page gets into her (extremely crappy, yet still weirdly flattering) costume, she reveals Libby to be a deeply repressed psychotic who sees Frank's gross misunderstandings of morality and raises him a not-giving-a-flying-fuck. Again, it's an obvious bit of casting to take a cute girl known for low-key comedy and drama work and stick her in a role that lets her curse like a sailor and be wantonly violent, but whereas Hit Girl was hyper-competent and ultra-slick, Libby is barely holding on by a thread, her complete incompetence only overcome by her breathless, manic desire to hurt people for almost no good reason. Her size also allows for some pretty hilarious sight-gags, my favorite of which was her inability to walk while wearing a heavy Kevlar vest.

I don't want to give away the ending of the film as it involves some hilariously catastrophic violence and some deeply skewed quasi-religious morality, but if you check the movie out, you'll know what I'm talking about. And even thought I feel like I spent a lot of this review complaining about the film, I did have a good time watching it. It was mostly the little moments. Frank misspelling Jacques name as Jock. The smash cut from Libby suggesting a signature weapon to Frank inventing his signature weapon. An opening credits sequences that is remarkably like the opening credits of Grease. And one of the weirdest sex scenes I've seen in a film that wasn't a porn. As much as they were different, I think I can say that if you dug Kick-Ass, you'll dig this.

Unfortunately, I cannot say the same about Defendor. The debut feature from writer-director Peter Stebbings, Defendor makes the lamentable and always wrong choice of being boring rather than being inconsistent.

Woody Harrelson stars as Arthur Poppington, a mentally-challenged road crew employee who spends his nights fighting crime as Defendor, utilizing a variety of weapons ranging from the obvious (a truncheon) to the absurd (jars full of wasps). Obsessed with trapping and defeating the shadowy Captain Industry, Arthur enlists the help of a young prostitute (Kat Dennings) in his quest to overcome his own limitations and make a difference in the world.

Superficially, Super and Defendor have a lot in common. Both revolve around mentally challenged outcasts who undertake misguided quests as superheroes with the help of female sidekicks played by cute, hipstery actresses. But whereas Super has the feel of a fun, schlocky B-movie, Defendor plays more like a Lifetime movie-of-the-week. The film was advertised as a comedy, but almost nothing about the movie, beyond the inherent absurdity of Arthur's Defendor get-up, is amusing. The film takes itself and it's message way too seriously and suffers for it at every turn.

By this point, Woody Harrelson has proven that he can do drama, or at the very least create pathos with a character, so I won't say he was miscast in this film, but if you've got someone as goofy as him for your lead actor, it would behoove you to make the character a bit funnier. Harrelson's irrepressible, smirking wit shines through in a few scenes, but the character feels too obvious, like something Robin Williams or Jim Carrey would have played ten years ago when they were trying to be all serious. I won't knock the guy for trying something new, but the character, and by extension, the movie, just felt too low-key and trite.

Compounding this situation is the film's tendency to tell rather than show. Defendor is supposed to be set in a city (it was shot in Toronto, but felt like Philly for some reason) where crime and corruption run rampant. Rather than showing us this, beyond a few dark alleys, a couple of hookers and a powerful gang that seemed to consist of only half a dozen guys, the film includes a Greek chorus in the form of a talk radio host who complains about how crappy the city is and wonders why someone doesn't do something about it. You see what I'm getting at here?

This entire problem is rendered crystal clear by Kat Dennings. Now, I like Kat Dennings. She manages to be super hot without being a waif and she's got a easy-going, natural screen presence that's well suited to comedies and indie dramas. In this film, however, she is the most unconvincing crack whore I've ever seen. Like, Denise-Richards-as-a-nuclear-physicist unconvincing. Despite this being an R-rated film, everything about her character feels sanitized. Chapped lips, rings under her eyes and trashy clothes are the only physical indicators that she might be a prostitute. She looks well-fed otherwise and when she smokes a crack pipe, it comes off as cute, rather than gross and sad. And her relationship with Harrelson's character seems to develop out of obligation to the plot rather than any actual chemistry that exists between them.

It's a shame too, because there are some good performances lurking in this film. Elias Koteas (or to anyone in my demographic, Casey Jones from the 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film) plays a corrupt cop and made me question why he doesn't have a bigger career. Also on hand was Clark Johnson (Gus from season 5 of The Wire) as police captain. Always a pleasure.

Ultimately, Defendor (as a film) seems less concerned with the tropes and consequences of superheroes and vigilantism than it is with exploring the tragedy of mental illness. It's attempts at this vary between the extremely obvious (the framing story, in which Arthur is being interviewed by a psychologist played by Sandra Oh, feels cobbled together from similar scenes in numerous other films) and the extremely preachy (the entire ending). This isn't to say that genre films can't tackle big issues (the obviously can), but a clumsy film is a clumsy film.

UP NEXT: I just saw Source Code tonight, so that should be up by the weekend. GAME OF THRONES starts Sunday. So. Goddamn. Excited.

BIG FAN / MYSTERY TEAM

Dir. Robert D. Siegel USA 2009

Dir. Dan Eckman USA 2009

These films were both low budget comedies by first time directors, so I thought they'd pair well. As it turned out, they're almost nothing alike, but they're both well worth your time.

Big Fan was written and directed by the former editor of The Onion, although very little of that publications snarky, absurdist humor is present in the film. Patton Oswalt stars as Paul Aufiero, a 36 year old parking garage attendant who lives with his mother in Staten Island. Despite living with a complete lack of accomplishment or aspiration, Paul is nonetheless satisfied by his one and only hobby: being a New York Giants fan. Too broke to afford tickets to the games, Paul and his friend Sal tailgate in the parking lot with a radio during every game, and Paul spends his long, boring days at the parking garage writing out long diatribes that he then reads on a call-in radio show every night. When an encounter with his favorite player (fictional quarterback Quantrell Bishop) goes horribly awry, Paul's already bleak life is plunged into further chaos and despair.

So yeah. If you're a Patton Oswalt fan going into this movie expecting a laugh riot, you're going to be sorely disappointed. Big Fan plays more like a low-key, sports-centric version of Taxi Driver, if Travis Bickle lacked any sense of motivation or self-respect. There are a bunch of genuine laughs during the first act, but as soon as Paul's luck begins to take a turn for the worse, things get really dark, really quickly.

Although the roles asks him to restrain his goofy, hyper-literate onstage persona, Patton Oswalt is a smart casting choice for Paul. His diminutive stature and schlubby ineffectiveness allow him to accurately portray the character without making him completely detestable. And while the audiences feelings of pity and disgust for the character are never alleviated (nor should they be), Oswalt always keeps you rooting for the guy, even when you know it's futile.

