Cozzalio'd!

For the first time ever, my blog pal Dennis Cozzalio has cooked up a movie quiz that I can answer (for the most part), meaning either my cinematic knowledge is improving or he's kindly taken something off his curveball - the latter, more likely. In either case, here are his questions followed by my responses:

       
1)      The classic movie moment everyone loves except me is: "Show Me the Money!" from Jerry Maguire. It always makes me cringe. I usually take the opposite stance on this issue, however: I'm frequently surprised by the number of people who pooh-pooh the most memorable scenes from movies or TV shows. I always want to ask how they think the film or episode would play without them.

       

       2)      Favorite line of dialogue from a film noir: "You were born to be murdered." - Trevor Howard to Joseph Cotten in The Third Man. It's a line that perfectly encapsulates the entire genre (even though, of course, he isn't killed).

       

       3)      Second favorite Hal Ashby film: The Last Detail.

       

       4)      Describe the moment when you first realized movies were directed as opposed to simply pieced together anonymously. * Around the time I started watching Siskel & Ebert, 10-11 years old. Spielberg was likely the first director I was conscious of - so Raiders or E.T., I would guess.

       

       5)      Favorite film book. Mark Harris's phenomenal Pictures at a Revolution.

       

       6)      Diana Sands or Vonetta McGee? Who?

       

       7)      Most egregious gap in your viewing of films made in the past 10 years. I've avoided Harmony Korine like the plague so far, but Spring Breakers may finally change that.

       

       8)      Favorite line of dialogue from a comedy. "You slut." - Bill Murray, Tootsie.

       

       9)      Second favorite Lloyd Bacon film. Who?

       

       10)   Richard Burton or Roger Livesey? Burton easily over Whatshisface.

       

       11)   Is there a movie you staunchly refuse to consider seeing? If so, why? Anything by Vincent Gallo. Others will undoubtedly tell me I'm missing out. I say there's more than enough narcissistic bullshit in real life, and much more adeptly staged and focused.

       

       12)   Favorite filmmaker collaboration. Kurosawa and Mifune.

       

       13)   Most recently viewed movie on DVD/Blu-ray/theatrical? DVD: Lockout. Blu-Ray: Paris, Texas. Theatrical: Thief of Bagdad (the one with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr).

       

       14)   Favorite line of dialogue from a horror movie: "Take me!" - Father Karras's ultimate sacrifice in The Exorcist.

        

       15)   Second favorite Oliver Stone film: W., believe it or not. I think it's a brilliant black comedy.

       

       16)   Eva Mendes or Raquel Welch? The "sexy duds" category. I'll pick Raquel.

       

       17)   Favorite religious satire: Life of Brian by default. Slim pickings.

       

       18)   Best Internet movie argument? (question contributed by Tom Block) Matthias Stork's "Chaos Cinema." He went on to confuse his own ideas the more he tried to explain them (and became needlessly apologetic to his straw-man critics), but his original video essay is still a game-changer.

       

       19)   Most pointless Internet movie argument? (question contributed by Tom Block) Anything concocted by the Neo-Auteurists, such as insisting the reliably shitty Paul W.S. Anderson is a major filmmaker or, worse, a better filmmaker than Paul Thomas Anderson. (hat-tip Steven Santos)

       

       20)   Charles McGraw or Robert Ryan? I don't need to know who McGraw is to say Ryan.

         

       21)   Favorite line of dialogue from a western: "Trust you? Why should I trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders? You don't even trust your own pants." - Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West (although the line was partly co-opted from Ace in the Hole).

       

       22)   Second favorite Roy Del Ruth film: Dunno.

       

       23)   Relatively unknown film or filmmaker you’d most eagerly proselytize for: I've already proselytized for The Big Year, an uncommonly gentle comedy that finds truth and beauty in conventionality.

       

       24)   Ewan McGregor or Gerard Butler? McGregor, a good actor, in a walk.

       

       25)   Is there such a thing as a perfect movie? Not often, but yes. I do grow weary of critics proclaiming every movie they see from their favorite director as a masterpiece. After a while the word starts losing its meaning.

       

       26)   Favorite movie location you’ve most recently had the occasion to actually visit * The Hotel Coronado in San Diego, the setting for the second half of Some Like It Hot.

       

       27)   Second favorite Delmer Daves film: ?

        

       28)   Name the one DVD commentary you wish you could hear that, for whatever reason, doesn't actually exist * The riotous James Ellroy and Eddie Muller (Crime Wave) should do commentaries for every classic film noir ever made.

       

       29)   Gloria Grahame or Marie Windsor? GG.

       

       30)   Name a filmmaker who never really lived up to the potential suggested by their early acclaim or success: Kevin Smith, who decided a long time ago he'd rather be a slacker poseur than build on the success of Clerks and the creative promise of Chasing Amy.

       

       31)   Is there a movie-based disagreement serious enough that it might cause you to reevaluate the  basis of a romantic relationship or a friendship? * Both Jason Bellamy and I have recounted my anecdote about Last of the Mohicans.

