Gone Baby Gone ***
Ben Affleck, 2007
US
@ Kips Bay

Kips Bay is just far enough away from the subway that it's not very crowded, even though there are plenty of decent stores and restaurants and all that. It's also very close to where I work, so I can easily make a 5:15 show like this one.

Critics love to complain about how regular-guy stars aren't mature anymore, forty is the new twenty and so on and so forth. It's interesting, then, that babyfaced Casey Affleck spends all his time here trying to convince everyone that he is older and more mature than he looks.

This really doesn't look much different from Clint Eastwood's Dennis Lehane adapation, Mystic River, dark and moody but not in an overly stylized fashion. Sean Penn doesn't really have a method-acting counterpart, though, which is fine with me. I like the restrained, deliberative fashion in which the characters deliver their arguments; too often in tense movies like this the moral dilemmas are played out between couples screaming at each other or archrivals bellowing from behind their firearms.

What's probably most noticeable, though, is the extremely overt depiction of class conflict at the beginning. Affleck overloads the screen with cheap jewelry, ancient furniture, bad haircuts, worse teeth, and Jerry Springer constantly playing in the background. The bar scene and Patrick's meetings with his friend the classy drug dealer also zero in on details of the trashy white urban lifestyle.

See also: IMDb | Metacritic

Hot Fuzz *
Edgar Wright, 2007
UK
@ home on DVD

So, this was fun but I don't imagine I'll ever need to watch it again. I was pretty interested until Simon Pegg's character discovers the dark secret of the NWA. To me it felt like from that point forward Edgar Wright, who could have gambled by attempting to make a truly great cop movie, decided to cash in and go the easy route, by making the ultimate cop movie. Which was kind of weird, considering it was at least part splatterfest, though maybe that's just his own thing. Maybe this worked better in Shaun of the Dead because the genre he's deconstructing/memorializing there is in many ways just as outlandish as his own film. On the other hand, the best cop movies tend to maintain a certain sobriety. Maybe I've just been spoiled by the Hong Kong and Korean films I've been seeing lately, cf esp. Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder.

See also: IMDb | Metacritic

Lars and the Real Girl ***
Craig Gillespie, 2007
US
@ Clearview Chelsea

This multiplex is possibly my favorite in the city. The facilities aren't quite as nice as, say, Lincoln Square, but it's also never that full. It's comfortable in a way that's almost a little bit tacky, but not really. My other option was the Angelika, where the screens are small, the seats uncomfortable, and it's on a really gross stretch of Houston.

The cast is just really solid across the board. Probably my favorite part of the film is the way Lars' "real doll" eventually becomes more and more of a character, particularly when Gillespie makes use of carefully lit reaction shots, such as during an argument in Lars' beat-up Toyota Tercel. Like a lot of indie (romantic) comedies, this is a bit of a quirkfest, but for me it feels like a slightly odd version of one possible version of believable reality, rather than some bizarro world that shares only superficial similarities with our own. I suppose when arbitrating the artistic worth of stuff like this, personal taste is basically the final criterion. There are probably people out there who would wholeheartedly support, say, The Station Agent or Me You and Everyone We Know but not this movie.

See also: IMDb | Metacritic

The Assassination of Jesse James ***
Andrew Dominik, 2007
US
@ AMC Empire

This might be great but I had a hard time deciding with so many distractions: people getting up and walking out, talking to the screen, etc. I didn't much care for the voiceover narration until the end; mostly it was, or should have been, pretty redundant. The film looked very good, with interesting long-held close-ups, and effective saturation of browns for an old west color scheme. I liked Casey Affleck a lot, wondering how much of the uncomfortable obsessive character was in the script and how much was his own contribution, so I'll almost certainly try to see Gone Baby Gone over the next several weeks. There are a lot of small touches, like with food, for example, that I think I could pick up on a second time through.

See also: IMDb | Metacritic

Control **
Anton Corbijn, 2007
UK
@ Film Forum

Stylus Review

This could well be the most beautiful collection of black-and-white photography you'll look at this year. As a bonus you get an impeccable soundtrack, featuring diegetic songs capably performed the cast, non-diegetic music by Joy Division proper, a score by New Order, and a rousing cover of "Shadowplay" by the Killers (no, I've got no idea who picked them either) over the closing credits. It's also, as expected, a real punch to the gut.

Anton Corbijn's film, his first feature, is ambitious and polished. Ultimately it's less a biopic of Joy Division's iconic lead singer than a collection of memorably bleak vignettes from the tragically short life of a young man from Macclesfield, England, named Ian Curtis (Sam Riley). The year and setting are superimposed over the first sequential scene, we first glimpse a 23-year old Curtis in his childhood bedroom very near the end of his life. From there we drift uneasily toward May 18, 1980, though months or years at a time are often elided without explanation or forewarning.

Even during the select moments that Corbijn chooses to feature in the picture—e.g. proposal and marriage to the longsuffering Deborah (Samantha Morton), Tony Wilson (Craig Parkinson) signing Joy Division's record contract with his own blood—Corbijn's camera often seems more centered around rays of light in a particular room than the visually decentered and frequently silent characters populating the frame. Critics have long spoken of the band's music as otherworldly, something not quite human, perhaps a reaction to the brutalist modern architecture dominating their childhoods in and around Manchester. There are touches of humor here and there, largely via Parkinson and Toby Kebbell, who plays the band's slovenly but reliable manager, but the film largely has the same emotional effect as a Joy Division song. The stern long shots, the starkly beautiful monochrome look of the film, and the taciturn protagonist all keep us fascinated but, most of the time, at a distance.

