The first hour is a little slow and feels a bit too much like a history lesson, but the second hour more than makes up for it.  We know, especially from recent efforts, that Clint Eastwood can tell a good story, lead actors to peak performances, and engage an audience, but Invictus is not the type of film we’ve come to expect from the director.  It’s too epic, too international, and too overtly political.  Maybe we should check our expectations about Eastwood and just enjoy the ride.  Morgan Freeman is on point as Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon is equally convincing as rugby star Francois Pienaar in a film that his half historical drama and half sports movie.  When the new president of South Africa asks the national team, formerly a symbol of apartheid, to do what seems impossible and win the 1995 Rugby World Cup and unite a nation, surprising things begin to happen.  Solid filmmaking that should appeal to a broad audience.

I’ve tried to gather some resolve, but I just cannot make myself go see Nine.  Sorry.

The title fits.  It is complicated to put this movie in an appropriate context.  It’s not a great movie (not as fully realized as Something’s Gotta Give), but I enjoyed virtually every frame.  And why shouldn’t I?  Writer-director Nancy Meyers has made a fantasy film for women like me (and extending demographically past my mother).  I’ve never related more to Meryl Streep – even though she plays a woman at least a decade my senior – because she is so down-to-earth and together.  On the other hand, she has a picture perfect home, a fabulous business, and a garden to die for, and it must all be maintained by pixies and fairies because I never see anyone doing the work.  Even at her bakery, Streep’s character seems to just breeze by in one scene during business hours.  She also has two successful and reasonably attractive men after her, and one of them is actually worthy.  Wow!  This really is fantasy for women of a certain age.  It’s Complicated won’t make my top ten list of the year, but I’m glad to have luxuriated in it for a couple of waking hours.

Hint:  I’m working on my top ten movie list for 2009, and at present my two favorites are both directed by women.  This is unprecedented!

I want to like Up In The Air more than I do.  Good movie?  You bet.  Great movie, or best movie of the year?  Not by a long shot.  The film is well-crafted, clever, and topical, but it is riddled with conflicts.  That’s not always a problem, but here I’m more concerned about all of the people losing their jobs than about the man (firing them) who has lost his soul.  I liked the movie while I was watching it but wanted a little something more when the credits rolled.  Director Jason Reitman is talented to be sure, but my favorite of his films to date remains Thank You For Smoking.

AN EDUCATION

I have been a fan of Lone Scherfig’s work since her Dogma 95 film Italian For Beginners (which I show to students when I teach Introduction to Film).  Likewise, I’ve enjoyed Nick Hornby’s novels and film adaptations (particularly About A Boy and High Fidelity).  With An Education, Hornby is adapting someone else’s work, a memoir by Lynn Barber, a British journalist, set in a London suburb in 1961.  The story is simple:  a precocious 16-year-old schoolgirl is seduced by an older man, with the unlikely complicity of her parents, and there are consequences none of them foresee.

The implications of the story are anything but simple, and I’ve seldom seen a more compelling argument for formal education presented in a movie.  The tricky part of the film, the unsavory part, is determining the effects of the other education the girl seeks and finds outside of the classroom.  Peter Saarsgard gives a wonderful performance as a man of about 30 who is both less and more than he appears.  We know from the outset that he is a predator, but we can also see how his charm causes people to overlook, at least for a time, what is right before their eyes.  The education this predator gives the schoolgirl is presented, ultimately, as something of a mixed bag, which will be a problem for some viewers but makes the film more complex.  An Education will give you a lot to think about as you watch it and more to consider after the credits have rolled.

A SERIOUS MAN

Ethan and Joel Coen’s latest film, A Serious Man, is a 1960s retelling of the Job story.  The film is fascinating (as the Coens are wont to be) but not wholly satisfying.  The cultural context and cinematic detail throughout are rich, and the terrible things befalling our protagonist are also clever and, at times, slyly amusing, but it is that character who needs a bit – just a bit – more of a response to these events to draw the viewer more fully into the film.  Michael Stuhlbarg plays physics professor Larry Gopnik as an appealing but ineffectual man.  That’s okay so far as it goes, but I want more.  Probably I’m just looking for larger meaning where none is intended – and I do not expect the filmmakers to answer all of the great questions about human existence and theology – but it would be nice to have some clues about Larry’s interior life.  All of that aside, the film is still worth seeing.  Go and judge for yourself.

EVERYBODY’S FINE

Everybody’s Fine has a terrific cast (Robert DeNiro, Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell, and Kate Beckinsale), but the movie cannot overcome its torturously contrived narrative structure.  I won’t knock it for some holiday clichés because those sometimes are worth repeating, but there is not any magic here.

