the movie club
The Movie Club
In praise of "Gimme an Oscah" performances.
By Dan Kois, Karina Longworth, Matt Zoller Seitz, Dana Stevens, and Stephanie Zacharek
Updated Friday, Jan. 7, 2011, at 4:11 PM ET
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From: Dana Stevens
To: Dan Kois, Karina Longworth, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Stephanie Zacharek
Subject: Looking for Trouble in Your Top 10 Lists
Posted Monday, Jan. 3, 2011, at 12:45 PM ET
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Dear all:
Thanks so much for joining the Slate Movie Club this year. Two of you, Stephanie and Dan, I've happily clubbed with in the past, and the other two, Matt and Karina, I've long wanted to engage in conversation. We don't get a chance to talk much during the year as we duck in and out of darkened screening rooms—especially since two of you, Karina and Dan, do your ducking in other cities. So this post-holiday Movie Club is always a dreamy week for me, a chance to take stock of those hundreds of hours we spend immobile in front of giant flickering rectangles. (Estimating conservatively, I've probably put in 300 hours at the movies this year, and I suspect I see far fewer than some of you.)
Since this first post will be the only one starting from zero, let me take a quick tour of all your 10 best lists—in Matt's case, a roundup of video essays on the best individual scenes of the year—and see what rabble I can rouse. Dan, I notice you're the only one of us to have put Black Swan on your top 10. I'm not asking you to defend that choice—I didn't hate the movie, though I thought it failed on the terms it set for itself (more on those terms below). Draw me a flowchart of the pleasure you experienced in that film, because I'm genuinely flummoxed by people's swooning love for it.
In his recent consideration of Black Swan for Slate, Dennis Lim asks: Is the film intended as camp, or is it appropriating camp tropes (the victimized ballerina, the passive-aggressive stage mother, the leering Svengali ballet master) to do something different? And if so, what? For all its virtuosic technique, Black Swan seemed to flail tonally, unsure of how to combine body-horror voyeurism with an after-school-special-like focus on the travails of its virginal heroine. Natalie's artistic apotheosis at the end felt like a pure narrative contrivance. And—the one commonality tying together all of Aronofsky's films so far—so little humor! (Though I did laugh at the moment when the dancer costumed as the evil wizard Rothbart passes by an overwrought Natalie in the wings and proffers a hilariously casual, "Hey.")
Karina, I loved how you kicked off your Top 10 list with some musings about this year's preponderance of epistemological mind fucks at the movies. Catfish, Exit Through the Gift Shop, I'm Still Here, and in the non-documentary format, Shutter Island, Inception, The Ghost Writer, and others asked the quintessential 3 a.m. dorm-room question you summarize as "How do you know that what you think is real is actually, like, really real?"
As soon as you start to think about it, the circle of films that posed some version of that riddle won't stop widening: Dogtooth, Salt, Black Swan, even Greenberg all in some way forced the viewer to continually re-address disorienting questions like "Did what I think just happened really happen?," "What sort of movie am I watching, anyway?," and "How am I supposed to feel about this?" Some of these films (Shutter Island, for example) manage, or at least try, to pull off 180-degree genre shifts midway through. Others (I'm Still Here) seem intended to mock their audience for having believed the bill of goods the movie initially tried to sell them. Given that your list hints at a personal predilection for movies that yank the viewer's chain—Harmony Korine's faux-found documentary Trash Humpers was your no. 1—I wonder if you have further thoughts to share about the state of cinematic chain-yanking.
Matt, I was amused by how the scene from The Social Network that you considered worthy of close reading on your scenes-of-the-year list was my least favorite moment in the movie: the part where the Winklevoss twins lose a crew race on the Thames to the strains of Trent Reznor-arranged Grieg. And Stephanie, before the Club is over, you and I have to talk Somewhere. Now let me quickly fire up the Italian historical drama Vincere—one of Stephanie's favorites—in the DVD player while Dan takes up the baton for the next post. It's a full day's work keeping up with you people.
Epistemologically,
Dana
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From: Dan Kois
To: Karina Longworth, Matt Zoller Seitz, Dana Stevens, and Stephanie Zacharek
Subject: My Flowchart Explains the Trashy Greatness of Black Swan
Posted Monday, Jan. 3, 2011, at 2:48 PM ET
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Hello, Movie Clubbers!
I was hard at work on my thoughtful defense of Black Swan when I was struck down by a 24-hour bug that confined me to bed all New Year's Day. Reportedly, I wandered into my front yard wearing pajamas, and also I managed to watch five minutes of the Rose Bowl, but mostly I was afflicted by feverish nightmares of Barbara Hershey, shattered mirrors, and the terrifying Texas Christian mascot SuperFrog. Talk about a mind-fuck!
Then I woke up and found that A.O. Scott—my dark swan?!—said all the stuff I was gonna say, except better. So I'll just follow Dana's instructions and draw you a flowchart.
So what did I think of Black Swan? I thought it was a fucking piece of trash, and I totally loved it. I use trash here, as distinct from camp, which I think Dennis is right to conclude the movie has only a glancing relationship with. Trash is usually used pejoratively, but in light of my delighted response to Black Swan—and other examples of wonderful recent trash, like Inglourious Basterds, Enter the Void, and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy—it's come to mean something different to me.
The best trash gleefully appropriates any and all tropes—camp tropes, horror tropes, Expressionism, first-person shooters, long Chris Rock routines—and combines it with top-drawer talent and inspiration as a way of bashing high and low together to generate sparks. And it's the sparks that matter, for while a movie as elegant as I Am Love, as ambitious as Carlos, or as tonally consistent as Toy Story 3 still can wow me, there's a real charge to undergoing the kind of sensation that Black Swan put me through: the feeling that the movie's going off the rails, and I'm happily going with it.
What do y'all think? Is it time for some aspirational cultural critic to write "Notes on 'Trash' " for whatever this era's equivalent of the Partisan Review is? (Urban Dictionary?) Karina, given that I still haven't even seen the actual movie that came out this year about people, like, humping trash, perhaps I should cede the stage to you. I'd love to hear more from you about your No. 1 movie, and also about your "Number 11"—James Brooks' How Do You Know, a movie liked by me and you and nobody we know.
May SuperFrogs haunt your dreams,
Dan
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From: Karina Longworth
To: Dan Kois, Matt Zoller Seitz, Dana Stevens, and Stephanie Zacharek
Subject: Trash Humpers and the Importance of WTF? Picks
Posted Monday, Jan. 3, 2011, at 3:56 PM ET
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Hello Movie Clubbers,
I guess it was inevitable that I would become the Trash Humpers Girl. I reiterate—only because it's become something of an issue online since my list was published—that it's a completely sincere choice.
That said, of course part of the fun of choosing Harmony Korine's barely released, banned-by-Netflix, shot-on-VHS (!) provocation as my film of the year was knowing that it wouldn't be a common choice and hoping that it would start a conversation. Not very long ago, before I was professionally mandated to create year-end top-10 lists and was purely a reader of them, I lived for the whiplash-inducing WTF? choices of a Hoberman or a Nathan Lee, picks that would force me to re-evaluate a film that I hadn't previously considered world-beating. And Trash Humpers is a film that I adamantly believe deserves to be part of some kind of canon, even if it'll never appeal to even a fraction of the audience reeled in by many of the year's zeitgeist-defining consensus choices. At the very least, it's not a dismissible prank or a lark. It is, in its own way, both special effects epic and costume drama, hyper-niche porn and staged, simulated snuff film—but what blockbuster isn't? Within that trendy subgenre of quasi-documentaries, Trash Humpers offered a rare aesthetic sense of purpose (and when it comes to fiction films that engage in what Dana referred to as "cinematic chain-yanking," its most striking images are more uncannily dreamlike, or at least nightmarelike, than a lot of Inception). At the same time, it's not just a formal experiment—I find it truly satisfying emotionally and dramatically. Of all the 2010 films to stumble over the "really real" question, for me Trash Humpers most powerfully revealed that question's ultimate irrelevance. And it's funny!