That austerity makes for some pretty extreme swings of emotion when anger, jealousy or physical malady explode through the cool exteriors onscreen. A singular inability to respond to his problems leads to an excruciating separation from Deborah, and elsewhere appears to be linked to an epileptic fit incurred when Curtis is forced onstage during a particularly rowdy gig. This inability to connect to those around him verbally or emotionally leads to escalating problems at home and on the road until, just hours before the band is set to depart on their first American tour, he exits the situation via a noose in the kitchen.

I suspect that the film will register most strongly not with devoted fans, but with those who share or recognize Ian Curtis' semi-autistic isolation. (I count myself among both groups.) We've heard the stories of drug-addled rock stars and celebrities going out of control, hitting bottom, etc. etc. ad nauseam. By this point we're so desensitized to rock 'n roll casualties that they seem almost part of the natural order of things. Curtis was no teetotaler, but neither was he an unbridled hedonist, and, at least in this account, succumbs to a situation that probably seemed far more dire in his own head than to anyone whom he might have asked for advice or help. What's most wrenching about the film is the cruelly logical, steady progression of withdrawal from human contact from the generally accepted—escaping at the end of the day to listen to David Bowie alone his room—to violent, permanent, irreversible alienation.

Next time you cue Closer on the iPod and turn up your noise-canceling headphones to seal out the surrounding frustration, you may well find yourself taking a moment to pause and reflect.

Lust, Caution (Se, Jei) *
Ang Lee, 2007
Taiwan
@ Landmark Sunshine

The critical consensus is right: this movie is really boring except for the few scenes that earned the NC-17 rating. The prologue seems just peremptory, full of flat dialogue and uninteresting characters. Particularly the camera work indicates to me that not much attention is paid to the less integral moments in the movie, of which there are a lot over 158 minutes. Scenes are rarely well-conceived, shots mostly cut from one close-up to another, sometimes almost at random. Maybe Ang Lee knows things about these minor characters (the acting troupe, the mah jongg players) that he fails to reveal effectively, but it seems appalling that we spend so much time watching go-nowhere characters through an uninspired lens.

The few high points: there's one scene where the camera is set near the ceiling, craning down toward the couple, and it kind of circles around as one of them leaves, reframing around the other. It's not worldchanging by any means, but it reveals just how dull most of the other similar scenes are. Then you've got the sex scenes, and maybe even better, Tang Wei's monologue about what her role as a Mata Hari is doing too her emotionally, which is obviously much more than her supposedly tough intelligence liaisons can handle. In particular her description of the longed-for assassination of her target/lover as a kind of metaphysical and bloody Cronenberg-esque orgasm feels really inspired.

Tony Leung's character in 2046 was similar in many ways, but somehow his muted emotions in that film resonated whereas here they almost don't even register.

See also: IMDb | Metacritic

Silent Light (Stellet Licht)***
Carlos Reygadas, 2007
Mexico
@ Frederick P. Rose Hall (New York Film Festival)

At times the framing and the long shots almost struck me as so conspicuous that they unbalanced the movie, but I suspect that had to do with my seat. (Near the lower left corner of the screen which was so large that it seemed a little distorted from my vantage point.) Though there isn't an exact correspondence, it's interesting how the sun figures as a kind of manifestation of God's presence. The natural elements are always very present: the clouds, the hills, the dust from the dirt road.

I'm intrigued by the idea of farms as visually rich settings for contemplative, "syrup-paced" art films like this (that pejorative is from The Onion AV Club), which of course brings Satantango to mind. Most of the time people talk about cinema as a largely urban art form, based on the particular kind of social dynamics you find in cities. There was even some ill-informed guy who attempted to ask why there weren't any urban scenes, although it's hard to see how that would make sense in a nature-centered film about an unworldly community of Mennonite farmers.

I had an idea after watching Fargo last month about a movie with similarities to this one and Satantango, Gus van Sant's Elephant and especially Last Days, and various other influences, with a couple of deadbeats on a rundown farm, with the present shot in black and white and recurring scenes, shot in color, of a more productive past on the same property. The soundtrack would be entirely diegetic, either performed or played on a radio, and would feature far too much pedal steel guitar.

The guy standing in front of me at the box office was perusing the entire festival schedule mentioning titles to the attendant as he found screenings he liked. He had already started when I got there and probably took ten more minutes to finish. The whole affair seemed pretty ostentatious to me, from the ticket prices to the people attending to the venue (inside the Time Warner building), etc. That's kind of sad in my opinion because the programmers and the films are really good, and it seems like the whole deal caters directly to residents of the Upper West Side rather than anyone who not already into these sorts of movies.

Quote from the women behind me: "Gus van Sant… where have I heard that name before?" Their conversation made me kind of wonder how they wound up paying twenty bucks for something like Silent Light in the first place.

See also: IMDb