Magic Mike (Sunday, July 1, 2012) (62)

Film directors these days seem to trip into genre holes, where they make one kind of movie, either action movies, comedies, dramas, trashy popcorn fare, etc. Steven Soderburgh, on the other, hand makes all sorts of different kinds of movies, and seems to approach the movies he makes these days as experiments in genre analysis, more than just story-telling itself.

Last year he made Contagion, which, although being disappointing, was a contemporary effort at a disaster flick. Earlier this year was Haywire, a very small and totally solid bite-sized action movie. Now he comes out with Magic Mike, a movie that is more about an examination of trashy exploitation fare (something out of the late-'70s and early-'80s) than it is about male strippers. To look only at the beefcake on stage is to miss the point of the movie. This is a send-up of that moment when B-movies went mainstream, the kind of thing you would have seen playing on a loop on some Turner network in the late-'80s and groaned but continued to watch (and now quote to your friends nonstop).

The eponymous Magic Mike (Channing Tatum) is a scrappy young man in Tampa who works as a roofer and handyman during the day and a stripper at night. His boss, Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), the entertainment boss of the review show is a bit older and has bigger dreams than just taking over the Gulf coast. Mike seems to have no problems with the women, sleeping with whomever he wants. One day he takes under his wing a younger guy at the construction site, Adam (Alex Pettyfer), who is a bit of a lost soul and lives on the couch of his (super hot) older sister, Brooke (Cody Horn).

Mike gets Adam to strip one night and Dallas believes he has the goods to do the work and become part of the troupe. Mike and Adam become best friends, of course, until Adam gets naively involved in side projects like drug deals. Mike has to figure out what his figure is (if it's with Brooke or not) and how he can work with Dallas and Adam going forward.

On its surface, this is a ridiculously stupid movie. There is nothing complicated about the plot and the elements of the narrative (from the guys being construction workers to Brooke being silly hot but unable to connect to guys) seem banal or even forced. Yet Soderbergh is too smart a guy to not know what he's doing. He includes all of these details because this is what the genre dictates. (This reminds me a bit of Verhoeven's Showgirls, a superficially ridiculous movie that recasts All About Eve as a story of strippers in Las Vegas. But there too, a surface look misses the point of what the director is doing. He's mocking the genre and mocking the ridiculous consumerist culture of entertainment and movie-going.) 

Soderbergh is also, of course, very interested in an examination of the genre and how more broadly it can be a Nicholas-Ray-like critique of masculinity in our culture. These men are all perfect physical specimens, of course, but they generally function only a half-level above drooling dogs. The lifestyle that Dallas represents and advocates is empty and impotent in the long run, and Mike has to go through the journey to discover this. Throughout all of this there's the paradox that these super-men are doing a job that's incredibly homoerotic, but makes women get horny. 

For me, this is a really fun and interesting film, partly because it's just silly and sexually interesting and partly because, on a meta level, it's a very harsh criticism of our culture. I love that for most it comes off as not being political in the slightest, just being an easy-to-swallow pill. Soderbergh shows (again) that he's a great actors' director and gets a hell of a performance out of Tatum, that's both multi-faceted and profound. Listing the actors the director has worked with over the years shows that he knows what he's doing on set; watching this movie shows that he's really thinking about a lot of interesting stuff behind the camera as well.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Safety Not Guaranteed (Saturday, June 23, 2012) (59)

It would seem like Safety Not Guaranteed is a movie that was made in the 1990s and somehow got lots in the shuffle, only to be released now. It has the generally feeling of a generally safe and broad-enough-but-also-a-bit-weird '90s romcom (think So I Married an Axe Murderer) and seems weirdly to have no idea what's going on in the world today. Still, it's a generally enjoyable movie (with a very surprising ending).

At its core, this is a story about living in the past versus living in the present and future, or living in a fantasy world versus living in the real world. Jeff and Darius (Jake M. Johnson and Aubrey Plaza... yes, Darius is a girl... just go with it) work for a magazine in Seattle. They get tipped off to a story out in the middle of nowhere where there is a guy who claims to be building a time machine to go back and fix mistakes that were made in the past. Interested in the story, they go off to meet him and look into his life.

Darius meets the guy, Kenneth (Mark Duplass... yes, you basically need to be a Duplass or on a TV sitcom these days to be cast in any movie), who is at first weary of who she is and why she's coming to him. He seems paranoid and weird, but she falls for him right away. She never lets on that she's a journalist only interested in his time machine for the story, but they slowly fall in love. Of course the relationship is based on lies, so once the truth comes out, it will ruin their relationship.

Kenneth lives in the past and can only look back on mistakes he made (something about running his car  into the living room of a woman he was interested in... ooops!); Darius is also hurt from past history (something involving her dead mother), and is interested in the possibility of going back in time. She's not as stuck in the past as he is, but she's not a very optimistic person. Jeff, on the other hand, is a rather brainless frat boy who is looking to get drunk and laid as much as possible. He is a buffoon, but a generally happy one with few regrets.

At some point the movie turns from a rather typical romcom to a darker, more dramatic heisty scifi movie (the time machine might actually be a real thing and not just a paranoiac's pipe dream). I rather like this pivot and appreciate that it's a brave, atypical move to make with the story.

Mark Duplass is becoming a very good dramatic/comedic actor. He plays serious better than he does silly-- and this role is much darker than he normally does. This is probably his richest, best and fullest performance to date. He seems to act in weird, small movies to make money to finance his own directoral work, and I really appreciate it. Sorta a comedic Wally Shawn or Sam Shepard, I guess.

This is not really an important movie, but it's a good movie. I forgive it for being a bit dated (I don't know many magazines today that would send a team of writers to a far-off town to write an article about a crackpot) because it's sweet and has a clever idea about what it is. It's a very creative exploration of a legitimate human psychological dilemma presented here in a charming way.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

You Sister's Sister (Friday, June 15, 2012) (56)

In her last feature, Humpday, Lynn Shelton examined male sexuality and friendship in a very mumblecore way (though it was much more polished that a true mumble). In this film, Your Sister's Sister, she comes back to look at relationships between brothers, sisters and friends and how sexuality might be a silly cultural construct that ignores an emotional human element. Both films suffer from sometimes silly writing decisions, but Shelton is clearly a great director of actors and creates interesting relationships and moments on screen.