The escalation of Paul's anger and despair is perfectly played out in a number of scenes in which he calls in to sports talk show to argue with Philadelphia Phil, a boorish, cruel Eagles fan. Paul's rants are always interrupted by his mother, who pounds on the wall or screams from the other room, telling him to keep it down. This is an easy gag that gets played in a lot of lesser films and sitcoms, but the fact that Paul and his mother feel like real people (Marcia Jean Kurtz is wonderful in the role; her saving entire ziplock bags of duck and soy sauce packets from Chinese takeout because "throwing food out is a sin", rings wonderfully true) and the subtle escalation of these scenes as the film goes on, gives the relationship a real sense of tragedy and pathos.

This sense of escalation is a thread that runs through other aspects of the film as well, eventually culminating in a wonderfully edited, genuinely tense climax that actually left me surprised. Not something I'd expect from a movie about football starring Patton Oswalt.

Although Big Fan is definitely a better made film, Mystery Team is the one I see myself revisiting in the future (hell, I watched it twice in a week already). Conceived by and starring the Derrick Comedy troupe, who's members were a year ahead of me at NYU, Mystery Team works as both a hilarious series of set-pieces and sketches, as well as a fun throwback to some of the entertainment I enjoyed as a kid.

Donald Glover, DC Pierson and Dominic Dierkes star as Jason "The Master of Disguise", Duncan "The Boy Genius" and Charlie "The Strongest Kid in Town". As children, they were beloved by their suburban New England community as lovable kid detectives, policing the schoolyard and solving childish mysteries. Now, they're about to graduate from high school and everyone (including their parents) just finds them weird and sad. When a young girl comes to them and asks that they solve the murder of her parents, the Mystery Team find themselves thrown into an major case that threatens to tear apart the friendship and get them killed.

Mystery Team rides that perfect line between complete absurdity and carefully managed realism (not unlike Community, which Donald Glover landed a role on shortly after completing this film). The film is shot in this nostalgic soft-focus and is scored with uplifting strings and peppy refrains that call to mind the Nickelodeon-style shows of the late 80s and early 90s. The Mystery Team themselves inhabit this bizarre fantasy land that seems part Encyclopedia Brown and part 1950's cop show. The rest of the characters exist in a very real world of vulgar language, sex and responsibility, and the contrast remains hilarious through the entire film. If you're buying what the film is selling, you'll find it hysterical and almost comforting on a number of levels.

Glover, Pierson and Dierkes form the core of the film, and their roots in sketch comedy shine through in their well-oiled banter and effortless interaction. As the protagonist, Glover carries the film, blending the child-like cluelessness of his character on Community with a hyperactive, over-the-top energy that makes me wish he'd blow up in the same way that Seth Rogen and Jason Siegel did a few years earlier. He and Pierson maintain a perfect balance with Pierson acting as the nebbish straight man to Glover's increasing absurdity. Dierkes feels like the odd man out at times and some of his lines fall flat. His best contribution to the dynamic are his awkward mannerisms and facial expressions; his performance alone justifies a second viewing of the film, as he's usually in the background doing something stupid or muttering something under his breath that you'll probably miss the first time around.

The film also features a number of comedic character actors, including Aubrey Plaza as the female lead, playing a more balanced version of the Daria-like persona she's cultivated in her stand-up and on Parks and Recreation. Matt Walsh of UCB fame and John Lutz from 30 Rock pop up in the third act as well. The only person who didn't really work for me was Bobby Moynihan from SNL as a pathetic convenience store clerk who desperately wants in on the action. I'm not sure if it was his performance or the character being too broadly drawn, but I felt like he wasn't worth the time devoted to his subplot.

As I said, this movie is clearly amateurish in a number of ways (the directing is a bit to ambitious for its own good and the film at times feels like set-pieces strung together by a story rather than a narrative with funny moments) but if you're looking for something a bit off-beat and starring a bunch of really funny people, I'd say this one is time well spent.

UP NEXT: Two weeks until Game of Thrones. I'll try to get a few movies in before then.

THE AMERICAN

Dir. Anton Corbijn USA 2010

If The American was anything, it was predictable. It was much more than that; in fact many of the adjectives I would use to describe it would be positive. But the beats of the story are ones you've seen a thousand times. I won't spoil the ending or anything, but it barely matters. If you've ever watched a movie about a hitman before, you've more or less seen The American, whether it's In Bruges or Blast Of Silence or Le Samourai or The Killer. I enjoyed all of those films more than The American, but this film (hell, this genre), is rarely one that you visit for the plot. Above all, The American is a mood piece, as tightly wound, effortlessly professional and quietly hollow as it's protagonist.

George Clooney plays Jack, a meticulously professional assassin who is sent to a small Italian town by his handler to hide out following a violent incident in Sweden. There, Jack befriends an elderly priest and begins a romance with a warm-hearted prostitute named Clara. He also begins building a customized rifle for a new client, a fellow assassin named Mathilde. As Jack attempts to reexamine his old life, his new one is threatened by retaliation for the incident in Sweden as well as new threats from unexpected sources.

See? Familiar, isn't it? Trite, even? Absolutely. However, the worthiness of The American lies not in its plotting or its scripting or even its acting, but the direction. Corbijn shows his European roots (he directed the 2006 Best Foreign Film winner, The Lives Of Others) by crafting a methodical, icy thriller in which the glacial pace is made all the more agonizing by the blink-and-you'll-miss-it bursts of violence that punctuate the film. The film is almost two hours, but I wouldn't be surprised if the script was about 50 pages. The dialogue is direct and to the point and Corbijn isn't afraid to include natural pauses that last for so long, they almost become unnatural. Despite it's realism, the movie becomes almost dream-like by the end, as you get more and more entrenched in Clooney's headspace.

Speaking of which. For a guy who's so handsome and charming, Clooney has a surprising amount of range. You've got suave, smarmy Clooney (the Ocean's movies, Out Of Sight), goofy Clooney (his work with the Coen Brothers) and serious, grim Clooney (Syriana, Michael Clayton). He plays all of these types pretty well, and in The American he takes his serious, grim performance to it's extreme. It's a deceptively tough role to pull off too. The stoic badass seems pretty basic, but Jack is given very little dialogue to work with and is shown to be particularly heinous at the beginning of the film (in a sad, brutal scene that is stunning just by virtue of it's nonchalance). Clooney still manages to create an evolution for the character though, and by the end of the film I was really pulling for him.

