Madhabi Mukherjee in Charulata

2008 began, for me, with Blade Runner and City Lights, and it ended with Bridge on the River Kwai. While the movies in between didn’t always reach those lofty heights, I saw a lot of great stuff in ’08. For better or worse, most of the truly great movies I saw last year were repertory films that played at theaters like the Music Box, the Siskel Film Center, and Doc Films. So I thought I’d lead off this year with the Top 10 Old Films of 2008. Don’t worry, though. I’ll get to the more traditional top 10 in a couple days. My only requirements for this list are that they played somewhere in Chicago and that I saw them for the first time last year. For fun, I’ve listed the theater where I saw each film.

1. Charulata (Doc Films)
One of the best movies I’ve seen anywhere in several years, this incredible “woman’s picture” from Satyajit Ray completely blew me away. A story of a wife who finds her own voice in writing, it’s an incredible portrait of both a woman and her marriage. While I enjoyed Ray’s Apu trilogy, nothing in that prepared for me for his incredible style in this film, which is full of tracking shots, spectacular lighting, and breathtaking freeze frames. Made in 1964, it’s clearly influenced by the French New Wave just as the Apu films owe much to Italian neo-realism. But Ray takes the playful New Wave-isms and joins them with his Bengali sensibilities to create a film that’s staggering in its accomplishments. A movie that I wanted to see again as soon as I left the theater and one I’ve been thinking about ever since.

2. Last Year in Marienbad (Music Box)
This film’s reputation for impenetrability preceded it, so I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, but Rob had so enjoyed it in San Francisco that I wanted to make sure I saw it on the big screen. Needless to say, I’m glad I did. Resnais’s use of his palatial setting pairs with spectacular cinematography and sound design to tell a story of a couple meeting and then I don’t know what. But I found that sense of mystery engaging, and Resnais plays with certain modernist ideas of time and space in ways I could puzzle over for hours. But J. Hoberman says it best: “a drama of erotic fixation that takes Vertigo to the next level of abstraction.”

3. Les parents terribles (Doc Films)
An amazing film from Jean Cocteau in that it’s able to be both farce and melodrama at the same time, it offers us two parents who are terrible indeed and yet somehow understandable, and it could be used as a master class on camera placement and composition.

4. So This is Paris (Doc Films)
A silent comedy from Ernst Lubitsch, it focuses on two couples. Lies, wrong assumptions, and missed connections are beautifully knitted together to create a masterful screwball comedy. And the Lubitsch touch is in strong evidence with clever “wordplay,” a wonderful scene where people are communicating through pantomime (in a silent movie), and some clever special effects. One scene of a man dreaming about a cane is simply awesome, as is the moment when the doctor literally shrinks in size under his wife’s withering criticism.

5. The Leopard (Film Center)
Burt Lancaster takes what could’ve been a slow, long love letter to the aristocracy and creates a performance for the ages.

6. California Dreamin’ (Film Center)
The Film Center’s Romanian retrospective was an invaluable survey of one of the more remarkable contemporary national cinemas. I thoroughly enjoyed Occident, The Paper Will Be Blue, and Adela. But this 2007 film from now deceased director Cristian Nemescu was what most caught my eye. A sprawling comedy about what happens when a American military train convoy gets stuck in a Romanian backwater village, it is both hilarious and deeply insightful about the state of our world.

7. City Lights (Music Box)
Rob will probably make me do penance for this choice — both that it took me however many years to finally see this masterpiece and then that I don’t have the decency to put it #1. Still, it’s a truly sublime picture, full of real pathos and beauty, that builds to one of cinema’s greatest final scenes. I may not be as big a Chaplin fan as Rob is, but even I can recognize what he does with the Tramp here. And, yes, it was worth it to wait to see it on the big screen.

8. I Am Cuba (Northwestern’s Block Cinema)
Another film that gained immeasurably from the big screen experience was this paean to the Cuban revolution. It isn’t as much agitprop as it is a celebration of the country and its people. But seeing as it’s another film made in 1964, it’s also full of lush stylistic devices, including some of the most incredible long tracking shots I’ll ever see.

9. Barry Lyndon (Music Box)
And another film that I’ve waited years to see on the big screen. It’s not my favorite Kubrick, not even my fourth or fifth favorite. But his trademark control and unbelievable compositions help overcome a bland Ryan O’Neal performance to create a costume drama that’s sharp and thought-provoking. An earlier comparison between this and Brideshead Revisited can be found here.

10. Pickup on South Street (Film Center)
A crackling film noir from Sam Fuller and anchored by a surprisingly rich turn from Richard Widmark, this is a hugely enjoyable classic Hollywood flick. The story revolves around some stolen information, and Fuller combines a cops-and-robbers drama with elements of the Cold War. You know your noir is dark when the film’s moral center is selling information to anyone who’ll pay.