House Arrests (This Is Not a Film and Killer Joe)

Over the last few weeks have come two articles of note - Complex Pop Culture's "25 Best Movie Critics of All Time," followed by Cineaste Magazine's profile of a handful of the 35-and-youngers, "Film Criticism: The Next Generation." For all the usual fallacies associated with list-making (Dana Stevens on, Kent Jones off - riiiiiight), the former is a surprisingly decent overview, if typically Americentric and short-term-memoried. The latter is a commendable attempt to advance the notion that the future of movie criticism is bright, a thesis disputed by at least a couple of the "best." For our purposes here, I'm less interested in what the established Eeyores think about the whippersnappers than in what it would take for an up-and-comer to make his or her way into the canon.

To paint in broad strokes, I think that many twentysomething critics are gifted with strong voices without having a whole lot to say. Oftentimes, on sites that employ them, they blend together as the same voice, bereft of any individual distinctions; their prose isn't instantly recognizable the way Fernando Croce's is, for example. Far from tentative, their biggest flaw is supreme confidence masking insecurity: They come across like grad students straining to come up with an "original" point-of-view on topics that have been thoroughly excavated. Consequently, I find hard to take seriously any "bold" statement they make. (That every movie is regarded as either a towering masterpiece or a crime against humanity doesn't help.) You really think O.C. and Stiggs is better than Nashville? Then show your readership something beyond a string of haughty declarative sentences. Show that you are searching and grappling with the film, with yourself, with the connection between the two. These are the qualities that have made many of the greatest critics: look at the Top-25 list again.

These are the qualities of all great artists, as Jafar Panahi demonstrates in This is Not a Film (2011). I'm going to bypass what everybody already knows about Panahi's house-arrest iPhone documentary (cake-smuggling, a pet iguana named Igi) and sidestep what I don't know about his body of work (i.e., everything) and instead focus on what resonated with me the most - the film's concluding movement. After approximately an hour of Panahi and his co-director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb's detailing of the tension between Panahi's physical confinement and intellectual freedom, the pair are interrupted, as Mirtahmasb is about to leave, by a garbage collector, who takes note of Mirtahmasb's sophisticated digital camera left on Panahi's kitchen table. Panahi takes the camera and follows out of his apartment and onto the elevator the garbage collector as he makes his rounds through the building. Collector and filmmaker chat for several minutes as the elevator goes down, culminating with Panahi following him outside while the banned "Fireworks Wednesday" celebration explodes in the sky around them.

What I love about this sequence is not merely not knowing whether it's spontaneous or staged or both, but that Panahi shows it doesn't matter. While other documentary filmmakers - from Errol Morris to Alex Gibney to Michael Moore to Werner Herzog - may at times questionably mix fact with fiction, Panahi makes the creative impulse This Is Not a Film's true subject. By finally finding a compelling "character" (other than himself), even introducing him via what is essentially a Meet-Cute, does the director become briefly yet exhilaratingly free.

 

If they haven't already, the Neo-Auteurists - i.e., the aforementioned upstart critics who concur with the pantheon of Great Filmmakers while claiming that their justifiably forgotten works are better than the highly regarded ones (John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn is greater than The Searchers, Orson Welles's wine commercial is superior to Citizen Kane) - will sooner or later burst forth to declare that William Friedkin's Killer Joe (2012) is a more significant achievement than his 1970s watersheds The French Connection and The Exorcist. It isn't, not by a long shot. But it's a buoyantly sleazy noir-comedy made by a filmmaker arguably more resourceful now than he was then. Give the 77-year-old Friedkin credit for staying power: working again from a script by playwright Tracy Letts, this director, often reprimanded by Pauline Kael for blunt docudrama brutalism, has reimagined his style without going soft. He doesn't "open up" Killer Joe so much as supply it with a vibrant atmosphere. The movie breathes, even as it's exhaling toxic fumes.

A thoroughly disreputable film that made me laugh a lot (Kael may have laughed, too: What she wrote about Repo Man - "Sometimes a movie without any redeeming social value can make you feel good" - applies equally here), Killer Joe shows perverse affection toward its venal Texas lowlifes: they're alive in a way the zombies of Soderbergh's Bubble or the woebegones of Kelly Reichardt's movies are not. (How else could Emile Hirsch give his most vivid and weirdly likeable performance ever?) It's also more deeply entrenched in classic noir than other movies that make no more than feints and nods toward the genre. The title character's murderous predilections are in tandem with kinky sexual fetishes from which neither Friedkin nor Letts nor Matthew McConaughey (another of his recent career-redefining performances) shy away. Meticulous in planning the details of a homicide (in this case the mother/wife of, respectively, Hirsch and Thomas Haden Church), yet impulsive in his lust (in this case their jailbait sister/daughter, who becomes his "retainer" for the killing), Joe is a control freak who loses control of the situation only to take extreme measures to gain it back. His cool desperation culminates in a dinner-table set-piece that's like the demented mirror-image of the breakfast-table climax in Moonstruck. Killer Joe turns into a bloody comedy-of-marriage - imagine the climax of Much Ado About Nothing crossed with Julius Caesar - a revelation perhaps obscured by the appearance of a chicken drumstick. This key prop, and what it is used for, has become understandably controversial. Yet it's like Chekhov said: If you introduce a drumstick by the third act, sooner or later it's gotta go off.
        

