an aside about justified

*A FEW SPOILERS*

Twice I have recommended Justified to people who ought to appreciate its sublime charms, and twice they have turned away without a second glance. It is difficult to convey the genius at the heart of the thing: a happy synchrony of writing, casting, and production design. Easy to ask, "Who wants to hang out with southern trash drug dealers?" Well, nobody does, unless they are Mags Bennett, Boyd Crowder, and Ava Crowder, and then, up in the Holler, there's Limehouse and his barbecue...

There's a convincing simplicity, droll humor, and occasional poetry to the dialogue which makes it low-key irresisitible. Here's an example of its genius: when it comes up on the inevitable moment when the pregnant Winona is going to leave the man she loves, there is no telegraphing of the intention. The couple is happier than they have ever been, and entirely devoted, one to the other. And yet, when he is riding in the car on his way home and says to his boss that, strangely, Winona is fine with the way things are, a chill goes through your heart and not only do you know exactly the letter he'll find when he gets home, but also your mind flashes back across a series of tiny moments and you know, but only in retrospect, that this is not sudden, that Winona has been coming slowly to grips with this decision for a very long time.

These women: Ava, Winona, Loretta, especially Mags Bennett (who I think I can say absolutely is my favorite villainess of all time, with her lack of glamour, and her particular mix of grounded pragmatism, maternal loyalty, and utter ruthlessness in the running of her crime empire) are some of the best written on television. Only Rachel has yet to spring into flaming life, but there's time.

I'll be honest: it was a hard sell for me, as well. I watched the pilot when it premiered and decided it was intriguing but far too weighty to take on as a weekly burden. Sometime into the second season I read a piece on Slant Magazine's "The House Next Door" blog which instructed me in how to fall in love with it (and I wanted to. What crazy person doesn't enjoy spending time with Timothy Olyphant?), and this knowledge I pass on to you.

Watch the first ep, "Fire in the Hole", not expecting to fall in love, but for purposes of orientation. Give yourself a week, even a month, to let it breathe and twist a little in your subconscious. Then plunge back in with the mid-season episode called "Hatless", which is really where the series moves past its birthing pangs and starts to sail with new grace and humor. It's the episode where Raylan Givens, our Kentucky-born U.S. Marshall hero, he of the quick draw, deadly aim, and constant cowboy hat, loses the hat in a bar fight and is thrown off his game until he gets it back. If you don't fall in love then, keep with it, one after another, until you do. Because you will. My boyfriend resisted: what hillbilly, he said, would say, "I need to know what all transpired," instead of "What happened?" But that's just it: there's such an incredibly strong sense of place, --Harlan County and Noble's Holler and the Bennett stronghold,-- it all feels so real, and the way they talk is part and parcel of it. There was a time in the second season when a new, minor bad guy came onto the scene named, I don't know, Billy Ray Earl or something, and Raylan's first wry comment was, "Uh-oh. Three first names. That's never good." Then, when he went up to question Mags Bennett about the fellow she said, "Three first names. That's never good," the point being that, adversaries that they are, Raylan and Mags sprang up from the same soil, learned the same hard things, probably living within a few acres of one another, and the use of words and humor points that up.

And there is nothing in the world that's better than listening to Boyd Crowder while he's working a crowd into a lather over one thing or another.  Hillbilly drug dealer that he is, he's a genius when it comes to preaching.

So now I'm done with the third season. Each one is better than the last, so far. I'm half in love with Limehouse, and the final vanquishing of Quarles was mad, mad, epic and insane, and I mean that in a good way, in the very best.

two world wars and a staggeringly awful blend of pot humor, dick humor, and swords and sorcery

Air Force: (1943. dir: Howard Hawks) A flight of B-17 Bombers sets off on a routine mission to Hawaii ... on December 6th, 1941! Alright, for an unapologetic piece of wartime propaganda, it's a gem. The lighting and photography (James Wong Howe is my hero) are fantastic, and Hawks manages to avoid the near-stultifying insect-caught-in-amber stern-faced righteousness that freezes up Ford's PT-Boat hagiography They Were Expendable. It still suffers the two inescapable embarrassments of WWII film-making: unabashed "Nip"-bashing (when a Zero retreats to the safety of numbers, it is cowardice; when a Yank does the same, it's common sense) and ridiculously saintly Americans. These men and women are absurdly hard-working, loyal and cheerful, with all chins up through hard times. And as good as Harry Carey and Gig Young and Charles Drake are, John Garfield blows everyone out of the cinematic water with his quiet magnetism. Sure, he enjoys the advantage of being the only three-dimensional character in the piece, playing a disgruntled gunner who flunked out of pilot school and is looking to skip out of the service as soon as he can. (Think he changes his mind before the final frames? Say, what gives? have you seen this before?) But Garfield is a force to be reckoned with: a Movie Star with capital letters, every bit as good and charismatic (certainly as sexy) as Grant or Stewart or Fonda or Bogart. Toss out a name, I'll set him up alongside 'em, and he'll give them their money's worth.