And let me end with a huge note of thanks to the many Chicago programmers who continue to make this a wonderful film town.

Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures

Will Smith and Rosario Dawson in Seven Pounds

Let me get this out of the way. Seven Pounds is retarded. If this thing didn’t have the star power of Will Smith and Rosario Dawson, Lifetime Network execs would reject it. On an online forum I frequent, someone was curious and asked what the movie was about. My friend Garth described the plotline, and people genuinely thought he was pulling their leg. So when I spoil the plot for you near the end of this review, trust me, you’ll thank me for it.

But rather than focus on the ridiculous contrivances that occur in this film (apparently, stalking people is ok if you’re as handsome as Will Smith) or the irritating way the movie both withholds information (so as to draw out the interminable narrative) and yet foreshadows every single plot point (wait! what’s he doing with that jellyfish??), I thought I’d reflect on the nature of sacrifice in movies.

The theme of someone sacrificing herself for the good of the group is as old as literature itself. It is the hallmark of almost every major religion and a primary motif in too many stories to count. Despite its familiarity, it still packs a wallop, in part because we want to believe that people are willing to do this and because it’s universally admirable when someone does, even if we don’t agree with his motivations.

For Hollywood, the sacrificial hero is the prestigious flip side of the summer blockbuster. In action and comic book movies, the hero is willing to sacrifice himself for the good of the world. But he’s so awesome (and sequels are so lucrative) that the movie contrives to have him survive his ordeal. But at Oscar time, the sacrificial hero must follow through to the bitter but poignant end. The movie seems the more realistic for it, and we have the powerful emotion of pathos to send us out of the theater inspired.

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Karen Ballard/Paramount Vantage

Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber in Defiance

Tis the season for ... World War II movies. It’s easy to see why. As we ramp up towards Oscar season and take stock of our world, World War II allows for big set pieces, period costumes, epic conflicts, and unambiguous, unironic good guys and bad guys. All things that make film critics and arthouse audiences swoon and the Academy weak in the knees.

I, on the other hand, have grown weary of WWII and especially Holocaust films. I’m tired of the faux ethical dilemmas that movies like The Counterfeiters raise, the moral uplift those movies supposedly offer. Audiences leave the theater thinking they would’ve risen to those same challenges, blithely ignoring the fact most Germans failed miserably and we certainly aren’t rising to the challenges of Darfur and the Congo today. So it was certainly more from a sense of duty than any kind of excitement that I sat down to watch Defiance, The Reader, and Valkyrie. Surprisingly, I thoroughly enjoyed two.

Defiance is the most conventional of the three but also the best. A stirring story of a group of Jews in Byelorussia who fled into the deep forest in fall 1941 and made a camp for themselves, it shows how they survived through both perseverance and fighting back. These are the Jews who kick ass. It’s a straightforward narrative, though the movie doesn’t skirt away from the theme of revenge and whether it might be necessary and even right to kill. The movie also integrates familiar tropes in inspiring ways: the joys of love, no matter the circumstances; sibling rivalry and devotion; hope in the midst of evil. And I particularly like the way Moses and the Exodus are invoked; it’s subtle without being opaque. The acting from Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, and Jamie Bell is strong, with Schreiber’s manly fighter the most interesting of the three. And the character actors provide a well-rounded sense of community. The movie’s only weakness is a doozy — a battle when Schreiber suddenly comes out of nowhere like Han Solo returning in the Millennium Falcon. Cliched and corny. Fortunately, little of the rest of the film is like that.

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Ralph Nelson/Universal Studios

Frank Langella and Michael Sheen in Frost/Nixon

Frost/Nixon is one of those Oscar-bait movies that gets the Academy all worked up. Throw in two titanic actors (Frank Langella and Michael Sheen in this case), a hot-button issue, prestigious art direction, and you’ve got a film destined to make certain Top 10 lists. Not mine, though. Oh, wait. This one will make my Top 10 list.

But why does this piece of Oscar bait thrill me while Doubt leaves me in a funk? It’d be easy to say that the subject matter has something to do with it. I’ve been a political junkie since I was in elementary school, and the paper I remember most from junior high was on Watergate. So a movie about President Nixon’s interviews with the British talk show host David Frost has an innate appeal. Even better, re-living the moment when the Dark Lord of the Sith received his comeuppance is most satisfying. And the movie is smart enough to subtly link Nixon’s abuse of power with our current president’s comedy of errors. Maybe it’s just me, but the Nixon quote “I'm saying that when the President does it, that means it's not illegal” has real contemporary bite.

That doesn’t quite explain my differing opinions, though. For the subject matter of Doubt — the struggle with religious uncertainty — would usually be right up my alley, as well. So what’s different about this prestige pic?

