Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011)

Director: Stephen Daldry

Yes it is true that 9/11 was a very emotional experience for everyone, whether they were directly affected or indirectly affected. But Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close takes the emotion of that day and its affects and just shoves them down our throat. You may feel some emotion while watching, but trust me, any emotion you feel is due to 9/11 as an event rather than genuine emotion that the movie gives off. The biggest mistake is that the plot itself is completely contrived and never keeps your interest. The plot just seems like a way to meet a bunch of people in New York City and see how dedicated this kid is.

Another thing that was quite odd about this movie was its caution in using 9/11 as a way to get emotion. The image of a man falling from the WTC is deeply disturbing no doubt, but that image is repeated over and over in the film and it once again makes you emotional only because of what we remember that day. There is one scene towards the end that uses that image of a falling man in a happy context, and honestly, it was pretty cringe-inducing. There is absolutely nothing this film offers to us about either human emotion or 9/11.

Grade: D

Heat (1995)

Director: Michael Mann

Auteur cinema in Hollywood is incredibly rare, especially today when Hollywood is just focused on movies with $200 million budgets. With budgets that size, the studio will be very involved, and film becomes nothing but a business. But there are a couple of directors I can think of that succeed in retaining their artistic integrity and still operating within the major studios of Hollywood. One of them is Martin Scorsese, and the other is Michael Mann (Steven Spielberg might be one too but I'm not so sure). Arguably Mann's most famous film, Heat, is a great example of just that.

Mann created an epic crime film that takes the conventional tropes of the police-crime drama and adds real meaning and emotions into it. He's not only great at taking those conventions and making them really effective (like the shootout), but he addresses them by having the characters realize the inevitability of their situations, both professional and most of all personal. Both Al Pacino's police character and Robert De Niro's criminal character know who they are in this game and what role they play, it's nothing new to them. Both are completely aware of the consequences of their work on their own lives. Mann also maintains a brilliant control of tone and direction that uses the music, the lighting, the sound, and the editing to emphasize the highly personal and fairly existential nature of this epic city-spanning movie. When it comes Hollywood genre filmmaking, nothing comes close.

Grade: A-

Incendies (2011)

Director: Denis Villanueve

This is a thriller-drama that consists of an investigation of a family history, a history that takes place during war and travesty. The investigation by the daughter and son of a departed mother is compelling and fun to watch, but for some reason the investigation ends up stopping right at the end when the final answers are not figured out, but given to them by a guy who found out off screen. Unfortunately, while those answers are not bad on their own, they are much more melodramatic than the tone of the rest of the movie would have you believe.

The film does craft a great journey through the history of a family that spans real-life wars in Lebanon and Palestine, but the end turns the movie into a family melodrama without much logic unfortunately. It's definitely a very memorable movie only for where the mystery actually ends up, but at the end, the larger questions of war, religion, and ethnicity seem to take a backseat to the questions of the plot. I definitely had a personal interest in the story because of its Middle Eastern setting which made the movie interesting to watch for almost the whole runtime. The movie is well-made and well-intentioned, but it proves to be just a bit too melodramatic for its themes.

Grade: C+

The Interrupters (2011)

Director: Steve James

I thought it would be pretty hard for a social issues documentary/long-form PSA to faze me in anyway, but then I saw The Interrupters. This documentary is an incredibly powerful movie that takes the giant issue of gang violence highlights it for what it is. The documentary focuses on a group of "violence interrupters" who go around preventing fights and violence. It is extremely telling that the head of this group used to be a doctor, because gang violence is an epidemic that affects an incredible amount of people living in urban areas around the country and it will continue to rise because of the growing urbanization of our country.

Director Steve James, who also directed maybe my favorite documentary of all time, Hoop Dreams, embeds himself within these people who are trying to make a difference, and in doing so not only see the problem, but also the problems that may come about in finding a solution. You don't always see movies that show us the problem, but also the ways people are trying to solve the problem and the reasons why those efforts are not entirely successful. Honestly, The Interrupters is a movie that can spur action in anyone, and it's something I felt a deep connection to. There's nothing flashy about it, but it doesn't keep it from being one of the most effective "take action" documentaries I've seen in years.

Grade: A-

Infernal Affairs (2002)

Directors: Andrew Lau and Alan Mak

I've already seen Martin Scorsese's The Departed, which is a remake of this film, so many of the surprises in the movie weren't all that surprising to me. But nonetheless the movie is wonderfully plotted and paced, and it does actually get into some of the psychological issues of the characters. The two main characters in the movie make sensible decisions, and that difficulty of living a double life for both of  them is well established and not entirely cliche.

While the plot is exciting and well done, some of the filmmaking is actually pretty cliche, and worse, lazy. The music is cringe-inducing at times, and the all-too-frequent flashbacks to scenes we've already seen assumes the viewers are not smart enough to figure the movie out. The movie has got some serious flaws in the way it tells the emotion of the story. But the relatively high level of actual character study in what is essentially a crime picture, is enough to make it worth it. It's not quite as great as The Departed, but it is a movie that can be enjoyed on its own merits.

Grade: B-

The Arbor (2011)

Director: Clio Barnard

The first thing to know about this documentary is the unique lip-synching style, in which actors lip-synch real dialogue from interviews of real people. It's a pretty unique documentary method and Clio Barnard does it well enough that it offers a new way of making documentaries. It seems to give more freedom to the director to take real testimonies but frame them in any way the director sees fit. More power to the artist is something I am always for. The style also makes for some great scenes that question the difference between documentary and "based on a true story" fiction film.

