Just in time for the Oscars, reviews of most of the movies I saw in 2010

I watched 42 of 2010's theatrical releases.  As much as I'd like to write a thoughtful dissertation on each of them, I'm too busy with my own stories (I'm revising "Every Airship Needs a Wizard" and "Painter" (aka "Black Mist," aka "In Its Place") and mailing "The Dream").  So I gave myself 10-20 minutes per movie to crank out a couple paragraphs, then got burnt out around 30 reviews.  Enjoy!

 
"Date Night" (2010)
"The Fighter" (2010)
"The Town" (2010)
"Black Swan" (2010)
"American Psycho 2" (2002)
"127 Hours" (2010)

Here are a few movies I missed in 2010 that might find their way to my Netflix queue:

"Another Year"

"Blue Valentine"
"Carlos"

"Conviction"

"Enter the Void"

"Film Socialisme"

"Greenberg"

"Hereafter"

"Kick Ass"

"Let Me In"

"Machete"

"Never Let Me Go"
"My Dog Tulip"

"Predators"

"Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"
"Somewhere"
"Splice"

"Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives"

"Vengeance"
"The Way Back"

"Wild Grass"
"Youth in Revolt"

Date Night (2010) **1/2

Directed by Shawn Levy

For reasons that I don't need to get into, a bored suburban couple (Tina Fey and Steve Carrell) having a night on the town gets mistaken for criminals.  They're chased by the law, the crooks, and the crooked law.  (They get mistaken for James Franco and Mila Kunis, who are both in Oscar-nominees for Best Picture this year.)

I like Tina Fey and Steve Carrell, although I think their cinematic track record is hit-and-miss.  I like when Steve Colbert called Carrell's next film "Focus Group: The Movie!"  The chase scenes in "Date Night" are mostly perfunctory (although the car-on-car car chase is pretty good), and Fey and Carrell, because they're primarily TV actors, are mostly in one-shots.  This is convenient for TV-style ad-libbing, but it keeps them away from each other.

I like the way the whole caper becomes an exaggeration of their dull marriage is charming.  At one point, Tina Fey breaks down and describes her dream day of locking herself in a hotel room with a Diet Sprite, and it's kind-of perfect.

I also like that Marky Mark never puts a shirt on.  He's in a movie nominated for Best Picture, too.

"The Fighter" (2010) **1/2

Directed & co-written by Ben Affleck

+

"The Town" (2010) ***1/2

Directed by David O. Russell

The word for today is "Mass-ploitation."  That's "Massachusetts" + "Exploitation."  Think "The Departed," "Good Will Hunting," and "Gone Baby Gone."  Every location is a post-industrial craphole.  Everyone drinks in seedy bars.  Everyone says "facking" this and "facking" that.  Every "R" is softened to an "H."  Are the movies serious, funny, or offensive?  Your mileage may vary, but I like them.

When Christian Bale runs directly into the camera and yells "Where'd ya pahk the facking cah, Boo-Boo?!" all arguments of taking "The Fighter" completely seriously go out the window.  And then Bale goes out the third story window of his crackhouse while making the kind of scream you're used to hearing on "The Simpsons."

Mahky Mahk is an aspiring welterweight boxer, but his mother and crazy sisters are holding him back.  In their minds, Mahky Mahk's whitetrash caricature of a family wants what's best for him.  But in every situation, their massive insecurity takes over, and every situation turns into how they've been wronged.

They prepare a surprise party for Mahky Mahk's crackhead brother (Bale) upon his release from prison.  But when Mahky Mahk calls the party off, all they can think about is how they've been inconvenienced and offended.  Why are they so beaten down?  Because they live in a post-industrial craphole where everyone drinks in seedy bars.

And any movie that has a "skank-fight" can't be all serious either.

"The Town" is basically "Heat" in Boston.  Which is alright by me.  Director-star Ben Affleck is the thief and Jon Hamm is the cop.  I was clocked in at three stars until the last act.  I'm a sucker for the "closing net" at the end of heist movies, and director Affleck kicks ass at the closing net.  The "one last job" has gone wrong, the cops are closing in, the hero-thief is running out of safe places, and, one-by-one, the other thieves are getting arrested, killed, or turning traitor.

So why am I so fired up about "The Town" but lukewarm about "The Fighter?"  Because "The Fighter" is a sports movie.  You could argue that every genre film is predictable.  We know the cop is going to catch the serial killer and the couple will end up together at the end of the rom-com.  But the sports movie has the least variation.  It's going to end where it began:  in a ring, or on the field, or on the court.  And I could never stop feeling "The Fighter's" gears grinding toward its inevitable destination.  Your mileage may vary; my wife liked "The Fighter" just fine.

Maybe we like heist movies so much because, of all genres, they have the most variation in their endings.  Is the hero-thief going to survive and get away with the loot?  Or is he going to get away but lose the loot?  Is he going to die but give the loot away?  Is he going to die and lose the loot?  Or what about getting arrested?  Is the heist going to come at the end or in the middle? 

Maybe you'll say to yourself "Ben Affleck's hero-thief and Jon Hamm's hero-cop are going to have a face-to-face showdown at the end of 'The Town.'"  And you'd be wrong.  "Killing Zoe," "Heat," "Point Break," "Rififi," and "The Score" all end differently depending on their themes, ranging from nihilism to Zen to loyalty to the shortcomings of masculine codes.

