On the Outside Looking In

Maybe Jack Skellington’s large, empty eyes were Tim Burton’s way of not allowing anyone to see into his soul. (We did anyway!) In Big Eyes, Burton’s most recent work of art, we are invited to dive into those big, sorrowful eyes; not the ones that Margaret Keane painted on her waif-like children, but those of the artist herself, her soul, remarkably well portrayed here by Amy Adams at her best.

Tim Burton has outdone himself in this film. The film concentrates many aspects of the creative style he has been building over the years, like his use of colors, for example. Burton’s films are always marvelously colorful, whether he is using pastels, like he does here or in Edward Scissorhands, or dark hues, like in Batman, Dark Shadows or even Alice in Wonderland. His camera angles are another example of his skill. There is a little bit of Hitchcock, a little Wes Anderson, but a lot of just Tim Burton, his close-ups, his landscapes, his so very carefully crafted sets where there is so much movement, so much to see in each shot! The screen is truly a canvas for this director and there is never a wasted moment of film. It is still Tim Burton and Wes Anderson that keep American cinema in the forefront of creativity and give the audience so much more than just a story.

But even in the choice of the story we find Tim Burton’s style. Once again, as in Ed Wood, here is an artist with a rather obscure place in art history. Were Keane’s paintings art? Were Ed Wood’s films? Who defines what art is and how is it determined? What about popularity and art, "mass" art? All touched upon here, but this time Burton not only dives into the art of Margaret Keane and has his eyes on her soul, but he also impressively presents the dynamics of her relationship with Walter Keane, the husband that passed her art off as his and dominated her almost to the point of destruction.

Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams

The plot, then, is not just about Keane and her art, it is about a woman confined, dominated, as women were (and too many still are), trapped in a relationship that is slowly sucking the life out of her.  Burton is brilliant at capturing the feeling of suffocation, of despair that Keane suffers. With the talent of Christoph Waltz, who plays Walter Keane, we also witness the undoing of the domineering man; as women begin to take control of their lives, the men who dominate them also see their senseless world begin to crumble. We witness their ridiculousness, their smallness. The movie is a feminist statement in this way and more. For many women, it is a roller coaster of emotions and we are never removed from the characters on the screen.

I am surprised that many critics haven’t seen a lot of what I’m pointing out in a film that I consider one of the most complete films of the year. Again, maybe it is because a lot of movie critics are male, very mainstream and safe within their privilege. (The same ones that found Keanu Reave’s macho movie John Wick so compelling!) Burton’s humanity sheds so much of his male privilege and he is able to see into the soul of women dominated. Because he has looked into the world of the “outsider”, of those on the margins of society so many times in his films, he is able to takes us along as he looks into the souls of his characters, making us all the more humane in the process.

Director Tim Burton

A Good Year

The floodgates to the better movies of the year open in fall. Then it’s hard to catch up. Not just writing about them in this my most humble blog, but even watching them. I also don’t write from a major city, although its proud inhabitants would probably scorn me for saying this, so we have to impatiently wait for some of the more talked about films to arrive. I will not be able to make my top ten list of the year until they do, even as I read with gusto the ones being made by my favored film critics. It is these I want to share, even though many may have already read them in the newspapers and magazines they originally come from.

Noteworthy in this year’s top ten is the variety in the selections among critics who, in the past, have pretty much agreed on their ten favorite films of the year. This is good news. It means there were a lot of good ones to watch. This year my favored critics all agree on only one film: Linklater’s Boyhood, the movie feat filmed over twelve years. I have seen the movie and was not captivated, while I understand the accomplishment this director has achieved. Could it be that the critics are all male; does that make the difference? I did not include Manohla Dargis on the chart, even though I enjoy her critiques, because her list was in alphabetical order and included much more than ten films, so we don’t know which her top were, but Boyhood certainly was on the favored list.

Ellar Coltrane in Boyhood

I think all critics agreed that there were more than ten films they would have selected as the best of the year. This is wonderful for us film lovers. If we just count the number of movies on the chart below, there are 28 very good movies on the list. The directors of these great films are also from all around the world, including South Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Russia, France, Poland, the UK and Spain, alongside some very talented US directors. Some of the American directors are very well known, like Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher and Christopher Nolan, and others still quite new and young, like Dear White People’s Justin Simien and Whiplash’s Damien Chazelle. There are only three women directors on the chart, one of them, Laura Poitras, for a documentary film. It is, however, fantastic that Ava Du Vernay stands out with her film Selma, included in the majority of critic’s choices on this chart.

Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons in Whiplash

The Lego Movie and Guardians of the Galaxy are surprisingly on these lists, surprising because it is rare that the movies on the top ten box office list are included on a film critics top ten. They were both fun to watch and wonderful achievements in digital and FX talent, so good for them!

Will these lists coincide with the films that the Academy and the different movie guilds and associations choose for their nominees? Most certainly the fact that this has been a good year in movies, but with such diversity, will probably make the choosing hard and the award season that much more interesting.  Happy Holidays indeed!

Ranking	New York Times A.O. Scott	Rolling Stone Peter Traverse	Entertainment Weekly Chris Nashawaty	The Guardian Adam Boult	Time Magazine Richard Corliss
1	Boyhood Richard Linklater	Boyhood Richard Linklater	Whiplash Demian Chazelles	Under the Skin Jonathan Glazer	The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson
2	Ida Pawel Pawlekowski	Birdman Alejandro G. Iñáritu	Boyhood Richard Linklater	Boyhood Richard Linklater	Boyhood Richard Linklater
3	Citizen Four Laura Poitras	Foxcatcher Bennet Miller	The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson	Inherent Vice Paul Thomas Anderson	Lego Movie Phil Lord, Damian Miller
4	Leviathan Andrey Zvyagintsev	Selma Ava Du Vernay	Life Itself Steve James	Whiplash Demien Chazelles	Lucy Luc Besson
5	Selma Ava Du Vernay	Gone Girl David Fincher	Selma Ava Du Vernay	Leviathan Andrey Zvyagintsev	Goodbye to Language Jean-Luc Godard
6	Love is Strange Ira Sachs	Whiplash Demien Chazelles	Guardians of the Galaxy James Gunn	Two Days, One Night Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne	Jodorowsky's Dune Frank Pavich
7	We Are the Best! Federico Padilla	The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson	Gone Girl David Fincher	Nightcrawler Dan Gilroy	Nightcrawler Dan Gilroy
8	Whiplash Demien Chazelles	Unbroken Angelina Jolie	Snowpiercer Joon-ho Bong	Ida– Pawel Pawlekowski	Citizen Four Laura Poitras
9	Dear White People Justin Simien	Under the Skin Jonathan Glazer	Birdman Alejandro G. Iñáritu	The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson	Wild Tales Damián Szifrón
10	The Babadook Jennifer Kent	Interstellar Christopher Nolan	Jodorowsky's Dune Frank Pavich	Lego Movie Phil Lord, Damian Miller	Birdman Alejandro G. Iñáritu

Crowd Pleasers

There are a couple of somewhat overworked moments in Birdman, the otherwise very original and captivating film by Mexican auteur Alejandro González Iñárritu; in one of them a wannabe street actor screams out the famous lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Scene 5:

 “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

In Birdman it is literally an actor upon a stage that embodies the line, which fairly summarizes one of the themes of the movie. This “nothingness” and the need to overcome our otherwise pithy existence through fame, on the stage, in front of a camera or behind it, is something that unites Birdman with another recent release Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut about a disturbed young man who becomes a crime videographer and moves into “some-thingness” through his ruthless work.

Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler

Both movies also show the voracity, the almost cannibal-like nature of the modern day viewer that preys on other people’s weaknesses and disgrace. The movies denounce the vicious cycle that we seem to be caught up in, where many use technology and things like social media so cruelly that they are negatively impacting art, journalism and, more importantly, our morals, our compassion, our humanity.

Michael Keaton and Edward Norton in Birdman

The main characters in both movies are men whose egotistical nature is extreme to the point of insanity. They live only to be known by people who really don’t care. The directors of both movies, who are also the writers, make these points vividly clear. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) tells the story of a washed-up actor, Riggan, who once played an iconic superhero, Birdman. Riggan is played by Michael Keaton who once also played an iconic superhero, Batman. Probably not a coincidence. Riggan puts everything into a Broadway play to try to reclaim the success he once knew. His young, drug addicted daughter, very well played by Emma Stone, harshly grounds him by reminding him that he is a nothing who doesn’t even have a Facebook account, no “followers” on Twitter. Later, in his disgrace, he quickly gains many. Such is the case also with Nightcrawler’s Lou Bloom, who is making his way to fame and fortune by giving people what they want to see. As Nina, the news director he sells his crime videos to, tells him very frankly: “If it bleeds, it leads”.