The story itself starts off as a documentary about the life of playwright Andrea Dunbar's. Parts of the film are filmed scenes from the eponymous famous play of hers, and those plays give us a very inside look at Dunbar's life. But the film eventually turns into a movie about her first daughter, Lorraine's. It's a long downward spiral that is sad, but not new or original and has many of the same lessons we're already used to. The subject doesn't seem completely worthy of the stylistic treatment that Barnard gives, but the style itself is unique and for documentary fans I'd recommend it just for the style.

Grade: B

Nostalgia for the Light (2011)

When it comes to movies, the year 2011 was defined by its examination of nostalgia. From Hugo to Midnight in Paris to Super 8 to The Artist (still haven't seen that one) we saw films that were either nostalgic or examined nostalgia in some way. The documentary Nostalgia for the Light most certainly fits this narrative by examining the Atacama desert in Chile as a place where the past comes to rest. It is the driest desert in the world, so it has virtually no cloud cover at all, which makes it a great place for astronomers to look into the stars and find the origins of the universe. But about 30 years ago it was also used as a dumping ground by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for bodies of those his regime killed.

We follow loved ones of those whose remains lie in the dirt of the desert and their search and reconciliation with the past. This juxtaposition between the astronomers looking for answers to the grandest of questions and the women looking for answers regarding their relatives makes Nostalgia for the Light the documentary equivalent to Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life. Similar to Malick's film, Guzman's documentary is also a form of poetic meditation on how things came to be and why what happened in the past happened.

The film is on one end an intellectual exercise, but it attains spirituality and poetry with its images of galaxies and the personal stories of the women looking for their brothers and fathers. The film shows that no matter who we are, we yearn to learn about our past. It doesn't matter if we are daughters looking for the remains of our fathers, or we are astronomers looking for the remains of the universe in the sky. Remembrance is one of the most human qualities there is, and if we lose that quality, we run the risk of losing our humanity.

Grade: B+

L'Enfant (2005)

Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Modern culture has celebrated and encouraged arrested adolescence. This mantra of leaving adulthood till as later as possible. In this Dardenne brothers movie, the other side of that notion is shown. What happens when that type of person first encounters adult responsibilities. Our main character, Bruno, finds himself living in a part of town that is lacking in jobs, and so he usually spends his time doing petty crime trying to make some money. But he then has a child with his girlfriend, and while his girlfriend is similar to him, she seems to have a better sense of responsibility than him now that she's had a child.

The story is a coming-of-age tale for Bruno, but one that is more effective than most because Bruno actually faces real lasting consequences for his rash decisions. Purely as a descriptive term, the movie is bit like Truffaut's The 400 Blows meets Godard's Breathless. Bruno is similar to Michel in Breathless, but what happens to Bruno, and the tone of the movie, is more similar to The 400 Blows. The Dardenne's trademark documentary-like observational approach is used once again very effectively to help give the movie a completely natural feel. It is also important they capture the working-class milieu of Bruno's environment, because that gives us subtle hints as to why it may not be completely his fault as to why he is stuck in this arrested development.

Grade: A-

Tuesday, After Christmas (2011)

Director: Radu Muntean

This is what you call a movie with no gimmicks. The movie is composed of probably less than ten scenes altogether, that all go on for a while. The camera in the scenes is usually stationary and we get very cuts in the scenes. The plot is your basic affair, a married man with a daughter likes another woman. But the simplicity of the films basic plot and aesthetics only make the complexity of the characters and the simple situation more impressive.

The characters in the story feel extremely authentic. In a Hollywood version of this story, somebody would have to be the bad guy, most likely the husband. But in this Romanian film, there's no one really to blame. The husband fell in love with another girl and there's nothing he can do about it, no matter the consequences it might have on his wife, his child, and himself. The situation is just unfortunate and sometimes there's no one you can blame. The simple style with the real characters and situations gives you a feeling that you're just watching a real life. Sometimes real life is bland, so there isn't always something of note going on in Tuesday, After Christmas, but it is the rare movie that succeeds in reflecting reality completely accurately.

Grade: B+

Downton Abbey: Season One (2011)

Creator: Julian Fellowes

I was never a fan of stories of the period pieces about the British class system, so any enjoyment I get from this show is not because I adore the genre. The first season of Downton Abbey is a surprisingly intricate, nuanced, and well-written drama about love, inheritance, and class. The themes of the show are certainly not original, neither are the character types. It's not one of those shows that will sound all that appealing to most people who are not already fans of English literature. But the show has these characters that are so compelling, and they are all acted in such a way that transcends any and all the cliche's associated with those characters.

It is remarkable how the characters and their relationships with each other are so nuanced even though on paper the relationships would be so standard and conventional. The biggest reason the show stands out to me is the relationship between the upstairs royalty and the downstairs servants. Each have their own culture, but when those cultures meet is when the show does great work. All of it helps in telling a story that is also about the culture these characters live in, one that is changing in terms of family roles, gender relations, and also class relations. The show doesn't seem to criticize the class system, but it recognizes the changing perception and tries to capture the change in motion. It is a show that oddly respects the class system while not mourning it when it is clear that tradition is changing. The show is not at all as sophisticated and well-written as Mad Men, but it really is the British Mad Men of the 1910's.

Grade: B+