The Joy of Cows

Okay, it didn't make me weep repeatedly as it did my friend Jessica (she also exclaimed, "Oooh I love autism!" as the movie began...). But this biopic about autistic cattle expert Temple Grandin was a very nice film. Claire Danes does an excellent job embodying the title character, and Catherine O'Hara as her sympathetic Aunt Ann is also a standout (and finally given a substantial dramatic role). Produced by and screened on HBO, Temple Grandin (Mick Jackson, 2010) tries through visual techniques of enhanced flashes of bits and pieces of what Grandin is seeing to convey what it is like to be autistic. I have no idea if this is accurate or if it's possible to convey what it's like to live as an autistic person, but I liked it. In typical biopic fashion, the audience follows Grandin from her summer before college on her aunt's cattle ranch when she discovers the comfort of the cowpoke, through adulthood, all the while summoning flashbacks to childhood and school to explain where she is now. It entertainingly relays her triumphs and struggles leading to her innovations in understanding how cattle work. It's definitely an inspiring, uplifting story, but it's also funny and not too sappy. Unless you're my friend Jessica.

The Black List

During downtime throughout carnival in New Orleans, we caught a lot of HBO entertainment. One pleasant find was Elvis Mitchell's The Black List (dir. Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, 2007). When it came on, I immediately thought, ah yes, Black History Month. But whatever. It's a great portrait of amazing people coming from very disparate parts of culture, their only commonality being that they are black. Yet there are unifying elements. Every person is shot against a grey background, well lit, well dressed, everything's real classy. The interviews were insightful and frank, inspiring and not too sentimental. My favorites were Thelma Golden, Colin Powell, Lorna Simpson, Toni Morrison, Serena Williams, Chris Rock. It's an appropriately celebratory piece and I'm definitely glad we caught it.

Old Joy

I finally watched Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy, a film I kept missing at Rotterdam a few years ago and have not made a chance to see since then. It was perfect for my flight from Denver to New Orleans- and a glimpse of male nudity always perks up an airplane row!

"Sorrow is just worn out joy" is the line, spoken by freewhellin' Kurt (Will Oldham), that the title comes from, and I've been trying to think about how this is the theme of the film. The weepy Pacific Northwest is certainly the perfect setting for such a theme, and the buddy movie aspect of old friends coming to terms with adulthood in their own particular ways was a good context for this emotional nostalgia. It's largely a film about just that: male bonding, manhood, masculinity, life responsibilities, growing up, becoming an adult, procreation... It made me think about the man-friend-couples I know and how they are and aren't allowed to express their affection for one another, what is an acceptable amount of attachment, and how friend-pairs sometimes grow apart as much as romantic pairs.

The context of Mark's (Daniel London) wife's pregnancy is also interesting to me with regard to the fact that his pending fatherhood is mentioned only briefly at the beginning of the men's brief camping trip. Yet it is the coming infant intruder that seems to so threaten Kurt, or at least it is a manifestation of Mark's increasing distance from their friendship, a threat that seems in some way to be the cause of Kurt's current sorrow. I kept thinking about how different it would be if Kurt and Mark were women, going on a camping trip right before a birth like that, how omnipresent that coming presence would be in its advent. But this was a bromance, and that was the point.

Up

Some people I know and trust have raved about Up, how deep and complex it is, how much it's a story for adults, how it made them cry. I wasn't terribly excited about it myself, but it wasn't a complete waste of time. I think I appreciated the Pixar technology in this film more than I have in other Pixar films. And I like the intergenerational story, the idea of an old man and a young boy becoming friends. I like the fact that the romantic couple of this story does not have kids, yet they live out a happy life together. And even more I like that Mr. Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner) by the end of the film takes on responsibility for Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai) in a non-conventional family role. (It would be nice if some of the boys receiving medals at the end of the movie could have been accompanied by someone other than a normative father figure, but this is a Disney film...) I probably like Dug (the dog voiced by Bob Peterson) the best, but after a while his humor got tired too. No matter- it was all entertaining enough. Oscar nomination-worthy, no. But neither is Up in the Air, which I really liked. C'est ça...