The rest of the cast is pretty solid as well. LOST fans will recognize Mathilde (who's name, I think is a reference to The Professional) as the woman Sayid encounters in his flashforward and the woman playing the prostitute also managed to do a lot with a pretty thankless role. I wasn't really sold on the priest character, mostly because he seemed to exist only as an excuse for Jack to cryptically wax philosophical about his job.

All in all, I'd recommend this movie, just don't go into it expecting an action move because...it's totally not. Definitely more of a mood piece. Or if you just like seeing George Clooney looking pensive and sad.

UP NEXT: A way less pretentious review. Mystery Team! Also, Game Of Thrones starts in less than a month! Get psyched!

MOON / MONSTERS

Dir. Duncan Jones USA 2009

Dir. Gareth Edwards UK 2010

I caught both of these films on Instant Watch this week. They're both minimalist, low-budget (one much more so than the other) sci-fi flicks with small casts and high concepts. I wouldn't call either of them new favorites, but they're both well worth your time and warrant a bit of discussion.

Moon is the directorial debut of Duncan Jones, son of David Jones, better know as David Bowie. I'll refrain from any Space Oddity and Ziggy Stardust jokes and just say that Jones shares his fathers fascination with the unknown, both physically and psychologically. However, he eschews the psychedelic fantasy of his fathers work for a believable reality to create one of the hardest sci -fi films I've seen in years.

In a one man (sort of) tour de force, Sam Rockwell portrays Sam Bell, an astronaut in the last two weeks of a three year contract to mine helium on the moon. Fueled by a desire to see his wife and new daughter (who was born while he was away), Sam attempts to stave off boredom and loneliness, with only an AI construct (voiced by Kevin Spacey) for company. When an accident caused by a possible hallucination leaves Sam injured and even more unstable, a strange new arrival at on his one-man space station threaten to unravel everything Sam knows about his past, present and future.

I'm being purposefully vague here because there's a first act twist that I don't want to spoil (although if you've heard even a little bit about the film, you probably already know what it is), but I think I can say enough about the movie otherwise without giving anything away. Jones has stated in interviews that he is a fan of the austere sci-fi films of the 60's and 70's (2001, Solaris, etc.), and Moon certainly wears those influences on its sleeve. The mining base, as the sole location in the film, is heavily grounded in real science and combines the sleek, white Macbook look of the new Star Trek film with the grubby, lived-in vibe of the original Star Wars films. Both the spartan, claustrophobic interior of the station and vast emptiness of the lunar surface combine to draw the viewer into the cramped loneliness of Sam's headspace. For a 90 minute film, Jones definitely allows the film to breathe, wallowing in the day-to-day slog that is Sam's life on the moon. It's slow, but never boring.

Really though, this movie rests on the shoulders of Sam Rockwell, who creates a multifaceted, believable character in Sam Bell. Rockwell is probably one of the best character actors working today, with scene-stealing supporting roles in Iron Man 2 and The Assassination of Jesse James. Moon is one of his rare leading roles (apparently it was written with him in mind) and he makes the most of it, blending humor, confusion, fear and despair into an understated, but extremely affecting performance.

I don't know that I'd say that Moon is for everyone, but even if you're not into sci-fi, I'd say it's worth checking out. The plot is twisty and thought-provoking without being overly complex and it's just the right length for such a slowly paced film.

Monsters isn't as well made as Moon, but it's definitely the more impressive of the two films. Made for less than half a million dollars and shot on location in three weeks without permission with a seven man crew (the two lead actors included), Monsters is a film that makes you wonder how studios still manage to invest hundreds of millions of dollars and months of work in films far that are far less interesting.

Set six years after a NASA probe crashes in Mexico, Monsters explores a world where the titular creatures have overrun Central America, forcing the United States to build a massive barrier to keep them out. The film follows a mercenary-minded young photographer named Caulder, who travels the region documenting the destruction caused by the aliens. He is forced by his wealthy employer to escort his daughter, Samantha through the infected zone and back to America after she is trapped by a quarantine order. What follows is a low-key indie romance/road-trip film that occasionally features giant squid aliens.

The 90 minutes that make up this film were assembled from over 100 hours of shot footage and whittled down from an initial 4 hour rough cut. This isn't surprising, given the shaggy, unhurried pace of the narrative. The plot is straightforward and simple and the spaces between the few major story beats play out in short, documentary style montages of travel and observation. This is clearly a film more interested in exploring a world than telling a story and watching it feels like a cross between looking at someone's (well-shot) vacation photos and looking at a photo expose of a war zone. Considering that the plot is, in broad terms, a tried-and-true road-trip/action film plot, the movie has almost no sense of urgency, even during the "action" scenes. If you go into this expecting Cloverfield, you will be disappointed. This is best exemplified by the fact that Edwards devotes the 10 minutes that would be the final climax of an action film to a beautifully shot and rendered interaction between the humans and the monsters that is genuinely moving.

In a lot of ways, this is a very uneven film. The lead actors are a bit bland (for a real life couple, Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able display some lukewarm chemistry in this film) and don't do much to fill out their lightly drawn characters. The film is also a bit on the nose with some of its social and political metaphors. It also features some fractured chronology that ends up being completely unnecessary. As a mood piece, however, the film is a compelling portrait of the chaos and decay lurking at the edges of American society. And the special effects are surprisingly beautiful for something done in the directors home computer.

Neither of these films are going to go down as my favorites and neither packs the sheer originality or pulpy fun of District 9, but they are both encouraging examples of small-scale, personalized science fiction, demonstrating that limited resources and a lot of ingenuity often generates better art a studio-commissioned script and hundreds of millions of dollars.

THE BROOD / TRIANGLE / THE LITTLE GIANT

So I've kind of fallen behind (again), but rather than let myself get bogged down, I'm just going to give some brief thoughts on the last three movies I watched and do my best to get back on track. They have almost nothing in common, other than the first two being horror films, but don't let that bother you.

THE BROOD

Dir. David Cronenberg CANADA 1979

I've been on a sporadic David Cronenberg kick for the last year or so. After seeing and loving Eastern Promises, I dove into his (significantly stranger) back-catalogue and haven't looked back. The Fly, Videodrome, eXistenZ and Rabid were all horrifying and thought-provoking to varying degrees, but something about The Brood missed that disturbing mark.

