Outside the Law (Hors-la-loi)

"Outside the Law" has perhaps one of the worst first scenes in cinema history, so its cause isn't helped from the get go. It involves an Algerian family being evicted by French colonist from the land they've owned for so long. I'm pretty sure Rachid Bouchareb wanted the scene to be devastating, or something, but his direction is so awful that it doesn't work in the slightest. He doesn't get the actors to seem like they relate to each other, or to have any sort of affect. The mishandling of this moment throws off the rest of the movie, completely blowing its chance at getting a grip on the audience and thus relegating us to being bystanders. It's even worse when you consider that an episode like this should work on its own.

It only gets drearier when it devolves into a bunch of what are basically vignettes following the three brothers (Jamel Debbouze, Roschdy Zem, and Sami Bouajila, all of whom get their histrionic freak on, despite having potential for understatement and evocation) of the family on their separate paths, and then more bland as we see the brothers become less and less respectable human beings and interesting characters. I don't have a particular weakness for guys-in-treachcoats-and-hats movies, but this movie must one of the most hopeless, as it cannot come up with at least one decent staging as it descends, minute by boring minute, into becoming a time-waster. As my friend points out, you won't learn anything about the French-Algerian Conflict here.

Watching Bela Tarr's "Satantango," as I did last night, makes one appreciate good, careful craft. Watching Boucherab at work here shows just about how choppy you can get. He's pretty much the anti-Tarr, cutting off scenes way before they should close, impressively shuffling lenses and colors, but to no avail. One wonders if "Days of Glory," this film's apparent predecessor (which got a lot more pats on the back), worked some great wonders that are absent here (now I know why the section on the war in this one was so scarce).

"Outside the Law" is monotonous and out of touch with the audience. It is almost entirely unsatisfying. It's like someone made a musical and removed all of the musical numbers, stringing the sudsy in-between bits together and calling it a day. We get separated from the characters, and thus are left to look at them simply as murderers, a mistake that every good crime film is able to avoid. If this manages to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, it'll be one of the Academy's biggest lapses. It is the movie of the year which makes the biggest step at divorcing the Cannes Film Festival from quality. The only way that it can be seen as a success is that it inflicts the same sort of repression on you that it portrays. You will want to leave early, so save yourself the trouble. D

Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts 2010/2011

More capsule reviews, this time the nominated animated shorts along with a couple of special mention, "highly commended" films:

Bastien Dubois' "Madagascar, a Journey Diary" is an 11-minute college of every different animation style you can imagine, a film that can only be seen to be appreciated. It doesn't exert that much of a pull and the audience member feels a bit disconnected, but it's powerful as an evocation of a country and (presumably) what that country is all about. The film probably should be seen more than once to be most properly received, as it blows past you, incorporating souvenirs from the trip as centerpieces in the drawings and more. That being said, it can't quite keep up with itself, getting a bit repetitive by the time it reaches its close. Even though it has a nice stream-of-consciousness feeling about it, I wish it been slightly more refined (and a bit less show-offy). Yet, it really does more for animation than any of the other nominees. B+

Deserving a nomination but only garnering a "Highly Commended" citation, Bill Plympton's "The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Hamburger" is jarring, arrestingly simple 8-bit hilarity. The title does accurately describe the film, but it makes it sound like less of a film than it actually is. What we get is an original work that only succumbs to trying to be allegorical at the end of its jam-packed 6 minutes. The (wrongheaded) cow training sequence is the piece de resistance. B+

If you've ever played the computer game Spore, where you create creatures just like the ones in this film, "The Lost Thing" by Andrew Ruhemann and Shaun Tan may seem both like less of novelty (in the way that "District 9" seems less original when you factor in its similarities to "Halo") and also may work its weird effect doubly well. It has relatively sentimental insights (something along the lines of "The Last Book in the Universe"), but it also refuses to surrender to an uplifting ending and creates an interesting if mildly hamfisted view of the apocalyptic future (evoking the album cover for "Hail to the Thief" as well as "1984"). It follows an unnamed fellow (Tim Minchin) who stumbles upon an unidentified object on a beach and tries to put it back in its place. This is another film that requires closer study, as it puts a lot in and one might not to get all of it out in a single viewing. B