Emma Stone in Birdman

The other thing that these movies share is amazing acting. Michael Keaton is great in Birdman, as is Edward Norton, who most certainly steals many scenes (yet fades as Keaton grows). We expect both actors will be nominated for many statuettes come award season, something they will share with other actors that have worked in front of Alejandro G. Iñaritú’s lens, like Javier Bardem nominated for Biutiful, Benicio del Toro and Naomi Watts for 21 Grams (Watts is in this movie as well), Gael Garcia Bernal for Amores Perros, Adriana Barraza and Rinko Kukuchi for Babel. Competition will be steep, beginning with Jake Gyllenhaal and, surprisingly, Rene Russo for their excellent acting in Nightcrawler.

Renee Russo in Nightcrawler

Both movies are reminiscent of other greats. Birdman strongly reminds us of Bob Fosse’s All that Jazz; Nightcrawler has a very Taxi Driver feel to Blooms increasing craziness,so evocative of Travis Bickle, so wonderfully acted by Robert De Niro. Iñaritu’s directing is, however, closer to Fosse’s or Scorcese’s genius. He has chosen to reduce cuts to nothing (visible) and his camera flow is amazing, in constant movement, completely fluid, even when moving from interiors to exteriors, through different points in time. In an interview, Iñaritu expressed his objective saying: “I realized — and I am probably the last person in the world to realize this — that we live our lives with no editing. From the time we open our eyes, we live in a Steadicam form, and the only editing is when we talk about our lives or remember things. So I wanted this character to be submerged in that inescapable reality, and the audience has to live these desperate three days alongside him.” And this we do. The interruptions to this very realistic fluidity come with the majestic and magical scenes when we are inside Riggan’s mind.  Most certainly this will lead to a Best Director nomination for a director who clearly has surpassed his previous films with this one.

Of course these movies leave us feeling disheartened and wondering how we will be able to move away from so much of the dehumanization that has come with the tinsel-like values of the small screens that we carry everywhere with us now, the ever shorter messages that force us to stereotype humans and reduce art and communication to clichés; a society where everyone feels they have fame at their fingertips, and we live to please these nameless crowds.

Till Death do us Part

As much as I am an unapologetic romantic and can happily sigh my way through some great romance movies (see posts Dream a Little and Love in all its Strangeness in this blog), my admiration as a cinephile tends to be stronger towards those movies that are able to capture the reality of a relationship or a marriage gone awry, since they respond more accurately to reality than those that capture our first endorphinous associations. Painful as they are to watch, movies like Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973), Mike Nichol’s Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolff (1966) or Heartburn (1986),  and, even more recently, Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005), Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine (2010), or Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), impress and certainly explain the statistics of divorce.

Yes, sadly, love fades. Can it fade, however, to the point that one spouse isn’t content with just the legal end of a relationship and wishes to use the till death do us part vow as an early get out of marriage free card? These are the thriller marriage-gone-oh-so-wrong movies and they are quite the fascinating ones to watch, as can be attested by the close to 95 million dollars that David Fincher’s movie Gone Girl has made at the US box office in a mere two weeks.

Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne in Gone Girl

Gone Girl joins a very fascinating group of thrillers that take us into this world of spouses plotting to kill their spouse, and no spoiler alert as to if they succeed or not. Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954) brought the beautiful Grace Kelly and the very talented Ray Milland into an excellent theatrical experience as this ex-tennis pro carries out a plot to murder his wife. The movie was remade in 1998 by director Andrew Davis, this time called A Perfect Murder and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Viggo Mortensen and Michael Douglas; though a little less theatrical, quite equally captivating. Interestingly, Davis also directed The Fugitive (1993) in which Harrison Ford acts as the doctor accused of his wife’s murder. Ford seems to have acted in his share of whodunit-killed-the-spouse movies, which besides The Fugitive, also includes Allan J. Pakula’s Presumed Innocent (1990) and Roman Polanski’s Frantic (1988). Australian director Bruce Beresford took his hand at the topic directing Tommy Lee Jones and Ashley Judd in Double Jeopardy (1999), an intelligent thriller about a woman accused of murdering her husband. I could go on, but back to the most recent marriage-gone-twisted thriller.

