Note: And now for this year's "North Country Award," given to the screeners that sit on the bottom of my pile, unwatched. The co-winners are: Catch A Fire, Blood Diamond, Tsotsi, Somersault, Bobby, Days Of Glory and Water. Other screeners unseen at present (though I still plan to watch them): The Dead Girl, The Good German, An Inconvenient Truth, Shut Up And Sing, Flushed Away, Over The Hedge, Once In A Lifetime, Hollywoodland, Duck Season, We Are Marshall and Time To Leave. And as for the significant releases that I've neither received a screener or a screening of, that would be: Dreamgirls, The Good Shepherd, Mrs. Potter, Rocky Balboa, Perfume, Curse Of The Golden Flower, Charlotte's Web and The Painted Veil. Nevertheless, my A.V. Club best-of list has been completed and submitted, and it looks a little different from the one I proposed back in Part One of this series. And because I crave consistency, even though I've got a few more days before my lists are due for the critics' organizations I belong to, I'm probably going to lock this down. See you next December.
Friday, December 8th
Apocalypto (commercial screening): The problem with Mel Gibson's directorial career to date has been that he takes himself and his movies way too seriously. At heart he's a pulp craftsman, cranking out slapstick and bloodletting in a serviceable style, with the occasional breathtaking shot or camera move thrown in. But because he apparently feels he has to justify why he (of all people) has deigned to step behind the camera, he gives every movie he makes an air of portentousness. That's certainly true of Apocalypto, which tries at times to turn a bloody jungle chase story into a metaphor for our own age of terror. Only the metaphor is pretty muddled, and Gibson's persistent commitment to the idea of simple-but-wise everyman heroes versus decadent, unknowable villains means any points he wants to make about sacrifice and conservation are rendered blunt from the get-go. But you know where crude heroes-and-villains stories really work? Pulp trash. And once Apocalypto gets past its dopey "ancient Mayan hunter-gatherers are just like you and me" opening, and the dull, dark slog through the jungle after our hero is captured, it starts to get pretty good. A long, nightmarish tour through the depravity of a temple-bound bound society keeps topping itself with mounting horror, right up to the shots of heads rolling down staircases, an arena where humans are used for target practice, and an endless field of decapitated corpses. Then the good guy runs through the jungle, and for the last 30 or so minutes Apocalypto becomes a gritty one-man-against-six guerilla battle flick in the tradition of action maestros like Walter Hill and William Friedkin, and some of the shots and sequences–like the waterfall dive, and the surprise ending that my wife saw coming but that I didn't–are just masterful. This is Saturday matinee stuff at best, but when it works, it works hard.
Grade: B
On the list? No, but there are ample glimmers of hope here, and indicators that Gibson could make a best-of-list quality movie if he just let his B-movie flag fly. Unfortunately, "the incident" has likely only cranked up Gibson's messiah complex, which means we can expect more overwrought epics in the future, if anyone will give him the money to make them. (And I bet they will … Apocalypto looks to me like the kind of movie that becomes a solid word-of-mouth hit, though likely not a blockbuster by any means.)
Saturday, December 9th
Letters From Iwo Jima (Academy screener): Flags Of Our Fathers was far from a disaster, but it felt like a brilliant hour-long movie padded out to more than twice its natural length; and while Letters From Iwo Jima isn't perfect either, it's a more focused and confident film. Some of its "how different were the Japanese and Americans really?" moments are too on-the-nose, and the way Eastwood and company build sympathy for the "good" Japanese soldiers and distinguish them from the real enemies strikes me as kind of cheap. But the detail of how the battle at Iwo Jima was won (or lost, depending on what side you're on, traitor) is fascinating, and builds to a couple of larger points. On one level, the movie is asking a simple question: Does it really fucking matter if you die for honor or you die in shame? At several points in the movie, the Japanese kill themselves or kill their own rather than either surrendering or fighting to the death, and it all seems so senseless (even though it worked out okay for the U.S.). Tradition trumps reason. I'm not saying this is necessarily applicable to our contemporary situation, but it's something to ponder.
