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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: george clooney

The Best and Worst Films of 2011

02 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

aaron sorkin, amanda seyfried, brad pitt, bridesmaids, charlize theron, christopher plummer, comedy, crazy stupid love, drama, drive, ewan mcgregor, george clooney, hugo, jason reitman, jessica chastain, joel shumacher, justin timberlake, kristen wiig, martin scoresese, michael fassbender, moneyball, nicolas cage, nicole kidman, oscars, owen wilson, paris, ryan gosling, sarah jessica parker, sean penn, shailene woodley, take shelter, taylor lautner, the descendants, the help, The Ides of March, the tree of life, thriller, trespass, woody allen, young adult

THE BEST FILMS OF 2011:

1.       “Midnight in Paris” (written and directed by Woody Allen) – Whoever thought you’d someday utter the words “Woody Allen” and “magical” in the same sentence?  After all, it’s been a long time since his “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985).  America’s greatest living filmmaker gives us not just his biggest box-office hit in forty years but the longest running movie of 2011.  A delightfully literary meditation on time travel and the Lost Generation.  No one can assemble a cast like Allen; Owen Wilson channels Allen without parodying his jokes and gestures in the City of Lights.

2.      “Drive” (directed by Nicolas Winding Refn) – This ultra-violent vehicle for Ryan Gosling, as the anonymous “Driver,” is a rough patch of LA noir, vicious and thrilling.  It also solidifies Gosling as the most versatile leading man to watch – politically mercurial in “The Ides of March” and a sartorial stallion in the comedy “Crazy Stupid Love” – in 2011.  “Drive” is on track to become a lasting cult favorite.

3.      “Take Shelter” (dir. by Jeff Nichols) – A harrowing meditation on paranoia and climate anxiety with the indomitable Michael Shannon (a sure-fire contender for the Best Actor Oscar) as an Ohio man coming apart.  Jessica Chastain (“The Help,” “The Debt”) was the ingénue of 2011, giving here, as a foil to her bubbly Southern belle in “The Help,” a restrained performance as the wife of a man either mentally ill or clairvoyant.  You decide.  Another powerful psychodrama, set in the heartland, from the writer-director of “Shotgun Stories.”

4.      “The Tree of Life” (written and directed by Terrence Malick) –  It appears only the “little things” in life matter to Malick (“Badlands,” “The Thin Red Line”).  His moving meditation on childhood, love, family, dinosaurs, Texas, the cosmos that had Americans demanding a refund must be worth the price of admission.  Believe it or not, in 2011, many movie-houses had to enforce their NO-REFUND policy for those left dazed and confused by 2011’s only poem-on-film (also the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes).  Costar Sean Penn even admitted that he had no real idea what Malick’s movie is about.  Actors!  Like any thoughtful work of art, it demands a lot from its viewer, but this tree’s roots stretch far and wide.

5.      “Bridesmaids” (dir. by Paul Feig) – Sure, it’s the female “Hangover” – replete with scatological slip-ups and crudely sexual candor – but “Bridesmaids” will get you to the church on time and, potentially, buzzed on the drive there.  Kristen Wiig dropped the over-the-top personae she brings to life on “Saturday Night Live” and surrounded herself with a hilarious ensemble cast that turned the chick-flick genre on its head.  That image alone of Wiig riding the automatic gate to Don Draper’s love pad is comic gold.

6.      “The Descendants” (directed by Alexander Payne) – After reading George Clooney boast to Rolling Stone that he’d be “surprised” if “The Descendants” didn’t go on to become a Best Picture nominee, I went into a showing of Alexander Payne’s new dramedy with my critical force-field up.  Yet its achingly honest tone and gallows humor eventually win you over.  Clooney’s light is less intense than newcomer Shailene Woodley as his truth-telling daughter.  The family bonds forged here feel real rather than Hollywood hokum.