Now on to the other commercial and artistic extreme: As Dan noted, I've been calling How Do You Know my No. 11. I had to file my list a few days before they screened it here; I don't know if the movie would have replaced anything on my top 10, but I think it's a really special film, and I'm frankly not surprised that the public seems totally uninterested in it. As commercial product, it just doesn't work. I reviewed most of the year's studio rom-coms, and, in its defiant tonal chaos, How Do You Know exposes the extent to which the genre has become completely, well, generic. It operates on an internal rhythm and logic that's fully its own. And that Paul Rudd performance is phenomenal—splitting the difference between Albert Brooks and Jack Lemmon, his authentically troubled sad-sack heartthrob is an important corrective to contemporary romance's parade of loveable schlubs and pretty vacant boys. It made me cry, and not in a way that made me hate myself for doing so (see: Eat, Pray, Love). Sony, here's my pull quote: "It's the most convincing Hollywood romance since the advent of bromance."
As for the rest of my top 10, I'll let Stephanie tackle Somewhere––a film I really fell for but have already defended at length. I would love to hear from the rest of you as to what would have made your top 11-20. Depending on the day, mine would likely include Carlos, And Everything Is Going Fine, Disco and Atomic War, Lourdes, Life During Wartime, and—for pure escapist pleasure—Jackass 3-D, Piranha 3-D, and Tron: Legacy. And, yeah, I'm being sincere about that, too.
Love and other drugs,
Karina
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From: Matt Zoller Seitz
To: Dan Kois, Karina Longworth, Dana Stevens, and Stephanie Zacharek
Subject: My Inception Problem, and Yours
Posted Monday, Jan. 3, 2011, at 5:59 PM ET
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Dear Movie Clubbers,
Karina writes somewhat nostalgically about the days when she wasn't compelled to make Top 10 lists. I know the feeling—I felt it when I was one of those people who had to do it, when I was reviewing for Dallas Observer and New York Press. I used to rationalize the Top 10 list as an exercise, a snapshot, a yearly ritual. But I still dreaded it.
Why? First there's the matter of comprehensiveness. How could I label these particular films the year's best, I always asked myself, when I knew there were dozens of good or great movies that for whatever reason I hadn't seen? And I used to see about 300 theatrical releases a year—three times as many as I managed to see in 2010! (Still haven't seen Black Swan yet, but I plan to see it this week, having been forewarned that it would come up here—though not in flowchart form, Dan, you sneaky bastard.) Beyond that, taste evolves, and hindsight cools reactions to Films of the Moment. I bet almost everyone who makes Top 10 lists looks back at them years later and wonders why they put a certain movie on a list when they can barely remember a thing about it.
All of which is a prelude to saying I don't have a proper "10 Best" list to offer this time out. That's partly due to being a gypsy freelancer who's not tied to one publication or beat. But it's also due to my having shifted my focus in recent years. Most of the pieces I published in 2010 weren't straight reviews but pieces that took a macro- or a micro-view of movies and TV—everything from video essays about the life and work of Dennis Hopper, the cultural impact of 24, and the opening credits of David Fincher's movies, to pieces about the soul-sucking mediocrity of most superhero films, and how digital-era filmmaking clichés have destroyed the magic of stunts. It's either the microscope or the telescope for me—and that's increasingly how I like it.
In that spirit, here's a list of telescope and microscope subjects that I hope we'll examine.
1) The documentary (or "documentary") as conceptual art stunt—a category that includes such diverse films as I'm Still Here, Catfish, Exit Through the Gift Shop and Karina's favorite, Trash Humpers (which I reviewed, quite positively). These movies dealt with issues that don't often get examined outside semiotics classes: the fungibility of genre distinctions; the relationship between art and audience; the storyteller's right to blur fact and fiction and/or intentionally mislead viewers. Their impact extended beyond the art house, and at least one of them—Exit Through the Gift Shop—was a breakout popular success, deservedly so. Last summer my 13-year old daughter and 68-year old father went to see Exit together on my recommendation, loved it, then went to a deli and spent two hours discussing it. Talk about crossover appeal! Is this kind of movie a momentary blip on the radar or a harbinger of art house cinema's future?
2) The "3-D is the future of theatrical movies" meme, and the utopian fantasizing and cranky backlash that went with it. I suspect the fascination with 3-D is less about the (legitimate) fear that theatrical moviegoing is being threatened by home video and Internet piracy and more about a deeper shift that has made the computer the main venue for experiencing media—and life. Are we on our way to becoming Matrix people with data ports in the backs of our skulls? What does it to get people to turn off their laptops, desktops, iPads, iPhones, and spend a couple of hours experiencing popular art in the company of other humans?
3) Inception, aka the answer to the question posed at the end of 2). Karina writes that certain images in Trash Humpers "are more uncannily dreamlike, or at least nightmare-like, than a lot of Inception." I've noticed a lot of critics doing this—describing a favorite 2010 movie that was unconventionally structured and/or dealt in dream imagery as somehow being better than Inception. (I did it myself just last week in a video essay about one of my favorite 2010 films, Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island.) Clearly Inception is to 2010 what Avatar was to 2009 and Titanic was to 1997 and what the original Star Wars was to 1977—the box-office juggernaut that many critics find lacking, perhaps egregiously shallow and overrated, but that cast such a powerful spell over millions that they keep invoking it over and over to call attention to their own pets. So I have to ask: If we repeatedly deny the quality and effectiveness of a movie that enthralled the world, is that not a back-asswards way of endorsing it? If we ourselves cannot stop thinking and talking about Inception, might there in fact be something to it?
P.S. And have you seen this? I want to make it my ring tone.
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From: Stephanie Zacharek
To: Dan Kois, Karina Longworth, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Dana Stevens
Subject: Pleasure at the Movies, or Why I Loved The Tourist
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 4, 2011, at 10:29 AM ET
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Dear Dana, Dan, Matt and Karina,
Happy New Year to you all! I'm delighted to be here, among friends old and new.
I don't want to prolong the Black Swan debate too much, because Dan's flowchart really says it all. In fact, Dan, Black Swan would have been a much better movie if Aronofsky had used your chart as a storyboard.
That said, I enjoyed watching this silly ballerina-crackup saga and laughed all the way through—twice! But I can't even begin to think of it as the work of a mad genius, or even a sane one. It's more like the self-conscious work of a very, very self-aware wannabe genius—the whole thing reeks of calculation. In the Slate piece you referenced, Dana, Dennis Lim had a line I wish I'd written: "Aronofsky misses one of camp's most essential qualities: its tenderness." In the next paragraph he goes on to say, "Aronofsky, to put it bluntly, just loves a freak show." That's it: Aronofsky is aware every minute of how totally cray-zee his vision is, and he never lets us forget it.
Of course, all directors are self-conscious to a point—they're putting their vision on a screen for us, for Pete's sake. But watching Black Swan—even that bloody, feather-sprouting climax, which is technically very well done—I just hear Aronofsky's meter ticking. It's not like Amy Irving blowing up John Cassavetes in The Fury, which is both crazily organic and operatic. Black Swan feels goal-driven in its nuttiness, like a novelty pop tune of the '60s, a little ditty written for the kids out there in radioland, as opposed to, say, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," which seems to have been willed into being by its own pure need to exist.
On to other matters: Karina, I was struck less by the presence of Trash Humpers (which, I confess, I have not seen) at the top of your Top 10 list than by the fact that the movie's ranking on your list became, as you so delicately and tactfully put it, "something of an issue online." By that, I presume that a bunch of anonymous commenters, writing from the safety of their own little feetie pajamas, tore you a new one? I didn't scroll to the end of your list and thus have not actually read those comments. But I don't need to. My world-renowned Carnac the Magnificent abilities tell me that at least a few of these brain trusts called you a "contrarian" and claimed that you were "just making a name for yourself by saying the opposite of what everybody else is saying." So come clean, Karina: You don't really like Trash Humpers. It's just your plan to become more famous than, like, Abraham Lincoln. I knew it.
I just don't see what good a critic's, or anyone's, Top 10 list is unless you choose mostly from the heart or the gut. (And at some point this week, I do want to say a little about Somewhere, which is perhaps a movie I love beyond reason. But what other way is there?) As Matt just said, "I bet almost everyone who makes top 10 lists looks back at them years later and wonders why they put a certain movie on a list when they can barely remember a thing about it." Amen to that. On the other hand, the movies that I've put on lists that were, at the time, deemed wackadoodle choices (by the aforementioned feetie-pajama brigade, at least) are often the ones that have stuck with me for years: something like David Koepp's Ghost Town or Bob Dylan's America-as-dreamscape Masked and Anonymous, to choose a few randomly random examples.