the Awakening: (2011. dir: Nick Murphy) A stately, old-time ghost story whose loose ends don't quite tie together satisfactorily, but the acting is very good (Rebecca Hall, Dominic West, Imelda Staunton, Isaac Hempstead Wright from Game of Thrones), and it captures extraordinarily well the remnants of a generation of young adults left shattered by the Great War and haunted by all its myriad dead. All grown-ups in the film share three terrible things in common: staggering loss, survivors' guilt, and the neverending search for a way to go on living, regardless.

Your Highness: (2011. dir: David Gordon Green) Are you trying to tell me that this was made by the same guy who did George Washington, Undertow, and Pineapple Express? What happened to his talent? He's got star power galore (Franco, Natalie Portman, Zooey Deschanel, Damien Lewis, Charles Dance, Toby Jones), the same underscored lack of shame he used for Pineapple, but he never finds the laughs, not one. The best bits are between Deschanel as the innocent virgin and Justin Theroux as her evil wizard captor: those two manage some twists to their line readings, which is necessary, since the lines as written are so thumpingly lifeless, obvious, and unfunny. It's not enough, though, not even close. Danny McBride (I actually watched this because I mistakenly thought he was going to be Danny Dyer) never comes to life in the lead, -- he's like a bad Oliver Platt imitation,-- and Franco is duller than you can possibly imagine.

two turkeys: clash of the titans and you will meet a tall dark stranger

Clash of the Titans: (2010. dir: Louis Leterrier) Here are the things that are good about it, in order: Mads Mikkelsen, Jason Flemyng, Liam Cunningham, and Pete Postlethwaite. I mean, there's nothing wrong with Alexa Davalos' performance, but it's such a non-role that it doesn't even register as a performance. There's a lot of that here. Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson MIGHT have done alright, but they keep repeating the same stupid conversation, so all bets are off. (Zeus: "I must have the humans' love." Hades: "It's their fear which feeds me." Zeus: "Yes, but I must have their love." Hades: "Not me. Just the fear is fine.") In a nutshell, it's a badly-scripted excuse for special effects and monster fights. OK, so was the original, and I didn't like that one, either, but the original had those lovely, sweet, Ray Harryhausen monsters, and this has CGI, which is probably OK if you're a kid and don't know better, but I'm not, and I do.

Once you wrap your mind around this director's resume (two Jason Statham action films, a Jet-Li action film, and the Edward Norton remake of the Incredible Hulk), throw in his Frenchness, and it's amazing it turned out as well as it did. The worst part is that his next film, Now You See Me, will have Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, AND Elias Koteas, which means I have to watch that, too. You think the calling of the cinephile is an easy one to follow? Sometimes it's exhausting, and this is just the aggravating sort of fellow who makes it so.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: (2010. dir: Woody Allen) Let's face it: none of us looks for the brilliance of say, Woody Allen from a Woody Allen film anymore. That way when he has an occasional piece of success (his Jules et Jim tribute Vicky Cristina Barcelona was my favorite from recent years), one enjoys it from the easy vantage point afforded by the Plateau of No Expectation. But there comes a time when a filmmaker reaches such a low point of disinterest in his own work that for the good of everyone he ought to just stop. These are actors I LIKE, for chrissake, throwing themselves up against a wall of material so incredibly badly written that it feels like he didn't bother to write it at all. This script is just an outline of the script, the bare plot-points without any finesse, any humor, any care to detail. Everyone says exactly what you think they're going to say, all the time. Everyone is snarky and selfish and no one rises above it, ever. Which would all be alright if Noah Baumbach had written it, or the young Woody Allen, or someone who cares about making films, but this guy, this aging imposter, doesn't.