7.      “Beginners” (dir. by Mike Mills) – It’s hard to believe that the man who, nearly fifty years ago, played Georg van Ludwig Von Tropp in “The Sound of Music” has the gumption, not to mention the joie de vivre, to play a newly widowed man who belatedly comes out of the closet.  Playing Plummer’s son, Ewan McGregor is on hand to scratch his head and find love (and roller-skate) for himself.  Mike (“Thumbsucker”) Mills based the comedy on his father’s own coming out and cancer.  A more cross-generational cancer comedy than the also entertaining “50/50.”

8.      “Young Adult” (dir. by Jason Reitman) – After stumbling with “Jennifer’s Body,” Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (“Juno”) reestablishes herself by drawing up the virtually unlikable Mavis Gary, a “prom queen psychopath bitch” (lovingly described by a fellow native of Mercury, Minnesota unhappy to see her back in town and trying to break up a marriage).  Theron embodies another kind of “Monster” while Patton Oswalt delivers the laughs as a self-described “fat geek” who shares the most surprising love scene of ’11 with a wine-stained, cutlet-wearing Theron.

9.      “Hugo” (dir. by Martin Scorsese) – While contemporary Steven Spielberg stretched himself thin with “The Adventures of Tintin” and the mawkish “War Horse,” Martin Scorsese focused his attention – his 3-D attention, no less – on his first children’s film.  “Hugo” has a timeless feel, capturing the hurly-burly of an urchin inhabiting the walls of a Parisian train station and the advent of the motion picture in the age of Georges Méliès.  Is there anything Martin Scorsese can’t do? Oh, that’s right: comedy (see, or don’t see, his “After Hours” of 1985).

10.     “Moneyball” (dir. by Bennett Miller) – After last year’s “The Social Network,” screenwriter Aaron Sorkin hits another home-run with Brad Pitt  as Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane.  Even a sports-phobe like myself could connect with a script this dizzy with details and  dialogue for grown-ups.  It’s probably time Pitt picks up his first Best Actor Oscar and why not for a willful film that venerates all of you who think outside the box – or better yet, the diamond?

THE (VERY) WORST FILMS of 2011:

1.    “Abduction” – Sorry, Twi-hards, but Jacob Black of the Twilight Saga film series committed a serious error here in the lobotomizing tale of a kid raised, unbeknownst to him, by secret agents.  Lautner is far from ready for his close-up, Mr. DeMille.  He has the vacant, Neanderthalic gaze of Kim Kardashian’s short-lived husband, Kris Humphries.  If only “Abduction” had felt as short as that marriage.

2.    “In Time” – A perfectly acceptable script from Andrew Niccol (“Gattaca”) was marred by the calling-it-in acting style of Justin Timerblake who, like Taylor Lautner, is best kept in the chorus.  Costar Amanda Seyfried resembles a dyspeptic goldfish as she and Timberlake chase across rooftops, trying to beat the clock in “In Time.”  An acting malfunction.

3.    “Shame” – For some inexplicable reason, Michael Fassbender is being praised for playing a Manhattan professional addicted to sex in the impotent “Shame.”  Never has sexuality been so boring, characters so undeveloped, and a narrative so negligible as in Steve McQueen’s self-serious sophomore effort.  If the audience isn’t laughing derisively by the time Brandon descends into an inferno of gay bars and Sapphic three-ways, they’re not paying attention.  I returned to the lobby to dispense liquid butter directly into my eyeballs to blur this nightmare of a “drama.”  Shameful, indeed.

4.  “I Don’t Know How She Does It” – The one-note Sarah Jessica Parker fails to mix it up a bit (again) in this wannabe feminist twaddle.  Parker plays Kate Reddy, a finance executive juggling professionalism and pampers.  If only Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha had helped with babysitting duties, we might not have had to once again sympathize with the saccharine sentimentality of white woman bourgeois guilt.  Far from a breadwinner, this is a bread-loser that confirms the old adage that indeed you can’t have it all.

