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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: paris

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: “Abduction”

23 Friday Sep 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

abduction, alfred molina, alien, avatar, boyz n the hood, cia, fast and furious, frida, jason isaacs, john singleton, lily collins, maria bellow, michael nyqvista, paris, phil collins, sigourney weaver, spiderman, taylor lautner, thriller, twilight

“Adventures in Baby-Snatching”

Film: “Abduction” (2011)

Grade: F (SKIP IT)


 

“TWILIGHT” STAR TAYLOR Lautner included, this flaccid timewaster of a “thriller” is full of shiny surfaces and zero substance.  BMWs, Apple Macbooks, even the pearly magic of Lautner’s dentistry are set before our eyes like glossy windup-toys headed right off the side of a cliff.   Putting the abs in “Abduction,” a toned but tonedeaf Lautner plays Nathan Price, a high school senior duped into thinking his parents (Maria Bello and Jason Isaacs) are his biological progenitors when instead, they’re undercover agents determined to arm and protect him from impending badguys.

Something’s fishy when your psychologist dissuades you from thinking too deeply about your dreams, especially that flashback of what could be your mother dead on a hotel floor in Paris.  Slumming it as Nathan’s psychiatrist, Sigourney Weaver plays Dr. Bennett, another adult actively involved in the cover-up of Nathan’s real origins.  (Are the “Avatar” and “Alien 1, 2, 3, 4” residuals really that paltry that Weaver needs “Abduction” for the moola because it can’t possibly be the script that called her great name?  The same goes for the equally distinguished Alfred Molina, of “Frida” and “Spiderman 2,” as a crooked CIA agent.)

Something’s even fishier when your dad picks you up from a ragin’ pool party – of course, a shirtless and hungover Nathan is strewn, alongside the obligatory red Dixie cups, on the lawn – only to bring you home and viciously defeat you in a kickboxing match.  “Drink like a man; fight like a man!” growls Isaacs as Nate’s dad.  It’s boot camp masquerading as tough love, and when danger finally comes a knockin’ – cue the Russian goon squad and the dead-eyed villain named Viktor Kazlow (Michael Nyqvist) who wants the encrypted information on Nathan’s cell phone – Nathan is ready to defend himself.  “Abduction” knows its demographic all too well for any real harm to come to its hero, and his haircut, and the film ends, improbably, with he and girlfriend (Lily Collins – Phil’s daughter) snuggling in an empty baseball stadium.  Hot dogs, get your hot dogs here!

If  director John Singleton (of “Boyz n the Hood” and “2 Fast 2 Furious”) musters little shock when Nathan eventually stumbles over his childhood photo on a missing persons’ database – I know my name is Steven! – it’s because Lautner too closely resembled the guy who misses quite a bit throughout his day: irony, algebra, carbohydrates.  Lautner isn’t so much an actor but the multiplex’s version of a chocolate Easter bunny: he may satiate your sweet tooth, but he’s all hollow inside.

Whatever “Abduction” names as its ransom, don’t pay it.

Poem: The Padlocks of Paris

13 Wednesday Jul 2011

Posted by colincarman in Poems and Plogs (Poem-Blogs)

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

eiffel tower, marriage, paris, poetry, seine river, tucson

Nine nights into their European vacation

And she still felt superimposed on the place

This was Sheila’s idea of her first trip outside the States –

That she and Sam weren’t really part of Paris yet

But pasted onto photos she loved as a high schooler

At Langley, where Monsieur Wallace would insist

En francais, Mademoiselle! Though it was in plain English

That he told her, from the driver’s seat, in the rain:

“Look, Sheila, I have a wife, a family, I could go to jail for this.”

Around that time she began saving to leave Jersey, to get out,

To walk London and Paris, with a husband, which she finally did,

Thanks to Atlantic City and the death of Sam’s aunt.

Along the Pont des Arts, which the book told them

Was the first metal bridge across the Seine,

Sheila noticed the scores of padlocks and remembered when

Sam’s bicycle was locked to hers behind Langley

That’s how it began: by accident, already entangled

The new boy from Tucson who hadn’t heard about her,

About Wallace, about her father in the teachers parking lot,

Smashing windows with his nine-iron, shouting something,

Something about Sheila, “my baby girl,” and broken noses.

She probably loved him then, even before he came to unlock his bike

The red Schwinn that he weirdly resembled: tall, geometric, rickety even

Whatever Sam heard from teammates, he simply ignored

Looking forward, never back, to their first kiss (which wasn’t French),

To the wedding, to children (a trio of sons), to retirement, to Vegas

Where she wore a blue dress and looked longingly at the  miniature Eiffel.

On a dare, she ate escargot in Rue Jacob

Sheila called them “a delicacy”; Sam called them “snails”

But an empty stomach since produced dizziness

And downright elation at the bridge’s center

Where they watched a young couple, almost ritualistically,

Lock, kiss, and throw away the key

And all around them, love’s graffiti,

The urban equivalent, she thought, of trees

With lovers’ initials etched in branches and boughs –

Four strokes of a switchblade and you have a heart –

She thought also of Langley and her disgrace

Though Sam was smiling and had in his open hand

A lock from his luggage, a lock too tiny to protect anything,

Which they fastened to the railing in the rain.

– Breckenridge, CO (7/2011)

 

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