The Most Exceptionally Groovy Oscars Podcast Playlist

For the second consecutive year, I was invited onto the Indiana University Cinema Podcast, along with the venerable James Paasche, to talk about the Oscar nominations with hosts Andy Hunsucker and Jason Thompson. Andy has kindly created a video playlist, so if you're dying to know what I think about, say, costume design, now's your chance to go directly to the source.

Contenders (Life of Pi, Lincoln, Flight, Silver Linings Playbook, Skyfall, Beasts of the Southern Wild)

I'm surprised by how much I've enjoyed catching up with some of this year's Oscar contenders, and not just because of my above-it-all hipsterish indifference to awards' bait. While all of these films have received generally good reviews, I've realized that I've been putting too much stock in contradictory opinions based on rather specious or trivial issues. While Ben Affleck's boneheaded Argo draws praise for being "like a decent TV movie of the week," as though that were something worth paying even matinee prices for, the Realism Argument that has taken Zero Dark Thirty to task in the political arena has been trotted out - oftentimes as its close cousin, the Insider-Knowledge Argument - to pan other movies on socio-cultural grounds. At least one critic has slammed Silver Linings Playbook because he once dated somebody who was bipolar and their experience did not include Eagles games and dance contests; someone who was from the same part of India as the protagonist in Life of Pi helpfully informed us that they don't really talk like that there, a crucial element missing from Ang Lee's documentary approach to the material.

Also being woven into many reviews with seeming frequency are quotes from the filmmakers themselves, the underlying assumption being that arbitrary soundbites from random interviews by creative artists with vested interests (personal, political, commercial) should automatically be trusted. Jonathan Rosenbaum, for example, is correct that Kathryn Bigelow's "naive contention that (Zero Dark Thirty) 'doesn't have an agenda, and it doesn't judge' has only helped to confuse matters," but that confusion only exists by letting an external comment interfere with what's on screen in the first place. 

That's my general rule for evaluating movies: the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the film itself. Unlike Argo, whose cliches grate as loudly as a stalled clutch at Tehran International Airport, Zero Dark Thirty lets nothing incongruous inside of its own reality. (Well, almost nothing: Mark Boal's script gives Jessica Chastain a couple of grandstanding moments, but at least they're entertaining grandstands.) Similarly, while I know little about Indian culture or alcoholism or what it takes to ratify an amendment (I did, however, once spend considerable time with a bipolar person, but I don't assume that qualifies me to a higher level of experience), I was absorbed by the worlds of the following films; in varying degrees, they made me believe.

Life of Pi. Ang Lee's beautiful, harrowing fable about a pair of mismatched shipwreck survivors - an Indian boy and a Bengal tiger - is the greatest boy-meets-animal story since Carroll Ballard's The Black Stallion, featuring 3-D used for maximum creative effect and CGI that looks shockingly substantial. I think some folks are taking too literally as a mission statement the claim by the adult Pi (played by Irrfan Khan, who tells the tale to an unnamed Canadian author) that his story "will make you believe in God." With the kind of tough-minded sentimentality often mistaken for exclusively treacly sentiment, Life of Pi undercuts the stereotype of Indian mystical wisdom for a more double-edged belief-by-necessity in order to survive both our ordeals and our memories. 
      
Lincoln. The first Spielberg movie I've liked since the last time he filmed a script by Tony Kushner, Lincoln, like Munich, provides the director with intellectual rigor that meshes beautifully with his emotional clarity. Both qualities embody the personality of the main character himself, played with effortless authenticity by Daniel Day-Lewis, who transforms the abolition of slavery from an emotional appeal into a legal argument in order to get the 13th Amendment passed. Among its other achievements, Lincoln does something exceedingly difficult by depicting internal conflict among the key players on both sides of the issue, as when an admittedly racist Representative, whose brother died in the Civil War, votes no as expected, only to hold his head in moral anguish.
      

Flight. Denzel Washington must have sensed that his estimable acting skills were in recent years calcifying into shtick (or maybe he caught Jay Pharaoh's unerring parody on SNL), because he throws timidity to the winds as a drink-and-drug-addicted pilot whose life-saving actions during a plane crash forces him to confront a personal tailspin of his own doing. Robert Zemeckis's return to reality from twelve years of motion-capture brings his controversial strain of conservatism back to Hollywood movies, but you don't have to be religious to appreciate the sincerity with which he approaches spirituality. Flight is in a sense a disease-of-the-week movie in disguise, but whereas most actors playing drunks oversell weakness, Washington emphasizes his character's strength, making the demons that bring him down all the more formidable.       

