In Film

What Hollywood did in 2008 may have worked then, both stateside and abroad, but it’s by no means guaranteed to continue working in the future. Slumdog Millionaire is a mongrel piece of work based on a novel by a globe-trotting Indian diplomat. It’s structured around a frequently franchised international game show, stocked with Indian cinema heavyweights, and shot like a jittery thesis film by a dark-hearted Brit who is seemingly ill-suited to the story’s romantic light. But the film’s swirled-in cultural streams—equal parts Dickensian grotesquery, Horatio Alger striving, ‘90s arthouse growl, and Bollywood flair—just may make it the perfect kind of creation to survive in the world’s increasingly cross-pollinated cultural landscape…

You can read the rest of this week’s “The Screener” column — about the Golden Globes, Slumdog Millionaire, The Dark Knight, and other sundry items — now at PopMatters.

In Theaters

A beautiful tissue-paper piece of art that falls to shreds should you so much as blow upon it, Dorris Dörrie’s Cherry Blossoms is the kind of film that dares you to laugh at it. There are heartfelt declarations of love and elaborate avant-garde dance routines, not to mention a major plot point about a mountain appearing from behind a veil of mist. Cynics: Don’t venture within one hundred meters. Romantics: Run, don’t walk, to the theater. Everybody else: Approach with caution…

Cherry Blossoms (aka Kirschblüten – Hanami) is in very limited release now. The full review is at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters

With his bifurcated status as Hollywood powerhouse and indie maverick, there are few directors besides Steven Soderbergh with both the creative chops and the stubborn drive to make a film like Che. A more mainstream director would feel forced to smooth the political edges, and a more resolutely indie director might be tempted to make a retro-propaganda film about Che Guevara, all fluttering flags and poster-ready stalwart revolutionaries sweeping the capitalists from power.

To his credit, Soderbergh doesn’t fall into either of these traps with Che. But he also never figures out a convincing third path to follow. The resulting film is an uneasy mix of war procedural and unabashed hero worship, something like a guerrilla take (both in the artistic and military sense) on Patton…

Che is now playing around the country, both together and as two films. You can read the full review in this week’s “The Screener” column at PopMatters.

In Comics

PW Comics Week just put out their third annual critics’ poll, which they were nice enough to ask me to take part in. While you can never quite definitively say what are the best graphic novels in any given year, this is a nicely weighted listing of titles that are pretty much all guaranteed to be worth your precious time and money.

The winner, not surprisingly, is Dash Shaw’s Bottomless Belly Button, a phantasmagorical piece of work that had critics around the country gobsmacked with admiration. Other notable mentions include the creepy-as-hell Three Shadows by Cyril Pedrosa and Mia Kirshner’s I Live Here.

In Lists

So filmcritic.com just launched their Best of 2008 year-end list, compiling the opinions of our crack cadre of critics, like Bill Gibron, Chris Null, Norm Schrager, Sean O’Connell, Don Willmott, myself, and others. Some pretty good choices in there, nice attention from Bill to Revolutionary Road, and Don to Flight of the Red Balloon. For what it’s worth, here’s my top choice of the year…

The Class — Laurent Cantet vaults to the top ranks of modern filmmakers with this scrupulously observed, cinema-verite take on a year in the life of a French high school class headed up by a tough-minded teacher played by co-writer François Bégaudeau (an actual teacher). Refusing to fall into the clichés of either heartwarming success stories or hopeless nightmare — the two ways in which multiethnic urban classrooms are usually depicted — Cantet just sets up a series of short-fuse explosions between the teacher and his rambunctious kids and watches the struggle for power play itself out, with fascinating results.