The plot concerns Frank Corveth, a man forced to raise his young daughter Candice by himself after her mother, Nola is committed to an experimental psychiatric institute run by Dr. Hal Raglan, who utilizes a technique called psychoplasmics to channel their mental anguish into treatable, physical manifestations (I know, right). While Nola's obsession with returning to Candice begins to intensify, Frank's life is systematically dismantled by a rash of violence and murder that seems to be focusing on him and his daughter.

Although this is the last Cronenberg film (of those I've seen) that I would recommend, I don't want to give away the ending, because it's still pretty wild. The film is extremely subdued when compared to the other films I mentioned, both in terms of body horror and violence, but the finale boasts one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen committed to film and is worth the wait if you're inclined to watch it. The 80 minutes preceding it however, are pretty spotty.

The Brood is probably most similar to Rabid, of all the Cronenberg stuff I've seen. Videodrome seems to be where he cemented his voice and style, and his early films, while still extremely interesting, come off as a the work of a talented amateur. Both Rabid and The Brood concern a young woman undergoing horrifying experiences at experimental medical facilities and both unwittingly unleash said horror on the outside world (specifically the men in their lives). But where Rabid follows the more exciting template of the zombie/vampire film, The Brood is more of a paranoid murder mystery, with a slow-burn plot and a more subtle tone of dread as opposed to outright horror. It's an interesting turn, but even at 90 minutes, the movies starts to drag a bit. Combined with the low-budget, late 70's set decoration, most of the film ends up feeling like a made-for-TV psychodrama. The acting is also pretty weak across the board, with the exception of Oliver Reed, who plays Dr. Raglan like a sinister, subdued William Shatner. Not a bad flick overall, but I'd only recommend it for Cronenberg completists.

TRIANGLE

Dir. Christopher Smith UK/AUSTRALIA 2009

Of the three films that I review here, this is the one I'd recommend the most, although it's going to be a short review. It's almost impossible to discuss the plot of this film at all without giving away some major curve balls, of which the film throws many. It's a horror film. Sort of. About a group of friends who go for a sailboat ride. Melissa George plays the lead. That's honestly all I feel comfortable saying. I will however, try to convince you to see it.

So I only heard of this film (it was never given a theatrical release in the US) thanks to the guys over at the Slashfilmcast, who spent about ten minutes of one episode raving about it but not actually saying what it was about. Naturally this piqued my interest. I convinced my roommates to watch it, even though they knew nothing about it other than it was a horror movie and we all enjoyed the hell out of it.

Triangle operates on a pretty familiar, yet unique wavelength. It features numerous tropes common to all horror movies, but manages to effectively turn them against the audience and create a film that will probably take two viewings to completely understand (assuming it can be fully understood) and will probably possess Memento-level rewatch value for those who enjoy narratively twisted horror films. The protagonist/antagonist relationship, the attrition of the cast and the straight-forward, goal-oriented plotting of single location horror films are all features present in Triangle, but all of them take on bizarre new dimensions, thanks to a story-telling technique that, while not wholly original in itself, is applied here in a scenario where it is quite unexpected.

This is the ultimate success of Triangle, I think. It presents itself as a film that shouldn't require much thought, but abruptly and deftly begins to make you crank your brain into overdrive at the end of the first act and doesn't let up until the final frames. It would be easy and not completely incorrect to call this film pretentious and ultimately incoherent (I'm sure you could tear the plot to pieces if you were so inclined), but ten years into the 21st century, it manages to be a gripping and effective horror movie without being disgustingly violent, overly self-referential/meta or broad and pandering. And that, my friends, is refreshing.

I'd never heard of Christopher Smith before seeing this film, although I'd been aware of his latest film The Black Death, with Sean Bean, and am now all the more interested in seeing it. He makes some interesting visual choices, given the genre he's working with (I don't think I've seen so much effective use of soft focus in a modern horror movie), and some of his shots are simply striking. And Melissa George, who was serviceable if not particularly inspiring in 30 Days Of Night (that's a good way to describe that whole movie actually), is extremely capable of playing the wide range of emotions and scenes required of her in this film. Her character, Jess, is given a surprising amount of depth for the blonde protagonist of a horror movie and George perfectly strikes the balance of beautiful vulnerability and raw brutality that is at the core of every female character in a horror film.

If you've got any interest in this film, I'd recommend that you read nothing else about it and check it out as soon as possible. I don't think it will disappoint.

THE LITTLE GIANT

Dir. Roy Del Ruth USA 1933

The Little Giant is one of at least 4 films Edward G. Robinson made that spoof the gangster persona that launched in to stardom in Little Caesar. A Slight Case Of Murder is the best of the ones I've seen so far, although Brother Orchid is solid as well (I have yet to check out Larceny, Inc.). Little Giant has a bit of workhorse quality to it (Roy Del Ruth directed James Cagney in Lady Killer, which I reviewed a few months ago, another enjoyable, if unremarkable gangster comedy), but it's more than worth the 75 minutes it takes to watch it, and does take a slightly different perspective on the very narrow "Edward G. Robinson playing a retired gangster trying to fit in with high society" genre. Seriously, he made at least 4 movies about that.

So Eddie G. plays Bugs Ahearn, a wealthy bootlegger who gets out of the business when Prohibition is repealed. Eager to put his ill-gotten gains to good use, he and his crotchety right hand man move to a fancy resort town in California and attempt to rub elbows with classy high society types. There he acquires a snarky Girl Friday secretary in the form of Mary Astor and falls in love with a callow socialite who is only trying to land him because her family is broke. Zaniness ensues.

As I said, despite being a highly specific formula, the film is formulaic nonetheless. However, it's still massively entertaining for a number of reasons, chief among them being Robinson himself. Perhaps the reason Robinson made these fish out of water comedies so often was due to the way he felt about his real life career. A highly educated European immigrant, Robinson ironically became famous for portraying uncouth toughs with delusions of grandeur. His real life passion for and knowledge of art lends an extra layer of amusement to a scene in which Bugs shows off a Cubist painting he spent many thousands of dollars on, claiming it's got "loads of perspective" and claiming, "I'm just crawlin' with education. I been reading all them Greeks. They do plenty besides shining shoes and running lunchrooms." in a bit of hilariously obscure racism. Robinson sells all of this with his usual pitch-perfect theatrical hand gestures and machine gun delivery. I could watch a whole movie of him just ranting about things.

The film also shines as an example of what you could get away with in the Pre-Code era (basically the years between 1929 and 1934, when films had sound but no organized system of regulating content, until the Hayes Code was instituted). The scene I quoted above also contains a joke about cocaine use (actually using the word cocaine), which is never even mentioned, let alone joked about in old films. Some one also gets called a faggot, which I didn't even know was an slur back in the '30s. Not that racism and bigotry are funny (only sometimes), but it's pretty wild to see what you could get away with back during that tiny window of time, and it gives the films a looser, more natural feel, rather than the stuffy, uptight tone that people now associated with older films.