Max Lang and Jakob Schuh's "The Gruffalo" is somewhat of a sentimental favorite for me, since I am automatically charmed by monsters like one shown in this one (see: "Where the Wild Things Are," which you may have noticed is the source for my avatar). Locked into rhyme and also feeling a bit intolerable at times, "The Gruffalo" didn't always work for me. But it's pleasantly drawn and has great voicework. It's a story-within-a-story, told by Mother Squirrel (Helena Bonham Carter) to her little squirrels (Sam Lewis and Phoebe Givron-Taylor), about a mouse (James Corden) who goes to get food and encounters predators (Tom Wilkinson, John Hurt, and Rob Brydon). He uses the threat of a Gruffalo as an alibi, and although they (and he) thinks he's making it up, it turns out to be oh so real (and voiced by Robbie Coltrane). It is a humorous short, something you can't say about all of the movies up this year. B

"Day and Night" from Pixar's Teddy Newton I had harbored resentment for since I saw it before "Toy Story 3." It's not quite as bad as I remembered it to be and definitely skillful, though it is too clever by half. It just seems from its idea (two whatchamacallits representing the two halves of the day who want to experience the other's enjoyments) and brevity that it was quickly thought up and quickly put together, and I'm still not quite sure how I feel about that. Also, it ends on a strange decadent note, having one thing relishing the hot woman it now has, the other savoring its newfound Vegas. Not too sure about that one. B-

"Urs" by Moritz Mayerhofer, the other "highly commended" short, is, except for its remarkable drawings, pointless. It involves an old man bringing his unwilling wife over a mountain (done in a jagged style evoking "Metropolis"). I was pretty bored with it. As a friend noted, it could be portraying some sort of legend, but that explanation doesn't really make it any better. C+

Finally, "Let's Pollute" is 6 minutes of needless agitprop about the environment. Sloppily animated and blunt as hell, it repeatedly tells you to destroy the planet instead of to try save it. It makes a mild dent, admittedly, and plays a bit better than I let on, but that it blocked "The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Hamburger" from a nomination is ridiculous. C

Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts 2010/2011

Here are capsule reviews of the nominated live action shorts, in order of preference:

Always a step ahead of you in the way that "The Social Network" was, but much more purely enjoyable and wacky, Luke Matheny's "God of Love" stands above the others in its category. With a trite voiceover, B&W, and an appeal to god for help w/r/t unrequited love, it seemed to be heading for mannered eccentricity, but with verve, esprit, and great timing it bounds out of its shackles. Matheny is probably the only one who could have realized his vision to the fullest extent, and so he stars as Ray, who sings and throws darts simultaneously. He's in love with the drummer in his band, Kelly (Marian Brock), who's in love with Ray's buddy Fozzie (a great Christopher Hirsh, who keeps up with Matheny). Ray out of nowhere gets a bunch of darts that, when thrown at someone, strike the victim with an uncontrollable urge to be with the person they immediately look at. That is, for 6 hours. After that, they either snap out of it or continue onwards entranced. It's an intriguing idea (like something out of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"), and, with a countdown and all, Matheny examines it to its fullest, funniest extent. The film's quasi-coda, which completes the film's circular structure, falls a bit into sappiness and doesn't resist the temptation to have things fit perfectly together, but what Matheny does shouldn't go unnoticed and should hopefully win him the Oscar. A-