The Devil Came on Horseback

Wow. I've been meaning to see The Devil Came on Horseback (Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg, 2007) for a while. Tonight a year+ old article in Harpers, Nick McDonell's  "The activist: Alex de Waal among the war criminals," left me wanting to make more sense of the situation in Darfur, and this film certainly helped with that. I was at first skeptical that Brian Steidle, an ex-Marine and African Union hired monitor of a ceasefire in Sudan in 2004, was our entrée to this situation. But, as I came to learn, he was in fact the one to expose this situation to the world, starting with Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. In an op ed piece, Kristof published some of the thousands of photographs that Steidle took, along with his account of the genocide occurring in Darfur. The story burst out from there, but somehow not enough, and that is part of the puzzle that this documentary leaves its viewers pondering and the inaction it leaves viewers wanting to react against.

The story is absolutely horrifying, a call to action against a genocide full of the worst atrocities you can imagine. I suppose that is exactly why Steidle's photos are so important to the story (in a way that reminded me of Rory Kennedy's Ghosts of Abu Ghraib or Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure). They are proof, they are undeniable, they are terrible, they are haunting. Equally disturbing is the frustration Steidle expresses in his inability to get the world to react in a meaningful way to the genocide. ...

Crazy Good

This evening I went to Crazy Heart and came home to Sam's crazy chicken in time to meet crazy Nihar at the corner bar. Crazy Heart was crazy good. I'm trying to live by the theme of it, "give love another try" like I'm trying to live by "carpe diem," simple mottos that ain't always so easy. I see why this film is such a hit, so touted for the great acting. I was very skeptical, didn't expect to like it at all. It's probably Maggie Gyllenhall (a present crush because of interviews) that made me go see it. But it's really Jeff Bridges' Bad Blake (and Colin Firth's Tommy Sweet, for that matter) that makes this film great. And the script and the music- it's just a great story that is completely believable and relatable.

MG acts first like a therapist and she's also super sexy from the start. Bad Blake thinks she's too good for him. He is enchanted with her classiness (and her youth?). She gets all shy and bashful, which was for me off-putting. I mean, really? This old scruffy dude complaining about his hemorrhoids is that intimidating to you? I didn't expect to, but I totally bought their love story, it made perfect sense. It's chemistry that draws them to each other, like it always is, and they have it.

Just as important as the love story, the struggling musician story, the buddy story, and indeed central to the story as a whole, is Bad's struggle with alcoholism. It's good to see alcoholism portrayed humanly, as the fatal disease, the killer that it is. I've seen a few friends struggle with this disease and it's heartbreaking how it destroys lives, just as it does here. When Bad calls his friend Wayne and says, "I wanna be sober," it's a moment of great triumph, but with a deep breath in anticipation of the long road ahead. In that sense the ending was very real too. But I won't spoil it for you...

Here's Sam's Crazy Chicken! Yum.

Steve McQueen's Hunger

Like most of artist Steve McQueen's work, Hunger is absolutely beautiful. It's also deeply disturbing, in a visceral sense that I haven't experienced since Precious. That's probably at least partly because Hunger is based on the true story of a "blanket" and "no wash" strike that lead to a hunger strike of IRA prisoners held in Maze Prison in Northern Ireland in 1981. The stillness of this film echos the monotony, the disturbing silence that must have existed there. It's, well, imprisonment. The film is full of shit, spread all over the walls of each cell as part of the prisoner's protest to being denied political prisoner status by the British government. This image is so strong you can absolutely smell it and it's overwhelming. We watch an orderly pour bleach onto pools of piss that prisoners have poured out their doors into the hall, and we watch him sweep the liquid all the way down the hall toward the camera, methodically, as if to hypnotize the viewer, the pools reflective and somehow beautiful. I love it when experimental filmmakers and video artists make narrative features, because then we get this beauty, this stillness, this pause. And the film is indeed slow, but this is called for. It takes time to fully contemplate what is happening and to digest the horrific violence the prisoners endure (historical echos of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo). The sound design is amazing- sparse and quiet, so that there is an overlying tension and we can hear every little thing. The confined, entrapped, seclusion of the prisoners is contrasted with extreme low angle shots of a prison guard in the outside world with the sky behind him, no limits. In the same sense we see birds crossing through prisoners' dreams and at the end of the film flashbacks to outside times, forests and trees, causing my friend who'd gone to the bathroom to exclaim, "is this the same movie?"