Finally, although she has a pretty small part, the film is a nice showcase for Mary Astor, who always left me a little cold in The Maltese Falcon. Granted, her character in that film is a remorseless, manipulative bitch, but the fact that she played it so well always kind of made me dislike her. Unfair, I know. Here, she plays a clever, sympathetic wise-ass and displays some pretty great comedic timing as the straight (wo)man to Robinson's motor-mouth gangster. The film as a whole makes an interesting choice to breeze through the crime elements and focus most of its time on the absurdities of the upper class and anyone who would try to fit in that crowd, an unsurprising, but understandable viewpoint for a film made during the height of the Great Depression. After all, who doesn't like to laugh at their betters?

WINTER'S BONE / THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

Dir. Debra Granik US 2010

Dir. Lisa Cholodenko US 2010

There's a lot to work with when comparing these two films. I watched them both as part of my Oscar catch-up (making me 8 for 10 on Best Picture noms). Odds are that neither would have been nominated if the Academy were still operating under the 5 film structure. Both feature nominated Best Actress and Supporting Actor performances. Both were directed by women. Both are about (in their own very different ways) the importance of family and the difficulties therein.

I watched Winter's Bone at a pretty interesting point in my life, in terms of what I'm watching and reading. I'd just finished my second viewing of The Wire a week or so before I saw it. Later that night I watched the second season premiere of Justified. And just this past week I re-read all my issues of Scalped, my current favorite comic book from Vertigo. All four of these works deal with American communities functioning in abject poverty, places where the drug trade, substance abuse and violence run rampant. Places with their own cultures and codes and lifestyles. Justified even takes place in roughly the same area of the country as Winter's Bone (Harlan, Kentucky and the rural Missouri, respectively). Winter's Bone seems like an easy contender for the most realistic of the four (with The Wire probably being a close second), and it's definitely the most meditative. Structured loosely as a detective story (much of what I've read about it calls it a noir, although I don't totally agree with that), Winter's Bone is at its core a story about a girl who must endure the hell that is her extended family for the sake of saving her immediate family.

Jennifer Lawrence (Best Actor nom) stars as Ree Dolly, a 17-year old girl living in the wooded mountains of Missouri. Having dropped out of high school in order to care for her younger siblings and her mentally-disturbed mother, Ree's efforts are further complicated when she discovers that her father, who cooks meth for a living, skipped his court hearing after posting their home as collateral. Facing eviction within the week, Ree descends into a world of crime and violence in order to find her father and save what's left of her family.

Winter's Bone does a lot with very little. The dialogue is sparse and to the point. Other than Ree, the characters are vague sketches left to be filled in by a cast of weathered-looking and very effective character actors. The camerawork and editing are minimal as well, much of the mood being set by the chilly cinematography and the drab landscape. More than anything, Winter's Bone is a mood piece, the simple plot merely acting as a towline for the audience as they are dragged through a dark corner of America.

Within the plot itself, the more is less approach applies as well. Despite there being almost zero onscreen violence in the film, the threat of violence in the film is almost omnipresent. Nearly every character Ree encounters is willing to do her harm if it serves there interest, and unlike the protagonist of a detective novel (who would most likely be in the same situation), Ree is never afforded any means of protecting herself. Her willpower alone fuels both her character and the plot.

Lawrence herself, in her first leading role, plays along with the film's aesthetic; her voice is muted but clear, her reactions solid and measured. The believability of the entire film rests entirely on whether or not you believe that a 17-year old girl can be as hard, as determined and as savvy as Ree. The other nominated performance in this film is John Hawkes, who plays Ree's dangerous uncle, Teardrop. It was pretty wild to see Hawkes get an Oscar nomination, I have to say. I've been a fan of his since Deadwood and its nice to see someone doing so much solid character work get the recognition. Teardrop is definitely a departure for Hawkes, who manages to exude a gloomy, world-weary menace despite his thin frame and short stature. There's a scene toward the end of the film between him and the local sheriff (played by Garrett Dillahunt, another great Deadwood alum), that kept me on the edge of my seat despite being extremely underplayed by Hawkes. Neither Lawrence nor Hawkes have a chance in their respective categories at the Oscars, but I'm sure they appreciate the thought.

As for the movie as a whole, my feelings toward it could best (and most obnoxiously) be described as chilly. The premise and the execution are all solid, but by the end of the film I still felt like I was still at arms length from all the characters, even Ree. The overwhelming bleakness of the film doesn't allow much room for humor (and rightly so), but moments of levity are ultimately the best device for generating sympathy for characters, and there is none to be found in this film. It's a fascinating world and flawlessly made on a technical level, but I don't know that it's something I'd ever want to revisit.

Speaking of levity. The Kids Are All Right. Following the unanimous praise the film received in the immediate wake of its release, I starting coming across a lot of backlash against the film, especially following its multiple Oscar nominations. I agree with a number of these criticism, which I'll get to, but on an emotional level, I felt a pretty strong disconnect from this film as well. Maybe I'm just dead inside.

So the movie is about a middle-aged lesbian couple Nic and Jules (Annette Benning and Julianne Moore; a more realistically hot middle-aged lesbian couple would be tough to come by), who each gave birth to one of their two kids via artificial insemination. Their kids, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutchinson) are now 18 and 16, and become curious about their biological father. They meet him without telling their moms and discover that he is a free-spirited hip(ster/pie) who owns an organic farm and rides a motorcycle (unsurprisingly, he's played by Mark Ruffalo). They all meet each other and heartfelt wackiness ensues.

One of the more common criticisms I heard about this film was that no one would have been that impressed if it had been about a straight couple. I'm inclined to agree. I'm grateful that the movie used only its broad premise to establish its quirky indie cred (other than a few details which varied in annoyance; the kids calling them 'the moms' was kind of charming, the son being named Laser, which is never explained, was pretty stupid). The characters are all well acted, but I really wasn't sure who I was supposed to be rooting for (among the three adults as least), and eventually ended up feeling ambivalent about their collective relationship(s). Benning and Moore have a natural chemistry together and the scenes between them where they're at peace, but their 'personality flaws' were a little too neatly drawn (Benning as the functioning alcoholic/control freak and Moore as the capricious, irresponsible one) and it made all the domestic drama a bit too predictable. Ruffalo's character felt a bit more real, mostly due to how increasingly despicable his actions become as the film progresses (although he was still fairly sympathetic by the end). His character arc is also left completely hanging, which I felt was a strange choice, but ultimately it does reinforce the familial bond between the other four characters, which is the point of the entire film.