THE ROAD

The Road (adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel) is grim.  Perhaps this is true to the post-apocalyptic story presented in the book of a man and his son traveling toward the coast and trying to stay alive amid storms and falling trees, roving bands of people who have resorted to cannibalism, and isolation against the endlessly gray landscape.  I can’t make the comparison because I have not read the novel (though I always argue books and movies are separate entities that should each stand alone).  I frequently appreciate bleak and desperate films because of the context they provide – the lessons about life and meaning.  I found none of that in The Road.  I do not feel enriched (even a painful way) or enlightened (even in a sad way) by seeing this film despite the fact that the production design is effective.

Sometimes there are movies that you want to like more than you do, movies that despite your desire for more are instantly (or nearly instantly) forgettable.

I’ve been meaning to say something about Amelia, but I keep forgetting!  Hillary Swank is always fun to watch, and she actually looks like Amelia Earhart.  The big problem here is the story.  Both Ron Bass (Rain Man [1988], The Joy Luck Club [1993] and more) and Anna Hamilton Phelan (Mask [1985], Gorillas in the Mist [1988], and Girl, Interrupted [1999]) have some good credits separately, but this script they’ve written does not work.  Director Mira Nair is hit or miss for me:  hits include Mississippi Masala (1991), Monsoon Wedding (2001) and The Namesake (2006), and misses include Vanity Fair (2004) and Amelia (2009).

Me and Orson Welles intrigued me as a Richard Linklater period piece and because it showcases Orson Welles during the Mercury Theater portion of his career a year before the famous 1938 broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.”  I was intrigued with the idea, but the film will not be very interesting to viewers who don’t have a good grasp of Welles biography.  My two favorite Linklater films (best viewed as a double feature) are Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004).

Definitely see Avatar in 3-D.  The story draws on familiar sources – more on that in a minute – but the look of the film is fresh with 3-D a welcome enhancement here.  I really felt as if I were being drawn into a new world in a way that was more appealing and realistic than simply fantastic.  After awhile, I saw Pandora as a real place, lovely and real.

The story is fairly standard James Cameron with some lines of dialogue that land with a thud and some characters that seem one-dimensional.  The narrative structure is grounded in the familiar terrain of the hero’s journey (Joseph Campbell) and embedded with contemporary touchstones like corporate greed, military hubris, and the exploitation of natural resources.  Those themes fit well with some of the progressive tendencies revealed in Cameron’s work over time.

Most of the time (The Abyss, Aliens, Terminator and Terminator II) Cameron exhibits a progressive bent in terms of gender depictions on screen (I admit that True Lies and Titanic are exceptions that have irritated and disappointed me.   Avatar does offer some expansive roles for women, including Sigourney Weaver, and it’s nice to see her back on board in a strong role.

A close friend of mine said her son described Avatar as “Dances With Wolves in space” (credit here to Jordan Beil).  I had to chuckle because the thought did cross my mind that Cameron may have been in touch with his inner Native American when crafting this story.  Avatar leaves no doubt about whose way of life is better, and that honor does not belong to the usurpers who look like us.

That was not a spoiler! I’m willing to bet you already knew it from the preview trailers.

By the way, if you’ve never see the director’s cut of The Abyss, I recommend it.  Sometimes more is more, and the additional scenes in this film make the fine original even better.  (For the record, I feel the same way about Apocalypse Now Redux – longer but better so that it actually feels shorter.)

So, I didn’t watch a musical after all for the second act of snow day viewing (there are only a few musicals I love anyway).  I decided that a western would be a good complement to Out of the Past and decided to spend a couple of hours with my adored Robert Altman by watching his 1971 revisionist western McCabe & Mrs. Miller (disclaimer, I hate the use of ampersands in titles or about anything else).

First, let’s have a little context.  I think westerns are the easiest films to locate in broad cycles of their genre.  The primitive phase, in which conventions are established, goes back at least to 1903 and Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Robbery (which you can find easily online with a little trolling).  All the basics are there:  good guys and bad guys, settlers, guns, horses, trains, civilization and wilderness, etc.

The classical phase, in which conventions are fully developed, is marked by the transition from the popular “B” westerns into another level with John Ford’s much-lauded Stagecoach.  Remember, this film was released in 1939, a year distinguished by some of the best films ever made, and it also made John Wayne into a leading man.

Of course, classical films invite parodies, and Blazing Saddles is surely the best-known (though not the only) parodic western.  Mel Brooks has made a career of genre parodies, and this 1974 release is one of the broadest yet most insightful and most effective.

There are some interesting transitional westerns that challenge the conventions of the form without fully breaking away to contradict them, High Noon (about which I recently read over 70 final examination essays and still love) comes to mind.  And, there are revisionist westerns that break with the established conventions of the past.