At a memorial service for his dead brother, Jack (Mark Duplass), loses his temper at some of the mourners. His best friend and his brother's widow (or was she a girlfriend?), Iris (Emily Blunt), tells him to go to her father's vacation home in the wilderness to cool off for a few weeks. He rides his bike out the place (it's Seattle, so that's normal) and when he gets there he discovers Iris' half-sister, Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), is already there, getting over the pain of her long-term lesbian relationship that she just ended. They're awkward at first, but settle in to drinking and talking about their respective issues.

At the end of that long night, they decide to fuck, even though Hannah is gay and Jack is really in love with Iris. The next morning, Iris comes to visit Jack (not knowing Hanna is there) and the three of them proceed to hang out there for a few days or relaxation. Issues of love and sexuality, betrayal and coming to peace with past mistakes all come up and are worked through.

This is a very nice independent movie filled with some really great acting and great interpersonal quiet moments. Shelton clearly knows how to get actors to do what she wants them to do, to act naturally in strange situations. She also has a very interesting, slow touch, letting shots last for a bit longer than you might normally see in other movies, letting moments sink in a bit deeper. Strangely she seems to either be bad at or unconcerned about framing and composition, as almost every shot is either trite or just weirdly random and neither balanced, nor interestingly asymmetric. (I think it's more that she's just bad at composition because there doesn't really seem to be a point to these clumsy shots.)

I'm always a bit weary of liking Emily Blunt too much, because she seems like too big an actor for me to be very interested in ... and yet, most of what she does is small stuff like this, so I'm really being unfair. Still, she wins me over every time and I fall a bit in love with her. She's got great comic timing and seems heartfelt in her more serious speeches. She's a great match for Duplass and DeWitt here, both of whom are natural and warm. This is a very good trio; a group we wish were our friends we could hang out with in an island cabin.

There is an annoying sentimental ending that really doesn't do much to add to the story, but, other than that, this is a very gown-up post-mumble movie that deals with growing up and putting away childish things. Shelton clearly has chops for some things, but she should work on small elements like her writing and composition. I hope she improves those things -- if she does she will make great movies!

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (Saturday, June 2, 2012) (52)

Oy vey iz mir. The Best Exotic Merigold Hotel. Oy vey. I'm not sure who was asking for this movie, though it's not at all a surprise that it was made. In an era when we celebrate old people just simply for being old and celebrate brown people just simply for being poor, this movie was bound to come about at some point. John Madden, the sentimentalist who brought you Shakespeare in Love and Captain Corelli's Mandolin, directs what is sure to be his most beloved movie in the years to come. Because it's so nice. Pardon me while I wipe the vomit from my t-shirt.

This ensemble piece has every old actor in London (all of 'em) come together to show us how just because people live around the poverty line in a developing country doesn't mean that they don't have love in their heart (in case we were wondering about that). So a listing of the case would take up six pages here, so I'll just say you have a bunch of cranky or nice Englishfolk over the age of 70 who all decided to move to a hotel that's being advertised online. They all go for different reasons (some of which are totally unclear) and all end up living next to one another in what turns out to be a ramshackle lodging (what a surprise! and - that's so funny!). They slowly help to make their world more nice (because they're white and rich) just as the hotel owner and his mother fight about his future with his girlfriend (hmm - that seems random and disconnected...). Then all the old people find love and happiness or die in peace.

I'm really over this cultural fetishization from a very Western, white point of view. Isn't it nice that white people can visit these places and bring their money and help these people? Isn't it nice that a untouchable warms the cockles of the cold woman's heart? Isn't it wonderful that homosexuality is not a death sentence in a developing nation? The answer to all these questions is, of course "no" in the real world, but in the universe of this soft-focus kingdom, economics and social mores mean nothing. As long as we can pat ourselves on the back when driving out of the multiplex parking lot. We are modern and liberal and understanding and warm to all peoples. Yes we are.

There's no real substance to this film. It's mostly loathsome because of how reluctant it is to offend anyone and how rosy a picture it paints. Yes, India is a land of bright colors... and so what? Does the untouchable's life get better after her brief interaction with the mean white lady? Does the growing service-economy middle class in India really have much more room to grow and does it train its workers in skills that are at all transferable? What sort of security net do most entrepreneurs have in such a place? Clearly this isn't a political movie, but then what is it? A sweet romance? Eh - that's not really that interesting... and not really that romantic or heartfelt.

This is the most maximalist superficiality you might ever seen in a movie. It generally looks good (photography by Ben Davis), but that has more to do with the setting and the wide aperture than anything particularly interesting or more than one would expect. It's just that this movie really is just about the surface of things. Relationships are defined in metonymic terms where one untouchable symbolizes the suffering underclass of society, unable to ever reach the middle class and where one love affair between a black sheep son of rich people and a successful yuppie woman equals the difficult love the white people have for this non-white country. It's all deeply boring and trite and mildly offensive in it's tone-deafness.

Stars: 1 of 4

The Intouchables (Tuesday, May 15, 2012) (49)

Toward the end of last year, I kept hearing about a French movie called The Intouchables (which, as far as I understood means "The Untouchables"... I don't understand the weird semi-translation... because of the De Plama movie? What about the two Crash movies?) that was setting all sorts of box office records in Europe. Today it is the highest-grossing film not in English of all time. This has to be a brilliant and amazing film, right?! Well, no so much.

The Intouchables, directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano (from their script), is based on a true story (a concept that always makes me gag for its worthlessness) and is filled with all sorts of post-neoliberal racism and bizarrely blind classism. I would hope that white people who go to see this movie feel really proud of themselves for witnessing the assistance of a single African immigrant, who lives in the housing projects. Clearly such magnanimity is the key to moving our world forward in a peaceful and beautiful way where all children are loved regardless of their color... just like The Help.

Philippe (Francois Cluzet) is a billionaire living in an amazing house in Paris (it seems to be on Ile St. Louis... or maybe that's just where it should be). He is a quadriplegic and has a gigantic staff of helpers and attendants who look after him at all times. One morning, he and one of his assistants are interviewing new caretakers who will wash, dress and chauffeur him around all the time. In walks Driss (Omar Sy) a tall and dark black man who is clearly not taking the interview process seriously, but simply is looking for a signature on his unemployment form (in France you have to prove that you're applying for jobs and not getting them before you can get your unemployment benefit). 

He proceeds to give incredibly rude and unprofessional answers to basic questions, and hits on Philippe's hot assistant (Audrey Fleurot). This has the opposite result than he was hoping, of course, and Philippe hires him, seeing his unpolished and direct style as a welcome change from the sycophantic treatment he gets from most people in the world. Naturally, Philippe and Driss become best friends, each one helping the other see the world in a different light and each one showing the other that friendship can be filled with real emotions and real connections. 