Ivan Goldschmidt's "Na Wewe" is the short of this year's crop that I would call the most audacious. 19 minutes long, it takes place in real time and plays out in only one scene. It takes place in '94 Burundi, where a Belgian newsperson or something and his assistant are picked up after his car breaks down. The guy talks on and on to the annoyance of the other people in the car before the vehicle is forced to stop by a group of Hutus who want to kill all of the Tutsis onboard. They try to separate their targets from the rest, but everyone stays as a group. They go on to question every person in the crowd, with each person giving reasons why they should be spared. Once it gets going, you can see how it will end, but it throws curveballs in along the way, as kids are not automatically allowed to live. Of course, due to its subject, it gets a bit heavy-handed, and some of the details (especially the whole bit about U2) are a little dubious. But the acting (which I would single out, but can't do to the fact that I can't find the players' names on the Internet) is quite solid, and (as my friend noted) the editing is splendid. This film has a good chance at winning the award. B+

The way that the somewhat stilted "The Crush" by Michael Creagh portrays its story, in a condescending manner, is spot on, even though I thought otherwise when I began watching. It's about how a second grader named Ardal (again, I cannot find the actors' names) wants to marry his teacher Ms. Purdy (strangely named, since that's the moniker of Creagh's production company) and how he tries to obstruct her jerk of a fiancee from beating him to the punch (right down to a duel at a handball court, which yields those banal observations which show how Ms. Purdy much of an a-hole the dude really is). One could have developed this to be something creepy, but instead Creagh makes it sweet and coy, though perhaps a little too syrupy at the close. One weird thing: the lighting makes some of the actors look like they're made out of clay, which in my opinion doesn't do the film too many favors. B

Tanel Toom's visual style in "The Confession" is seriously good, especially in how he juxtaposes two still shots of a road and a cornfield and how he shoots inside of a church. However, no tonal sensitivity is evident, and the film's eventual spiral from control seems both deliberate and unintentional. We follow a youngster named Sam (Lewis Howlett, whom we will hopefully see again), who is coming to his first confession with nothing to confess. He spends his days innocuously with his friend Jacob (Joe Eales), making fun of the whole process (mimicking the eucharist with potato chips) and biking around. Jacob feels that Sam should have something to say when he goes his first time, and so the two for some reason decide to take a scarecrow down from the cross on which it is hung and place it in the middle of a road. Why they do this I guess can be seen as an instance of the logic of children, but it goes underexposed, as do most things as the film progresses from this moment, the turning point in the film. Toom does have something interesting to say about how confession can be rendered meaningless, and Howlett is strong portraying a kid who now has way too much to confess, but it's hardly an impeccable work. B

"Wish 143" promises something subversive (a la "Cashback") with its premise of a cancer patient who wants to use a Make-a-Wish style program to lose his virginity rather than rub elbows with a famous person. Instead it takes the path of least resistance, ending up depressingly cloying. To the film's credit, it does set up a good comedic duo in Samuel Peter Holland and Jim Carter, who play the patient in question and his priest friend, setting up some pretty humorous scenes. But it goes all chickenshit and turns from comedy to sentimental drama at the drop of a hat, replete with that cheesy generic narration that connects some sort of obscure knowledge with life. The film is mildly touching, yet the ways it could have developed are potentially much more interesting. All directors should remember: you only get to direct a film once, so make the most of it. C+

Cold Weather

Critics of Mumblecore films such as "Tiny Furniture" have slammed them for "narcissistic" elements. "Cold Weather" has a self-centered character at its center, yes, but Aaron Katz doesn't have us totally identify with him. He instead uses him as a part of a satire on detective fiction, showing us how sleuths lose all track of the world outside of their mystery. It gets where (as Ignatiy Vishnevetsky said) the mystery itself becomes beside the point: it's all about detectives doing their thing (and going to ridiculous measures to do it), because if something enables a slacker to feel like they have a purpose, they'll grab onto it with both hands and not give it up until it's run its course (and then some).