I don't know how deserving any of the three adult leads are of their Oscar nominations. None of them are stretching themselves too far outside their comfort zone (not that you need to do that to deserve an Oscar), and the script was competent enough for it not to feel like they were carrying the movie entirely on their shoulders. I'm also not sure if its the fault of the marketing or the film itself that so much of the buzz revolved around its portrayal of a 'normal' gay family, but it does at times seem like its trying a bit too hard.

The Oscars are on tonight (it took me forever to post this review) and I don't see any of these films winning big (Annette Benning for Best Actress is probably the strongest possibility), but I'm glad I got to check them out beforehand. If I have time I may do a quick write-up of the ceremony in the next day or two. Other than that, I'm watched a pair of horror movies last week that I will hopefully get too soon.

YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE / YOU & ME

Dir. Fritz Lang USA 1937

Dir. Fritz Lang USA 1938

My final cinema seminar at NYU was a comparative directors course on the work of Fritz Lang and Luis Bunuel. Both were prominent European directors who were forced out of their own countries and continued to make films in America (or Mexico in Bunuel's case). Both were know for their striking visual styles and incisive social commentary. Of the two, I vastly preferred Lang's angular expressionism and pulpy narratives to Bunuel's dreamy surrealism and bizarre storytelling devices. Although he will always be remembered (along with F.W. Murnau) as the pioneer of German Expressionism, Fritz Lang actually had a much lengthier career as a workhorse of the Hollywood studio system, directing one film a year from 1936 to 1957. These ran the gamut from social awareness pictures to crime dramas to westerns to noirs. Although the quality and importance of his American work varied, his auteurial stamp (bold, expressive shadows, shots of staring eyes, the steep price of vengeance, etc.) is clear, at least in all the examples I've seen. The Film Forum on Houston Street was showing a Lang in Hollywood series for the past few weeks and I caught a double feature at the tail end. I'd seen You Only Live Once in the aforementioned class. I was seeing You & Me for the first time.

You Only Live Once stars Henry Fonda as Eddie Taylor, a small time crook just released from prison with the assistance of his fiance Jo Graham (Sylvia Sydney) and her boss, a sympathetic city attorney (Barton MacLane). Despite his attempts to live honestly, Eddie finds himself framed for a bank robbery and facing the electric chair. Following a violent escape from prison, Eddie and Jo go on the lam, condemning themselves to a life of crime and violence on the road.

At a punchy 76 minutes (there's apparently a more violent 90 minute cut somewhere out there), You Only Live Once is narratively and structurally similar to Gun Crazy or, most obvioiusly, Bonnie And Clyde. But whereas the protagonists of those two films are genuine criminals and psychopaths, Eddie and Jo are simply good people pushed too far by circumstance and injustice. Despite its occassionally hokey plotting and some very on-the-nose dialogue (even by the standards of the era), the film does a good job of portraying many of the ills that normal people were forced to endure toward the end of the Great Depression (seriously, like, every ill you can imagine. The string of bad luck these two have strains even my generous credulity). The film pull as few punches as it's time allowed, featuring a number of scenes that would be bleak even by today's standards. Notable moments include Jo sucking milk from a punctured tin can, the two of them raising an infant in a bullet-riddled car and a pair of gas station attendees robbing the register and blaming it on them after they've stolen some gas and driven off.

Thematically, this film is very similar to Lang and Sydney's previous collaboration, 1936's Fury, which was also a powerful tract on the injustice suffered by individuals when they are faced with indifferent institutions and mob mentality. Sylvia Sydney is wonderful here as the wide-eyed, always encouraging Jo, who believes the best of Eddie and is willing to follow him into Hell with a naiveté and optomism that's always understandable and never annoying or ridiculous. Less impressive is Henry Fonda, who is more than capable when it comes to portraying Eddie as a desparing, down-on-his-luck shell of a man, but less convincing when he's required to appear dangerous or violent. I suppose that's the point ultimately, given that Eddie is by nature not dangerous or violent, but I found myself struggling to take him seriously whenever he was waving a gun around.

I was much more invested in You & Me, a film that addresses very similar issues, but does so with a bit more levity and charm. The film features George Raft and Sylvia Sydney as Joe and Helen, a pair of employees at a department store with a kindly manger (Harry Carey) who goes out of his way to hire reformed cons who have trouble finding work. One of these cons is Joe, a decent man with impulse control problems who manages to ground himself in a relationship with Helen. Initially told that they need to hid their marriage due to store policy, it is eventually revealed that Helen herself is an ex-con who knows that their marriage is a violation of both their paroles (is that still true? Seems kind of Draconian). While Joe begins to grow suspicious of Helen's behavior, he also finds himself being drawn back into a life of crime by his old gang members, who claim to be the only family he'll ever truely have.

It would be a stretch to call this film a comedy, but it features plenty of witty dialogue and doesn't really get serious until the back half. It also features two extremely bizarre pseudo-musical sequences that were very interesting, but felt extremely out of place in an otherwise grounded film. Beyond that though, I was pretty charmed by this film overall. It begins as a comedy of errors (of sorts) that seemlessly segues into an effective social drama without feeling tonally imbalanced. It's got a strong supporting cast and some clever dialogue, some of it a bit risque for the time (nothing like gregarious Jewish landladies for some inappropriate humor, amirite?)

What really sold this movie for me, however, was the pairing of George Raft and Sylvia Sydney. I've never been a huge George Raft fan, and this movie didn't quite convert me, but I was definitely the most enjoyable performance I've seen of his. Raft coasted for most of (if not all) his career by pretty much playing himself. Bogart and Cagney were able to fill same roles while having a lot more range as actors and thanks to bad career management and his own vanity, Raft popularity waned throughout the 40's while his fellow tough-guy actors went on to win Oscars (Raft actually inadvertantly launched Bogart to stardom by passing on the lead roles in High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon). His role in this film allows him to stretch a bit, incorporating his usual act into a more broadly comedic role. Surprisingly, while I found his dramatic performance in the film to be a bit stiff, early scenes of him joking around with Sydney while having a night out on the town are some of the best in the whole movie. His personality bleeds into the performance to such a degree that some of the dialogue feels as though it might be ad-libbed (although that doesn't really seem like something Fritz Lang would have allowed).