Also, naturally, there's lots of stuff about Driss being a hoodrat who has never heard opera music, only listens to Earth, Wind & Fire (Really? A contemporary black dude who only listens to '70s funk/disco? Not Jay-Z?) and is the world's best dancer. We are aghast that Philippe's friends react to Driss in such a callous, superficial way ("because he's black," we whisper) -- even though his behavior really is mostly  unpredictable and sometimes offensive. 

But then there's a scene when, for Philippe's birthday, everyone gets dressed in black tie for a concert and Driss looks amazing (insert house-slave stereotype here) and that aforementioned hot assistant says that he looks "just like Obama". Let's be absolutely crystal clear: Omar Sy looks NOTHING like Barack Obama, aside from the fact that both of them have skin that's not lily white. This is not played as a comment designed to make us see Philippe's world as unchangeable and eternally racist; this is a scene to show us that a black man in a suit is an object of sexual desire (again, house-slave theme) and the assistant's comment is supposed to be what we are all thinking -- that is if we were all living in 1952 Mississippi. ("They all look alike to me."l

The third act is a total structural mess, with Driss being sent away to his aunt in the projects for some bizarre and unexplainable reason, and then being brought back for equally unclear motivations. We understand that Philippe and Driss are two halves of a pair and that they complete one another like a black and white cookie (look to the cookie!). And then we all sit back in our seats an groan because it's such a hackneyed idea (when it's not being totally offensive). Meanwhile, Philippe does nothing to help Driss' family or anyone not inside the walls of his urban chateau -- because Marxism is a terrible thing and that would be punishing Philippe for working hard... or something. 

This is such a silly trifle of a film, and so offensively post-racial it's shocking anyone has said anything mildly kind about it. It should be looked at with contempt. Sure, there are some brief, sweet moments between the two guys... and Sy is a really fantastic dancer, if you can put your "magical negro dance number" glasses on the top of your head... but it's overall message, that we should all get along better -- but only on the terms of the white guy and the billionaires -- is deeply disgusting. 

Stars: 1 of 4

Declaration of War (Friday, February 3, 2012) (6)

It's long been an easy thing for people to say that some new young film talent in France is "the next Godard" or "has the feeling of early Truffaut," so when hearing such a thing about Valérie Donzelli and her film Declaration of War, I basically ignored it. And yet, the film really does have the feeling of the first generation of New Wave fare in the first part of the 1960s.

There's something about the brightness and joy of the experience of watching the film, the post-modern taking of film conventions and magnifying them, that's totally reminiscent of such films. Just like how Godard and Truffaut were cinephiles who enjoyed the game of making movies and inserting hundreds of allusions and jokes in them, it's clear that Donzelli is a very keen movie watcher and a talented artist.

Billed as being "based on a true story," the film was co-written by Donzelli and her frequent collaborator Jérémie Elkaim (who also co-starred in her last film, Queen of Hearts - available on DVD and worth watching) and would seem to be their own story of love and pain. The film opens with Juliette (Donzelli) taking her young son to the hospital where he gets an MRI. We then see a flashback to her in a club several years earlier where she met Romeo (Elkaim) (silly or not, the name joke is straight out of Godard). The two have a passionate affair that ends in her getting pregnant and them getting married.

All of a sudden, these two thirty-somethings have to be grownups and take care of serious stuff, whether they like it or not. At some point their young baby starts behaving strangely, and after a series of frantic doctor visits, it seems he has a brain tumor. They must grow up even more in a short amount of time and see what all this stress does for their relationship.

Donzelli has an interesting on-screen persona (I say this based only on the two films of hers that I've seen). She's basically a French Zooey Deschanel, light and bubbly, not against singing or crying for no particular reason; a cool chick you feel like you might know or might want to know. (Granted, many people hate Deschanel, and they might hate Donzelli as well... all I can say to these people is that you're jealous and clearly hate joy.)

Perhaps a more apt comparison, however, in the world of independent film is Miranda July, at least from the point of view of being cute and relatable and technically interesting. In many ways, this film feels like a "what if" sequel to July's The Future (what if Sophie and Jason had stayed together in that film?). This is a story about young people enjoying freedom until it gets serious and then not totally having the tools to deal with reality.

There is a risky and interesting musical number in the film, that really shouldn't work but does. Unlike Queen of Hearts, which is a Jacques Demy-esque musical comedy, this is really a light drama with a single song in it.

Throughout the film, Donzelli punctuates moments with rather daring and interesting filmic devices, such as iris-ins and third-person off-screen narration (again, another ode to Godard, who might have been paying homage to a Dassin or someone like that). It's all very fun and quirky. In one sequence, as the young family is rushing to the train station to catch a train for Marseilles to see a doctor down there, Donzelli and editor Pauline Gaillard give one of the most amazing left-to-right hurry-up sequences I can remember in a long time. It's really beautiful. I really appreciate such bold efforts, if for no other reason than so many movies are so goddamn boring, at least this is an effort at something clever and new.

This is a much more serious, real-world-based story than Donzelli's previous film and I think her style works wonderfully here. I look forward to seeing what she will do next, perhaps a return to sentimental musical fare or maybe a deeper journey into this more serious world of formalist drama.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Lebanon, Pa. (2011) (Wednesday, January 11, 2012) (136)

Lebanon, Pa. is about Will (Josh Hopkins), a guy in his mid-30s who lives in Philadelphia who has to go to Lebanon, PA to deal with his estranged father's estate once after his death. Once he gets there he becomes friendly with his dad's neighbors, a guy about his age who is raising two teenage kids. The daughter, CJ (Rachel Kitson), is in a Juno-like dilemma about whether or not to keep an unplanned baby and the son is just discovering sex with girls. Will also falls in love with Vicki (Samantha Mathis), a teacher at the high school (yes, of course she is one of CJ's teachers. Of course.) who is married buy upset with her average life.

Easily the best thing about the film is Rachel Kitson who doesn't appear to have ever acted on screen before, but is totally wonderful as a precocious, self-determined teen. She's particularly great because she looks like a teen, a girl who a geeky guy could fall in love with, who would want to go to college rather than becoming a housewife at age 18. She's totally genuine and wonderful. I hope she acts in other stuff again.

