Author name: Blake Williams

Doubt caught me off guard and was almost terrific. I don’t know why I had such low expectations given the amazing cast. Hoffman obviously steals the show, as Streep, while still very very good, felt to me like she was retreading her role in The Devil Wears Prada. This movie is a great demonstration of an argument. The whole thing is basically about an argument, and how gossip and absence of proof can magnify tiny things. A priest holds a few private meetings with the lone black boy at a Catholic school, one of which ends with the boy’s breath smelling like alcohol, which sets in motion a chain of events that make a great example of how to not seek the truth. The central sermon in the film about gossip is spectacular, equating the act to scattered feathers with a beautiful, if unnecessary, visualization of what he is speaking about.

There are a couple of scenes, though, that almost pushed the film off the rails. The first was the scene involving the boy’s mother, played by Viola Davis. I’ve been hearing rumors that Davis steals the show, that her one scene shames everyone else in the film, and this just isn’t true. I think that she completely overacts in this, just like she does in Soderberg’s Solaris. Her dialogue was poorly written, too, jumbling up what might have been an interesting development into a convoluted, ‘what the hell is she getting at’ rant that sounded ridiculous coming from a mother who has just been informed that a priest may be seducing her son. Most people in my theatre, including myself, were laughing at this.

And the other scene that doesn’t work is, unfortunately, the final scene, which left me with a worse taste in my mouth than this film deserved. This scene involves Streep, in which her character makes a couple of confessions of her own, one of which clearly tries to sum up the film with a bright beautiful bow, how all of the characters experience Doubt in the film. I would have been fine with the film ending with Hoffman’s third and final sermon of the film, which was better acted and written than Streep’s scene. All in all though, a nice, ambiguous portrait of three religious people trying to prove things that they have no means of proving. This is a very frustrating situation to be in, and that frustration that I felt very much while watching it.

A surprisingly good superhero movie is, so far, still just a superhero movie. Iron Man is mostly good because of the acting. Robert Downey Jr. is on a hot streak right now by playing different permutations of the same sarcastic and witty character. It kind of felt like I was watching Harry from Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang as a geeky, suave superhero. Gwyneth Paltrow is remarkably inoffensive as the love interest that, intelligently, is never completely won over in this film. The relationship is just kind of put on hold in the background, which will most likely and unfortunately be further explored in the unnecessary sequels.

One of the things I do like about Iron Man is that, other than Unbreakable, it is the most camouflaged superhero movie that I have seen. One could watch the first hour of this film and not get the impression that it is in the superhero genre. It is played out as a the story of a smart man who develops something that is useful for his situation. The film is more interested in being a well-made action movie than anything else, and it succeeds at that.

My main problem with it is one of the main problems that I have with all superhero films, which is that the film tries to spread a pacifist message of ‘I’m fighting to end all wars and violence and to protect the people’ but is filmed in a manner that portrays the fight scenes as graceful, well-choreographed spectacles that the audience is clearly intended to admire. I’m still waiting for the mainstream, anti-violence movie with fight scenes that really make the fighting look unappealing. But other than that, there is nothing really wrong with this film, nothing I have to see again, but certainly the best superhero movie released in 2008.

This might have made a decent short film, about 20 minutes long. I’d recommend anyone watching this, actually, to stop it after 20 minutes and take it as a short, because after that point it becomes completely repetitious, so much so that I cannot right now remember any specific scenes as being near the the beginning or near the end. It was like the same thing playing over and over again, only with Malkovich becoming more and more annoying as time wears on. Speaking of John Malkovich, I think that I don’t like him as an actor after this film. I haven’t seen too many things with him, maybe four or five, but he is the same character in everything. He reminds a little bit of Samuel L. Jackson actually. There was an homage to the one good film that I have seen him in, Being John Malkovich, that came off just as lazy as the rest of the film.

Basically, this film was trying to honor Stanley Kubrick in an interesting way and failed. A man took advantage of Kubrick’s reclusion from the press and pretended to be him to benefit from the perks of fame, like free entrance to clubs, extra trust from people expecting money, and a general kindness from strangers. This could have been pulled off very well, but there is no development at all for this man, why he feels the need to do this, why he’s chosen Mr. Kubrick (he’s clearly not a fan as he couldn’t even remember his somewhat sparse filmography), or the relationship between this stunt and his blatant homosexuality. Instead, it is scene after scene of him conning people until they discover that he is not Kubrick. It was fun the first time, boring the second, and annoying the rest. And John Malkovich acts like John Malkovich, again.