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Andrew Schwartz/Miramax Film Corp.

Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt

Doubt is one of those Oscar-bait movies that gets the Academy all worked up. Throw in two titanic actors (Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman in this case), a hot-button issue, prestigious art direction, and Roger Deakins’s always assured cinematography, and you’ve got a film destined to make certain Top 10 lists. Not mine, though.

It stars Hoffman as Father Brendan Flynn, a friendly, progressive priest, and Streep as Sister Aloysius Beauvier, the kind of nun who terrorized parochial students in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Sister Beauvier doesn’t much like Father Flynn, and that dislike turns ugly when a younger nun (played by wide-eyed Amy Adams) suspects Flynn of making untoward advances on a young boy.

I can understand why Meryl Streep has received so much acclaim (she knows how to chew her scenery without over-stuffing her mouth), but I could never get past the fact that I was watching Meryl Streep. Hoffman, on the other hand, gets just as many dynamic moments and yet effortless slips into his character. His Oscar nomination will be richly deserved.

Effortless slipping is not how I’d describe director John Patrick Shanley, who wrote and directed the original play. Plain old slipping would be more like it. On more than one occasion, he punctuates critical moments with lightning and thunderclaps, a cliche that even horror maven Clive Barker would find hoary. At another time, we have a scene where a cat catches a mouse. Ah, metaphor — I learned about that in junior high. And while cantic camera angles might work in The Third Man, which is all about style, they’re as out of place in this naturalistic setting as a pedophile at Chuck E. Cheese. Ok, that’s not such a good analogy.

The writing is also unnecessarily direct. An early homily by Father Flynn starts with the not-so-subtle, “What do you do when you’re not sure?” Hmm, I wonder what this movie’s about? For those who’ve never taken a philosophy or religion class, this might be provocative stuff, but the theme never rises above the superficial.

I do give the film credit for at least keeping the audience in doubt. Is Father Brendan Flynn a compassionate priest looking out for an outcast student, or is there something much more sinister at work? At various times, the movie has us leaning in one direction only to push us in the other. And because the movie is set in 1964 and we know what would happen in too many Catholic parishes over the next 30 years, we have great sympathy for Sister Beauvier’s passion for ferreting out the truth. Even if our natural inclination is to see her unwavering certainty as a self-righteous flaw, we know that the opposite response of looking the other way led, in real life, to too many shattered lives.

Still, it’s not that hard to keep an audience suspended between two poles. What’s much more difficult is to provide a satisfying ending to such an exercise. In that, Doubt utterly fails. It feels like we’re missing a couple scenes. How else to explain one character’s sudden, unexpected, and completely unexplained burst of emotion? And with that character weeping for her Oscar moment, the camera pulled back and up — yet another film cliche — and I silently swore that I had no doubt how I felt about this film.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been finding it more and more difficult to get work done the last few weeks. I sit down to start grading papers or write that review, and instead I find an excuse to start surfing politico.com or MSNBC’s First Read or any of the dozens of political websites I’ve tripped over this election season.

I’ve been a political junkie for most of my life. I distinctly remember being enthralled with the 1976 presidential primaries when my third-grade teacher decided to put a big chart on the wall. I had no idea who Reagan or Carter were, but the steadily building numbers of delegates seemed almost mystical. A few years later I discovered a game about presidential campaigns and electoral votes at a friend’s house. I’m embarrassed to say I’d sometimes ignore him just so I could finish the game that he’d got bored of.

In high school, I became passionate about Model UN, and my political interests broadened. Ever since, my reading has revolved around newspapers and magazines that let me indulge my passion for understanding how the world — especially the political world — works and doesn’t work.

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Will Ferrell and a whole bunch of Sleestaks in the adaptation Land of the Lost

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned how 11 of the 30 movies already scheduled for next summer are sequels or prequels. I know what you’re thinking — that leaves a lot of room for original stories. Fortunately, however, there are a lot of blockbusters based on other things we’re already familiar with. Like TV shows! Who can forget delightful TV adaptations like Charlie’s Angels II and The Beverly Hillbillies? So in the great tradition of The Mod Squad, next summer will give us The A-Team. I pity the fool who doesn’t go see that movie!!

I was starting to get nervous that Hollywood was running out of TV shows to make into movies, but then I heard they’re making Land of the Lost. Of course! Saturday morning live-action TV shows! We could be watching those movies for years to come! Even better, Will Ferrell is starring in this one. That’s kinda cool because he usually doesn’t have any movies in the summer. I’m a bit surprised, though, as I don’t remember Land of the Lost being a comedy when it was a TV show. But I guess with this and Semi-Pro, Ferrell is tired of making us laugh and hopes to make us cry, too. You go, big guy!