Sylvia Sydney, who plays a very passive second to Henry Fonda in You Only Live Once, is given much more to work with in this film as a second protagonist alongside Raft. Savvier and more down-to-earth than Jo, Helen is a proactive, intelligent character and allows Sydney to play both the sexy flapper and the cute girl-next-door personas that she combined so well. She's rapidly overtaking Priscilla Lane as my favorite underrated early film actress.

I'm happy to finally be getting to the Film Forum on a semi-regular basis. Hopefully I'll be able to check out some other cool things in the coming months. The double features especially, are tailor made for this blog.

UP NEXT: Winter's Bone and The Kids Are Alright as part of my 2010 Oscar catchup.

APPALOOSA / THE FURIES

Dir. Ed Harris 2008 USA

Dir. Anthony Mann 1950 USA

Leave it to a pair of Westerns to get me back in the groove. Oddly enough, both of these films are fairly unconventional as Westerns go, but at least that gives me something to talk about.

Appaloosa is Ed Harris' sophomore directorial effort following 2000's Pollack. Based on a novel by crime writer Robert B. Parker, Appaloosa is the story of Virgil Cole (Harris) and his partner Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), a pair of gunslingers who roam the West and hire themselves out as law enforcement officers. They arrive at the titular New Mexican town in 1882 to find that the local sheriff has been murdered by a vicious rancher named Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) and his gang of thugs. Cole and Hitch's attempts to clean-up the town are stymied by the arrival of Allison French (Renee Zellweger), a mysterious widow with uncertain allegiances.

By my standards, all Westerns fall into one of three time periods, Classic (1903 to 1964), Revisionist (1964 to 1992) and Modern (1992 to present). Classic Westerns are your old school John Ford/John Wayne style films. Clear-cut good guys and bad guys, the usual stock characters and plots, basically the foundations of the genre. Revisionist Westerns begin and end with Clint Eastwood (A Fistful Of Dollars and Unforgiven to be specific). They introduce morally grey protagonists, shifting cultural dynamics and graphic, omnipresent violence. Both of these eras are fairly well defined, whereas the Modern Western remains a categorically murky classification that has yet to fully form. After Eastwood's Unforgiven became the final word in Revisionist Westerns, the genre remained stagnant for much of the 90's before a small resurgence in the middle of the last decade, mostly thanks to the success of the HBO series Deadwood. The films that followed in its wake (The Proposition, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford and Seraphim Falls are what I would consider the stand-outs) were marked by fastitious attention to historical detail, sparse, yet measured storytelling and a minimalist (but still brutal) approach to violence.

So what makes Appoloosa such an oddball? The film features the plotting and sensibilities of a Classic Western (well-mannered characters, and a story featuring a hero, a villain and a love interest) combined with the visual aesthetic of a Modern Western. What little gunplay occurs in the film is over in a manner of seconds and the attention to detail is convincing and immersive. Ultimately however, this created a tonal imbalance that ended up bothering me for most of the film. And while I'm not opposed to a light-hearted Western, I found it difficult to take the film seriously as a whole.

Beyond the issues of genre, the movie is a mixed bag overall. Jeremy Irons is does an excellent job with the material he's given, but ended up feeling wasted. Renee Zellweger (who just bugs the crap out of me anyway) didn't seem to have a clear idea of how to play an admittedly difficult character. Allison French is duplicitious and sycophantic, and her relationship with Cole distracts from Cole's far more interesting relationship with Hitch. The character would have probably been a problem no matter what, but casting an actress I dislike in the role didn't help.

The characters of Cole and Hitch are interesting and well-drawn and Harris and Mortensen are extremely convincing in their portrayal of two guys who have been friends for so long that they're able to communicate their intentions and plans to each other in glances and nods. They're emotionally complex while still being consistent and reliable in their words and actions. You can read a lot of homosexual subtext into their relationship, but that actually makes it feel richer. You could also kill yourself with a drinking game based around all the instances of Hitch putting down and picking up his shotgun. I chalk that up to Viggo Mortensen being even cooler when insinuating violence than he is when committing it.

The Furies can really only be called a Western by virtue of it's setting (New Mexico again, but ten years earlier in 1872). It's actually more of a dynastic family drama with unusually impressive scenery. Known for a series of five Westerns he made with Jimmy Stewart in the early and mid-50's (Winchester '73 and The Naked Spur are the best ones, incase you care. Bend In The River is pretty good too.), Anthony Mann noted use of landscape to set the mood of his films is clearly present in The Furies. Unlike the Jimmy Stewart collaborations, which were shot in Technicolor, The Furies shadowy black and white cinematography does a excellent job of conveying the bleakness and dread that pervades the film.

Barbara Stanwyck plays Vance Jeffords, the daughter of ruthless, self-made cattle baron T. C. Jeffords (Walter Huston in his last film role). While scheming to wrest the titular estate from her father, Vance falls in love with an awesomely named, but extremely shady gambler, Rip Darrow (Wendell Corey). Meanwhile, her father intends to marry a shrewd widow (man, you can't trust widows apparently) with her own designs on The Furies.

Although the film is almost two hours long, The Furies feels a bit like an epic that never quite got off the ground. There are a number of plot threads, several of which I left out of the recap above, and while nothing ever feels half-baked or cut-off, there are a number of avenues the film could have explored in order to give the film the scope it seems to be after. For example, Vance has a brother who's introduced at the beginning of the film and who presumably hangs around the entire time, but is never given any kind of character development. You'd think he'd have something to say about who inherits the estate, but nothing ever comes of it.

Despite feeling a bit rushed, The Furies is quite the odd little gem, unsurprisingly brought to DVD by the good folks at Criterion. Barbara Stanwyck is fantastic as Vance, a character that allows her to bring her impressive range as an actress to bear. Ruthless and ambitious, she's nonetheless vulnerable and sympathetic when necessary and generally an all around badass by the standards of a woman in a film made in 1950 and set in 1872. This is somewhat disappointingly undercut by her relationship with Wendell Corey's character, who's chauvinism struck me as a bit much, even given the era. Corey himself is also a bit bland, not quite possessing the charm of Gable or Grant, who could slap a woman around all day and still manage to be pretty damn likable.

Also excellent is Walter Huston as T.C., a hilariously self-possessed man's man who prints money with his own face on it and begins circulating it into the local economy in order to escape his crippling debts. The relationship between Vance and T.C. is, despite seeming vaguely incestual at times, is uniquely entertaining, as they scheme against each other while still maintaining a genuinely respectful and affable rapport.