This was significantly less annoying than I was expecting, and I would go as far to say that I really, really liked it. Poppy, the protagonist pictured in the poster to the right, is excessively cheerful and optimistic. I keep hearing that she’s a girl that is just happy all of the time, which is also implied in the title, but I don’t know that I would describe her as always happy. She says ‘hello’ to just about anyone and tries to start up conversations with strangers, talks quickly and has a really funny sense of humor, and she calmly shrugs it off when her bike is stolen, but I think that she is just very good at avoiding annoyances and wants people to feel better after spending time with her. The great thing about this film is that it shows how her ‘happiness’ isn’t actually working in the way she’d like it to, and often does the opposite for people.

One criticism I do have is that the film feels a little black and white. The happy people are really happy, and the unhappy people are flat out miserable, misanthropic, and, in one case, satanic. Obviously, it’s a little more grey than that, but it’s Sally Hawkins acting and Mike Leigh’s writing that makes it so it all remains feeling natural. There is a strange scene between Poppy and a homeless man that is one of the most beautiful scenes I saw this year. The ending is really intense, and the final scene is perfect in an ‘everything is back to normal, but what is normal?’ kind of way.

This is one of the only films that I have seen that is about criticism, and it is massively impressive that it not only portrays it so well, but that it is disguised as a family animation film. Another big theme in the movie, that genius can come from anywhere, is nice but somewhat trite, and I’m glad that the film’s climax involved the food critic Anton Ego to steer the film more toward that direction. Ego is perfect; he reminds me of one of my high school art teachers, who manages to be both snobby and charming. This just edges out Finding Nemo as my favorite Pixar film, and it is exponentially more interesting than Wall-E.

It is good to see Brad Bird back, after The Incredibles disappointed me as just a plain action superhero movie after his Iron Giant, which is just about perfect. I see he is making a live-action film next, here’s hoping it goes over as well as his animated films do, and I can’t wait to see how he directs people (as opposed to just their voices).

After I saw Sunshine, I convinced myself that Danny Boyle would one day make something truly great. Sunshine was brilliant for the first two acts (as good as a film can be that has a crew of astronauts flying into a sun to reignite it) before it became terrible, and his 28 Days Later and Trainspotting were more consistently good without ever being great. With Slumdog Millionaire, be goes completely in the opposite direction, embracing a sort of audience-friendly Oscar sure-thing that immediately falls in the same category as Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, and possibly even Haggis’ Crash. Half feel-good indie film and half pseudo culturally significant, ‘pat myself on the back because I was able to make it through, and even enjoy (!), a film that is mostly subtitled” schmaltz field. The subtitles even jump around the frame, locating themselves next to the speaker in crazy colors like blue, green, and orange.

The premise is okay. A teenager named Jamal is on the India version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” and he isn’t actually intelligent enough to know the sort of questions that are commonly on the show. But, all of the questions are remarkably familiar to him. The film is structured in a way that you see the question asked on the show, and then the film has a flashback to an early part of Jamal’s traumatic childhood to reveal the event that shows us why he knows the answer to the question. Not a bad set up. Except that every flashback makes Jamal’s life seem more and more miserable. Oh, you thought it was bad that he had to escape from a latrine by jumping in a pool of shit? Just wait until you see the fucked up sway his mother dies! Oh, you think that’s terrible? How about how his childhood dream girl is sold into prostitution! Man, Jamal got a raw deal.

But it’s ok. He gets the girl, and the money, as you can predict 5 minutes in. This is the favorite for the Best Picture Oscar. Okay, then.

This is a dynamic list, so it’ll be updated each time I see a film which had its world premiere in 2007 that is better than at least one of the films already on the list.

This second time seeing Silent Light was a lot more relaxing than the first. The bath in the lake is somehow hypnotically perfect. I always thought that scenes involving bathing or washing had a strange lulling effect that comforts me to the point of nearly falling asleep. I’m not sure what it is. The same happens for me in the disgusting dirty bath scene near the end of Gummo, the lone good thing in that movie. Shampooing hair just does it for me, I guess.