While I like a few of the classical westerns, I tend to gravitate toward the transitional and revisionist because of the complexity of these films.  McCabe & Mrs. Miller is surely different from those that came before it.  Though The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962) questioned the way legends are created and The Wild Bunch (1969) blurred the line between good guy and bad guy, Altman’s film went further.

Altman’s narratives unfold in a rambling way (a macro version of the overlapping and unpredictable dialogue in his scenes) that defies the viewer to predict where the story will lead.  Everything is so understated in this film that it feels real moment to moment.   There is a grittiness to the day-to-day and a profound isolation to the longer term for the characters populating this town that provides a bridge to later efforts like the gripping Deadwood series (HBO 2004-2006) or one of my favorite films of recent years, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007).

While it is possible to chart the progress of Clint Eastwood’s work in the genre from his spaghetti western days in the 60s to the pleasing Pale Rider (1985) and the magnificent Unforgiven (1992), there is also another, parallel, vector for charting films moving from classical forms of the western into a different, more complex, set of revisionist narratives.

Robert Altman is on that path.  Just typing his name makes me want to see Short Cuts (1993) right now.  It’s my favorite of his films, though I wouldn’t mind seeing Gosford Park (2001) or The Player (1992) or MASH (1970).  So many films…so little time.

This afternoon I’m going for something entirely different, however.  I’m heading out soon to see Avatar.

I started to watch Holiday Affair (1949) again, but I like my Robert Mitchum movies to have a bit more bite than this forgettable story about a widow and a department store clerk who fall in love at Christmas.  This is pleasant but forgettable holiday fare.

So, how did I spend my snowed in morning after I put a turkey into the oven?  I watched Out of the Past, a film noir classic (1947) that is a far cry from treacly (or bland) Christmas movies.

It’s not quite up there (for me) with Sunset Boulevard or Double Indemnity, but Out of the Past is well worth watching.  Mitchum meets his match in a femme fatale played by Jane Greer, and a young Kirk Douglas has some problems with her, too!

I think I’ll watch something totally different in tone this afternoon. A musical?  We’ll see.  Aren’t snow days grand?

I know that many (probably most) people are going to disagree with what I’m about to say.  After all, some of my closest friends have “oohed and aahed” over The Blind Side for a couple of weeks now.

I’ll admit that I loved the preview trailer.  Even knowing that I was being manipulated with every frame (after all, isn’t that what ads are supposed to do?), I felt a tear come to my eye each time I saw the trailer.  There is no ice water in my veins.  Still, in the final analysis, The Blind Side leaves me cold.

Remember what I said about racial representation in The Princess and the Frog and, earlier, about Precious? I wish I could say there was the same sort of sophistication and nuance in The Blind Side that I found in the former or the same sort of searing realism that I found in the latter.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, The Blind Side is based on the true story of NFL player Michael Oher.  He was taken in by a wealthy, white family in Memphis then went on to play for the University of Mississippi before being drafted by the Ravens.

I’m sure it is very satisfying in a “feel good” way to a lot of viewers who like the great, white savior model we’ve seen time and time again in other “true” stories like the teacher movie Dangerous Minds. That model is extremely problematic for me in the way it privileges white experience, but on a simpler level, films like this are just far too formulaic.

Furthermore, I really think all of the people grumbling about racial stereotyping in Precious should step out to see this film.  In fact, seeing the two as a double feature would be most instructive.

Yes, as noted in a previous post, Precious’s parents are monstrous, but there is a much broader range of representation in that film so I think it is wrong to castigate the movie for stereotyping.  Precious eventually falls into a social safety net – system in which a teacher, a nurse, and a social worker all try to help her.

These are middle class folks who work in her neighborhood and who represent diverse ethnic backgrounds.  At times, they are presented with somewhat ambiguous backgrounds that get at the racial indeterminism I discussed in the previous post on The Princess and the Frog.

On the other hand, The Blind Side takes such a superficial, individualistic look at complex social problems that something just didn’t add up for  me until after the movie when my mother told me about an article she had read.

She said the real-life Michael Oher was not happy that the film presented it as if he did not play football until after he moved in with a wealthy, white family when, in fact, he had played sports all along.

That’s when I had my “eureka moment,” and the movie made sense.  Why this young man?  Why did this fabulously wealthy white family take in this particular young man at this particular time in his life?  The movie is built on a deceit.  Football came first.

I’m not saying this family didn’t do a good thing for him.  Clearly, the family members helped him.  But Michael Oher was an athlete.  He got into a private school because of that in the first place.

He was helped out all along the way because he could play ball.  The family that took him in didn’t give Michael Oher that gift of athleticism, he brought it to them, and that is why extraordinary measures were taken.  Otherwise, their paths would never have crossed.

Did they come to love him?  I bet they did.  But what if he hadn’t been able to play ball?  What if he were like the character Precious?  That’s a very different story.  It’s also a better film.