Doug (a hilariously chipper Cris Lankenau) went to school for forensic science (in the hopes of becoming a Sherlock Holmes type) but then dropped out because he "lost interest." Finishing out would have put him in a much better position than he is now, clinging to his sister (Trieste Kelly Dunn) and holding down a job at an ice factory. At work, he befriends Carlos (Raul Castillo, holding the screen in an excellent comic performance), a part-time DJ who laughs at first at Doug's aspirations at being a detective but comes to appreciate them.

You see, Doug's ex-girlfriend Rachel (Robyn Rikoon) is dropping into town for some reason and Carlos starts inviting her to do things (like go to a Star Trek convention, which Doug scoffs at). It's unclear what sort of relationship that Carlos and Rachel develop, as implications could go either way. Anyways, Rachel is a no-show for a DJing gig of Carlos' and he gets really anxious and solicits Doug's help to find out where she is.

From the point at which the two investigate the motel room in which she was staying until the end, the film makes little to no sense, and gladly so, as it is proving its point well. There is a briefcase of money, multiple identities, and a cowboy/porn photographer named Jim Warden involved, but how those dots are connected is beyond me. But, as I said, Doug jumps right in, making stops for a pipe and tobacco and for breaking a code of baseball statistics, much to the annoyance of his dragged-along sister. I will go and say now that there is no conventional resolution to the film, so as not to disappoint anyone, but if there was, it would offset Katz's vision (by leaving information limited to assumptions, he's making another comment about the whole detective business). Eliminating the film's deliberately slow start would be unfitting as well. It may be a bit tiresome, but we would see Doug in a much different way without it.

The acting and writing may strike some as bad. Personally, I think both are endearing. The eccentricities of the film (that often are present in movies of this genre) totally work, and the characters are always enjoyable to watch, as Lankenau, Dunn, and Castillo all play off each other exceptionally. The cinematography by Andrew Reed is jaw-droppingly good as well, especially in the scene set in a storage building. There's another passage that rests all on the camerawork, an exchange in the ice factory where we follow Doug back and forth from one wall to another while talking to Carlos. It absorbs you in a remarkable way. I doubt a lot of people will love this film, but to me, it's an observant work that knows how to treat its main character: supplying him with laughs, but also expressing a bit of disapproval at his lethargy and desperate attempts to free himself from it. B+

Biutiful

The only innovation in "Biutiful" is having different colors for subtitles in different languages (white for Spanish, blue for Chinese, yellow for Senegalese), something that last year's confusing Oscar nominee "Ajami" could have used. Otherwise, "Biutiful" is an emotionally manipulative, 147-minute tapestry of cliches and poorly-developed characters that Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu puts together clumsily and without much coherence. A good but not necessarily Oscar-worthy performance by Javier Bardem (co-winner of Cannes Best Actor) and a pretty touching (and at times pleasantly mechanized) score by Gustavo Santaolalla (et al.) are to the film's benefit but don't really help it work as a whole.

Uxbal (Bardem) is a disciplinarian who has a handle on everyone but (you guessed it) himself. He tries to get money to support his children but his long-lasting felonious venture (something involving construction) seems to be nearing its end. His other job, telling people what their recently deceased family and friends (who look like something out of J-horror) said, is also losing steam as people are tired of him sayingthat their kids stole things (even if they did). His separated wife, Marambra (Maricel Alvarez), whom he still loves, claims to be stable but engages in an affair with his brother Tito and, when Uxbal moves back in with her, displays all of the problems she's said to have overcome.

Before his life bursts by itself, he finds he has contracted cancer (portrayed gratuitously with bloody urinations and needles) and neglected it beyond the point of return. Uxbal doesn't want the same thing to happen to his kids that happened to him when his father (whom he never met) passed early on in his life, but there's very little he can do about it. And that's all I'll say about the film's plot, since I'm getting annoyed describing it and also because I don't want to transcribe the whole movie right here, which is sort of tempting.