This has an overall light tone and is a bit of a real-feeling twist on the "going back home" genre with the abortion talk and all. It's a very small movie and nothing more than one would expect from such a movie... though it does have some good pro-choice, anti-counseling center stuff in it and that's wonderful.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Descendants (Friday, November 18, 2011) (100)

Alexander Payne's newest film, The Descendants, has a lot going on in a pretty modest little movie. George Clooney plays the father of young girls, one is 10 and the other is 17, and his wife is in a coma in the hospital after a massive head injury. They live in Honolulu and seem like pretty normal, nice people. As Clooney is reeling from his wife's situation, he finds out that she had been cheating on him for a few months. Meanwhile, his family owns a significant amount of land in a trust that they're being forced to sell and he is the final decision-maker about whom to sell the land to. At some point Clooney and his daughters, along with the older daughter's stoner boyfriend, go to find the man his wife was cheating with, only to discover there might be some ramifications of that affair in the land deal.

The central motif of the film is family, and that makes me really sleepy because that's a dumb thing to make a movie about.There are a bunch of tangents to the story and it's much too complicated for what it needs to be. I think there is probably a pretty decent movie that could be reformed from the skeleton of this one just about the wife being in a coma, having had an affair; there is no need for the land deal part or the daughter's dumb boyfriend part.

If the script for the film, by Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, based on a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, were cleaner and better, this could ultimately be a good movie. It's very small and really doesn't have the materials to be more than just good. Probably the most remarkable thing about it is that Clooney really looks like a normal middle-aged dad in this, not the gorgeous movie star that he has become over the past decade or so. I give lots of credit to Clooney, Payne and the costume designer, Wendy Chuck, who really transform him and make him seem totally normal, desexualized and not at all hot.

Stars: 2.5 of 3

The Skin I Live In (Saturday, October 22, 2011) (92)

This is a very nice film, beautifully executed and directed by Almodóvar and a real pleasure to watch. I think it's about the creation and consumption of art as much as anything. It's a loose update of the Frankenstein story, but as a contemporary psychodrama. The narrative gets a bit lost in the middle act, but it all ties up nicely. I like how it functions as an exploitation film, a virtual ode to Val Lewton, and I don't really think it has much more depth than that. It's a bit of a trifle. I think it's Almodóvar's best work since some of his early films, possibly because it's so uncomplicated by other noise his recent works have been surrounded by. Overall a very good, but not perfect work.

Stars: 3 of 4

Le Havre (Thursday, October 13, 2011) (91)

This is Aki Kaurismaki's interesting take on European immigration issues. It tells the story of an African boy who is being smuggled from his home country to London, but gets out in Le Havre, France, where he meets a nice, sad Frenchman (Andre Wilms) who takes him in and tries to help him get to London, his ultimate destination. It is a story about uncomfortable juxtapositions, black boy/white man, comedy/drama, old/young. At times is slips into a rather gonzo mannered, absurdist comedy, particularly around the domestic scenes, and at other times it's a send-up of classic French policiers. Overall it's a lovely film and beautifully executed. I'm a bit tired of this kind of story (it's very reminiscent of Philippe Lioret's film Welcome from last year, which dealt with a similar story a hundred miles up the coast in Calais), but this is at least a fresh look at it.

Stars: 3 of 4

50/50 (Saturday, October 8, 2011) (88)

A comedy about cancer?! They said it could never be done, but here it is! Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a twenty-something guy who is diagnosed with some bad kind of cancer (as opposed to the good kinds). His best friend, played by Seth Rogan, is a bit of a clown and doesn't deal with the news well. The only place he finds solace is with the hospital social worker, played by Anna Kendrick. This is a very OK movie, not really all that funny, but not really a downer either. I was impressed by Kendrick, who I normally find particularly forced and showy (as in her role in Up in the Air), but here is understated and vulnerable. I hope she can keep up this tone and not try to be the high-school-drama-queen she has been up to this point in her onscreen career. JGL is brilliant as always, though the role he's playing here is more limited and not really interesting. Rogan phones in his performance as only he can.

Stars: 2 of 4

Restless (Wednesday, September 21, 2011) (82)

Restless is a Gus Van Sant movie about a boy obsessed with death (Henry Hopper, fils de Dennis) who becomes friendly with a girl who has a few months to live because she's about to die of cancer (Mia Wasikowska). It's slight and facile and generally boring, but it does portend nice things from Master Hopper... and once again begs the question: why the fuck does Young Mia get work - she's really not good at all. There's nothing here that you didn't see done better in Harold and Maude (though this time the sex is at least age-appropriate... though that was part of the beauty of Harold and Maude that it was so wrong). There's really nothing about this film that's wonderful or terrible. It's mostly a fart in the wind.

Stars: 2 of 4

Beginners (Thursday, August 4, 2011) (63)

Beginners is a very intimate, funny, personal and sad movie by writer/director Mike Mills. It does sometimes boil over with sentimentality and cuteness (he is married to Queen of Cute Miranda July), but his enthusiasm is infectious and he communicates the difficulties of discourse brilliantly through montage, score and clever dialogue (sometimes from a dog).

As the film opens, Oliver (Ewan McGregor) tells us that his mother died five years ago and that his father, Hal (Christopher Plummer) has just passed away from cancer. Hal had just came out as gay after living as a straight married man since the 1950s; in his final years, he had a lover, Andy (Goran Visnjic) and began to open up to his son in ways that he had never done in the past.

The story is told simultaneously in the present and flashbacks at the past, sometimes at Oliver's childhood interacting with his off-beat mother and sometimes looking at the last years of his father'a life, but always from Oliver's point of view. He's a sad guy; now in his 40s, he is an artist living and working in LA and never totally connecting to anyone (including his friends). There is a suggestion from them that he used to be more "into it all," but he's gotten sadder and more quiet, either because of his father's death or exacerbated by that.

At any rate, he goes to a party with them where he meets Anna (Melanie Laurent) a French actress living in an LA hotel for some short period of time. The two immediately connect, probably they each see a similar dourness in the other, and they try to make it work together despite their individual distrust of humanity and Oliver's specific pain from losing his father, who had become a close friend in recent years.

I think that a well-crafted montage is one of the best and most interesting devices a director can use, and Mills employs them here wonderfully and rather unlike anything else I've ever seen. There is a refrain and a structure they all come back to. In a monotone voice-over we hear Oliver say, for instance "I was born in 1963. This is the President in 1963; this is what nature looked like; this is the sun; the stars." As we hear these things, we see advertising or publicity stills of the things being described. Yes, it's certainly a bit precious, but it's effective. This is how Oliver sees the world and this gets us into his literal frame of reference. He is not a very elaborate emotional person, rather he sees things in a binary way: happy/sad, pain/pleasure, good/bad, comfort/discomfort. These montages lead us into this understanding.