The harder thing, for me, is drawing some big conclusion about the year that just passed, based on the movies that have or haven't made my particular list. So I just don't do that anymore. I think idiosyncratic, personal lists are the way to go—they're the only ones worth reading. As a prelude to my own list this year, I wrote about how most of the really interesting stuff happens in the bottom half of critics' lists. By that point, the pressure's off. You've already made your classy, unembarrassing choices (The Social Network, The King's Speech—two movies that, incidentally, made my list). The tail end of the list is where critics can go wild with the movies that just really got to them, or tickled them in some way. Things that are in some ways indefensible and yet may actually cut closer to the core of why we love movies in the first place. Those are also the movies that tend to invite jeers, mockery, and disdain from others, but who cares? They may end up being the movies you really remember in 10 years.
To that end, in addition to tangling with some of the questions Matt has raised, I'm curious about the No. 11's, the honorable mentions, the also-rans that may have appeared, or been tragically lopped off, your lists. Karina, I appreciate your defense of How Do You Know, especially in the context of all the other mainstream comedies (romantic or otherwise) that are foisted upon us year after year, so many of which try for so little. (I can't remember if Leap Year was a 2010 movie or a 2009 one. I know for sure it wasn't a 1939 one.) I'll take an interesting failure over a boring success any day. My personal favorite No. 11 this year is The Tourist, almost universally reviled, and yet I see it as striving for a kind of glamour and luxury that we rarely see in mainstream—or really any—movies these days. (The crass materialism of the hideous Sex and the City 2 doesn't count.) I fear that getting pleasure at the movies has become suspect. We feel much more comfortable when we're being punished by a Winter's Bone or a Biutiful. Pleasure is becoming the hardest thing to defend.
On that note, I remind you that Machete, starring the great Danny Trejo, arrives on DVD this week. Huzzah!
Yours,
Stephanie
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From: Dana Stevens
To: Dan Kois, Karina Longworth, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Stephanie Zacharek
Subject: I Like Films Where Nothing Happens, but That Doesn't Mean I Like Somewhere
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 4, 2011, at 1:00 PM ET
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Dear Matt, Karina, Dan, Stephanie, and readers:
Since Karina and Matt both mentioned a resistance to year-end lists, I'll stay on the meta-critical plane just long enough to say this: I understand the appeal of lists as bull-session chits, points of departure for discussion, and, of course, link-bait. But at the risk of sounding ungrateful about my awesome job, I'll say that I actively dislike compiling and writing lists. The culture of criticism—and, more generally, of consuming and appreciating film—is already so stratified and status-conscious. In practice, lists are anything but lists: They're badges, gauntlets, manifestos, masks. We're all familiar with this function of cultural taste as an identity marker that establishes one's place in some hierarchy of prestige or another. Carl Wilson's great book Let's Talk About Love, which I can't seem to stop mentioning since reading it a few years ago, dismantles this phenomenon with amazing concision.
Let's take it as a given that lists are there to be shared, debated, puzzled over, and then shredded into New Year's confetti. And, in response to something Matt wrote yesterday: The notion that these year-end lineups are ephemeral, that some of the movies on them might not matter in a decade either to the culture or to the author, bothers me not a bit. Years later, there is always something inscrutable about our past loves.
Dan, your flowchart leaves me speechless with joy. But it does nothing to change my opinion of Black Swan, which may just be one of those licorice movies that people either love or hate. Between the subject matter and the Grand Guignol approach, I still can't quite believe that movie didn't hold me. But I'll just have to acknowledge that one man's drink is another man's poison—and look forward to seeing the maternity gown that I hope the Mulleavy sisters (whose line, Rodarte, created the film's exquisite dance costumes) will be designing for Natalie to wear at the Oscars.
And Matt: That genius Inception button you link to—the one that allows you to summon at will a single, ear-shattering power chord from that movie's relentless Hans Zimmer score—answers your own question about Nolan's film. Even when it came out last summer, Inception was more a series of sensations than a movie—the filmic equivalent of an interactive haunted house where you're blindfolded and someone thrusts your hand into a bowl of peeled-grape "eyeballs." Six months later, all that remains are the sensations, which is why the Hans Zimmer button brings the entire Inception experience back in a single BrAAAAAHMMMM.
That said, there's no question Inception was an experience, and here we come back to your question about the future of theatrical movie viewing in actual theaters. The ponderous of-the-moment blockbusters that critics disdain and audiences enjoy tend to be movies whose effect depends on being seen in the theater—have any of you tried watching Avatar or Inception or The Dark Knight or The Matrix on DVD? These are movies that, whatever their strengths or weaknesses, give the audience a sense of being plunged into a different world than we lived in before the lights went down. So, although I found Inception a not-smart-enough film of ideas that was wildly overpraised by some, I appreciated its pugnacious insistence—BrAAAAAHMMMM—that we gather together and sit down in the dark and watch it.
I promised in the previous round that we'd get to Somewhere, so here goes. Somewhere, to me, was a lovingly crafted, impeccably acted, but vanishingly slight little movie. It was the work of a promising filmmaker, not yet an accomplished one. I've already talked at length about what didn't work for me in Somewhere both in my review and in a podcast discussion; what I'd like to consider here has to do with the reception of the movie.
I've noticed that, whenever I say in a public forum that I didn't love Somewhere, some critic or reader helpfully swoops in to inform me that, you know what, not every movie has to be a traditional Hollywood three-act narrative. Apparently there exists a whole tradition of films that are quiet and minimalist and subtle, films in which almost nothing (according to the crass plot-based formula I apparently subscribe to) "happens"! This is edifying for me, because in 30 years of cinema fandom I have never heard of or enjoyed anything by Bresson, Antonioni, Ophuls, or Ozu. Dude, I was thrilling to Ozu's deployment of silence when some of these patient explainers were still trying to unwrap their Bazooka bubble gum. I get what Sofia Coppola was trying to do in Somewhere—the problem, if anything, is that I get it at times to an eye-rolling "I get it!" degree.
Stephanie, I know you won't take that tack, because you're not a condescending jerk. Show me how to love Somewhere the way you do, not just in brief, luminous moments but as an aesthetic whole. I wasn't kidding when I kicked off my review by saying that I want to be one of those people who loves Sofia Coppola. Not just because so many of the cool kids do (you, Karina, A.O. Scott, Roger Ebert), but because, when I sit down to just about any movie, that's all I'm hoping for: to be swept away by love.
Dana
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From: Stephanie Zacharek
To: Dan Kois, Karina Longworth, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Dana Stevens
Subject: Somehow, There's Always a Man Responsible for Anything Sofia Coppola Has Achieved.
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 4, 2011, at 4:06 PM ET
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Hello, everyone—
Oh, Dana! I'm not sure it's in my power to make you love anything, not even a picture I love as fiercely as I do Somewhere. First off, though, it angers me that in defending a picture as simultaneously delicate and sturdy as Somewhere that anyone should use the old bullying technique of "you just don't get it because you're too conventional." Of course, bullies are everywhere—but Coppola doesn't need them.
Though I'm mortified that you've run into Coppola bullies, Dana (and pretty dumb ones at that), I more often see it from the other side. I'm surprised at how often I have to defend Coppola against charges of being elitist, a talentless benefactor of nepotism, or just plain boring. The last charge is the one I can at least comprehend: If her movies don't reach you, they don't reach you. Lord knows I've been in plenty of conversations where I sit poker-faced as a colleague or friend rhapsodizes about the understated genius of Kiarostami or Kieslowski or any number of obviously gifted filmmakers whom I simply find deadly dull. (Sometimes I'm sure they feel the same about some of my favorites, like Hou Hsiao-hsien or Apichatpong Weerasethakul.) It boils down to this: There are a million and one shades and styles of understatement. Of course you like films where nothing happens. You just may not like the nothing that happens to be happening in Somewhere.
Of course, I would say that that "nothing" is actually a very big something, but I'll concede that it's fine-grained. Coppola has the lightest touch of any American filmmaker working, but she also has very distinct fingerprints. Her sense of humor is oblique, when it's not downright odd. There's that sequence in Somewhere where Stephen Dorff's lost, disaffected movie star has been slathered with a chilly-looking mashed-potato substance as a prelude for some age-makeup that's being designed for him. And Coppola and her D.P., Harris Savides, train the camera on that droopy white face (we hear Dorff's noisy breathing on the soundtrack) for an inordinately long time, moving in verrrrry slowly. I don't know that there's an earth-shattering statement there demanding to be "gotten." It's like a knock-knock joke reinvented as a koan. (Actually, knock-knock jokes have a lot in common with koans, but let's save that discussion for another day.)