Bardem has some nice scenes of anger, tenderness, and sadness, but the performance isn't exactly the slam-dunk I was expecting. He, along with the other actors, is at the mercy of Inarritu's screenplay (with Armando Bo and Nicolas Giacobone). It throws in corny characters (a cop, a fellow supernatural friend, a conflicted immigrant), kills off minor ones to try to grip us, and doesn't treat the substantial ones as well as possible. The film's ending (and also prologue) is a mild triumph for the script, though. Despite lingering on an overplayed image, it made me feel something. "Biutiful," between its introduction and conclusion, however, doesn't really dig that deep. C

I've now seen all the nominees of the "above the line" categories at the Oscars. This enables me to do my feature to its fullest extent, though I'm unsure of how that'll work out. Stay tuned, though.

Barney's Version

The failure of Richard J. Lewis' "Barney's Version" comes from the fact that it is almost entirely unconvincing. It cannot sustain the illusion that what it's presenting is not superficial, timeworn, unintentionally hilarious, and inexplicably complex. It doesn't help that the writing is unbelievably bad on a scene-to-scene basis or that the direction is hopelessly unenlightened (revealing that lack of tonal sensitivity that is often present with a regular TV director). Paul Giamatti, whom everything depends on, throws it all on the line, but it's no use. As my friend notes, he's not skilled enough to overcome such impossible hurdles, especially without acting up a miraculous storm (he gives only an erratic if decent performance, which did win a Golden Globe). Such a film will only appeal to those who are willing to give themselves over to an insufferable collective. Do not take yourself to "Barney's Version" if you do not fit this criteria.

The film starts with Barney Panofsky (Giamatti) in the present day and goes on to cycle through his life from 1974 on. The first few sequences in the past are pointlessly supplied with time cards that give the audience information that they already know or could easily pick up. However, the film suddenly starts moving through time unclearly, coming back to the present and moving out without giving a good sense of where it's going. At this point, when the movie should be barraging us with time cards, it neglects to. In doing this, it confused me to no end, sapping the drama out of many a scene. The makeup, which is nominated for an Oscar, offers absolutely no help, and as a result is ineffective. (Add to that the fact that it is amateurishly noticeable.) Maybe it was hard for director Lewis and his writer Michael Konyves (working from Mordecai Richler's novel) to control their work. If so, they shouldn't have burdened the audience with the result.

The story of Barney for some reason picks up with him in Rome when he's in his 30's. He's chillaxing and experiencing the world and shit with his buddies and hoping to start his life soon with his pregnant fiancee, Clara (Rachelle Lefevre). But she has a stillborn, the unborn baby wasn't his anyways, and an upset Barney storms off. {{{{SPOILER She's depressed by Barney's depression and kills herself SPOILER}}}, providing a one-scene entrance for Saul Rubinek, who is as lousy as he'll ever be. The whole dramatic workings of this first segment are risible, with the making of jarring tone changes and miserable acting by Lefevre and Scott Speedman as close friend Boogie (though I will admit that Speedman goofiness is a bit appealing).

Things progress and Barney, after getting a job, meets and ties the knot with a character played by Minnie Driver, and since I was not taking notes and since the Internet gives no help, she will remain nameless. At their wedding (done up in a flauntingly Jewish fashion), he meets Miriam (Rosamund Pike, who, along with Dustin Hoffman as Barney's father, makes the film mildly tolerable), whom he immediately is attracted to and whom he really wants to be with, even then. She, being the prudent lady that she is, will not be with a married man, and so he must wait and wait and wait and wait and find an excuse to get away from Driver's character.

He does, but not before the film takes great pains to paint their marriage as loveless and shallow. A critical viewer will note that the third marriage may be just as empty. Consider the fact that we never hear Miriam and Barney talk about anything except for the origins of phrases, or the fact that Barney feels the need make a list of conversation topics that includes Saul Bellow's "Herzog" (an ironic gesture) and "All the President's Men." If this is the case, then there is no relationship in the film that is substantial, which is kind of dismal and not the intention.