Silver Linings Playbook. A romcom in disguise, David O. Russell's latest comedy-of-rage is the weakest of all of his movies that I've liked (though better than I Heart Huckabees), but as with The Fighter I still enjoyed the dexterity with which Russell tries to conceal the film's narrative trappings. I have to laugh at the accusations that Russell "sold out," since nearly all his movies - nearly all nervy, unhinged attempts to reconcile his thuggish and pacifist instincts - feature happy or hopeful endings. Russell may be a thug, but there's nothing cynical about his art. Like Bradley Cooper's mentally fractured antihero, he believes.
  

Skyfall. The latest Bond movie and the first Sam Mendes film I haven't found appalling (his staging of Javier Bardem's rock-and-roll helicopter raid gave me a tingle of laughter), Skyfall follows the personal storyline of the superb Casino Royale and hideous Quantum of Solace to somewhere in between. Roger Deakins' Oscar-nominated cinematography enhances a mixed-bag script, C+ dialogue offset by an A+ structure leading to an emotionally satisfying conclusion.

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot....

Beasts of the Southern Wild. The hatred for this (knee-jerk charges of racism, etc.) has been as overblown as the praise. I liked my friend James Paasche's defense on our recent podcast that the film is one of very few child-related movies that doesn't condescend to its protagonist. My problem with the movie is visually it's amateur-hour, the year's biggest eyesore this side of The Hunger Games. An admirable debut, a decent effort. I just wished, while watching it, that I could actually see it.

The Devil Inside (Zero Dark Thirty)

Shortly before Zero Dark Thirty came out, I flippantly remarked that I'd give the movie "bonus points if it spares us a Mission Control Applause scene." As you know, Mission Control Applause is nearly obligatory in dramatic thrillers depicting real-life, high-risk scenarios pulled off successfully while Ed Harris or Bryan Cranston barks orders at a team of men staring at computer screens with their shirt-sleeves rolled up and cigarette butts dropping to the floor. It's no surprise, at the end of Kathryn Bigelow's film, that the grand plan to kill Osama bin Laden succeeds; what is surprising is the absence of celebration. Instead of a hearty round of hand-clapping, Bigelow holds instead on the pensive expression of Maya (Jessica Chastain), the young, female intelligence operative who brought the ten-year pursuit of bin Laden to its end. Actually, her face is more than pensive. She looks haunted, as if the ghosts of 9/11 can never be fully excised.

Ghosts are haunting, indeed clouding the reception of the movie as well, namely the specter of Abu Ghraib that Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal - to either their credit or detriment - revive. As everybody knows by now, Zero Dark Thirty contains scenes at a CIA "black site" where an American agent named Dan (played by Jason Clarke) strips, dog-collars, hot-boxes, and waterboards a captured al-Qaeda member named Ammar (played by Reda Kateb). Maya, who is introduced during these passages as a troubled yet complicit bystander, eventually learns from Ammar the name of a courier ("Ahmed from Kuwait") whom she comes to believe is in the employ of bin Laden. Some critics - an odd, unwieldy mix of admirers of the film (Owen Gleiberman, David Edelstein), politicos with insider info (Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, John McCain), and left-wing crusaders who either have or haven't seen the movie (Glenn Greenwald, Ed Asner, Martin Sheen), it isn't always clear - have traced the steps from the black site to bin Laden as evidence that Zero Dark Thirty is saying "torture works."

While it appears that Boal and Bigelow have, in raising this topic, opened a Pandora's Box more incendiary than their methods (or interview statements) can quite get a handle on, I think that their stance is more complicated than these connect-the-dots reviews suggest. This is evinced not only in what Glenn Kenny perceptively defines as Bigelow's "film grammar," which conveys sympathy for Ammar in the early scenes (as a suffering and degraded human being, even though the movie never lets us forget he is also a terrorist with ties to 9/11), but in the narrative itself. Mark Bowden (author of The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden, which I haven't read) is one of only a few discerning viewers who have pointed out that the initial torturing of Ammar does not, in fact, accomplish Dan's objective - the prevention of an attack in Saudi Arabia - and that the discovery of the courier is obtained through Maya's subsequent kinder, gentler act of subterfuge. Others, like Jeff Reichert at Reverse Shot, have referred to a later scene, where Maya's friend and colleague Jessica (Jennifer Ehle) shakes her head dismissively during a broadcast of newly elected President Obama's condemnation of the treatment of detainees, ostensibly in response to the man's naivete. Yet this overlooks what ultimately happens to Jessica, involving a lead in Afghanistan that turns deadly, and could be inferred as payback (direct or karmic) for the detainee program.

The controversy over Zero Dark Thirty has become convoluted to the point where smart and stupid things are being written by the same people in the same pieces. Bowden interrupts his otherwise sound reasoning with an silly anecdote that suggests we know Kathryn Bigelow isn't pro-torture because he heard she's a nice person. Conversely, Reichert makes amid some inaccurate interpretations the most valid criticism I've read about the movie: that Zero Dark Thirty's journalistic realism is, like all "reality-based" cinema and television, just another fictional construction. "When Olivier Assayas...mounted Carlos, a similarly scaled production dealing with global terrorism, his opening card noted the necessary fictionalization of events," Reichert notes. He goes on: "Bigelow and Boal stick to their personality-free 'just the facts' approach as obsessively as their heroine sticks to her dogged pursuit of bin Laden, but what happens to a film like Zero Dark Thirty when the filmmakers' facts are hotly disputed, especially by people who are in a far better position to know?"