When in Rome, enter Storm immediately

Shannon and I wanted to go to a movie the other night. She vetoed Crazy Heart for its potential creepiness, and the only other film that fit our schedule was When in Rome. We thought we would enjoy a light rom com on a Sunday night, but boy were we wrong. Within 10 minutes of watching the zany hijinks of a not-so-smart Guggenheim curator at her sister's wedding in Rome, Shannon gave the thumbs up...to sneak into the neighboring screening room that was showing Hans-Christian Schmid's compelling Storm. 

The film began immediately as we were seated- perfect timing! And it was excellent. I have a large-international-organization fetish (thus too the premise of this blog) and Storm fed that for one thing. But I was also captivated by the strong women characters and the fact that the lead, Kerry Fox as Hannah Maynard a prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, was extraordinary. The truths that she uncovers regarding Bosnian war atrocities play believably (and unfortunately) with the bureaucracy and unjust justice of deal-making in international courts that she experiences. Anamaria Marinca (of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days) as her Serbian witness was also great, and together these two women drew me in. It's such a relief to see strong and smart women lead characters dealing with life as women deal with it. I don't think it's a coincidence that the film comes from Europe. (I don't need to remind you that we tried to see When in Rome before ducking into this...) When will Hollywood catch up?

Prison of the Mind

Terry Gilliam's Brazil is one of my favorite films. I was a fan of his Fisher King, I liked Twelve Monkeys as a take on La Jetée, and I appreciate the aesthetic of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But I couldn't sit through Tideland, and Gilliam's latest The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus was a disappointing mess. To appreciate a Gilliam film one must be fully taken in and I never got into this one. Perhaps I should have reverted to my motto for the new year, "Low expectations are the key to happiness."...

BUT, disappointment aside, there are things I liked about this film. I liked the idea. And I liked the compromise that had to come about in using 3 other actors to play Heath Ledger's Tony after he passed away- I thought that actually worked quite well. There are certain cynical Gilliam bits that I appreciate, for example the children's chorus singing about child exploitation and the chorus line of police encouraging violence-lovers to join their ranks. And, of course, aesthetically there is always richness to Gilliam's production design. Although, as my friend Shannon pointed out, CGI may not be a good development in concert with Gilliam's extraordinary imagination- there may be too much possibility, so that it gets out of control and loses focus. Nevertheless, it was a nice little film that didn't grab me in the end. What's next, what's next?

That was a matinée. In the evening, after Imaginarium, we rented Duncan Jones' Moon. I had no expectations going into the film, but I was pleasantly surprised. I keep wanting to call this film "Home" and I think that somehow that would also be an appropriate title for it. Sam Rockwell plays the caretaker of a station on the moon harvesting an energy-providing substance for a large corporation back on earth. Besides a robot that takes care of his every need (voiced by Kevin Spacey), he is all alone there for three years and is coming to the end of his tenure. But he is much worse for the wear and is having substantial mental breaks. Moon was a great take on solitude, loneliness, and the fortress of the mind, with major echos of Solaris and 2001 in design and feel.

2009 Revisited- My "Best of"

Here at the end of January, I am finally getting around to saying a bit more about the 2009 films that I most liked. In no particular order...