Kim Dickens as Detective Rhonda Boney in Gone Girl

Gone Girl is a great addition to this sub-genre. The movie tells the story of a man whose wife disappears in what appears to be a violent manner and he slowly becomes the spotlight of a media circus that begins to question his innocence. The movie is captivating and flows tremendously well. Most certainly one of the advantages that Fincher has here is that Gillian Flynn, the author of the novel on which the movie is based, was the screenwriterased, was the screenwriter fontages that Fincher has here is that Gillian Flynn, the author of the novel on which the movie is . She is faithful to a fault to her book. The casting has also been phenomenal. As much as Ben Affleck plays Nick Dunne with wondrous subtleness, Rosamund Pike plays Amy Dunne with the unsettling flair with which Kathy Bates played Annie Wilkes in Misery or Anthony Perkins played Norman Bates in Psycho, which is to say she is chillingly great!  Carrie Coon as Margo Dunne and Kim Dickens as Detective Rhonda Boney come alive even stronger than in the novel. This is an actors’ movie, without a doubt. Not to say that Fincher’s directing isn’t good, but it is the actors that make it a little more than that. The movie feels very much, in mood and tinting, like Fincher’s previous one The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and both clearly solidify his work as a director of thrillers, adding Gone Girl to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Seven and Zodiac.

Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl

Movies like Gone Girls and others of this type are ultimately nothing else than very warped and upturned romances; what makes them such entrancing thrillers to watch is, ultimately, that the love and passion that once was is no more; sort of like those lines in Pablo Neruda’s poem “If you Forget Me”:

Ahora bien,

si poco a poco dejas de quererme

dejaré de quererte poco a poco.

Well, now,

If Little by Little you stop loving me

I shall stop loving you little by little.

(White) Hats Off!

Hats off to stop motion and clay animators who still feel that we, mass movie goers, are worthy of their artistry and hard work! Thank heavens that they believe that we will appreciate and watch in awe the talent that has gone into every little bitty piece and every movement in films like the one I am singling out this time: the wondrous, treasure of a film called The Boxtrolls, directed by Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable.

The Boxtrolls has a very old-fashioned feel to it, not only because of the Victorian outfits worn by the people in the city of Cheesebridge, where the story takes place, but because of how the story develops and is told. Children in this story are not spared from the cruelty and abandonment of adults. Adults, especially the cold-hearted aristocratic “cheese-eaters” with their tall, embroidered white hats, and the men they have carry out their “dirty work” for them, the “Snatchers”, are rather scarily too real. The Boxtrolls are not. They are the poor, box-dressed inhabitants of the underground of the city and, like in the stories of Dickens, are the warm-hearted, creative beings that give this story its fairy tale quality. There is, of course, a young man that bridges both worlds, so we aren't all bad, Mr. Pickles.

Elle Fanning, the voice of Winnie

The characters are well designed and truly come to life through the great talent of the voices behind them, most particularly Ben Kingsley as the Snatcher, the tremendously lovable Moss from the IT Crowd, Richard Ayoade, playing the philosophical Mr. Pickles, Nick Frost as Mr. Trout, as well as the young talents of Isaac Hempstead Wright as Eggs and Elle Fanning as Winnie.

But our hats are off mainly to those artists and animators that continue the tradition of stop motion animation, the painstakingly slow process that we, the viewers will cherish and admire, even if at a subconscious level, above all the computer generated movements to which we have grown increasingly accustomed. It is probably because we movie goers  are still able to discern that what we are seeing is something real that has been filmed and not just pixels.

Stop-motion is a technique that goes back to the late eighteen hundreds, but it is kept alive today because there are still a handful of studios and directors that unbendingly pursue the art. LAIKA, the Oregon-based studio behind The Boxtrolls, Coraline, ParaNorman; UK’s Aardman Animations and their Wallace & Grommit films, and directors like Wes Anderson and Tim Burton, with their stop-motion works of art: Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Nightmare before Christmas and The Corpse Bride.