What happens, unfortunately, is we're left with one of those movies shanghaied by the agenda-mongerers, a film whose veracity and artistry can't be viewed entirely clearly in the present day. This will likely mean a shutout at the Oscars (oh-deary-dear!), among other irksome side-effects. Yet while I can't speak for the movie's veracity, I do believe, once the dust settles, its artistry is going to hold up well over time.

As a longtime non-fan of the "reality approach" (jittery cameras, etc.), I have to give Bigelow her due as its reigning expert. Less obtrusively than Paul Greengrass, she has, in her two collaborations with Boal, developed a style that looks "journalistic" (read: objective) yet embeds within that style a subjective perspective toward the events it's documenting. This leads us back to the issue of film grammar, and the notion that whereas a picture used to be worth a thousand words, now, it seems, a word is worth a thousand pictures. Just as some viewers cannot discern Bigelow's position on torture via her visual language, both fans and foes of Zero Dark Thirty have been praising or condemning the movie entire for "not taking a stand" and "letting you draw your own conclusions." It's true that Bigelow doesn't overtly push an agenda, nor do she crowd us, as Pauline Kael once complained about Oliver Stone. Her approach is visceral, not intellectual. And I think, in purely visceral terms, she has a pretty clear viewpoint about what she's depicting.

Zero Dark Thirty, like David Fincher's Zodiac, is a procedural about an obsessive manhunt that shows the effects of the hunt on the obsessives. Some of this is explicit: Black-Site Dan, for example, tells Maya that he's returning to Washington for less stressful work (and, not incidentally, because he tips her off that oversight committees are forming, and "you don't want to be the one caught holding the leash"); there are also a telling couple of scenes where Dan enjoys playing with monkeys in a cage (one, to his delight, steals his ice-cream cone), then gets upset that they were killed out of concern that they'd escape. Yet much of what happens is implicit, not just the look on Maya's face as she watches hours of video of tortured prisoners, but the way Bigelow's camera glides by a computer monitor for a fleeting glimpse of a digital image of Maya and Jessica on the desktop. It's in the completely unremarked-upon international gallery of light- and dark-skinned players who help Maya link the elusive Ahmed to bin Laden, among them none other than Edgar Ramirez (Carlos the Jackal himself), as well as the expressive Lebanese actor Fares Fares. (I do wish American movies, even well-intentioned ones like Zero Dark Thirty, would give foreign actors like Fares more to do besides stare suggestively.) It's in the opening prologue, similar to a scene in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 in depicting the events of September 11 via audio on a black screen, except Bigelow and Boal focus on one phone call from a victim trapped in the Towers and a 911 responder - both women, which subconsciously prepares us for the female protagonist we are about to encounter.

Most powerfully, the clarity is there at the end, a stunning thirty-minute recreation of the raid on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan. I'd be lying if I didn't admit looking forward to this sequence, to obtain some kind of visual "closure" in something we've all only heard or read about (most notably in Nicholas Smidle's superb August 2011 New Yorker account). Bigelow is uncannily good at casting familiar faces in small yet crucial parts (remember the doomed Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes in The Hurt Locker?), and among the Navy SEALS who led the assault are Joel Edgerton, Chris Pratt, and other actors capable of simultaneously embodying courage and lack of virtue. It's precisely this multifaceted approach that makes closure anticlimactic, unreachable. The details of the raid are vivid and unfussed-over (like the Belgian Malinois - similar to a German Shepherd - brought along, Smidle informs us, to sniff out false walls or hidden doors). Yet we miss nothing: a woman is killed; children wail; an extra bullet is put in each body unceremoniously. The killing of Osama bin Laden happens in the corner of the frame and is over in the blink of an eye.

If I were the type of critic who always feels the need to "balance" a positive review by pointing out a few flaws ("That thing in the corner, I don't like that thing"), I would mention that Boal's script includes a few cliches that clang (Maya telling off her superiors, etc.), and that Bigelow's staging of a long set-piece involving Jennifer Ehle could use a tad more imagination for leading to such a predictable outcome (ditto Alexandre Desplat's ominous "Middle Eastern" music). Boal is an odd talent, fumbling between occasionally overcooked zingers with lines of terrific precision and insight. (When told that Maya is smart, James Gandolfini's CIA Director deadpans, "We're all smart.") Yet he sidesteps many of the cliches Ben Affleck wades into in Argo: Maya's singlehood is brought up briefly and dropped quickly, without any couched family-values implications of disapproval.