New on DVD

In their seven-part Iraq War miniseries adaptation of Evan Wright’s book Generation Kill, David Simon and Ed Burns roll up a quiverful of arrows to fire off at various topics, ranging from the rampaging adrenaline of young men at war to the supreme idiocy of the invasion itself. However, the bright and gleaming theme running through most of these hard-bitten episodes has the filmmakers illustrating an age-old military maxim: Soldiers are often much more likely to be killed by the decisions of their submoronic leadership than they are by actions undertaken by the enemy. When that enemy is as pathetic a force as Saddam’s Republican Guard, and the American officer corps obsessed more with the idea of taking Baghdad at warp speed than properly clearing the territory they’re pushing through (both points made time and again in this series), that maxim is even more true than usual…

Generation Kill is now available on DVD, with helpful military slang glossary. Read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters

It’s been too long since we’ve had a proper comic book superhero on the screen. There’s been enough of them running around and bashing up the bad guys in a CGI-enhanced fashion, that’s for sure. But it’s hard to look at the recent cinematic incarnations of Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne and call them “superheroes;” even if they keep their identities secret and have nifty outfits. “Billionaire action figures” would be more appropriate, what with all their high-priced gadgetry and super-duper hideouts. Whatever happened to the caped heroes who kept an eye on the city’s dark alleys and took out the bad guys with nothing more than a sock to the jaw? Frank Miller’s jazzy The Spirit answers that question with a cocky wink and a grin…

The Spirit is in theaters now. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters

In Darren Aronofsky’s punishing The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke looks like a thousand miles of rough road, and that’s when he’s having a good day. His face is puffy and lined with the latticework of tiny scars that are the badge of the pro wrestler (never know when you might have to cut yourself with a razor in order to get the blood flowing for the audience). Rourke’s body is a battered hulk still roped with muscle but clearly on the verge of giving way; one more serious injury and the whole thing will be quits. Tellingly, “Job” is tattooed on one finger. It’s the eyes, though, that really shine with the ruin of his wrecked life…

You might have to go back to Claude Laydu in Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest to see an actor undergoing such exquisite anguish as Will Smith does in Gabriele Muccino’s Seven Pounds. There is suffering and there is suffering. And then there is the suffering evinced by Smith in this film, where he seems to not so much be a guy, apparently widowed and trying to make up for something in his past, but some sort of secular martyr, gasping and bleeding his way through the Stations of the Cross. He plays a man who could conceivably look at The Wrestler and think: Hey, his life’s not so bad…

The Wrestler and Seven Pounds are in theaters now; they’re both discussed in the current (the year’s last!) “The Screener” column at PopMatters.

In Theaters

In the calm but provocative agitprop film The End of America, author Wolf — still best-known for her 1991 college-feminist masterwork The Beauty Myth — stands on a stage before a studio audience and delivers a 10-point plan by which we shall know that democracy in America is no more. With her large wave of elaborately-permed hair, sensibly stylish suit, and colloquial manner, Wolf seems more like a particularly engaged PTA mom than the protest-marching Mother Jones-reading raconteur that her speech brings to mind. Probably that’s for the best, as the proto-fascist program enumerated by Wolf is more disturbing than just about anything dreamed up in today’s run-of-the-mill leftie documentary. Better a messenger she than Michael Moore…

The End of America is in limited release now; you can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

At the Movies

New York Film Critics Online, an organization kind enough to allow yours truly as a member, met today to vote on the best films of the year, and Slumdog Millionaire took the day — apologies to all you Dark Knight freaks out there. (It’s a fine film, and definitely awesome as far as superhero crime flicks go, but best film of the year? Really?) Danny Boyle’s brilliant, swooning Hindi Dickens melodrama won best film, director, screenplay, cinematography, and music score.

The full results are below, or you can read it in Variety.