In general, I'd say the gathering of small moments in Somewhere either hits you or it doesn't. For instance, the way Elle Fanning, as Dorff's preternaturally self-contained daughter, calls room service to order the ingredients to make macaroni and cheese or eggs benedict, as opposed to just asking for the finished product. Later, after she's gone, Dorff decides to make dinner for himself, obviously a novelty for him: We see him dumping out a giant's portion of spaghetti in the colander because he clearly doesn't know how much to cook. There's a beautiful, subtle parallel there, which is the sort of thing Coppola is great at. She gives her actors the canvas to build their characters layer by layer, but each layer is like a wash of watercolor—the building of intensity is gradual.
I have loved every one of Coppola's films, for different reasons—even Marie Antoinette, which, incidentally, isn't "revisionist" in terms of how it views the title character. It actually follows Antonia Fraser's scholarship (which Coppola used as the basis for the film) quite closely. But I can't tell you how many times when I mention Coppola's name in casual or even critic-type conversations there's someone there to drain credit away from her. And usually they're guys. One male critic assured me that Francis Ford Coppola cut his daughter's early movies. Maybe it's true, but if so, how come they make a lot more sense than Tetro does? (Or at least they're movies I'd much rather watch.) When Sofia won the top prize in Venice, the wagging tongues immediately chalked up her achievement to the fact that her ex-boyfriend, Quentin Tarantino, was the chairman of the jury. Lost in Translation was a good movie—but only because Bill Murray was great in it. Somehow, there's always a man responsible for anything Coppola has achieved.
Oy, I'm so sick of it. Matt, in a Salon letters thread attached to the Somewhere review written by my former colleague (and pal!) Andrew O'Hehir, you noted that while you had mixed feelings about the movie, you found it curious "that these 'nepotism' and 'rich girl' complaints pop up every single time Sofia Coppola makes a new movie," while no one makes the same charge about films by Jason Reitman or Duncan Jones (David Bowie's son, who made Moon.) To add another name to the pile—though his dad wasn't a filmmaker—what about that slacker, Jean Renoir? Then there's the recurring charge that Sofia Coppola is out of touch with reality. She only cares about rich people, and who can relate to them? Yeah, wow, I'm so sick of those whiners in The Leopard—and that Visconti, what a numbnuts.
I could talk about Sofia Coppola and Somewhere all day. It's funny: Sofia Coppola makes these beautifully constructed, quiet, subtle movies. A lot of people think of them as "girly" movies. But when I get talking about her, and them, my testosterone level gets cranked up higher than it does when I'm writing about Quentin Tarantino or Sam Peckinpah or Sam Fuller—any of the toughest tough-guy filmmakers you can think of.
So off I go—not with a meow but a roar.
Yours,
Stephanie
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From: Dan Kois
To: Karina Longworth, Matt Zoller Seitz, Dana Stevens, and Stephanie Zacharek
Subject: David O. Russell Is Wasting His Crazy Talent on Movies Like The Fighter.
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 4, 2011, at 5:05 PM ET
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Dear Movie Club,
I love making lists. God, I love it so much.
Long before I actually got paid to write about culture, I made year-end lists. In some dusty archive is preserved, to my horror I'm sure, the list I made for Whitefish Bay High School's Tower Times of the 10 best albums of 1991, which consisted of the 10 albums I'd been able to afford to purchase in 1991. And on my computer's hard drive, I have movie lists dating back to when I was typing them on a Mac that looked like the Banana Junior 6000.
Making a list seemed to me to stand as the ultimate perk of being a critic: the chance to weigh in, authoritatively, on the canon, to declare deserving movies masterpieces and demote the frauds to also-ran status, in one itemized flourish. Much later, I realized that the real pleasures of writing about movies were in, as Matt notes, the telescope and the microscope. But that doesn't mean I stopped loving lists.
What I'm saying here is that it was a piece of cake to round up my Nos. 11-20. (If anyone wants to know what No. 31 was in, like, 2000, let me know.) The movies that hovered at the edge of my top 10 this year were And Everything Is Going Fine, Animal Kingdom, Easy A, Four Lions, Harry Potter 7A, How Do You Know, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Night Catches Us, and Winter's Bone. My beloved "No. 11," in Karina's coinage, is Tanya Hamilton's debut Night Catches Us, an old-fashioned indie about ex-Black Panthers in Philly—"old-fashioned" in that it's a talky, nicely shot drama about people without much money. Its box office is dismal despite the kind of thoughtful praise in the Times that used to guarantee some heat; despite its terrific cast (Anthony Mackie, Kerry Washington, Wendell Pierce); despite a bangin' soundtrack by the Roots, for goodness sakes.
I agree with Karina about How Do You Know, whose laughable title—might as well call it How Could You Remember—certainly didn't help its commercial prospects. (Although it's already made literally 500 times as much as Night Catches Us.) And like Karina, I thought Rudd's performance was a major achievement, helped along by James Brooks' inspired decision to give his leading man at least as many long, dewy close-ups as Her Reeseness. I can't think of that many actors who could hold the camera so securely as Rudd; he's alive with feeling in this movie. All the characters, in fact, have exquisitely well-thought-out emotional trajectories—ones that might not be the same as mine or yours, but which are recognizably human nonetheless. (It also features an all-time great romcom best-friend performance from Kathryn Hahn, who in this movie, happily, is the best friend of the guy, not the girl, and never once is forced to pine for him from afar. She has a Prince Charming of her own.)
Regarding Somewhere, all I can say is: Dana, you say "I get it," but YOU DON'T GET IT. When he is driving the car around in circles it is because also his LIFE is going around in CIRCLES, like it is DIRECTIONLESS. BrrrAAAAAAAHHHHHMMMMM!!!!
Before I sign off, I want to ask you guys about The Fighter. It appears on none of our top 10 lists, although Matt's Twitter feed suggests he just saw it (and really liked it.) Along with The King's Speech, though, it's the December prestige film that seems to be ascending in the cultural firmament, rapturously received by critics and civilians alike.
But did you guys think it just seemed really … square? Matt, I know it's not a "sports movie" per se, but that didn't stop me from sighing with exasperation when the film followed a well-acted and sharply written family showdown with, like, a straight-up training montage. And while I can't deny the power of the catharsis that the Eklunds undergo, my pleasure was tempered by grim anticipation, knowing now I'd have to watch to see if Micky Ward won the WBU championship. I don't give a shit whether Micky Ward won the WBU championship, and if I did, I would already know whether Micky Ward won the WBU championship. I want the movie to reach an emotional climax, not a 10-minute boxing climax. (Yes, I know, to the Eklunds the boxing match is an emotional climax, but not to me.)
And sure, David O. Russell did a terrific job directing The Fighter. But is this really the kind of movie we want our David O. Russells directing? Any competent welterweight could punch his way through this story, but Russell is some kind of mad MMA genius. His anarchic energy seems to have been restricted, in The Fighter, to picking out patterns for Christian Bale's Zubaz. I don't mind back-to-basics filmmaking, when fiendishly inventive filmmaking machines cleanse their palates; True Grit and Summer Hours are great, for example. But David O. Russell has made five films in 16 years! He doesn't have time to waste by making better versions of Clint Eastwood movies!
Yes, yes, Russell probably needed just this kind of movie to maintain his viability after the collapse of Nailed—his awesome-sounding, abandoned, likely never-to-be-released comedy about Jessica Biel getting shot in the head with a nail gun, becoming a nymphomaniac, and going to Washington with an anal-prolapse-suffering Tracy Morgan to fight for health care reform. (I know!) After all, Darren Aronofsky needed to make the meat-and-potatoes The Wrestler after the expensive, crazypants souffle The Fountain. Here's hoping that after The Fighter garners him all due acclaim, Russell continues following Aronofsky's lead and makes something as nutty as Black Swan. I Heart Huckabees Too, anyone?
Yours in Zubaz,
Dan
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From: Karina Longworth
To: Dan Kois, Matt Zoller Seitz, Dana Stevens, and Stephanie Zacharek
Subject: The Painfully Awkward Sex Award Goes To ...