They say he's redeemed himself since this, and I'm glad of it, but I hardly believe it. Folks love Midnight in Paris, because who wouldn't want to flaneur around the various arrondissements with the Hemingway expats? Plus, there're all those lovely actors: Hiddleston as Fitzgerald, Adrien Brody as Dali, Corey Stoll as Hem, and I love the conversation that Owen-Wilson-as-Woody-Allen has with Luis Bunuel, but that leads to my point, which is that it is a movie with great bits arranged in a great atmosphere with great lighting, but that does not by any stretch make it into a great movie. I believe that Allen has forgotten how do that. Which is alright, it's his prerogative, but I'm not going to bother watching the Italian one.

the sixties from opposite sides of the pond: the paperboy and white heat

the Paperboy: (2012. dir: Lee Daniels) In a year crammed with explorations of human cruelty, here instead is an often excruciating plunge into the urge toward slow self-destruction and its favorite mode of expression, fetishistic sexual obsession.

Like Killer Joe, this one softens its brutal edges by placing itself in the midst of the white-trash south. Ostensibly the story of a reporter (Matthew McConaughey, again!) returning to his hometown to reopen an investigation into an old murder conviction, this investigatory framework is so undervalued by the writers that it is left in the end hanging and unconcluded. Instead, the film is really about the magnetism a sociopath exerts on those with a yearning towards self-immolation. John Cusack as the murderous cracker in question has garnered all manner of hard criticism for his performance, but it's a tough role and I think he nailed it just about exactly. Zac Efron (whom I understand has built up a hardcore teen-idol reputation but will always be the young Simon Tam to me) is equally good as the belated innocent taking his baby-steps into the complex and often ugly world of adult sexuality.

These hard-working actors are not given an easy time of it. There is some obvious improvisational chatter which, along with other things, leaves one with a wish for a more disciplined editor, although, truly, I think we can leave the blame for this failure (and it is that, ultimately, despite a lot of hard work from good people) at the director's door, since the editor sometimes does lovely things which save the movie's collective ass. The unrelenting ugliness of the story is ameliorated by a jaunty comic touch in the lighting and the pace, but there are no laughs here, at least not intentional ones. Pete Dexter, who wrote the book and co-wrote the screenplay, is a fine author with a twisted psyche, and things which work on paper don't always project into light with the same clear result. "Art," said Thornton Wilder, "is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time." This movie is a failure because it does not value its own story, but uses it as a flimsy framework to explore those secrets: that dark, amorphous and amoral morass that is human eroticism. Which makes it interesting, certainly, but not a good movie.

*SPOILER ALERT*

White Heat: (2012. dir: John Alexander) Wiltingly overheated but engaging six-hour melodrama about London flat-mates renting from the son of a peer. It's the late sixties, and he's assembled the motley group as a sort of sociological experiment. You can name these characters without knowing anything else about it: there's the black man overcoming racial bias, the gay man overcoming sexual bias, the overweight Catholic girl from Belfast who does the cooking and picking up, the flitty arts student, the socially challenged computer genius destined for wealth once the world catches him up, the young feminist fighting with gender bias, and the druggie aristocrat who wants to be Che Guevara but depends on daddy's money to keep at it.

The cast is enormously likable, and that's the rub, isn't it? that's what keeps you watching. Outside of that attraction, it's by the numbers stuff, really; you can close your eyes and guess the crises, from abortion to AIDS to drugs intervention to the brother in the IRA. It's not American TV, though, and some of the choices are unexpected. Not all the lies come out, for instance: the slate is not entirely clean by the end, as happens in life, but never in American television. There's also a throughline of English politics running on screens and newspapers in the background and sometimes running rampant in the streets which provides shape to the passing decades and context for the changing haircuts and attitudes, and that's appealing.

Here's a thing which irks me, though, a thing you can always count on in television anywhere: the girl who ruins her womb with an abortion grows ever bitterer about her sterility until she accepts a second-best in creating a thriving business, and the feminist who doesn't want to subsume herself in motherhood, does, and when anyone asks, what does she say? (You don't need me to tell you this. There's only one answer any woman in any TV show or movie has ever given to the question.) "It's the best thing that ever happened to me." One day I'm going to hear a woman on television say one of these two things, speaking honestly, and without being written off as a villain or buffoon: "I never regretted not having children," or "I've always regretted having had children." On that day, we will know that we have entered a strange and very brave new world indeed.