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François Duhamel/Warner

The first half of Body of Lies is a crackerjack spy thriller. Leonardo DiCaprio is Roger Ferris, an up-and-coming operative who can actually speak Arabic. Russell Crowe is his handler back at Langley, driven to track down a terrorist (nefarious, obviously). The two Americans spend a great deal of time talking to each other on the phone, as Ferris criss-crosses the Middle East — starting first in Iraq and then Jordan and Dubai.

As you might imagine from the title, conspiracies and deception are intimated from the very beginning. Is that intelligence chief in Amman all he appears? What about Ferris’s new assistant? Is he on the up and up? And should Ferris really be falling in love with a Jordanian woman who lives in a Palestinian refugee camp? Of course, those of us who’ve seen these kinds of movies before will suspect Russell Crowe from the beginning.

The film, though, is more in the Tony Scott blowing-stuff-up mode than John le Carre’s cerebral approach. But Ridley Scott directs set pieces more effectively than his brother, incorporating high-tech surveillance footage and old-fashioned explosions into taut, urgent chases and confrontations that aren’t marred by ridiculously convoluted editing. This being a modern-day spy story, the Internet is also a primary location, though Hollywood still hasn’t learned how to make those kinds of encounters exciting (“now send emails to all his associates!!”).

The movie raises some interesting political issues early on, but those are quickly ignored for standard-issue espionage. Still, Scott and his editor Pietro Scalia move things along, offering just enough information to keep us guessing. That is, until the film’s final act when the guessing turns into head scratching.

The problem is that the film does such a good job of establishing Ferris’s motives early on that we don’t believe the story when his motives suddenly change. I spent far too much of the final 45 minutes asking, “Why is he doing that?,” and not coming up with a satisfactory answer. Indeed, a couple decisions are absolutely inane, but the movie hopes we won’t notice. This all culminates with a climactic scene that is both gratuitous and unconvincing. It’s all relatively watchable, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit disappointed.

Our obligatory movie-related content, but Slap Shot and Paul Newman deserve separate posts of their own

The National Hockey League season kicks off tonight*. For most people, that “news” elicits something between a shrug of the shoulders and a furrowed brow. Hockey in the second week of October? Isn’t football still on? At least people aren’t asking whether hockey players are still on strike.

I’ve been a hockey fan as long as I can remember. I joke with friends that growing up white and lower class in Michigan requires that you be a Detroit Red Wings fan, but I’m only half-joking. My childhood years coincided with the worst stretch in Red Wings history. In the first 16 years of my life, they only made the playoffs twice. And this was in a league where 16 out of 21 teams made the playoffs. Yeah, not good. Yet, still I rooted and hoped, believing as all true believers do that success was just around the corner, that my team would eventually shed the “Dead Things” nickname.

Eventually, they did, in large part because of two people: Mike Illitch, the owner who bought the team in 1982 and has run the organization with dignity ever since; and Steve Yzerman, who was drafted in 1983 and quickly became The Captain. I won’t bore you with my man-crush for Yzerman (and I am not alone, let me assure you). But I’m not embarrassed to say that I cried the day two years ago I heard Yzerman was retiring.

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Glen Wilson/Universal

One of the more pleasant surprises of last spring was the romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Though much of the marketing focused on Judd Apatow — the movie’s tagline was “From the guys who brought you The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up” — a producer credit is hardly a guarantee of success. Portending ill was a debut director, a debut screenwriter who had also finagled himself into the lead role, and a cast of TV actors who hadn’t shown any ability to carry a film. Besides, it’s hard to make a movie that’s both funny and romantic.

But Forgetting Sarah Marshall is able to pull off that winning double. Jason Segel, the aforementioned screenwriter/actor, is sweet and comical as a TV music composer trying to get over being dumped by his famous girlfriend (Kristen Bell). In his attempt to get away from it all, he lands at the very resort where his ex and her new boyfriend (the hilarious British comic Russell Brand) are staying. As in all great screwball comedies, the random and uncomfortable ways characters bump into each other provide much of the humor.

This being an R-rated comedy, sex and its foibles provide the rest. Nudity abounds. Well, male nudity at least, which is a much richer vein for laughs. But the actors also play off each other well. Mila Kunis (best known for her role in That ‘70s Show) is particularly winning as the new girl who may or may not be right for our hero.

The film also earns its emotional payoff. It doesn’t demonize the ex (Kristen Bell is too cute for it to work, anyway) or the new boyfriend, but it makes clear who we’re rooting for. And then it swings the audience back and forth, so that we’re not quite sure what path we’re on. Romantic comedies aren’t designed to surprise you with their endings (was there ever a doubt who Cary Grant was going home with?); their charm relies on how we get to that foreordained conclusion. Forgetting Sarah Marshall does it with laughs, a dash of intelligence, and a strong, likable cast.