To say they are reminiscent of Hollis Frampton's seminal art film, (nostalgia), is an understatement, and perhaps strikingly naive. The disembodied voice feels close and uncomfortably clinical at the same time; the idea of images summing up emotions and acting as stand-ins for whole stories. Really what the connection comes down to is exactly the title, nostalgia - and more specifically sadness over things long ago (even things you didn't experience yourself).

As the film goes along, Oliver seems to be working on an art project about sadness, hand-drawn pictures that have some political message and some personal connection (they're about his father's suppression of his sexuality). Clearly Mills isn't subtle with his themes.

Back with Anna, they both have issues with their parents (she has an ongoing discussion with her father he wants to kill himself for reasons we never find out). They connect because they're both moving at the same slow pace experiencing everything, stopping to smell the roses, as it were. Oliver is clearly afraid of commitment, and ambivalent about "taking the next step" with her, for fear their relationship will evaporate (because things move toward nothingness, of course).

The connection they mutually feel is frightening to Oliver, who has connected to several people over the years. First we see his unconventional mother (who is a riot, played by Mary Page Keller), who seems to interact with the 10-year-old Oliver as if she is a 10-year-old. She does a silly dance in an art gallery, she has a game where she shoots him with her fingers as a gun and critiques his death-fall. It's clear that as a kid, he connected more to his mother. After she died, he clearly connected to his father and appreciated his joie de vivre and recognized his life-long struggles. After his father's death, he connects to his father's dog, Arthur, who doesn't speak, though we do see his glances subtitled several times (this is wonderful and very reminiscent of Miranda July's joyful eccentricity).

Oliver is worried that he might not be in an emotional position, at this moment, to properly give himself to Anna, and he wants to cut off the relationship before they get in too deep. Clearly this is a self-fulfilling action, as pushing her away for no good reason...well, it pushes her away. We feel bad for her, but also bad for him. He knows not what he does.

All four lead actors here are non-Americans (and then the fifth is a dog) and only Laurent is playing a foreigner. I found McGregor's American accent difficult throughout, as much as I tried to ignore and just chalk it off to a silly LA affectation. Really, Plummer, Visnjic and McGregor all struggle with their accents, though they all give very nice heart-felt performances. I guess Laurent's performance feels the most honest (possibly because she's playing a French woman who speaks with a French accent), because she doesn't seem to be reaching as far for the emotional connections to Anna's actions. (I'm very upset that I'm not dating Melanie. She's beautiful and talented... and Jewish... .)

Perhaps Mills relies too much on his montages. I think they would have been even more effective than they are if there had only been three or four of them rather than the six or seven we see. He's certainly a bit too blunt about the theme of sadness. Clearly the actors' accents are distracting too, but Mills gets great performances out of them all. He also uses technical stuff, like a wonderful, sad piano score by Roger Neil, Dave Palmer and Brian Reitzell to convey the darkness of the film, despite it's very funny writing. This is a movie that I expected to hate for being too sweet and too on-the-nose about child-parent emotions. It's much better than that and is a very nice work.

Stars: 3 of 4

Terri (Tuesday, June 28, 2011) (47)

Azazel Jacob's first major(ish) film was Mama's Man in 2008, an interesting atmosphere piece, in a style that is rather a corollary to mumblecore (mumbleish you could say). It is very rough around the edges (on purpose) and tells the very sad story of a man in a sort of mid-life crisis, moving back to his parents' small apartment and regressing to adolescence while avoiding his own wife and family across the country. I found the film interesting from a style point of view, but ultimately difficult to watch and impossible to connect to because the story never really moved much.

Jacob's newest film, Terri, is a vast improvement on that first work. He maintains the interesting scruffy style of the first, but gives it just enough story (though still not very much) to move our emotions and sympathies. It's a good movie, much better than most, but is still stuck in such a weird place that it's hard to work around a few elemental parts of it.

The film opens with Terri (Jacob Wysocki), an obese giant of a teenager sitting naked in the bathtub of his uncle's house where he lives. This is a terrible, dirty, messy house in the Valley and Uncle James (Creed Bratton... Creed from The Office) is a 50-something man suffering from dementia who is highly medicated and not much of a caregiver to Terri. Terri walks to school through the woods, is laughed at by all the kids he sees on the soccer filed, is called terrible names (one kid calls him "garbage dump") and gets mocked in class with the tacit approval of the teachers who don't seem to care about much of anything.

One day he's ordered to the office of the assistant principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly), who tells him they can have a weekly meeting to talk about stuff and help him out. Mr. Fitzgerald says he was a freak as a kid too and that kids laughed at him, but he survived and can help Terri get through it. Terri seems to get along fine (though he's very sad) but he accepts the offer and they two start an interesting, funny relationship that helps to give Terri a boost of self-confidence.

What is hardest for me about this film is that there seem to be two separate tracks of the story that exist simultaneously and never totally get resolved or bump into one another. That is, Terri's home life with his uncle is incredibly sad (and by incredibly say, I mean really, really, really sad) while the relationship at school with Mr. Fitzgerald is sorta goofy funny (as John C. Reilly does very well). I really enjoy both parts independently, but they don't meld well and never really feel like they fit in the same film. I should also say that although they're both done well, neither one is particularly fresh; the home stuff feels very much like the recent trend in movies for showing the "shitiness" of life (see: Hesher, Super, Observe and Report) and the school stuff is very much like the gonzo, biting comedies that have become rather fashionable (see: East Bound and Down, Win Win, Cyrus... in fact Reilly's character here could be the same guy as in Cyrus).

But Jacobs does have a good eye for the look of the film and a good sensibility for actors. There is a scene near the end of the film where Terri and some new friends "experiment" with whiskey and his uncle's pills. I have to say I have possibly never seen a more realistic-feeling drunk/drug scene, let alone one with young actors who probably have little experience with such vices themselves. It's a great job on the actors' parts and a great job of direction. Wysocki is really great throughout, never mugging for the camera, always maintaining a proud exterior even when he's crumbling inside. He really seems like a kid from next door. I think it's a pretty difficult performance, because one's instinct would be to go very hammy and play up the fat thing, but Wysocki avoids that and goes quiet and natural. His performance is largely heartbreaking and very easy to identify with (as I was a ridiculed, misfit kid in high school with a fresh mouth who was mocked by classmates and never defended by teachers).