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2011, at 10:26 AM ET
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Hello again,
To briefly address a few topics/points thrown out there by each of you—
Stephanie: Funny anecdote related to that rumor about Sofia relying on her daddy to cut her films—I wrote a 4,500-word story on Somewhere for the cover of my publication, and someone I work with sent me a note asking why I failed to mention that Sofia's dialogue in Godfather III was obviously dubbed by another actress. (An odd rumor, I thought, because if it were true, wouldn't it at least partially let Sofia off the hook for her universally panned performance?) Whether it's sexism or reverse-classism or just plain bitchery, so many of her detractors seem to want to talk about something other than what she's actually putting on-screen.
Dana: Actually, I didn't mean to imply that I'm resistant to creating Top 10 lists—just that, because I was as a civilian heavily influenced by critic lists, I feel a certain kind of pressure when creating my own. It may not be my favorite part of the job, but like all the other small annoyances of this gig—to quote Deconstructing Harry out of context—it still beats the hell out of waitressing.
Matt: Of course, in an attention economy, adding to the conversation in any way, even if it's in a negative spirit, is some kind of endorsement. The fact that Inception is a juggernaut is probably one reason why so many of us find it useful to mention it in relation or in contrast to lesser-seen films—it's a reference that everyone gets, which is a rare thing in our fragmented culture. But I admit, I need to be more careful about referencing Film Z in discussions of Film X—that became abundantly clear to me when I saw the headline, "Karina Longworth Prefers The Human Centipede to Another Year." (In fact, I kind of do, but I didn't actually write that.)
Regarding 3-D: Here in Los Angeles, conversations tend to skew away from a film's merits, and toward industry trends and money, and so I've heard the same spiel about 3-D many times: that first and foremost, it's a method by which studios can charge more for individual movie tickets, thus goosing opening weekend totals, which is important for all the usual reasons but also because, increasingly, the way to get mid-range adopters to back away from the Netflix or Xbox or whatever is to convince them that there's a cultural phenomenon going on out there that they have to be part of. Which is all probably true, and I certainly had 3-D experiences this year in which, had I paid for a ticket rather than RSVPed to a screening, I would have felt cheated.
But as I admitted in my previous Movie Club missive, some of the purest pleasure I had at the movies this year came via 3-D films. Tron: Legacy was a particular surprise for me. I saw the original in the theater when I was a child but wouldn't call myself a fan and wasn't expecting much from the reboot. I certainly wasn't expecting a Christian allegory barely concealed within a bizarre-world mashup of The Big Lebowski and Speed Racer with an actor best known for impersonating Tony Blair cameoing as Ziggy Stardust. This is cinema!
Dan: I have absolutely nothing to say about The Fighter, which is, of course, saying something about The Fighter. As an ardent fan of I Heart Huckabees, here's hoping for The Full Russell sometime soon. Also, I hear you on Night Catches Us—what a mood that film creates. Best Sexual Tension of the year, perhaps?
Speaking of sex, allow me to simultaneously goose this post's SEO value and sneak in a mention of two more of my favorite 2010 films by dropping a few more random, highly specific awards. My pick for Best Painfully Awkward Sex goes to Greenberg. (Dana, I see Blue Valentine, a film about which I have very mixed feelings, on your Top 10—care to argue?) And for Character-Defining Nudity, does anything beat the mirror scene in Carlos?
Over to the next,
Karina
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From: Matt Zoller Seitz
To: Dan Kois, Karina Longworth, Dana Stevens, and Stephanie Zacharek
Subject: Emotion is the Gateway Drug to All Cinephilia
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2011, at 2:01 PM ET
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First things first: The Fighter. Dan, you ask if I thought the movie was a little square, then you go on to ask (rhetorically) if a director as brilliantly gonzo as David O. Russell ought to be expending his talents on such a conventional movie. The answer to both questions is yes. The Fighter is very conventional in its outlines. I wouldn't give it any prizes for aesthetic daring, except for the way it interweaves documentary or TV sports footage into the fabric of the movie proper. But it's still an unusual, heartfelt work.
As I've said before, it's not really a sports film because nobody in the movie finds fulfillment through sports. Boxing is just what Micky* does; when the film starts, he's already good at it. The real fights in The Fighter occur in living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens and on public streets. (Notice how the bout titles never appear over shots of boxing matches; they always occur in the very last shot of a scene preceding a bout, over an image of Ward and/or his family.) The Fighter is about how hard it is for talented people to transcend working-class or poor origins and reach their fullest potential without repudiating their roots. It's about people figuring out how to love each other without validating each other's manipulations and self-deceptions. The movie is a family drama about a guy trying to figure out how to succeed at what he does. Job No. 1 is identifying the forces stopping Micky from achieving his potential, then neutralizing them without permanently harming anyone's feelings.
In context of this here Slate Movie Club thingy, a yearly metacritical roundtable (or as the French like to say, wankfest) the word "feelings" is quite important, and should be. (Grabs soapbox; stands on it.) There is an entire subset of film criticism (not represented in this year's Movie Club, and certainly not by Stephanie, whose byline should be heralded by the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse music from Raising Arizona) that sneers at the very idea of doing such a thing. It's not scholarly or contextual and lacks the pretense of detachment, and hence cannot be "real" criticism, and if you do it, you're not writing about movies, you're writing about your feelings. Bullshit. We can talk about composition and cutting and long takes vs. short takes and video vs. film endlessly; God knows I have. And we can put movies in context of the industry or TV or the Internet or wider trends in the arts. And we should; we absolutely should. But it's also important for critics to remind themselves daily of the fact—the fact! not opinion, fact!—that most viewers don't give one-hundredth a damn about any of that stuff.
They should give a damn. One of the reasons mainstream movies are so generally mediocre to awful is because the ability of the average viewer to read images is only slightly better than their ability to read text. And the system likes it that way; it's much easier to crank out variations on cheeseburgers than to challenge moviegoers' aesthetic palates and expand their range of acceptable cuisine. But viewers won't give a damn about the aesthetic, political, and social components of filmgoing if we don't open the door of personal response—emotion, minus the whithers and wherefores and qualifiers, the wearily above-it-all routine—to lead them to a consideration of films outside their comfort zones.
How can we critics do this? By starting at the core and working our way out; by talking first about the heart of the film—what the movie is saying about the characters and world it depicts; whether or not what's on screen bears the slightest relation to the truth as we have experienced it; the feelings the movie evokes in us and why and how it evokes those feelings. Emotion is the gateway drug to all cinephilia—and I don't just mean the "That movie rocked!" variety or "Dude, that blew!" variety. I mean real cinephilia, which is endlessly curious and always on the search for the next innovation, the next curveball, the next epiphany. That comes from feeling—from personal response. Nobody falls in love with movies because some director framed a shot in a particular way or slyly quoted F.W. Murnau. That stage of appreciation always comes second or third or tenth in a cinephile's evolution. No, people fall in love with movies because they speak to them honestly and directly and with eccentric conviction, like new friends they really didn't expect to make—people who just sort of came out of nowhere and made them realize, "Oh my God … I'm not alone! Somebody else gets it."
Bringing it back around to The Fighter: I like a lot of the movie's technical and narrative details. I could do a whole video essay just on the integration of traditional film narrative and TV journalism techniques in Russell's direction (but I won't, because I couldn't possibly top Kevin B. Lee's video essay comparing the movie's climax to the real-life bout that inspired it). And yet all these aspects are subordinate to the film's beating heart, which is the tale of a man gradually realizing that most of what he was told about himself, his family, and life generally was a self-serving pack of lies—then deciding what, if anything, to do about it. It's an emotional procedural.
M
Correction, Jan. 5: This entry originally misspelled Micky Ward's first name. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
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From: Dana Stevens
To: Dan Kois, Karina Longworth, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Stephanie Zacharek
Subject: The Japanese Baby in Babies Gave One of the Great Diva Performances of the Year
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2011, at 6:13 PM ET
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Colleagues:
It seems hard to gainsay Karina's nomination of Greenberg for the Most Awkward Sex Scene award for 2010. Never before in history (I hope) has a shared Coors Light led so quickly to such unfun cunnilingus. But it's worth noting that Baumbach's cringefest faced some—fine, I'll say it—stiff competition in that department. From the Oedipal sticky wickets of Cyrus to the all-in-the-family hothouse shenanigans of Dogtooth to just about anything sexual that transpired in Sex and the City 2, this was a year in which it was wise to choose your date movies very, very carefully. And moving along the continuum from awkward sex to just plain awful sex, we had that hotel-room scene from Blue Valentine, in which Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams used the physical act of love to express everything but love: resentment, sexual frustration, repulsion, revenge.