Wallace and Gromit The Curse of the Were Rabbit - Fantastic Mr. Fox - The Nightmare Before Christmas

The challenge faced by these animators is  tremendous  these days when technology, in particular FX, VX and digital animation, seem to slowly remove the “wow” factor from audiences more and more used to seeing the impossible. That doesn't mean that there aren't digitally animated movies that still impress us no matter; I've written about them as well in this blog (see We are Groot). The competition is high, however. Stop motion has had to somewhat turn to technology to compete. In particular this is the case with the amazing facial expressions we witness in The Boxtrolls. To carve each face the many times it takes for a moving facial expression to have the flawlessness of digitally animated movies would be almost impossible. The Boxtrolls therefore had models of the facial expressions designed in computer and printed out with a 3D printer. But that was all, those faces, still had to be attached to the bodies and still scrupulously shot a fraction of a movement at a time.

The result is wonderful. Stay after the credits to see a behind the scenes piece, marvelously narrated by Mr. Pickles and his who controls who philosophy. I’m sure you’ll then join me in taking your white or red hat off to these artists that keep these gems of art in motion for us.

The Sins of Others

There is a scene in Calvary that has stayed with me. Brendan Gleeson, who plays a Catholic priest by the mane of Father James, is talking on the phone to Kelly Reilly, who plays his daughter, one he had before he took his vows and after his much beloved wife died. She is sitting on a terrace of a very modern building, in a steel and glass modern European city. He is on a pay phone outdoors, back in small town Sligo; behind him stands an ancient stone tower in ruins.  In the forefront is this priest in black cassock, surrounded by grass so green and a sky so blue they feel fresh and new, yet there he is with the remains of a period in time which is disappearing piece by piece, much like the Church and the values for which Father James stands. I’m not sure if John Michael McDonagh, the director of Calvary, meant this scene to be a representation of much that is conveyed by the film, but it came to me as a strong one.

Calvary is the type of movie which speaks volumes, both literally and figuratively, for much of the movie is made up of scenes in which two people are talking, one of them Father James, but it is also a movie about the things unsaid, the messages conveyed by the story and its symbolism. The movie starts in a confessional, where Father James hears of the monstrosity that befell one of his parishioners as a boy at the hands of a pedophile priest that has passed away without punishment in this world. This unknown voice lets Father James know that he is going to kill him the coming Sunday to atone for the sins of the bad priest, even though he is innocent and a good one. The movie then plays a little like a murder-to-be mystery and a lot like a reflection on our new world and its dwindling faith and values. And despite what I have described so far, it does so with humor, as well as with despair.

Gleeson and Reilly

Over the week we are introduced to the particular wretchedness of some of the people that inhabit this small, seemingly overlooked town in Ireland: the bar keep, the butcher and his wife, a mechanic who is an African immigrant, the inspector, a male prostitute, the doctor, the wealthy landlord, all of them people Father James is trying, unsuccessfully, to reach or help; most of them also his potential murderer. There are a few that believe and care for him, most particularly his emotionally damaged daughter who has herself felt, at one time, abandoned by him and his vocation. But he mostly faces his antagonists alone, kept together by his faith.

Brendan Gleeson and Chris O'Dowd

Father James is focused on the recovery or redemption of these, his ever more violent adversaries, rather than on his impending demise; something that is getting harder to find in a person in these our self-absorbed times: someone who cares more about others than himself, someone that still believes in sacrifice for his fellow man or woman. And this he certainly seems to be: a sacrificial lamb, another innocent to die for the sins of others. The film does not hide the parallels or symbolism in this sense either. He is met with temptation, at the hands of the wealthy stock broker, he faces his impending death with fear and has his moment of doubt, at night, alone. The symbolism is there: we know He who faced His Calvary before Father James faced his.

This is the second feature length film directed by McDonagh, the first one being The Guard (2011). Both of his films star Brendan Gleeson and there couldn’t have been a better choice of an actor. Gleeson carries the film and he is, without a doubt, astounding in his portrayal of Father James. He is able to convey the complexity of feelings in this priest and very much overshadows the other actors in the film, which may be one of the films only flaws. Their characters come off as stereotypes; very one-dimensional to how rounded out Father James is.

But all is forgiven because of the smoothness of the direction, the beauty of the photography (and Ireland!), the strength of Gleeson’s acting and the messages contained in the film. The final scene in the movie, also between two actors, is wordless. And yet, it is the silence, now, that speaks volumes.