Watch it, though, for the amiable cast, and for some interesting editing and dialogue. I watched it for Jeremy Northam as the paternal peer, and was entirely satisfied; he was flawless, as ever.

seven psychopaths: bunnies and casuistry

It doesn't want to be the Lock-Stock-ish bruto-comedy for which it was billed in American markets. That is, in fact, the film's central conundrum: a world-weary Irish screenwriter exiled in L.A. is suffering writer's block. He has the title, 7 Psychopaths, but is tired of writing violence,-- is, in fact, sufffering an uncharacteristic attraction to pacifism.

As the title suggests, it is less a unified effort than a picaresque story-book telling psychopathic tales. Not even full tales, but half-tales, as our squeamish scribe can hardly bear to let them come to their fruition. This embryonic state opens space for a complexity that is rare in the genre, and although much about the movie is frustrating, it offers powerful moments of melancholy along with its (slightly weary but often effective) humor.

Because the screenwriter is a hardly-veiled version of McDonagh himself, the movie is free to address its own flaws, as when the Christopher Walken psychopath reads the screenplay and complains that the women have nothing interesting to say, indeed, seem to be there only to die violently. (In one of the funnier self-knowing nods, the Sam Rockwell psychopath, who frequently holds a gun to the head of the Woody Harrelson psychopath's kidnapped shih-tzu, points out that you're not allowed to kill animals in movies, only women.)

The Rockwell psychopath's romantic search for the great climactic shoot-out, stymied at every turn by jamming guns, recalcitrant participants, and the physical truth that heads don't really explode when you shoot them, is one of the finest explorations of Hollywood's ethical code in a year filled with cinematic explorations into the roots and meaning of human cruelty. It is also a personal continuation of McDonagh's own philosophical search: this character can be seen as an extension of the younger, scarier psychopath in his Oscar-winning short "Six Shooter", a kid who kills with awful randomness and without self-catechizing, apparently in search of a Grand Guignol suicide-by-cop, and who has one of the funniest dying laments I've ever heard.

Those of us who went in hoping for the lopingly genius mix of acid humor and melancholy of In Bruges were in for initial disappointment. This is nowhere near as easily enjoyable a film, but it is also less concerned with entertaining than with its own internal debate. When the screenwriter tentatively posits the lame-sounding possibility that perhaps his movie wouldn't end with a great fiery shoot-out, but instead the characters might talk things over, the Rockwell psychopath snorts, "What, are we making French films now?" One of its more fruitful images is that of the Zodiac Killer as a happily aging hippy surrounded by rabbits and with posters of Gandhi and kittens papering his walls, and it is both an indication of the kind of humor this movie offers and a good choice for its central metaphor. Can people change? Once devoted to violence, is there a way to turn back? Is there an expiration date on the length of time we have to carry our sins? And what about an expiration date on our national sins? (In another moment of humor, the half-naked prostitute, making polite conversation with the ex-Viet Cong psychopath, asks, "Didn't we have a big war with you guys one time?")

Colin Farrell's screenwriter and Christopher Walken, as a sort of retired psychopath, play off one another extraordinarily well. Walken's amused, droll underplaying encourages Farrell into enthusiastic over-playing and then undercuts it in a happy rhythm. It's much more pleasing than the film's more central, and more frustrating, pairing of Farrell with Sam Rockwell, as Rockwell heads over the top and Farrell is forced into a quiet, straight-man role which does not inspire his finest work. He's an actor of action, Farrell, and a good one, but ill at ease when pinned passively into a chair, whereas Walken should be given Oscar after Oscar for the continuing fineness of his watching, listening, and spontaneous reacting. And for that perpetually exquisite thing he does with his eyes, when he goes from nice guy-Walken to psycho-Walken. I will never tire of that, no matter how many times I see it.

It's not the worst thing I've seen Rockwell do, and not the best. Even when he's at his full-on fightin' weight nowadays he tends to fall into his ancient schtick (which, now I think of it, is just the opposite of what Walken is doing, continually feeding new life into familiar choices, so that they feel vibrant with every repetition). Nonetheless, McDonagh has entrusted him with the most important role in the film, and he does pull off some great moments. One of my favorites is when he's doing an obviously improvised impression of Farrell and it's all "gosh and begora, bejesus," an Irishman straight out of John Ford.