But the bathing scene here is only one of many entrancing moments in this impossibly huge artistic improvement over Reygadas’ slimy, pretentious Battle in Heaven. Not that Silent Light doesn’t have its pretentious moments. I can think of several, actually; the out-of-focus track into a pink flower being the most ‘huh?’ Most of the tracks I felt an awareness of the aspect ratio that I thought was something new. Reygadas often tracks the camera, with its very wide 2.35:1 ratio, into narrow doorways, making me feel as if I am squishing into the space.

I also appreciated his use of clocks more this time. Stopping the clock in the kitchen at the beginning of the film, beeping wristwatch at the news of a character’s death, starting a clock at the moment of SPOILER resurrection END SPOILER. The film has a huge interest in time, daylight, and maybe even vampirism, and I admit that I still haven’t put it all together, but it is still a great thing to see, and a great example of magical realism in contemporary cinema.

One of the worst films that I have ever seen by an ‘important’ filmmaker, Mouchette seems to be daring me to hate it more than I should. Horrible acting, editing, effects work, and direction across the board, there is only one scene that is worth anything in this graciously short (81 min.) exploration of misanthropy.

The scene takes place at a carnival in which Mouchette is playing in the bumper cars. She and everyone else ram each other, aimlessly steering their vehicles backwards and forwards, and she makes contact with a boy’s car, and the two exchange flirtatious glances and then continue to circle each other around the rink taking turns bumping each other’s cars. Sometimes, the bumping gets quite violent and I am surprised that the actors didn’t suffer from whiplash. The harder they start to ram each of their cars together, though, the more flirtatious Mouchette and this boy become. I always thought that bumper cars were a great tool for seducing someone. I remember that I would always target only my best friends, or would usually go most after the person I had the hots for. When Mouchette and the boy get out of the bumper cars, they become very bashful toward one another, and can barely muster enough courage to approach the other. This reminds me of the peacocks that live on my street that I grew up on in Houston, who will run away from a human who walks toward them on foot, but will walk right up to someone who is sticking his head and arms out of a moving, giant automobile. Or how pedestrians in a city will flick off rude drivers but never do anything if an offensive person is standing right in front of them.

I love A Man Escaped, but after this and Au Hasard, Balthazar, I am starting to question if Bresson is for me. Like I mentioned in the paragraph I posted after I watched Au Hasard, Balthazar, I do not understand the theory that Bresson is making spiritual films. He made a film that shows a girl (who cannot even be considered a saint, she is kind of a brat) tormented for no reason by sane adults in the community, while her mother is dying and her father drunkenly stumbles around. There is never any reason for anyone to treat her this way, I am just supposed to accept that life is tough for some people; they draw the short straw, and are treated cruelly for no reason at all. No wonder Mouchette drowned herself (the looping water also makes for one of the worst editing distractions that I’ve ever seen in the final shot of a film).

So far I have seen embarrassingly few of Werner Herzog’s films, all of them documentaries: Grizzly Man, Lessons of Darkness, and now Encounters and the End of the World. I own both of Anchor Bay’s box sets, so I really don’t have any excuses. January is going to be my Herzog month, where I hope I’ll see everything I own by him. As I’ve come to understand with just these three docs, Herzog loves insanity. He also seems pretty pessimistic about humans, hypothesizing that it is in our nature to self-destruct.

This film works as a series of mini portraits of a range of individuals who have spent a significant amount of time living and working near our planet’s south pole. While one presumes that these studies will provide insight into the effects of isolation, consistently freezing temperatures, and inconsistent day and night cycles, the film instead focuses on more random quirks of the continent’s inhabitants, such as the man who has equal-length pinky and index fingers on both of his hands because of his Native American heritage, or the underwater diver who likes to show his crew cult science fiction films. The more interesting parts are when the subjects speak about their jobs, or upcoming retirement. The film will probably be most remembered for the ‘deranged’ penguin that Herzog deems insane as it marches toward a distant mountain range, mostly likely to its death. The concept of insanity occurring in the animal world is an interesting one even though I doubt it is a new idea. He also questions the idea of homosexuality in the penguin world, which is fun to ponder but again nothing new.

The film’s most beautiful moment involves the sounds that seals make under water. It sounds almost completely unnatural and synthetic, and should inspire electronic composers to capture some recordings of their calls to sample in their compositions.

The entire experience of watching Encounters at the End of the World is enjoyable, but without a clear focus it misses having a lasting impact on me, and settles for being minor, but still good.