5.  “Trespass” – What was Nicole Kidman thinking to team up with the execrable Nicolas Cage and hit-or-miss director Joel Shumacher (“Dying Young,” “Phone Booth”)?  Cage plays a businessman and diamond-dealer victimized, alongside wife Kidman, during a sadistic house invasion.  If it’s pointless violence you’re after, “Trespass” has more than enough gore to go around.  If you play this loudly in your house, your neighbors will likely call the police due to its vociferous gunfire and relentless female shrieking.

In a year belonging to Woody Allen, it’s worth remembering a line from “Annie Hall” (1977).  (It’s a classic older than I am with insights immemorial.)  In the following, replace “television shows” with “movies,” especially the soulless “Trespass”:

Annie, in California: “It’s so clean out here.”

Alvy (Allen): “They don’t throw their garbage away. They turn it into television shows.”

Review: “The Descendants”

29 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

alexander payne, comedy, drama, george clooney, hawaii, jack nicholson, jim rash, judy greer, kaui hart hemmings, nat faxon, patricia hastie, shailene wooley, shakespeare, the descendants

“Welcome to Paradise?”

Grade: A- (SEE IT)

NOT SINCE THE invention of the kitchen food-processor has a vegetable endured such abuse.  In Alexander Payne’s affecting new tragicomedy, “The Descendants,” an unfaithful thrill-seeker of wife named Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) lies comatosed in a Honolulu hospital while various family members stomp their feet and shout at her.  Even her lover’s wife (a mousy and marvelous Judy Greer) comes around, bearing flowers with seemingly good intentions, and soon rages against the dying woman.  The lasting notion of Payne’s drama is that Elizabeth is a blank screen upon which her family members project their worst ideas about her.  Because she never speaks, because she’s prematurely sent to what Hamlet famously called that “undiscovered country, from whose bourn/No traveler returns,” her own side of the story remains the great missing puzzle piece behind her infidelity and ensuing family fracture.

Elizabeth’s husband, Matt King, a real estate lawyer subtly played by George Clooney, has a long list of grievances, principally that their 17-year-old daughter Alex (Shailene Woodley) spotted her with another man not long before the boating accident that put her in a persistent vegetative state.  A bikini’d Alex returns from rehab, angry and adolescent, and in a nod to “The Graduate,” sinks to the bottom of a leaf-strewn swimming pool upon hearing that her mom will soon be taken off life-support.  Left to fill Elizabeth’s shoes is a cuckolded Clooney who tells us in the film’s opening voice-over: “I’m the back-up parent, the understudy.” Going to the movies means that more often than not, Humpty-Dumpty families have to put themselves back together again – that’s what fiction means – but “The Descendants” is so sardonically real, so life-like, in its representation of modern families that the predictable reconciliation in the final reel doesn’t feel forced or fantastical.  It can be as quotidian and Friday-night as watching “The March of the Penguins” on the sofa while sharing ice cream as a family.

Based on his previous two knock-outs, “About Schmidt” and “Sideways,” Mr. Payne is a master of loco-description, bringing particular places (and all their eccentricities) to life. (This is the dramedy filmmaker, after all, who made an everyman out of the usually larger-than-life Jack Nicholson.)  Just as Nebraska and California wine-country were central to those earlier films, the lush landscape of Hawaii, particularly Kauai, is hardly backdrop in “The Descendants.”  The hibiscus patterns, beach-bums, and Tommy Bahamas are all there, but stripped of their far-off exoticism.  For once, Hawaii on screen is a place you don’t want to someday visit.  Clooney utters the film’s most powerful analogy: “A family is an archipelago, part of the same whole but drifting apart.”

Working from Payne’s (and Nat Faxon and Jim Rash’s) of adaptation of a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, the plot is devastatingly domestic: after Elizabeth’s accident, Matt has to lead a gaggle of children and friends toward coming to terms with her loss.  When daughter Alex informs him of the affair, he runs flat-footedly in loafers to a nearby house to demand the truth from Elizabeth’s closest friends.   In “The Descendants,” Clooney is buoyed by the best ensemble cast of the year:  as the flippant Alex, Ms. Woodley (“The Secret Life of the American Teenager”) is a revelation; so, too, is Robert Forster who, as Elizabeth’s doting father, appears in only two scenes and fills each with his wounded rage.  After a word of warning, he cold-cocks Alex’s teenage boyfriend, Sid, who, in a lesser film, would have remained a stoner stereotype but here instead shares a brief bit of dialogue with a sleepless Matt about his own grief.  It’s these realistic touches that make “The Descendants” hard, like family, to shake off.