As I said, the film doesn't really qualify as a Western, despite a fairly large shoot-out toward the end of the second act, but I probably enjoyed it more than Appoloosa, which was a bit of a mixed bag.

Well. It's good to be back. I think I'm just going to blame my month-long lapse on the weather. It's been depressing. I'm feeling good about this though. Thanks for sticking around.

UP NEXT: I'm going to a double feature at the Film Forum tomorrow night. They're winding down a Fritz Lang in Hollywood run and I'll be seeing You Only Live Once with Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sydney and You & Me with George Raft and Sylvia Sydney again. Good thing she's adorable. Also, as part of my Oscar catch-up, I've got Winter's Bone and The Kids Are Alright from Netflix. Exciting times.

What Happened To This Thing?

Damn.

So I kind of over did it while I was home for the holidays. I was watching a few movies a day and keeping up with everything started to feel more like a burden or a chore than something I actually wanted to do. I kind of figured this would happen eventually, but I thought it'd take a bit longer than this. It hasn't even been a year yet.

I'm not abandoning this blog altogether, but I'm (obviously) going to be cutting back on my reviews. Maybe to just what I've seen in theatres. Since Black Swan, I've only seen Season Of The Witch (Capsule Review: It sucked), so there. I'm all caught up. If I see something I really want to write about on DVD, I'll do that too. And I'll definitely be doing week by week reviews of A Game of Thrones when it starts in April.

Anyway. Sorry to disappoint the 8 people that read this thing, but I didn't want to leave things hanging. Hopefully my inspiration will return.

BLACK SWAN

Dir. Darren Aranofsky US 2010

"I just want to be perfect."

I've been doing a good job this season of seeing all the probable Oscar contenders. I usually do this more out of a sense of personal necessity, rather than an attempt to win an Oscar pool or even come up with my own list of winners. Who or what gets an Academy Award is decided just as much by politics and popularity as it is by the quality of a movie or a performance. The Social Network seems to be the front runner this year for most of the big awards, but if I were allowed a vote, Black Swan would be my choice for Best Picture as well as Natalie Portman for Best Actress and Darren Aronofsky for Best Director. Had I not been sitting down while watching this film, it would have knocked me on my ass. While I wouldn't call it my favorite movie of the year (Hi-five Scott Pilgrim!), I did find it captivating and moving in a way that I haven't felt about a movie in a long time.

The film stars Natalie Portman as Nina Sayers, a sheltered young ballerina who is desperate to win the lead role in her company's production of Swan Lake. Her success is both encouraged and hampered by her disturbingly over-involved mother (Barbara Hershey) and her director Thomas (the always creepy Vincent Cassel). As Nina struggles to master the role of the seductive black swan, a rivalry with the newly arrived Lily (Mila Kunis) transforms her quest for perfection into a descent into madness.

This film is advertised as a psychological thriller, but I would have no trouble calling it a horror movie. There are a large number of moments in the film that are frightening for a variety of reasons. There's jump scares, gross-out moments and scenes of creeping, hypnotizing dread, all masterfully executed by Aronofsky, the actors and the effects team. Much of what I've read about the film compares it to David Cronenberg's work, but I would say that Dario Argento (especially Suspiria) is an equally strong influence. Many modern horror films claim/try to be "gritty and realistic", but Black Swan demonstrates how far off the mark they are by immersing you in an extremely mundane, tangible setting (Aronofsky uses the same over-the-shoulder camera work and grainy cinematography that he used to great effect in The Wrestler) and then having it come alive with other-worldly horrors.

Another little advertised fact about this film is how completely it is about ballet. It's a risky proposition, given the narrow range of popularity that ballet commands, to dive so completely into it in a film. With the exception of a ten minute segment in the middle of the film, the entire movie is set at either the ballet studio or Nina's apartment, which offers no reprieve given Nina and her mother's constant preoccupation with it. Surprisingly, this immersion isn't particularly expository. I don't feel that I learned a lot about ballet by watching this film (and I don't think I necessarily needed to) but I did get an extremely close look at everything that goes into it. The constant practicing, the endless preparation, the suprising amount of injury sustained, the abscence of the glamour and tranquility normally associated with ballet is all front and center in this film. It makes for an interesting look into something most people probably never think about.

Carrying this entire work on her skinny little shoulders in Natalie Portman. I've always wanted to like Natalie Portman more than I've actually liked her. She's very demure and intelligent in interviews, and clearly has a good sense of humor, but her film choices are always a mixed bag and she seems to always play the same few notes (worried, upset, scared) in every thing she's in. Her role as Nina pretty much takes her usual persona and cranks it up to a raw, vicious extreme. Portman lost 20 pounds for the role of Nina (she didn't really seem like she had them to lose before that) and this weight-loss, combined with Aronofsky's intimate, naturalistic style of filmmaking, keeps her looking haggard and exhausted for the entire film. And even though it's not really possible to cover up the fact that Natalie Portman is insanely hot, small imperfections in her skin and way her ribs stick out during the dance sequences are all tiny reminders that neither she or the film are concerned with her looking her best. The emotional transformation that Nina slowly goes through is never anything but completely convincing and requires Portman to play her usual just as much as she goes against it. She seems to be the front runner for Best Actress this year and she totally deserves it.

Given how completely this movie is about Nina (I'm pretty sure she's in every single scene of the film), the rest of the cast is somewhat marginalized. Mila Kunis and Vincent Cassel do what they do best (be extremely sexy and be sexy in a creepy, douchey way, respectively), but the biggest standout other than Portman would be Barbara Hershey as her mother, Erica. I'm not to familiar with the earlier part of Hershey's career, but here she walks a passive-aggressive line between tragically sympathetic and utter batshit insanity. Sure she treats her 28 year old daughter like she's 8, but as Nina becomes more and more unhinged, the fear and concern in Erica's eyes makes her much more relatable that you'd want her to be.

Oh yeah, there's a lesbian sex scene in this. Between Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman. As I mentioned above with regards to Natalie Portman's unnatural waifishness, this movie does an excellent job of showing you something sexy and then making it fucked up and/or revolting. The sex scene is no exception. There's also a masturbation scene that's even worse, playing out exactly as a scene from a horror movie would. Fucked. Up.

I could probably go on forever about this movie. It's beautiful and frightening and engrossing and sad. If you see one Oscar-caliber movie this season, make it this one.

UP NEXT: Christmas break has left me far behind on my reviews. I'm going to try to knock out one a night this week until I'm caught up. Wish me luck. Tomorrow: Kid Galahad, starring Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis and Humphery Bogart.