About Blue Valentine, Karina: After challenging a couple of you to persuade me to reconsider movies you loved, I find myself struck dumb when asked to do the same. I guess I just have to have recourse to Matt's impassioned plea that we, as critics and viewers "[talk] first about the heart of the film … whether or not what's onscreen bears the slightest relation to the truth as we have experienced it." To me, Blue Valentine just felt raw and honest and true, and modest about its rawness and honesty and truth, in a way that few American films about love and marriage are. And the performances, especially Williams', were beautifully modulated and not Oscar-grabby at all (which is precisely why I hope Williams gets an Oscar).
On a second viewing, I could get outside the story enough to see the movie's flaws, though I still found them relatively minor. The Grizzly Bear soundtrack in the flashback sections can be intrusively twee, and Gosling's character as written seems to oscillate between being a working-class salt-of-the-earth type and an educated hipster—would that character really play the ukelele and not the guitar, and would he know that Tin Pan Alley-sounding song that he uses to woo Michelle Williams in the shop doorway? But the fight the couple has in the car after visiting the liquor store—when we see both sides of the argument clearly but can't do anything to stop the impending carnage—was so acutely scripted and minutely observed that it was like one of those hyperreal Dutch still lifes that leave you saying, wow, that's just exactly what a bowlful of peaches looks like. If the bowl of peaches were a decaying marriage.
In a discussion of Black Swan on this week's Culture Gabfest, my colleague Julia Turner argued that the movie's appeal lay in the fact that it was, secretly, a sports movie, with the heroine's artistic triumph at the end standing in for the big game. This may explain my Swan allergy; sports movies, as a rule, bore me almost as much as real-life sports do (with very rare exceptions that are really not sports movies at all: Breaking Away, North Dallas Forty).
And yet David O. Russell's The Fighter, Dan, won me over despite the will-he-or-won't-he-win-the-boxing-title storyline. Matt's right; at its heart, that movie is no more about boxing than The Apartment is about the insurance industry. And though the movie didn't make my Top 10 list precisely because of the squarebait factor Dan mentions, it managed to Trojan-horse in plenty of first-class David O. Russell weirdness, like the a cappella rendition of "I Started a Joke" that Christian Bale sings to Melissa Leo in the car. (I know whenever my mom comes to pick me up from the dumpster behind a crack house, I try to cheer her up by singing 40-year-old Bee Gees songs about … well, what exactly is "I Started a Joke" about, anyway?) I fully concur that Russell should stay crazy—no one hearts Huckabees more than I heart Huckabees—but I also feel little need to worry on that score.
For our last round, I want to propose a game we've played in past clubs to rewarding effect: Without bothering to mount arguments or formulate zeitgeisty questions, just give me some of the individual moments you remember from movies this year, scenes or lines or cuts or music cues (BrAAAAAHHMM!) that stay with you, especially from films that might not otherwise make the cut of being worthy of discussion. I'll start: Mari, the Japanese baby, rolling repeatedly on the floor in an epic temper tantrum about midway through Babies, that quasi-anthropological Anne Geddes-photo-shoot-turned-documentary that Dan definitively assessed in a Village Voice review consisting only of the repeated word "Babies! Babies babies babies!" Frustrated by her inability to manipulate a stacking toy, Mari gave one of the great diva performances of the year, surpassed only by Tilda Swinton in I Am Love. Not much else of Babies sticks with me, but that little moment of recorded human behavior made an indelible mark: It was low comedy and high drama, and it made the whole film worthwhile. Anyone have a Mari moment of their own to share?
Yours,
Dana
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From: Dan Kois
To: Karina Longworth, Matt Zoller Seitz, Dana Stevens, and Stephanie Zacharek
Subject: A Movie So Wonderful in Every Way It Boggles My Mind
Posted Thursday, Jan. 6, 2011, at 11:31 AM ET
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DING!
You guys! Oh my God, I respect and love you and everything, but please stop saying that The Fighter is not a boxing movie! Of course it's a boxing movie! Like all good sports movies, it's also about things other than sports, but that doesn't make it not a boxing movie.
Dana! I'm sorry I'm shouting at you, but I am excited! You say that The Fighter "is no more about boxing than The Apartment is about the insurance industry," but I don't remember The Apartment stopping dead in its tracks for eight minutes so Jack Lemmon could sell insurance!
America! This is what I am saying: If, like me, you find boxing movies and all their boxing-movie accouterments boring, there are parts of The Fighter—the boxing-movie parts!—that will annoy you. You may still like the rest of the movie! (I totally did!) But you will also be like, "Those people on the Internet said this wasn't really a boxing movie, but look, there's all this boxing." DON'T BE FOOLED, AMERICA!
DING! Round over. Whew. Deep breath. Cut me, Mick! Cut me!
I accept your selection of Greenberg for Most Awkward Sex Scene, but would also like to declare the Most Awkward No Sex Scene, which of course goes to the moment in the tent, up in the snowy mountains, when Bella is cold, so cold, and of course Edward cannot help her because he is a vampire, as chilled and beautiful as the finest Italian marble; and so a shirtless Jacob smirks, "I am hotter than you," and then, his eyes locked on Edward's, slides effortlessly into her um sleeping bag—she gasps at his warmth!—and sweet Edward winces in pain, real pain! and the whole audience just basically fucking dies.
I found a lot of pleasure this year in movies—whether great, mediocre, or straight-up bad. The pleasure started in the opening credits sometimes—for example, in those of the amazing I Am Love, which baldly announces just what kind of movie you're in for with laugh-out-loud onscreen name-drops for Jil Sander and Fendi. The seizure-inducing credits of Enter the Void made my dog bark and were the perfect introduction to that ridiculous, phantasmagorical semimasterpiece. And, of course, there's the glorious opening of Jackass 3-D, as the gang gets machine-gunned with paintballs in super-slo-mo.
Individual performances from 2010 will remain with me for a long time. Michael Fassbender, breathtakingly sexy, kind, and dangerous in Andrea Arnold's coming-of-age tale Fish Tank. Ferocious Michael Shannon, as deranged manager Kim Fowley in The Runaways, a creature so exotic, he could only live in a giant gold birdcage. Ben Mendelsohn, in Animal Kingdom, the year's most frightening villain, with something deeply wrong behind his dead eyes. And Ruth Sheen, in Another Year, the year's most inspiring heroine, a good and happy woman doing right at work and at home.
So will individual scenes. The ecstatic arm-breaking in 127 Hours, more unbearable than the actual dismemberment. Isabelle Huppert finding her pharmacists dead, and still, for some terrible reason, sticking around, in White Material. Birgit Minichmayr and Lars Eidinger listening to that cheesy German pop song in Everyone Else, while we watch them fall forever out of love. Sad-eyed Hermione in Harry Potter 7A, her wand trembling, Obliviating her parents before she goes off to war.
I loved every hilarious scene featuring Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as Emma Stone's parents in the teen comedy Easy A. They tossed off bons mots as effortlessly as Coward characters and respected boundaries like NATO peacekeepers.
Sometimes, reviewing the stuff no one else wants to, you get to see a jewel of a performance that no one else notices. Shout-outs to four actors who I hope capitalize on having been way better than they needed to be: Joe Anderson, spindly and clever as the sidekick in The Crazies; Ginnifer Goodwin, warm and perfect as Ramona and Beezus' Aunt Bea; Brandon T. Jackson as a live wire in Lottery Ticket; and goddamn Craig Robinson, staring right at the camera and saying, "It must be some kinda … Hot Tub Time Machine."
The year's biggest breakout, though, came not from a single person but from a company: Australia's Blue-Tongue Films, a filmmaking collective responsible for three wildly entertaining movies this year. David Michôd's crime saga Animal Kingdom was ghastly and outstanding. Even better was Nash Edgerton's The Square, a dusty noir that reminded me of Blood Simple. And even better than that was Spider, the nine-minute short that preceded The Square in theaters. Readers can watch it right now if you like—it's on YouTube. Make sure no one around will mind if you scream loudly and laugh hysterically, possibly at the same time.