Review: “The Ides of March”

11 Tuesday Oct 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

audacity of hope, barack obama, beau willimon, Caesar, chuck schumer, drama, evan rachel wood, farragut north, george clooney, grant heslov, hbo, hilary clinton, howard dean, jeffrey wright, karl rove, marisa tomei, mildred pierce, ohio, paul giamatti, philip seymour hoffman, politics, president, Rome, ryan gosling, The Ides of March

“Et Tu, Brute?”

Review: “The Ides of March”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

Back in 2006, when President Obama was still on the top of the world, he wrote in his bestseller The Audacity of Hope that an American politician may not “lie” per se, but “understands that there is no great reward in store for those who speak the truth, particularly when the truth may be complicated.”  The fact that the system facilitates political prevarication, Obama asserted, remains a sufficient obstacle to making American politics cleaner and more transparent.  George Clooney’s fourth directorial effort, “The Ides of March,” could serve as another reality-check to Obama’s loftier aspirations.  In many ways, it’s not far off from Sarah Palin’s snide rejoinder: “How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?”

Still, the truth is actually quite uncomplicated in “The Ides of March,” but it’s the cover-ups and team-switching to protect the lying politician at the center of it all that powers Clooney’s indictment of a corrupt and corrosive political arena.  The truth is simple because it’s sexual in nature: no spoilers here, but suffice it to say that when a fresh-faced intern named Molly Stearns (played by Evan Rachel Wood), strolls onto the scene, men in power quickly come unglued, or rather, unbuttoned.  As erotic napalm, Wood reprises the vixen role she played so expertly in HBO’s reboot of “Mildred Pierce,” but she’s more vulnerable here and ultimately, tragic.  The script smartly piles it on, too, inasmuch as Stearns is the DNC chair’s daughter and soon an important player in the Ohio state primary.  Thankfully, Clooney’s film also treats its viewer like a grown-up; when Morris’s top aid gets the axe, for example, all we see is actor Philip Seymour Hoffman step inside the governor’s Suburban, then, without dialogue, exit to a rainy alleyway.

Adapted from a Broadway play, entitled Farragut North (2008), by Clooney’s longtime collaborator Beau Willimon (and Grant Heslov), who worked on campaigns for Schumer, Dean, and Hilary Clinton, “The Ideas of March” has the realist pulse of an exposé based on firsthand experience.  Our man-on-the-ground is Stephen Myers (played Ryan Gosling, who has more or less commanded the screen since the summer), a thirty-year-old campaign advisor to Clooney’s Mike Morris (a governor and presidential contender with a few skeletons in his closet).

“The Ides of March” is ultimately a cynical and disillusioning film in which Marisa Tomei, as a jaded Beltway reporter, speaks to its central beliefs.  “He’s a nice guy,” she says of Morris, “They’re all nice guys.  He’ll let you down sooner or later.”  Tomei is just one of the film’s great supporting actors: in addition to a Karl Roveian Hoffman – can’t someone in the costume department help Hoffman tie a necktie so it reaches his belt-buckle? – there’s Paul Giamatti as the top aide to Morris’s opponent and Jeffrey Wright (briefly) as another influential senator.  Each has a secret agenda and if Stephen survives their machinations it’s because he’s cut from the same duplicitous cloth.  It’s a relief to find an unabashed anti-hero at the core of “The Ides of March”; love or hate him, at least Gosling’s Stephen will inspire some spirited discussion after the film.

Historically, the Ides of March refers not just to the Roman calendar but to the day Julius Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times on the Senate floor.  We may no longer carry out our assassinations in the open-air, but as Clooney’s fine political drama suggests, we’re every bit as dead-set on power and revenge.

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