I won't go on and on about this movie, even though I could. It's just a cliched kitchen sink affair, what with Alzheimer's (always having to be paired with hockey in Canadian films), a dude from Waverly Films (who's also Dustin Hoffman's son), murder, bad song choices, Bruce Greenwood yet again tied with homosexuality, and on and on. The sprawl (this movie is almost 2 and a half hours long) is admirable on a conceptual level, but it plays out poorly. I guess I bottled up a lot of impatience throughout, because when the film got to a certain point, with a line so ridiculous in its enclosure, I had a laugh attack that was almost unstoppable. If I hadn't contained myself in a few seconds more, I would've left as to not be rude. Thank the film's padded corny dialogue towards the end (which for the most part kept me from cracking up) that I didn't, because then I wouldn't have been able to write this review and inform you of the mish-mashing incompetence of "Barney's Version." I still may not have done it justice, but I won't go further. D+

An Interview with Jon Foy, director of “Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles”

(src)

“Resurrect Dead” played at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Documentary Competition. Foy won the award for Best Director.

Flick Pick Monster: How did you conceive of this project and why did you choose this to be your first film?

Jon Foy: I think that for me a lot of this stuff happens on a gut level, so it’s really hard to know exactly why. I wanted to do something that seemed kind of fantastical, like magical realism, but this is all a documentary, it’s all true. And so I sensed that I could kind of present it is being this fantastical thing—that’s the mode of delivery, but it’s all real information and real events. That really appealed to me on that level. I’ve seen this kind of trend in Hollywood of doing films that are presented as found footage—stuff like “Blair Witch” or “Cloverfield” or things like that--- and that’s pretty cool, but to me it seemed interesting to me to go in the opposite direction, to take something as real and present it as unreal as possible [laughs].

FPM: I understand you composed the music and also edited the movie. How was that and do you like controlling all the aspects of the movie?

JF: Well, I self-funded the movie as a house cleaner. I spent 5 and half years working odd jobs. And the whole time I did clean houses. I did some other stuff: I did drug studies, I stocked shelves at a local food store. I did all sorts of crazy stuff. I was able to do everything myself because there was nobody that was controlling the money that was able to say, you’re crazy, directors don’t get to write their own scores.

I taught myself how to score specifically so that I could score this project. The score’s pretty key to the movie. I would say that goes back to what I said before about this being like a cinematic delivery: I wanted it to feel unreal, I wanted it to feel cinematic, like you’re actually seeing something that’s fictional. But again, it’s all very true-we’re not literally making anything up, it’s just that there’s this fantastical, whimsical music, and mysterious music going underneath that sort of elevates the mood of it.

I did compose the score, I edited, I shot it, I funded it, I directed it. I also did other smaller things, like the sound design and the sound mixing and the color. Pretty much everything, although I had a lot of helping as far as like dealing with concepts from Colin Smith, who also was producing the film. He would do a lot of quality control, of watching the film and letting me know, this part goes on too long, things like that, and he worked on the pacing…

FPM: What films and directors have influenced you? When I heard of this documentary, I was thinking it sounds kind of like Banksy [and his "Exit Through the Gift Shop"].

JF: We loved that movie. Well, that movie came out late in the game, in the last year or so, when our movie was being more or less wrapped up. But, yeah, certainly: we were so happy when we heard that movie came out that we actually went to the theater and saw it as soon as we could because we thought, oh my god another movie that’s kind of like ours [laughs].

I would say my influences were around the time that I was growing up—maybe around like 10 years old, I was seeing all these wonderful films that a lot of us probably grew up with. The Spielberg stuff, the early Tim Burton stuff, Star Wars-- all these wonderful escapist Hollywood films. That was the stuff that really planted the seed for me to want to be a filmmaker.

And then what happened was I got into punk rock, and that shaped my understanding of this raw approach to art and feeling as if you can do things yourself, you don’t need to hire professionals. You can just do things, and if they’re a little rough, then whatever, they’ll come across as being more honest anyway.