* * *

Picture
“Slumdog Millionaire”

Director
Danny Boyle w/ Loveleen Tandan – “Slumdog Millionaire”

Actor
Sean Penn – “Milk”

Actress
Sally Hawkins – “Happy-Go-Lucky”

Supporting Actor
Heath Ledger – “The Dark Knight”

Supporting Actress
Penelope Cruz – “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”

Cinematography
Slumdog Millionaire – Anthony Dod Mantle

Screenplay
“Slumdog Millionaire” – Simon Beaufoy

Foreign Picture
“4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days”

Documentary
“Man on Wire”

Animated Feature
“Wall-E”

Score
Slumdog Millionaire – “A.R. Rahman”

Breakout Performance
Sally Hawkins – “Happy-Go-Lucky”

Debut As Director
Martin McDonagh – “In Bruges”

Ensemble Performance
“Milk”

Pictures (alphabetical)
“Che”
“A Christmas Tale”
“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
“The Dark Knight”
“Happy-Go-Lucky”
“Milk”
“Rachel Getting Married”
“Slumdog Millionaire”
“Wall-E”
“The Wrestler”

In Theaters

Director Stephen Daldry stacks the deck in The Reader in a way that’s downright unseemly. The cinematography—courtesy of the quality-cinema tag-team of Roger Deakins and Chris Menges—alternates between sere minimalism and luscious beauty. Its core moral issues are framed in a pleasingly clearheaded fashion. Ralph Fiennes lends his tight-lipped gravitas, while Bruno Ganz balances out the steadfastness with some puckish aphorisms. It’s all quite well-calibrated, too much so. But when it comes to Kate Winslet, Daldry wisely steps out of the way and allows her to take over his movie.

The Reader and Doubt are in limited release, to open wider later in the month; full reviews for both are in this week’s “The Screener” column.

In Theaters

In Frost/Nixon, Ron Howard’s perfectly palatable film of Peter Morgan’s Broadway drama about David Frost’s historic 1977 interview with ex-president Richard Nixon, the parallels to our current times are striking. From imperial executive overreach to paranoid defensiveness, cartoon-skewed media image, and a scorched-earth attitude towards enemies (real and imagined), the end of the Nixon and Bush II eras have more in common than is comfortable for the average American liberal to comprehend…

Frost/Nixon is in limited release now; you can read the full review in this week’s “The Screener” column at PopMatters.

In Theaters

If there was ever a movie to make somebody regret that they had any familiarity with the Harry Potter universe, it would be the astoundingly irritating Potter fandom documentary We Are Wizards. Josh Koury’s smartly-shot but lazily self-indulgent work seems to be attempting to follow in the footsteps of such fan-exploratory films as Trekkies. Unfortunately, it takes a subject of potentially great pop-anthropological interest and turns it into an object of such airtight self-satisfaction that one escapes it wishing never to hear about the boy wizard ever again….

We Are Wizards is playing in limited release now. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.

In Theaters

It isn’t that [director Marc] Forster is trying to be too clever by half in Quantum of Solace, though. The problem is easier than that: he doesn’t appear to know what makes Bond different from any other spy out there. Prior to Royale (which Quantum tries to ape but consistently gets all wrong), there was certainly a lot of dead franchise weight that needed to be shed. All those hokey mannerisms, and the “Bond, James Bond” ticks that kept popping up in rigidly formulaic film after film. After a while, it was only the girls who were different, and even they began to blur together. Does anybody really remember anything about the Pierce Brosnan films? Casino Royale cut through all that and gave us a Bond who was certainly leaner and meaner, but also much closer to the charmingly callous and arrogant bastard whom Ian Fleming had originally imagined. There seemed a hint of a real person inside that tuxedo….

Quantum of Solace is playing everywhere in the known universe, should you choose to see it. You can read the full review in this week’s “The Screener” column at PopMatters.

In Theaters

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father is a film that nobody should ever feel forced to make, but just about everybody should see. It’s a story about a murder, made by the victim’s oldest friend, and structured as a cinematic letter to the victim’s son Zachary, a boy he would never know. The people involved are all too real, composed of both a goodness and evil that one never sees convincingly created in narrative film; neither the villains nor heroes here would quite be believed, which is just part of what gives filmmaker Kurt Kuenne’s documentary such wrenching pathos…

Dear Zachary is playing now in limited release. You can read the full review at filmcritic.com.