(still from Treeless Mountain)

TREELESS MOUNTAIN was simply a delight. It's a pensive rich tale of two child sisters in Korea, their relationship, dependence on and responsibility for one another for lack of adults. Quiet and tender and wonderful. So Yong Kim, who made the excellent In Between Days a few years ago, is really establishing her perfectionist distinct style and it will be exciting to see what she comes up with next. 

Carlos Reygadas' gorgeous SILENT LIGHT opens with one of the most beautiful sunrises captured on film. It's as though the story comes to life with this awakening in the sparse and vast Mexican countryside. All of the actors are non-professionals, which makes the film seem like a documentary. A shocking, scandalous, yet still tale of Mennonite adultery.

(still from Silent Light)

Another film set in Mexico that made a great impression on me is SIN NOMBRE by Cary Fukunaga. Rarely do we get to see with gritty realism what migrants from the south go through to get to the US, and Fukunaga went to great lengths to make this story authentic. The in depth look at gang life, the migratory process and an ill-fated love story make this film layered and rich.

(still from Munyurangabo)

Shot in Rwanda in only 11 days on a super-16mm camera, Lee Issac Chung's MUNYURANGABO is like no film I've ever seen. Also using non-professional actors and made by a non-native (coincidentally Asian American) director, it's kind of a miracle that this film turned out so perfectly. The first feature film in the Kinyarwanda language, it's a wonderful story of impossible friendship, unlikely forgiveness, and unexpected reconciliation.

With all the hype of Lee Daniels' PRECIOUS, I wasn't sure what to expect. But I was pleasantly surprised that it blew me away. Incorporating elements that we've seen before but never in this context, Precious was extremely effective and moving. The film has raised concerns about race and storytelling (Jenn shared this article by Malkia Cyril that I liked). But I was deeply impressed, physically impacted, and I think this is an infinitely valuable film.

(still from Sita Sings the Blues)

Probably my favorite film of the past few years is SITA SINGS THE BLUES (Nina Paley). A gorgeous, brilliant and fantastically fun animated film, there's nothing else like it.  You can watch it here for free. But I strongly urge you to see it in a theater if at all possible (it's playing at IFC in NYC last I checked). Or buy a DVD. It's well worth it and is one of those films you can watch again and again with great enjoyment, lend it out etc. 

I would not have thought that I would include Lars von Trier's ANTICHRIST on a list like this. But the fact is that this movie has stayed with me like no other. I think it would take a lot of work for me to entirely deconstruct it for myself, were that at all possible. Charlotte Gainsbourg's performance is one of a lifetime. And the issues raised are poignant and rarely handled with such intensity and courage.

Another film set in Mexico that deeply impressed me this year was Alex Rivera's SLEEP DEALER. I've been a fan of Rivera as a humorous culture critic video artist for years, so it was exciting to see he was coming out with a narrative feature (like when Miranda July made Me and You and Everyone We Know). But Sleep Dealer exceeded my expectations. I am not a fan of science fiction, but work dealing with race and class and futuristic situations is exciting, like an Octavia Butler book. Sleep Dealer way out-Avatars Avatar.

(still from Sacred Places)

We see far too few images of life in Africa and SACRED PLACES (Jean-Marie Téno) is simply a treat in this respect, fantastic candy for a film programmer and microcinema organizer who dreams of exhibiting film in Africa. Téno's documentary leads us through the streets of the acclaimed Cameroonian director's native Ouagadougou, peeking in on how his countrymen interact with cinema.

I was disappointed with Jane Campion's BRIGHT STAR when I first saw it. I knew I was going to see a period piece and perhaps this film dwelled too much in that realm. But in retrospect the inevitable beauty of a Jane Campion film stays with me, I see fields of flowers full of life, and this alone is a wonderful thing. Abbie Cornish's performance as Fanny Brawne is absolutely outstanding as well, and that too will not leave me.

(still from Bright Star)

There is little I like more than a good documentary that blows my mind with new information and changes the way I live my life. FOOD, INC. (Robert Kenner) is such a film. I'll never look at corn or beef or anything that I regularly eat the same way again.