There is a nice scene in the middle where Mr. Fitzgerald tells Terri that life is generally rotten and that we are all here just trying to "get by". He says that people are shity and make mistakes, but that you have to ignore most of that and just keep living. Although perhaps heavy handed, this dialogue sums up the story and structure of the film. There's no real resolution; it's just about a few weeks in a weird kid's life. He will survive high school (we all did... barely) and keep moving along. He makes mistakes and pays the prices, and then has some small successes. It's a very sweet movie.

Stars: 3 of 4

Midnight in Paris (Wednesday, June 15, 2011) (45)

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris begins with a five-minute montage of the beautiful sights and parks of Paris. I'm not sure you knew this, but Paris is a very pretty city; there are lots of nice buildings and some lovely parks there. (Strangely, Woody's shots have no people in them... I guess he likes the places more than the people... well, they smell, I guess.) To say this opening is an allusion to the intro to Manhattan, would be to miss the point of this movie.

When basically every scene of a film is taken from one's own oeuvre, they stop being allusions and start being tedious, uninspired, self-promotion. There is nothing fresh in Midnight in Paris, aside from the fact that it's set in Paris and not New York (or London). This is a dull movie with a bizarre, simplistic moral lesson.

Gil, (Owen Wilson) is the Woody character here, is a screenwriter about to marry Inez (Rachel McAdams), a WASP with two super WASPy paretns. They are all on vacation in Paris while Inez's dad finalizes a business deal. Gil, the only cosmopolitan screenwriter in history to have never been to Paris, talks nonstop, mostly about his love for old-timey Paris, when great writers and artists mingled in jazz clubs. One night, when wandering the streets at midnight, he is picked up in an old car and dropped off at a party in the 1920s where he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald and Cole Porter. Somehow Gil is living between the two time periods.

Over the course of several nights he meets basically everyone who was living in Paris at that time, Hemmingway, Picasso, Bunuel, Dali, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Tolkas, Josephine Baker and Man Ray (to name just a few). They help him "finish his novel" and come to realize what is really important in his life. During the daylight hours, meanwhile, he goes on field trips with Inez or avoids her as his heart changes regarding.

Gil is basically like every other nebbishy Woody character you've ever seen on screen. There are brief moments where Inez and him meet Paul (Michael Sheen), a guy who she had a crush on in college, an his girlfriend Carol (Nina Arianda). These scenes are pulled almost verbatim from Crimes and Misdemeanors, where Woody hates Alan Alda and everything he has to say.

I would compliment Wilson on his performance, but it's become so cliche to have a non-Woody actor playing Woody, that I don't think it takes much talent to do - it's basically just an impersonation blessed by the subject (deeper levels of self-obsession). I will say that Arianda is actually really funny and, after seeing her recently on Broadway in Born Yesterday, I can say she really does have something great going for her. She's probably the highlight of the film... and she's in three scenes for about eight minutes.

We never really see much of Paris after that opening montage. Most of the film is shot at night and on sound stages. I'm not convinced this is as much the love letter to Paris that many are making it out to be. It's sort of a love letter to the mentally limited who think that the best time is never now, but always in the past.

Assuming Gil comes to the conclusions he comes to after deep reflection (and not actually talking with Hemmingway), it's an admirable thing. But why then does Woody have to frame it in such a banal context? When was the last time you saw a character of Woody's creation have a deep moment of self-reflection or self-anaysis? Why does he have to put the agency for Gil's changes in the hands of others? Why is Gil with Inez in the first place? They seem to have nothing in common.

I've almost totally forgotten this movie already. The narrative is so silly, it could have been written as a children's book, and the lessons to come out of the story, could have been given by anyone with a rooting interest in Gil's happiness. The style is as flaccid as Woody has been in the last two decades. He really should retire and stop wasting our time.

Stars: 1 of 4

Hesher (Saturday, June 11, 2011) (43)

Spencer Susser's film Hesher is a really difficult but totally fun experience. It's one of the darkest comedies I've seen in a long time and it's also one of the most disturbing. It's a ode to anarchy and the shitiness of life.

T.J. (Devin Brochu) is a high school underclassman whose mother recently died in a car accident. He doesn't have any friends and he and his father (Rainn Wilson) live with his grandmother (Piper Laurie) in her tired house in the Valley. One day on the way to school he stops by a housing development and throws a rock through the window, not knowing that there's a degenerate metalhead, Hesher (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) sleeping inside. When Hesher is subsequently kicked out the squat, he shows up at T.J.'s house and moves in (after threatening T.J. with a plant clipper).

T.J. is harassed at school by a bully, and one day, he's chased into the parking lot of a grocery store. There he's defended by Nicole (Natalie Portman), a down-on-her-luck twenty-something whose life also sucks and is in a permanent rut. T.J. falls for her (she's at least 10 years older than he is). Aside from living with his family, Hesher mostly enjoys making T.J.'s life difficult, inciting the bully to further acts of violence, mocking him and his crush on Nicole, cozying up to his grandmother and father. Au much as T.J. hates Hesher and wants to get rid of him, he likes the attention he's getting and appreciates that Hesher's the only person in the world who give a crap about him.

I keep feeling this movie is a lot like that '80s Matt Dillon movie My Bodyguard - but much darker and more cynical. Hesher is T.J.'s bodyguard, but as he is an anarchist, he doesn't ask for anything in return and doesn't totally care about anyone. He seems to be hanging around T.J. because it's something to do. He's not really teaching him any lessons or helping him out at all. He's just really bored and the family is so damaged (dad's on anti-depressants and gran is sorta old and loopy) that they don't tell him no. There's a definite Existentialist streak here... Hesher never moves along... there's nothing to be done.

Aside from that, this is a shockingly violent, frank movie. There's one scene involving those plant clippers that's so gross I get sick thinking about it now. There's lots of fire and drinking and puking. It's all a bit funny (though not really as out and out comic book gonzo as in Super).

The film has that 'tired brown' look that lots of movies have now. Every interior is filled with tons of crap. The clothes that everyone wears are out of fashion. Nat Portman wears granny glasses and looks particularly unwashed (one problem is that Portman is simply too good looking that even wearing bad clothes and with bad hair, she's still hot; whatever the inverse of "lipstick on a pig" is what is going on here: bad glasses on a hottie; it doesn't totally work), to say nothing of Gordon-Levitt, who raises dirty to a new atmosphere.