Moreover, Boal has brought out the best in Bigelow. Their collaboration on The Hurt Locker, however impressive, has been eclipsed by their achievement here. As Tom Carson explicates, "the movie is about the moral, psychological, and even spiritual price we paid" to bring down bin Laden. It's there in the words, and most of all the images; and it's in the latter quality that the movie ultimately departs from David Fincher's aforementioned great film about the Zodiac killer. The main characters in that film see their lives destroyed by the case. With Dan, whom we see startlingly fresh-faced later in Zero Dark Thirty, and Maya, shedding tears at her mission's end, we can only imagine the damage that has been done to their souls. Yet a lingering shadow across their eyes - as well as the victorious SEALs, on the helicopter ride home, looking silently upon the corpse of the evildoer who so feverishly occupied the American imagination - is clearly, unambiguously there. It isn't hard to see why. In Zodiac, the monster is never found. In Zero Dark Thirty, the monster is killed at last. And it's a decrepit old man in a body bag.
        

Best Favorite Films of 2012: A Big Year For Small Gems

I can't on good conscience do "Best" lists, seeing probably less than 10% of the new releases over the year. I'm very selective of what I go to see and not infrequently disappointed by what I do, so I wonder if having to view the truly bad films would make me go easier on the merely mediocre. Whatever the case, this year I found the heavily hyped "big" movies often underwhelming (two of my favorite filmmakers, Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, whiffed big-time), yet several small gems impressed and delighted. Consider then the following a sample survey of the Year In Film.

Favorite Film: Friends and family scared me away from seeing The Grey (they hated it), until I halfheartedly caught up with it near the end of the year on DVD. For a while into the picture it seemed they were right. Even though I admired the craft of the movie (the plane crash is a model of economy), I thought the early wolf attacks, while terrifying and upsetting, were staged for nothing more than cheap thrills. Then somewhere along the way, the film stopped looking like a survivalist docudrama and turned into something more mysterious and substantial. Richard Bellamy on Twitter perceptively cited Jack London ("To Build a Fire" comes vividly to mind), and I also recalled what one critic said  about Sam Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue (reportedly a far gentler movie): It's a poetic allegory about a dying man coming to terms with his own mortality. I disliked Joe Carnahan's ballyhooed 2002 debut Narc and avoided all of his A-Team, Smokin' Aces Hollywood product since, but now he has my attention: His work in The Grey, anchored by Liam Neeson's stirring performance, has the diamond-hard integrity of Peckinpah at his peak.  

Other Faves: Moonrise Kingdom turned out to be a fragile classic, more beautiful and delicate than any of Wes Anderson's previous films while miraculously avoiding their pitfalls. Leos Carax's Holy Motors was the year's best movie about movies, a self-reflexive subject that's growing tiresome, but which Carax navigated with thrilling unpredictability. David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis was a sleek, masterful satire about an unfeeling robot (Robert Pattinson's billionaire limo-rider) who yearns to be a real boy. 2012's most impressive debut goes to Kleber Mendonca Filho's Neighboring Sounds, an Altmanesque survey of economic stratification in urban Brazil; while the nimble action-thriller Haywire was Steven Soderbergh's most entertaining, unfussiest work in over a decade. Forget the perfunctory plot: the real story was about a pointy-headed nerd-director falling in love with Gina Carano's physical prowess and staging her action scenes with verve and alacrity.

Also: Mia Hansen-Love's Goodbye First Love was a touching, observant film about the pain and joy of young romance, and Terrence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea the same - yet even better - about a middle-aged affair (with Rachel Weisz winning the year's Kirsten Dunst-in-Melancholia Award for most unexpected great performance). Last and possibly least, Josh Radnor's Liberal Arts was the wisest and most generous of the year's obligatory naval-gazing American indies. It's also the kind of movie a lot of other people don't like, and has the kind of setting (college campus) and theme (the precipice of middle-age) that together may make a blind spot for me. So be it.

Favorites of 2011 I saw in 2012: I was very glad to see Asghar Farhadi's superb A Separation at Ebertfest, a docudrama-thriller whose gradual revelation of its central event keeps expanding your understanding of what happened (and of Iranian culture in general) and shifting your loyalties even as it expertly tightens the screws. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was, for me, an immeasurably superior adaptation to the slow-as-molasses BBC miniseries, whittling down its visual syntax to a fine blade. Finally, The Big Year, David Frankel's uncommonly gentle comedy, makes some keen observations about the loneliness of obsessives and the bonding and competitiveness that derive from shared obsessions (rather topical, I thought). Among numerous lovely touches, Steve Martin's acceptance of facing "the abyss" is his most moving moment ever on screen.

Favorite Revivals: For the second full year, the Indiana University Cinema was the place to be (if you don't live in New York, Chicago, or L.A.) for revivals of classic films. Things peaked early, with a January screening of Once Upon a Time in the West, a 35mm presentation introduced by the supervisor of the restoration, retired film preservationist Barry Allen. Other delights were seeing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (2K DCP) with my dad, followed by Casablanca (2K) and The Third Man (35mm) with both my mom and dad. 2012 also ended on a high note, with a ravishing 2K digital restoration of The Leopard. As the laments over digital grow increasingly tiresome (as do the "See, I told you so!" reports of technical foul-ups at screenings, from folks forgetting all the occasions where film reels have broken or unspooled), the quality of both film and digital at the IU Cinema reinforces that it's the skill and experience of the projectionist that matters most. 