But the two movie moments that meant the very most to me this year were both in animated children's films. I'm pretty sure I witnessed the moment my giggling five-year-old daughter fell in love with cinema forever—while reaching for one of those gorgeous, bobbing lanterns in Tangled, Disney's sprightly spin on the Rapunzel story. (Complain about 3-D all you want; when it works, it works.) Seeing her excited face gave me hope that, no matter how content delivery changes, when I'm old and stupid, I'll still be able to go into a theater with her and hold hands in the dark.
Which brings me to my film of the year, a movie so wonderful in every way it boggles my mind: Toy Story 3. Matt pointed out, in video form, how great that jaw-dropping scene in the furnace was. But the scene that got me every time—the one I'll never forget—happens after that.
The toys have returned home safe from their epic journey, and upstairs, Andy's mom (Laurie Metcalf) walks through the door, nattering on about all the things that need to get done before Andy can leave for college. And then she sees her son's room, its bare walls, and her hand touches her heart, and she says, "Oh." And then I cry. This is a character, mind you, so unimportant to Toy Story that never in three movies has she been given a name. She is "Andy's Mom." And yet, watching an animated movie, a sequel, starring a bunch of talking toys—I weep, instantly, without shame, all four times I've watched it. To quote our hostess, Dana: "Shit—now I'm crying again."
Bye,
Dan
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From: Karina Longworth
To: Dan Kois, Matt Zoller Seitz, Dana Stevens, and Stephanie Zacharek
Subject: De Niro Finally Got Around to Acting Again and No One Noticed
Updated Thursday, Jan. 6, 2011, at 5:31 PM ET
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Dearest Movie Club,
Dan's shout-out to "that ridiculous, phantasmagorical semimasterpiece" Enter the Void reminds me of birthday cake.
Let's back up, and please bear with me: Adam Gopnik wrote a story in last week's New Yorker about "the history, and the future, of desserts." This ultimately involved going to Spain, where he learned about hot ice cream and ate an unfathomably complicated course designed to "re-create the emotions [great Barcelona soccer player] Lionel Messi feels when he scores a goal," but first, he went downtown and talked to Alex Stupak, the pastry chef at WD-50. Stupak gave this great spiel on why what he does is "the closest thing a human being can get to creating a new food."
All cooking has an alchemy to it, but between a savory entree and a dessert, there's generally a difference in what happens to the ingredients. When you eat, say, coq au vin, the elements are transparent: You can taste the chicken and the wine. Not so when it comes to the flour, eggs, food coloring, etc., in cake. "Pastry is infinitely exciting, because it's less about showing the greatness of nature, and more about transmitting taste and flavor," Stupak tells Gopnik. "Desserts are naturally denatured food. Birthday cake is the most denatured thing on earth."
Here's where I'm going with this: Birthday cake is a concept that virtually any American understands—loaded with sense memory and nostalgia—but I daresay very few of us, when eating birthday cake, can identify the ingredients and trace them back to their natural state. So many processes of transformation have occurred between the natural existence of sugar cane and its manifestation as bright blue icing coating a fork, and the distance between the two is actually part of the appeal.
I get off on birthday-cake cinema, and Enter the Void was the ultimate 2010 example of that: Shot after shot frustrates any attempt to analyze exactly how the images were constructed, and that abstraction makes the themes—as stoopid as they are—all the more impactful. In terms of totally baffling sensory experiences that approximate the movie version of "the closest thing a human being can get to creating a new food," I'd also point to certain sequences of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, much of Tron, the one-man Rambo stunt Flooding With Love For the Kid, Brent Green's live-action-stop-motion oddity Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, Film Socialisme, and, of course, Trash Humpers.
To a lesser extent, some trace of disorientation marked many of my most memorable movie moments and elements of 2010: All three lead performances in Stone (poor Robert De Niro—he actually gets off his ass and, like, acts, and no one pays any attention); the first two acts of Dogtooth, climaxing with the older sister's one-woman performance of Rocky; at least the first half of The Red Chapel (in a year obsessed with ambiguously realistic fakes, it injects some much needed humor into the vagaries of constructed reality); I'm Still Here's chronicle of Joaquin Phoenix's fateful Letterman appearance—fundamentally recasting what had been fodder for YouTube mockery into some kind of inadvertent tragedy; the laptop-generated spectacular of the climax of Monsters; How Do You Know's incredible delivery-room scene and its transition from light comedy to heartfelt romantic confession to self-reflexive comic reenactment of a sincere moment lost forever; the narrative break by which Sean Parker is introduced in The Social Network, a kind of story-shifting sidebar on charisma and calculation rivaled onscreen this year only by Carlos' first sex scene with Magdalena Kopp.
And with that, I'll say my farewells. It was truly a blast to chew over the year with y'all. Oh, and here are a few films I saw in 2010 that I can't wait to talk about in 2011: Kelly Reichart's Meek's Cutoff; Zeina Durra's The Imperialists Are Still Alive!; and Rubber, an American road movie made by a famous French DJ, about an anthropomorphized tire named "Robert" who blows shit up with his mind. Vive le cinéma!!
Love,
Karina
Still of Paz de la Huerta courtesy IFC films.
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From: Matt Zoller Seitz
To: Dan Kois, Karina Longworth, Dana Stevens, and Stephanie Zacharek
Subject: Two Films That Subtly Changed Some of My Attitudes About Movies and Life
Posted Friday, Jan. 7, 2011, at 8:24 AM ET
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Dear MC:
Dana, you asked for indelible moments, but I hope all of you won't mind if I expand on that request and talk about two films that subtly changed some of my attitudes about movies and life.
First, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I was in a rotten mood the first time I saw this movie, so I fixated on the title character, who seriously rubbed me the wrong way (and still does). Scott's soft-spoken self-deprecation is sly camouflage for a wish-fulfillment fantasy; Scott is the gawky 21st-century teen version of the protagonist in an old Bill Murray or Robin Williams picture— the supposed oddball hero whose ass must be kissed and who is always (by consensus) the coolest and most interesting character in any given room. How do we know Scott is worthy of our attention? Because every other character in the movie talks about and/or reacts to Scott all the time. It's like the scene in The Simpsons' "The Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie Show" where Homer gives the show's producers a list of ways to make viewers love the Poochie character, once of which is "Whenever Poochie's not onscreen, the other characters should be asking, 'Where's Poochie?'"
Then I watched Scott Pilgrim again with my 13-year-old daughter (a film-savvy kid who can't remember life before the Internet) and felt mildly ashamed for not appreciating director Edgar Wright's talents as a visual stylist and cultural observer. Wright—now officially three-for-three thanks to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz—is one of the few directors working at the studio level who can tell jokes with shots and construct rebus-like series of images that make arguments or express emotional states. The entire movie is filled with virgin moments—lines, images, and feelings that have no equivalent anywhere else in movies, past or present—and the battle of the bands and Scott's bass duel with the Vegan are two of the most original action scenes in memory. But here's what impressed me most: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World could be the first Hollywood studio picture to find a playful visual grammar that expresses how the real and virtual worlds have started to merge in the mind.
The world in Wright's film is at once actual (real friendships, romance, and heartbreak) and figurative (comic book visuals, video game graphics, pop-up annotations). When Ramona Flowers tells Scott that one of her previous boyfriends punched a hole in the moon for her, and then Wright shows us a little hand-drawn-looking moon with a hole through it, it's not just a fanciful metaphor; it's real/unreal, poetry made tangible. Before Scott Pilgrim, whenever I referred to a friend that I made online but hadn't met in person, I felt sheepish; I've even put implied quotes around the word "friend." Post-Scott Pilgrim, I don't do that anymore.
Another revelation was Let Me In, Matt Reeves' remake of the Swedish horror classic Let the Right One In. It validated feelings that began to stir after I saw Werner Herzog's batty remake of Bad Lieutenant, which re-imagined Abel Ferrara's souls-in-torment pulp thriller as an existential slapstick comedy. ("Shoot him again! His soul's still dancing!") When that project was announced I felt a tremor of disgust: Remake Ferrara's masterpiece? Are they evil, or just lazy? But the finished work was different from, yet equal to, Ferrara's. Let Me In is a comparably big surprise—more classically directed than LTROI and less naturalistic but just as sensitive, powerful, and perfectly shaped; an electric remake of an acoustic original.