The two lead performances, Gordon-Levitt and Brochu are both fantastic here. Brochu doesn't say much and mostly looks sad, but he's very powerful and his constant misery is great. Gordon-Levitt is great and doesn't go too far with the silliness of the role (which is possible when playing a character with a tattoo on his torso of a stick figure shooting his brains out and one on his back of a big hand with a middle finger). He's almost non-verbal, he's so drunk and sick the whole time. He's really great.

On a scale of from sick to funny, this falls somewhere closer to a horror movie than a rom-com. It really is one of the funniest things I've seen in awhile (thought much of that has to do with Gordon-Levitt's impeccable performance). This is a weird movie because it's so dark that its resolution almost is washed away by the pain and horribleness of the rest of the story... but it's really interesting and I really like what it's getting at.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

The Beaver (Friday, May 6, 2011) (28)

I first heard about The Beaver, when it won first place on the 2008 Black List, an annual industry round-up of the best unproduced scripts (it's important to note that the script for Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds is #11 on that list... and was one of the best scripts of 2009). It came up again when Jodie Foster became the director of it and cast Mel Gibson as the lead. Then, after production had wrapped in the summer of 2010, the audio tapes of Mel calling his wife terrible names (and other things) came out and the film's release (scheduled for the fall of 2010) was held indefinitely. So finally it's out in theaters (well, sorta... I think it was on 22 screens across the country).

The Beaver is a terrible movie, having nothing to do with Mel Gibson being an anti-Semitic bigot. It has what is actually one of the worst scripts I've seen in a long time that takes shocking, gonzo steps as a way of avoiding banality. It has no structure and the premise, based on a quick read of the psychology Wikipedia entry, is bizarrely naive about what it's getting at. That this movie was ever produced is a testament to how stupid and navel-gazing the movie industry is.

Walter (Gibson) is a massively depressed businessman who also seems to suffer with with mania and schizophrenia. One day, while on a drinking and suicide bender, he finds a stuffed beaver puppet in a dumpster, puts it in his hand and begins to talk to himself in a cockney accent. This externalized superego then gets Walter to go back home, after his wife (Jodie Foster) has kicked him out, and make amends with her and his two sons. His older son, Porter (Anton Yelchin), is a high school outcast who writes papers for his classmates for cash. He hates his father and is trying to do anything in his power to not be like him.

At some point, Porter is contacted by the school valedictorian, Norah (Jennifer Lawrence), to write her valedictory address. He agrees and comes back to her with an offensive piece about how sad she is that her brother overdosed on drugs. Oh - and she likes to paint graffiti, but isn't allowed to do that because her mother doesn't want her to. Are you bored yet? Remember how this was a about a guy who talks with a puppet? Right.

It's a real surprise to me how much of this story is not about Walter and the eponymous puppet. Almost half of the film is about Porter, a secondary character, and about half of that story (a quarter of the film) is about Norah, a tertiary character. I think the idea is that the beaver is for Walter what Norah and Porter are for one another, that is some sort of external force that guides their struggles. The problem is that this simple nugget of an idea is so convoluted that it's almost totally lost. For most of the third act, there is no Walter and there is no beaver. This is stupid.

One amazing thing about the script, by Kyle Killen, is that it seems to be about psychology on the surface (it's about a crazy guy and it's pretty clear that the writer has some idea of what an id, and ego and a superego are), but it's not a very deep examination of anything psychological at all. We see that Walter goes to shrinks in the opening montage (and apparently lays in the couch at one), but he then comes up with the beaver "cure" on his own without any medical guidance (as if the treatment of depression was somehow easy and good for a punchline). After not fundamentally improving with the help of the puppet, he hurts himself in a pretty grizzly way, and then is checked into a psych hospital, medicated, treated off-screen and healed (well, it's a happy ending, so the idea is that he's on his way to recovery). The film isn't really critical of psychology, but it deals with it so lightly that it becomes either a joke or a proxy for "all that's wrong in our world". This is stupid too.

Gibson's performance is much more subdued than he is normally. It's certainly showy - he's really playing a blank cypher for a cockney beaver - but it's not as loud and crazy as he is frequently and he doesn't chew up too much of the set. Foster's direction is fine, if unnoticeable, but I give her as much blame for the terrible structure and script as Killen gets. How on earth could she have let this movie be made with this script?

Hollywood loves movies about shrinks - because everyone in Hollywood is in therapy. Hollywood is not filled with smart people, however. This is the perfect storm of those two things. Somehow people read this script, saw it was a gonzo take on psychotherapy/psychiatry and decided that it was a winner. Nobody ever had the depth of interest or knowledge to pick out the interesting nut of an idea and re-write it. This could have been an interesting and hard-hitting film. Instead it's a joke and is terrible.

Stars: 1 of 4

The Human Resources Manager (Friday, March 4, 2011) (12)

I've written before that what I really love about contemporary Israeli cinema are the very interesting, small and straightforward stories. Take, for example, Haim Tabakman's Eyes Wide Open, which deals with very deep matters of love and faith, but does it in a very intimate way using a very tight story and style. In the past, director Eran Riklis has done beautiful small movies, like Lemon Tree, but with The Human Resources Manager he sheds the simplicity and embarks on a bigger movie with a much more complicated, banal story.

The script for the film, by Noah Stollman (based on a book by Abraham B. Jehoshua, possibly based on a real event) is a mess and lacks a sensible structure. In the film, the eponymous and nameless manager works in a big bakery in Jerusalem. It seem that a woman who used to work there was killed in a suicide bombing, but her body was never collected from the morgue. The woman was a guest worker from Romania who has no family in the country, and the HR man is brought in when the tabloid press suggests the bakery was being cold-hearted in the situation.

As a face-saving measure the HR manager has to take the woman's body back to her country. Following him in Europe is the tabloid journalist who wrote the articles against the bakery and has a beef against the man (because journalists HATE middle-managers). What follows is a screwballish journey into the middle of nowhere with a casket on the roof of an Eastern Bloc van.

My two main problems with this movie are that, first, it moves at a glacial pace and by the time you're near the end of the film, it's hard to remember how the hell you got there, and second, it's a really boring, hackneyed plot. There's a back story about how the HR manager is having trouble with his family (because his job at the bakery is really hard... really?!) and this trip is creating more friction with his wife - but he has to go on the trip to show her that he's a good man. That's all well and good, but by the time you're stuck in some ex-communist military bunker (where he gets a bad flu for no reason), all that back-story is totally beside the point. And do we really need another movie about a man who goes off into the wilderness (well, rural Romania) to find himself to be a good man? I've seen it a million times before and this does nothing to improve on past efforts.