I'm Probably Overrating: The Avengers. Admittedly, it's a bit messy, with too many superheroes to keep track of, some more interesting (e.g., Mark Ruffalo's Hulk) than others. But it's still a rare comic-book movie that possesses a genuine's artist's worldview, and Joss Whedon's light touch with so much character and incident was a balm following more heavy-handed affairs (see below).

Everyone Else is Overrating (But I Still Liked It): I might have enjoyed Richard Linklater's Bernie more had I not read so much about the plot in advance. Nevertheless, Jack Black's finely-tuned performance as a kind-hearted self-aggrandizer and murderer (on the heels of his fine work as a completely different character in The Big Year) is a showcase for his unappreciated depth and range.

It's Not That Bad: John Carter. Can a motion picture cost $250 million and still qualify as a "B"-movie? I'm somewhat skeptical, yet Andrew Stanton's old-school sci-fi epic feels lively rather than bloated, silly instead of self-important. That's a compliment.

And there were disappointments:

Biggest Load of Hot-Air: The Master. Paul Thomas Anderson's loud, posturing postwar/Scientology/male-bonding character study huffs and puffs on a whole bevy of topics without saying anything remotely insightful about any of them. It's never a good sign when scenes from the trailer not in the final cut looked more intriguing than what remains onscreen. 

Biggest Load of Hot-Air (Comic-Book Version): The Dark Knight Rises. Christopher Nolan stumblebummed his way through another grim portrait of the Caped Crusader, only this time with greatly diminished returns, trotting out a half-assed allegory of the financial crisis and Occupy Movement (see Cosmopolis for a superior take) so we never forget, as always, that he means Serious Business. It's been a long time since I've seen a movie repeatedly blow one potentially stirring moment after another.

Most Inexplicable Comparison to Alan J. Pakula: Argo. Ben Affleck's lame Iranian hostage-crisis thriller reduces a fascinating real-life incident to a stockpile of Hollywood cliches. Brilliant!

Betrayed By Its Own Ending: Friends with Kids. For the majority of its running-time, Jennifer Westfeldt's anti-romantic comedy challenges cultural assumptions of marital superiority, only to validate them with a deeply phony cop-out climax.

Good Will vs. Wretched Excess: Peter Jackson's The Hobbit returns to Middle-Earth without the heart and emotion of the original trilogy. Turning a feather of a story into a sledgehammer, it plays like a padded DVD Extended Edition released theatrically. Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained starts strong before getting uncharacteristically bogged down in its own unconvincing plot developments (some convoluted nonsense about an offscreen character named Eskimo Joe), rather than following through on the freedom-vs.-power, working-outside-the-system vs. manipulating-from-within friction between Jamie Foxx's bounty hunter Django and Samuel L. Jackson's plantation servant Stephen. It's the kind of glib, shoddy work Tarantino's critics have always accused him of delivering, but hadn't until now.

A Good Movie with One Unfortunate Distraction: the Dardenne brothers' The Kid with a Bike is a lovely, touching, well-acted film. And the entire drama hinges on a recurring plot device so irritating that more than once I blurted out: "Geez, kid, get a lock!"

Other Bummers or Near-Misses: Gary "Mr. Literal" Ross's visually incoherent The Hunger Games is the year's most breathtaking demonstration of directorial ineptitude. Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress has some witty early moments yet repeats itself and bottoms out by the end. Walter Salles's On the Road is a well-made adaptation of material that no longer speaks to me. Oliver Stone's silly Savages makes a lot of noise without going anywhere. The low-budget indie sci-fi comedy Safety Not Guaranteed has a few nice offbeat touches and won over some admirers, but for me Mark Duplass's dealbreaker performance is the definition of anti-charisma.

Have Yet to See: Zero Dark Thirty and Tabu. Both coming soon to Bloomington. And Soderbergh's Magic Mike, which I missed in theaters, is up next in my Netflix queue.

Can't Bring Myself to See: Les Miserables, which many have despised and a few defenders went in ready to love in advance and have told everyone else to shut up and so there. Maybe Tom Hooper will prove me wrong when I finally catch up to it, but I doubt it. I'm more interested in Lincoln, due to the participation of Daniel Day-Lewis and Tony Kushner, but something keeps holding me back. I may finally give in before the year is up, but right now the thought of Spielberg and speeches is too much to bear. 
   

More on The Big Year, with notes on the Extended Edition

I've become a little obsessed with The Big Year, the birding comedy I reviewed just three weeks ago and have seen a couple more times since. The movie isn't a towering masterwork, but it has the ability to shake the bad thoughts out of your head, a quality some of us could use these days, and which you're not going to get out of something like Au Hasard Balthazar. I'm not a birder - or even, really, much of an obsessive - but whatever granular inaccuracies the movie may have, it seems to get the essence of birding right. Although the film pokes some gentle fun at its subject, it's surprisingly respectful, even reverential on the whole. A cast that features Jack Black, Steve Martin, and Owen Wilson may promise the kind of big yuks (or, given their recent collective track record, unfunny ones) that The Big Year has no intention of delivering, yet David Frankel, who directed, offers something more: a sustained, sublime bliss.