There are four, maybe five scenes in Reeves' movie that resonate as deeply as anything in Let the Right One In, and at least one—the caretaker/father/companion character's final farewell—that's so piercing I can hardly bear to watch it. (It's as shattering as the moment in David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly when the transformed hero warns his beloved girlfriend to leave because he might kill her if she stays.) Thanks to Reeves, and Herzog before him—and Breck Eisner's version of George Romero's The Crazies, another 2010 horror movie that deserved more acclaim than it got—I've stopped dismissing remakes as evidence of studio greed and cultural bankruptcy. The batting average of remakes is no better or worse than the batting average of originals. Musicians cover great pop songs without being condemned in advance. Filmmakers deserve the same privilege.
Much love,
Matt
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From: Stephanie Zacharek
To: Dan Kois, Karina Longworth, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Dana Stevens
Subject: Elle Fanning in Somewhere Provided My Favorite Movie Moment
Posted Friday, Jan. 7, 2011, at 1:14 PM ET
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Because we switched the order of things, I didn't get to properly beat up on The Fighter, a movie that aside from three things—Mark Wahlberg, Amy Ryan, and those amazing sisters, with their gloriously fried perm-heads and acid-wash jeans—I could barely tolerate. I won't detail my problems here, except to say that, with the exception of the performances I've just mentioned, why is there so much damn acting in this movie? Melissa Leo is big, all right. She's big all over the place. It's the sort of thing that doesn't just beg to be noticed: It knocks on your door, kicks it down because you didn't respond fast enough, comes in and steals your TV, your laptop, and your toaster, whacks you upside the head with a two-by-four, and finishes by shouting, "Gimme an Oscah, ya fuckin' retahd!" Now that's acting.
Look, I know that sometimes a big, flashy performance is just what you want and need. And Leo sure has done the heavy lifting; she's definitely playing a recognizable type. But if a believable type is what you're after, why not just get (the great) Tracey Ullman? I tend to prefer the kind of acting you can't see, identify, and dissect so readily—you know, the kind that's totally impossible to write about. That's why Michelle Williams, in Blue Valentine, left my jaw hanging open. I can't tell you what Williams is doing, because I can't see what she's doing—all I see is a woman who's always been reflective (though not passive), a foil to her husband's roaring flame, and it appears to be killing her. You always hurt the ones you love? I'll say.
And now there's no time left! A few things I loved in 2010: The way I Love You Phillip Morris so convincingly turned a prison cell into a honeymoon suite (complete with Johnny Mathis records). Vanessa Redgrave, searching for her long-lost love (and look! It turns out to be her real-life husband, Franco Nero!) in the perfectly pleasing, and heartfelt, Letters to Juliet. The chilling, funny, exhilarating-as-hell murder sequence set to Blue Oyster Cult's "Burnin' for You" in Matt Reeves' glorious Let Me In—as you pointed out, Matt, remakes can also be reinventions. (And I'm pretty psyched to forget about those snoozy Swedish things, already. Bring on Rooney Mara!) The character design of Gru in Despicable Me—Alfred Molina reimagined by Charles Addams, sexy in a despicable way. (Also, in that same movie, Steve Carell's killer phrasing of the throwaway line "I hate that guy." Inexplicably funny—but then, most things that can be explained aren't funny.)
Then there's James Newton Howard's score for The Tourist: Lush, sophisticated and, for once, not phoned in, as Howard, Zimmer, and so many of the other go-to biggies are often guilty of. In I Am Love (a movie I Am in Love with), the vision of Tilda Swinton going about her daily errands in a loose, sand-toned coat slung around her shoulders that looks like it cost two-hundred-gajillion dollars, not because it did, but because she's inside it. Johnny Knoxville turning himself into a trompe-l'oeil bull target in Jackass 3D. (Ouch. Not everyone has a cock. But we all have a coccyx.) And the scene that gets to me more than anything I've seen all year: Elle Fanning's coltish, assured-yet-tentative ice dance (to Gwen Stefani's "Cool") in Somewhere, and the way Stephen Dorff's character is at first indifferent to it, until he realizes this is possibly the last time he'll see her as a girl—grown-up life is waiting for her on the other side of one of those leaps. I already know what it's like to be a daughter. In that moment, Coppola and Dorff showed me what it's like to be a father.
These past five days have been pure pleasure for me! Love to you all—
Stephanie
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From: Dana Stevens
To: Dan Kois, Karina Longworth, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Stephanie Zacharek
Subject: In Praise of "Gimme an Oscah" Performances
Posted Friday, Jan. 7, 2011, at 4:11 PM ET
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Dear All,
Stephanie, your hilarious takedown of Melissa Leo's "Gimme an Oscah, yah fuckin' retahd" performance in The Fighter brings me back to last year's Movie Club; while Roger Ebert and I were rhapsodizing about Tilda Swinton as an alcoholic kidnapper in Julia, you busted in (with your Raising Arizona leitmotif blasting full force) to, in your words, "rain on the Tilda Swinton love parade." You described your sense that, with Swinton, you could always see her showing her work, displaying her actorly passion and dedication and effort rather than disappearing into the character.
You're right that this is often true of Swinton, and of Leo in The Fighter. These are big, grand, divalike performances, light-years from the self-effacing, miniaturist work Michelle Williams does in Blue Valentine. And while Williams gave my favorite female performance of this year, I can see the value in, and derive great pleasure from, the Maria Callas school of acting as well. What was fun about Leo's turn in The Fighter came, in part, from how unexpected the casting was; we're used to Leo as a big-hearted, unglamorous earth mother (a role she played in the excellent 2008 film Frozen River and on television this year in Treme). To see her trailing cigarette ash on her tight white jeans as the domineering matriarch of a brawling Boston family was to witness the transformative power of acting on display. It's always glorious to see an actor humbly disappear into a role (the way John Hawkes did in Winter's Bone or Jesse Eisenberg did in The Social Network, probably my two favorite male performances of the year). But it's also great to watch someone disappear into a dress-up closet and sashay out, beehive-wigged and bigger than life.
Karina's category of the "birthday cake movie"—a film that's proudly artificial, that deliberately disguises its component parts and focuses on its effect on the audience—is a really useful way to think about movies like Dogtooth—wait, are there any other movies like Dogtooth? This Greek film about a father's mind-control experiment on his children also acted as a kind of mind-control experiment on the audience, alternating between icily bleak comedy and shocking violence. It won the "Un Certain Regard" prize at Cannes, and that phrase describes the film's strongest attribute precisely: It has nothing if not "a certain gaze," a weird, sui generis way of looking at the world. I wouldn't say I fell into the camp of unreconstructed Dogtooth lovers—it strained too hard to be a sociopolitical allegory, and the last half fell apart. But that movie felt like essential viewing, both as a promise of future things from the filmmaker Giorgos Lanthimos and as some kind of glimpse into a new possibility for cinema. On a less ambitious scale, Fatih Akin's shaggy comedy Soul Kitchen and Lena Dunham's coming-of-age sketch Tiny Furniture also worked as mini-genre reinventions that left me keen to see what their creators would do next.
And the circle of good movies keeps widening. Since this club started on Monday, I've watched two 2010 films—the explosive Italian melodrama/Mussolini biopic Vincere and John Cameron Mitchell's delicate bereavement drama Rabbit Hole—that, had I seen them a few weeks earlier, might have edged their way onto my list for best of the year. (Karina, what you say about Stone—that DeNiro "finally got off his ass and acted, and nobody noticed"—goes for Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole as well. She's a gifted actress who in recent years has risked being destroyed by her own vanity.)
Thank you all so much for coming together to have this conversation. Matt, you say that the multiplatform playfulness of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World convinced you for the first time that it was OK to call people you've met only online "friends." This Movie Club has definitely elevated all four of you (only two of whom I've met in person) to that status for me. I hope 2011 is your best year ever, both in the movies and out.
Love,
Dana
Dan Kois is the author of Facing Future and writes regularly for New York, the Washington Post, Slate, the Awl, and Village Voice.
Karina Longworth is the Film Editor at LA Weekly, a critic for the Village Voice, and a co-founder of Cinematical.com.
Matt Zoller Seitz is a film and TV columnist for Salon and the founder of The House Next Door, a Web site devoted to critical writing about film and television.
Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic. E-mail her at slatemovies@gmail.com.
Stephanie Zacharek is the film critic for MovieLine.com.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2279738/
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