I saw both of these movies at the AMC 30 Gulf Pointe, probably at the $5 show first thing on Saturday or Sunday morning.

Black Swan (2010) ***1/2

Directed & co-written by Darren Aronofsky

+

American Psycho II (2002) *

Directed by Morgan J. Freeman

"Black Swan" is a darker telling of the same story as "The Fighter."  Both movies are about athletes past their primes being crushed by the weight of expectations.  But while Marky Mark's working class boxer is able to find love and escape into wide open, bright spaces, Natalie Portman's uppercrust ballerina is always inside windowless rooms, always at a night, always trapped in close-ups, and ultimately alone.

Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan" has been Oscar-nominated for directing, film editing, and cinematography, but not screenplay.  That feels about right.  I love "Black Swan" as a virtuosic piece of camerawork, cutting, and art direction, but the script starts to get a teensy-weensy bit repetitive around the second half of the second act, before the final descent into madness kicks in.  Still, that's a small price to pay to get the highest-quality overwrought operatic lunacy in a ballet academy since "Suspiria."  Matthew Libatique's 16mm footage is tactile, and the exteriors shot digitally (because the crew had no permits) have a smeary quality that matches the uncertainty of our protagonist.

And is it just me, or is Mila Kunis finally getting roles that really suit her?  She has a great blank stare.  Libatique and Aronofsky shoot it especially well, reducing her eyes to black pools that are simultaneously opaque and have nothing underneath to mask.  That sounds negative, but it's not.  I love it.

Mike Judge put Mila's stare to great use in "Extract" in a scene that could have been insufferable but is instead much more interesting.  Mila's grifter goes into a music shop where two men are working.  She flutters her eyes and wiggles her ass and tricks them into leaving a priceless guitar unattended on the counter.  Of course she steals it behind their backs.  So many other actresses (say, Angelina Jolie) would have made a smug "ha-ha, stupid boys" expression.  Instead, Mila goes blank and walks off with the guitar.

SPOILER:  In "Black Swan," I love her delivery of the line "Oh my God, you had a lezzie wet dream about me?  Was I good?"  And there's a fascinating NOTHING to her face as she says it.  I'm sure there were takes where she was more snotty and bitchy like her character on "That '70s Show," and takes when she was downright threatening.

This sometimes mysterious, sometimes threatening blankness is probably what attracted the filmmakers behind the dreadful "American Psycho II" to her.  I know, I can't believe I saw "American Psycho II" too.  It was on cable late at night at a friend's house and we had nothing else to do.  "AP2" is an obvious, straight-to-cable / direct-to-DVD attempt to cash in on the Christian Bale / Mary Harron "American Psycho" that came out about a year earlier, with lots of direct-to-video locations and pacing that reflect a short shooting schedule.

"AP2" begins with the premise that everything in "American Psycho" was real (thus robbing it of 90% of its meaning), and then proceeds to have nothing to do with the original.  It follows Mila as she seduces / murders her way through college professors in an attempt to get a good grade, or something.  The movie's tone isn't so much jokey as insincere and lost.  William Shatner's turn as one of her self-loathing professors tries to save the movie, but can't.  The weight of being Mila's main antagonist falls on "Forever Knight's" Geraint Wyn-Davies, who is nothing if not professional, and does his best to sell the material.  Like Rutger Hauer, I've always thought his distracted mannerisms and odd cadences make him one of a few actors who can genuinely make supernatural characters appear non-human.  Or maybe I just think Canadians are weird.

Anyway, it's Mila's blankness that connects her to the original "American Psycho."  Christian Bale is also famously blank, even when he's emoting his hardest, and Mila's blankness deserves mentioning in the same sentence.

127 Hours (2010) ***1/2

Directed + co-written by Danny Boyle

James Franco plays real-life Aron Ralston, whose arm got stuck under a rock for 127 hours while he was vacationing in a national park.  Director Danny Boyle ("Trainspotting") has fallen out of favor among a lot of film snobs.  Whatever.  With "127 Hours," he achieves two things:  first, he makes interesting a movie about a guy stuck in the same place for days and days.  Second, he's able to make a movie about a guy who gets in and out of trouble all by himself into a parable about our responsibilities and connections to the human community (this probably makes Boyle unpopular among social libertarians on the both the left and the right, but that's a conversation for another day). 

Some audiences have criticized Boyle's hyperactive "snatch 'n grab" editing style, which is a legitimate complaint.  But I find he's one of the few directors (like recent Kathryn Bigelow and recent Michael Mann) who use this style to a purpose.  Even before getting trapped under a rock, Ralston's brain is going a mile a minute; he is very much a creature of the modern industrialized world, always listening to headphones, always in motion, always trying to get to the next thing.  Boyle's editing style matches that.  In flashbacks, Boyle often places Ralston in crowds, but with lots of cutting:  Ralston is physically close to people (moreso than most generations in human history), but his mind (like the editing) is always taking himself away from them.

And, really, if there's any movie where a lot of "cutting" is legitimate, it's this one.

Copyright © 2011 by Peter Kovic

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