I also feel that the tone of the film is weird. It would be best described as a "screwball dramedy", where you're never sure if the next moment will be silly or serious and significant. This style doesn't really work for me as I think the comedy elements are not really funny (mostly just crass and cheap) and it would have been more effective if it had been a drama with comedic elements in it. Ugh.

This is not a bad movie, but not a good one. I'm frustrated that a director I liked so much before would make such an unwieldy, rambling movie. In fairness, the best part of the film is Mark Ivanir who plays the lead guy very well. I just think the script here needs some editing or rewriting. As it is now, it's a bit of a jumble.

Stars: 2 of 4

Nora's Will (2010) (Saturday, January 1, 2011) (171)

Mariana Chenillo's Nora's Will is a lovely dramedy about the obstinacy of religion and old lovers. In it, Jose (Fernando Lujan) finds his ex-wife Nora dead from suicide in her apartment. The two were married for 30 years and now have been divorced for the past 20 years. They remained friendly over those years and he lives across the street from her in Mexico City.

As he begins to make arrangements for her burial, he gets wrapped up in the politics of her conservative synagogue. He has been particularly atheist and does what he can to thumb his nose at the rabbis and helpers who come to take care of her body. Meanwhile his son Ruben is caught in a messy situation with his father-in-law, a powerful man who is his boss and an important man in the synagogue.

This is a funny movie, with Jose acting the perfect devilish prankster. He orders a pizza with ham on it to annoy all the kosher men around the apartment. He tries to bury her in the Cemetery of Jesus and orders a gigantic cross-shaped casket as well as several floral crosses into her apartment. He does this as a passive aggressive act to combat the passive aggressiveness his ex-wife treated him and her family with throughout her life (and even in death).

In the third act, the film changes directions a bit and becomes more serious when Jose has to face facts and figure out a way to bury Nora. Many conservative cemeteries won't bury her because she committed suicide and Jose has to straighten up and figure out a way to make it happen, playing into the baroque politics of the occasion.

This is a lovely and small movie, but it allows Lujan to give one of the best performances of the year. He moves from being very silly to very sensible, always with a wink in his eye. We are delighted by his connection to his grand daughters and how he uses them to annoy his daughter-in-law and son. He is also very powerful as a hurt ex-lover when he realizes his wife might have cheated on him at one point during their marriage.

Chenillo has a very good, smart script here and also employs wonderful the cinematography of Alberto Anaya. This is a sweet little movie and one that packs a stronger punch than I was expecting it would. It is a much deeper film than it would appear on the surface and shows a lot of maturity on Chenillo's part. This is a grown-up movie in somewhat silly clothes.

Stars: 3 of 4

Another Year (Thursday, December 30, 2010) (168)

Mike Leigh has a wonderful way of making the most mundane people and situations beautiful and interesting. What's even more amazing is that his films are always so dialogue-based and they are always gripping, even when generally about dull topics. Another Year is another great example of this.

In it, Tom and Gerri (funny!) (Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen) are a married couple in their early 60s. He works as a geologist and she works as a social worker in a hospital. They love to garden, cook and spend time together. They have a grown son, Joe, who is a lawyer, and spend a fair amount of time with Mary (Lesley Manville), who works as a secretary in the same office as Gerri. Mary is a rather pitiful woman who never has luck with love and barely ever stops talking for long enough to figure out what to do differently.

The film is divided into four parts, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Through the course of the year, really through a major event in each season, we see how the friendships of Tom and Gerri with Mary change and develop.

There is nothing fancy about this story and no gigantic central thing (like some of Leigh's other films, Secrets & Lies and Vera Drake, for instance). Instead we get a warm and loving couple in a funny and normal relationship with their grown son and their nutty friends. This is a very gentle, character-driven story, one that moves very slowly, and doesn't really move all that much from beginning to end. Still, what we do see is so heart-felt and charming that it is a pleasure to watch.

All of the characters are full of depth and detail and are beautifully written. There is a certain quality to Mary that is somewhat reminiscent of Shirley Valentine. She's the loopy middle-aged woman whose dreams are bigger than her life will allow. She's totally lovable, if a bit annoying, and has a heart of pure gold. Lesley Manville does a wonderful job here, always talking and getting drunk with too many glasses of wine. She's aware of her situation, but feels like its not totally her fault. Broadbent and Sheen are a wonderful couple and come across as truly in love and in a fabulous marriage. They are able to warmly laugh with one another all the time and be supportive whenever needed.

Leigh uses wonderful cinematography (by frequent collaborator Dick Pope) to help tell the four-part story. The spring is bright and green and red; the summer is yellow and orange; the fall is blueish; and the winter is grayish. Such a transformation helps to move the story along (the narrative follows a similar path from brightness to darkness) and is lovely to experience.

I will say that at times I felt like Leigh was stronger writing and directing the scenes with poorer, less well-bred people than he was with scenes with Tom and Gerri and Joe. I think he is better in general with poorer people, like in his best film Life is Sweet or in Happy-Go-Lucky, where the people are struggling to keep their heads above water (like Mary here or Tom's brother Ronnie and his son Carl). I don't know why this is, but throughout his oeuvre, he always does better with less well-off people. There's something about the dialogue and how it works with the general design aesthetic. Interesting.

What is even more fantastic than Lesley Manville's performance here (which is sometimes a bit overdone), Imelda Staunton does a totally, totally amazing job here in a very brief role at the beginning. The film opens up with her going in for a check up as she is suffering from insomnia. She sees a doctor (one of Gerri's friends) and later comes back for a talking session with Gerri. She is a totally worn down and depressed with her terrible life. She is so powerful you identify with her immediately and want to scream out for help for her. She also really sets the tone of the movie, where Gerri is an upbeat woman dealing with very sad people who are not receptive to love and kindness. Even though she's only on screen for 5 minutes, Staunton totally deserves acting awards for her performance.

This is really a top-notch Mike Leigh film. Much of the last act has Mary talking to Ronnie, a sad and suffering man totally lost without his wife who did everything for him. Through most of the sequence, Mary does 90 percent of the talking (as she is wont to do), but we still get the most amazing interaction between the two. This is not a dull scene at all; it's painful, pitiful and uncomfortable, but it is exactly what is at the heart of Leigh's view of things and particularly of this film. People are searching for connections, some find them and some don't. Those who don't find someone grasp for anything they can find in the dark. It's very powerful.

Stars: 3.5 of 4