The Blu-Ray (recently purchased, as a Christmas present for myself) of The Big Year contains both the Theatrical Release and an Extended Edition, and the two offer a vivid comparison of the choices filmmakers make in post-production. The theatrical version runs 100 minutes, the extended 103 - either one still about 40 minutes shorter than the average Judd Apatow joint. The additional three minutes don't provide any more laughs; they're mainly superfluous character development scenes that the movie is better for having cut (e.g., a phone call from Black's ex-wife). Frankel, who did fine directorial work on HBO for a number of years (most famously on Sex and the City, but also two of the best episodes of Band of Brothers: "The Breaking Point" and "Why We Fight"), as well as the brisk, entertaining feature film The Devil Wears Prada, is a modern-day comedy director who obviously understands the value of editing. Fashion and birding aren't exactly topics that lend themselves to the term "fast-paced," yet both The Devil Wears Prada and The Big Year move swiftly, not as wild knockabout farce, but through character beats that cumulatively build narrative momentum. (Frankel's editor on both films is Mark Livolsi, who does a stellar job; yet watching Livolsi's work on Cameron Crowe's plodding We Bought a Zoo or Vanilla Sky suggests that Frankel is the prime mover for how nimbly his own films move.)

With a plot involving a trio of protagonists, a timeframe that covers 365 days, and a milieu expanding across the country, The Big Year offers some enormous editorial challenges; yet the most significant difference between the extended and theatrical version isn't anything we see but what we hear. The theatrical, which I saw first, features extensive narration from Jack Black, who plays the blue-collar birder Brad Harris, and an early in-and-out voice-cameo from John Cleese, whom Brad cheekily introduces as "this English guy" who briefly and loftily explains what a "big year" means in the world of birding. The theatrical release's narration foregrounds Brad as the main character, yet it also offers some occasionally incongruous phrasing and moments where Brad tells us about his principal competitors, retiring billionaire Stu Preissler (Martin), and big-year record-holder Kenny Bostick (Wilson), even though he couldn't have known what they were up to when he wasn't present.

The Extended Edition explains these oddities: Brad wasn't the original narrator. It was John Cleese, whom I am calling "John Cleese" because he never appears as a character onscreen. He plays, in fact, an omniscient narrator, whose voiceover in the extended version provides a kind of ironic counterpoint to what we see onscreen. Cleese's supercilious tone appears designed to resemble a ornithologist giving a presentation at an academic conference, the idea seeming to be that we should regard birders as possessing the attributes of a particular "species." I encourage you to see the extended version, but only after viewing the theatrical release, because the former - however clever the original narration may have sounded on the pages of Howard Franklin's script - is instructively disastrous on the screen.

While the J.C.V.O. levels the playing field between Brad, Stu, and Kenny - viewing each of them equally, objectively - the ironic detachment severs the movie's emotional connection, which Brad, as the most sympathetic character, provides. Consequently, even though Martin and Wilson come across as slightly more secondary in the theatrical release, they make stronger impressions there than in the extended edition. (This is Steve Martin's most committed performance in two decades, and possibly - particularly in his scenes with Black - his warmest ever; and the prickly qualities of Owen Wilson's Bostick, when viewed through Brad's eyes, come across as the temperament of an uncompromising artist devoted to his craft.) Cleese's inflections, while amusing for the "history of the big year" segment, intrude on the genuine passion and affection that The Big Year has for its subject. So while some of Cleese's scientific jargon sounds a little strange coming out of Black's mouth - much of it is rephrased or eliminated, but bits and pieces sometimes slip through - Black gets the emotions right, and that's what counts.

I don't know if the changes were the decision of the filmmakers or the studio, but they enhance the impact of the movie considerably. Even if nobody saw it. It's easy to denounce a studio's lack of imagination in the release of a movie that's a tad unconventional - a movie about birds that features no scenes where characters are crapped on from on-high is undeniably a tough sell - and I certainly did, but I'll give Fox 2000 Pictures and its financial partners a token of credit for being at least adventurous enough to green-light the picture in the first place. The Big Year didn't give them a hit; but it is a movie that deserves to be seen. It has my favorite line of dialogue from any movie all year. ("Fallout.") And it contains my favorite montage since the one where Anne Hathaway goes to work in an array of outfits in Frankel's Devil Wears Prada. In The Big Year, it comes during the middle portion of the movie on Attu Island (actually the Yukon), a remote hinterland that offers some of the best birding in the world. As the birders collectively set out, the names of the species they find are captioned on the tundra; and Frankel's scoring of this sequence to Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" becomes the most elating use of a major pop hit since U2's "With or Without You" in Tell No One. Like much of The Big Year, the words of the song aren't important to the scene; it's the feeling that's transcendent.