It is a very lo-fi film. I pretty much learned how to do everything as I went [laughs]. Not a whole lot of training or anything. So I would say a mix of those two things: those wonderful, fantastical films, and then, as viewed through the lens of someone who cobbles together things very raw and immediate, through the lens of punk rock, that’s how you end up with stuff like this [laughs].

FPM: Without spoiling anything, do you feel like you’ve found a satisfying answer to the mystery of the tiles in the making of this documentary?

JF: Well, the answer is yes and no. We leave people to decide what they think, but we present our evidence, we’re satisfied with what we discovered, and where the story took us. We felt like it was an adventure, and we shared that on film. We hope that people will enjoy it as well. And I guess people can make up their own minds, because a lot of it is conjecture, a lot of it is guesswork; we bring together things from the past… And so I guess it’s kind of interesting: we leave people to debate it afterwards and leave them to decide what they think of what we found. But hopefully it’ll be entertaining, regardless of what people come up with.

Another Year

Mike Leigh's last film, "Happy-Go-Lucky," may be a bit more consistent than his new work, "Another Year," but the latter is much more heartrending. It sees geologist Tom (Jim Broadbent) and his counselor wife Gerri (Ruth Sheen) through one year of their life (with season-titled sections a la "Rushmore"). People who see this film are bound immediately to think of them as "happy," but if their life is as taxing every year as it is in the year profiled in this film, maybe not entirely.

They are routinely imposed upon by clingy work friend Mary (Lesley Manville), who always gets embarrassingly hammered when she comes over and who wears her emotions on her sleeves. When she comes over for the first time in the film (obviously following many unseen occasions), we are let on that the patience of Tom and Gerri is nearing its end. Also making appearances is old friend Ken (Peter Wight), way overweight and sinking into extreme excess. Ken has a thing for Mary, but Mary makes no pretense in admitting that she wants him to go away. This is similar to her courtship of Joe (Oliver Maltman), the witty only child of Tom and Gerri, who is a bit more tactful in his rejection of her. A horrific scene, though, results when Mary icily receives Joe's lover Katie (Karina Fernandez).

There are also characters that come in on the bookends. In an intriguing non sequiter which is supposed to be a sort of entry point for the audience, we meet a client of Gerri's, Janet (Imelda Staunton), who is having a terrible time trying to sleep. And at the end, Tom's brother Ronnie (David Bradley) and his caustic son Carl (Martin Savage, aptly named for the character) come into the fray when Ronnie's wife dies and there is a funeral.

Leigh's meticulous and traditionally droll script deserves to the win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, the only nomination that the film has garnered. It's impressively controlled and subtle (letting on instead of screaming out), putting it above any other screenplay in its field this year. Not that all of the sections are equally good ("Summer" and "Fall" work much better than "Spring" and the "You, the Living"-esque "Winter" in my opinion), but that would be nearly impossible to do.

The acting is seriously good from everyone. Manville has gotten a lot of attention, and she deserves a good portion of it. She makes some great choices in how she plays scenes, and maybe, if you really want to scrutinize, a misstep or two (the first drunk scene, possibly). I totally agree with those who say that she's unbearable, which is exactly what she needs to be, a combination of needing and spiting. Should she have gotten an Oscar nomination? Yes. Either field, Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress, has at least one less deserving candidate than Manville. I admire Sheen, too, who should have also garnered some attention.

The biggest criticism I've heard of this movie is that it is that it "invites you to revile its characters." I can see that in a couple of instances (especially the final shot, an instance of bravura camera technique but on some level misplayed), but I find that the film mostly transcends this by captivating and distracting you. Unfortunately overlooked in both the 2010 Cannes competition (yet another film better than both the Palme and Gran Prix winners) and the Oscar field that was originally supposed to serve as consolation, "Another Year" is a film that I will want to revisit (like last week's "The Illusionist"). Maybe I'll even do that on an annual basis. B+

Catfish

This review is full of spoilers, so I recommend not reading it if you haven't seen the film first.