Grade: B+
On the list? In the honorable mention pool.
Jesus Camp (DVD-R): I tend to fear documentaries like this, maybe because I'm a self-hating liberal who tends to resent doltish, simplistic public statements and/or criticisms by "my" side. But while Jesus Camp clearly has an agenda–to scare the shit out of non-evangelicals by showing the indoctrination that goes on at a "kids on fire" church camp–it seemed pretty on-the-money to me. No, it's not entirely fair. A documentary with all its cards on the table would let us know what the filmmakers were asking the evangelicals, not just how the evangelicals responded. And it might question them more sharply, rather than letting them ramble on as though they were in the company of the like-minded. (Specifically, it would be nice if someone would point out the logical inconsistency of a movement that claims prayer in school should be allowed because the overwhelming majority of Americans are Christian, while also arguing that the absence of prayer in school indicates that the nation is turning away from Christ.) Also, because it's a personal fascination of mine, I would've liked more material about the oft-bizarre intersection of the secular and the evangelical, as seen in pop-culture-themed T-shirts, Christian rock/novels/etc. (It's touched on briefly by the leader of the church camp, who talks about how much she loves America, yet how corrupt she thinks it is.) But it's not like the doc's footage of home-schoolers being taught from textbooks that refute evolution is misleading, per se. Those textbooks are real, as is the paranoid anti-science sentiment behind it. And the fervid insistence that today's young Christians need to be as fanatical (and possibly suicidal) as young Muslims is legitimately scary, and part and parcel with a religious and political philosophy that insists on certainty and unwavering righteousness. (It's a viewpoint that has one little girl looking positively schizophrenic in her proselytizing mania.) Yes, the ominous music playing under prayer meetings is a bit much, but the insert shots of congested highways and strip malls, and the final shots of reddish foam at a car wash and two big Stop signs, all has a kind of cockeyed poetry about it.
Grade: B+
On the list? Another one for the HM pool.
Sunday, December 10th
Little Children (Academy Screener): Everyone seems to hate the voice-over narration in this now-free-falling former awards hopeful, but I thought it was really effective, establishing the characters as literary constructs, trapped in a narrative they can't fully comprehend–though we can. The problem with Little Children is that it never really digs beneath that narrative. Director Todd Field succeeds at making Tom Perotta's novel look like it was probably a hell of a good read, full of incisive observations on how hard it is for adults to raise kids when they themselves still feel like adolescents, in thrall to hormones and immature impulses. But despite good performances and a handful of gripping moments, the movie feels like a mere illustration of the book, not a dramatization. It's engaging, but shallow.
Grade: B
On the list? Not quite, but it was better than I'd been led to believe.
Monday, December 11th
A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints (Academy Screener): Dito Mantiel's filmmaking debut is a jittery urban film-a-clef in the Mean Streets/Laws Of Gravity mode, and it maybe feels a little warmed-over because of the familiarity of both the milieu and the story of thuggish working-class kids egging each other on to mischief. And true story or no, some of it feels phony, like the exaggerated violence and tough-guy speak, and a soundtrack that veers between songs that don't fit the 1986 setting (Were people really that into disco and Gerry Rafferty then?) and contemporary songs that it's hard to believe these kids would like (The Art Of Noise? Really?) But the performances by both the young cast and their older counterparts are uniformly excellent, and Mantiel tries some stylistic tricks that purposefully muddle the issue of whether this is nonfiction or just a story. And at times, when Mantiel is really swinging, he recreates two-decade-old moments that feel as fresh as yesterday, and can stand with the best personal filmmaking. He even makes his split rock and disco soundtrack work for him on the closing credits song, Ace Frehley's campy solo hit "Back In The New York Groove," a tune designed to bring genres (and people) together.
Grade: B
On the list? Nope, but it's undeniably impressive. Will this dude have another movie in him?