"Catfish" is a moderately entertaining look at how Facebook and other online communication breeds obsession and strange franticness, for its first 3/4. But when the film in its last quarter decides to make a big reveal, it becomes much less interesting, much less direct, and much less ethically sound.

The filmmakers, Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, have not gone the Casey Affleck route and admitted that they've made a mockumentary, so there still is legitimacy in the positions of considering it real or fake. Thinking of it as real, I side with my reader Cristina Acuna, who asked: "Why is nothing private anymore?" The film is about how Ariel's brother Nev talked to people he'd never met or seen before. However, it drifts beyond the innocuous. It begins when a girl from Michigan sends Nev paintings of his photographs. He engages in insane amounts of talk on email and chat, branching beyond the girl, Abby, to her mother Angela, and finally to her half-sister Megan. He starts to, through Megan's Facebook photos, develop an interest in her. They get up to the point (with sweet talk and everything) where if they met each other, they'd really be in a relationship. So Nev decides, when out west, to go.

When they are at another stop, Nev starts to find some problems. He finds that Abby's supposed art gallery hasn't been in operation for years, that Megan keeps sending him songs she apparently covered, but instead ripped off of Youtube and the rest of the Internet, and that her ranch is empty. But what should be an anvil drop isn't when we find Angela at home, holding Megan's phone as well as hers, painting, and updating over ten different fake Facebook profiles. If this film is real, it's exploitative to the max and I don't think that it should have been made into a movie for everyone to see. That they did means that either the Schulman and Joost are the imposing scoundrels everyone says they are, or they set it all up.

I think the film could get off pretty much unscathed (if a bit cheesy) if it were fake, save one thing: at the end of the film, there is a listing that one of Angela's mentally-challenged sons died. To create that sort of stuff in the way that Schulman and Joost (may) have to me is somewhat inexcusable. If the film is fake, they obviously put it in there to try to fake authenticity. But it just sort of makes me sick.

So it's a paradox: the film is shaky either way (much like Simon Abrams noted about "Exit Through the Gift Shop," in a piece I disagree with all the same but still admire). Ariel told me that it was as real, and if he wants to go that way, let him, though I'm unsure of what good that does the movie. C+

Ten Worst Oscar Snubs - 2010

The third edition of this annual feature. This time, I've limited it only to films (and aspects of films) that appeared on the longlists for Best Picture, Best Animated Feature, Best Foreign Film, and Best Documentary Feature. So that means no ineligible films on this list, like "Fish Tank," "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," or "White Material." Also, as has always been the case, one spot per snubbed film. Not that I thought all of these people/films would be nominated, but still. Finally, if a film has already gotten a certain amount of attention, I don't go apeshit if it doesn't get more (i.e. "Exit Through the Gift Shop," which I think is the year's best film, got its due in the Best Documentary Feature category and since documentaries don't usually get nominated for Best Picture and all that, I'm satisfied). Influenced by other Oscar pieces including the one on The Film Experience.

10. Robert Richardson, Shutter Island (Best Cinematography)

9. TIE Christopher Nolan, Inception AND Ben Affleck, The Town (Best Director)

8. Andrew Garfield, The Social Network (Best Supporting Actor)

7. Julianne Moore, The Kids Are All Right (Best Actress)

6. Eric Gautier, Wild Grass (Best Cinematography)

5. Barbara Hershey, Mila Kunis, and Vincent Cassel, Black Swan (Best Supporting Actress/Actor)

4. Ben Mendelsohn, Animal Kingdom (Best Supporting Actor)

3. Ben Stiller, Rhys Ifans, and Noah Baumbach, Greenberg (Best Actor/Supporting Actor/Director)

2. Roman Polanski, The Ghost Writer (Best Director)

1. Ryan Gosling, Blue Valentine (Best Actor)

More Oscar coverage coming soon.