As far as supporting cast, God only knows why Abbie Cornish and Olga Kurylenko took on these entirely thankless and offensive roles. Cornish somehow manages, against the roaring misogynist tide, to find three dimensions in her insulting non-character, but Kurlyenko is lost and wasted. On the masculine side, we've got Kevin Corrigan and Michael Pitt as mob underlings, and a great sequence with Harry Dean Stanton as a psychopathic Quaker.

The long and the short of it is that once you've let go of what you thought it was going to be and enjoy it for what it is, it's like nothing you've ever seen before. For those of you who have never experienced the vast, Sturm-und-Drang joy that is McDonagh at his best, either onstage or on film, here's a short introduction via the New York Times, in which McDonagh jokingly defends his work:


Reporter: In the film, a character's head explodes, there's a decaptitation and a man's hands
are fastened to a table with knives and then he's burned alive.

McDonagh: But there's a rabbit in that scene. There's a lovely rabbit. It's not all violent.

my top ten films of last year

And here they are, late, in order of love, and swathed in shadows.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan. A Turkish police procedural which reaches so gracefully beyond the bounds of its genre in all directions that it touches the numinous.

Looper
dir: Rian Johnson. An action movie with time travel, so well written, acted, and directed as to transcend its genre.

Kill List

the Loneliest Planet
dir: Julia Loktev. A perfectly orchestrated symphony of good acting, lovely cinematography, bold editing, and a story so finely told that its turning point, although it happens so fast you might miss it if you turn your head at the wrong moment, shocks in a reverberant way which even horror films seldom achieve.

the Master dir: Paul Thomas Anderson

Seven Psychopaths

Lawless
dir: John Hillcoat. Violence and family loyalty amongst bootleggers via the pen of Nick Cave and director of the Proposition and the Road.

Beyond the Black Rainbow

Sleep Tight
dir: Jaume Balaguero. A low-key Spanish psych-thriller that will leave you speechless and possibly sleepless.

Searching for Sugar Man




An odd thing about films from this past year: one thing they have in common, even those on this list (with the possible exception of Looper), is that I think I will never be tempted to watch any a second time. That goes for Moonrise Kingdom, too, for all its sweetness, and Django Unchained, for all its fun.

With the exceptions of Searching for Sugar Man and The Loneliest Planet, every movie on my list gets dark to a place of such uncomfortableness, as Jayne Cobb would say, that I doubt I will be tempted to return. That goes for Silver Linings Playbook as well, just barely knocked off in the final stages. Because it's David O. Russell, it isn't an easy ride, but it manages to bring to the surface both darkness and light in the dynamics of family and other relationships with veracity and apparent ease by exploding well-planted depth charges around his characters. I was glad that Jennifer Lawrence took Oscar home for that.

Obviously I enjoy flaneuring in the shadows or I wouldn't have chosen most of these. Cruelty is hard, though, and this seems to be a year for examining cruelty, from Zero Dark Thirty on down. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia succeeds most fruitfully in its exploration, most gorgeously, and with stunning patience and wisdom in leaving unanswerable questions unanswered. Looper comes in second in its exploration of the genesis of evil in a human being. The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson's tour-de-force, makes his last one, There Will Be Blood, a movie so tough that audience members were left breathless and anxiety-ridden in its wake, seem like an easy amble in the park.

It might be a reflection on my own current psychic place, or it may be a reflection of the changing movie-going experience, which used to be a sanctuary when I was young and now more resembles an assault, but I found that many of the films I saw this year I enjoyed objectively while never immersing myself fully in their worlds. Runners-up Moonrise and Django were two of these, both of which I enjoyed for their vision and galloping enthusiasm, but which felt so pointedly contrived that I felt they were holding me at a distance, not letting me enter fully in. Stand over there, Wes Anderson was saying, and watch, and feel, but from that distance. Stand over there, Tarantino always says these days, watch the awesomeness as I spew my love of cinema all over the screen, but stay over there, watching from the appropriate metafictional distance.

my one-night eric cantona film festival

Elizabeth (1998. dir: Shekhar Kapur)is in its way a stunning achievement. Had there been any doubts about Cate Blanchett's genius before her astonishing embodiment of that great queen, certainly everyone was genuflecting thereafter. (She even manages the tiniest nod, in a particular facial gesture, towards Glenda Jackson, which endears me, as Jackson will always be the face of Elizabeth to my generation.) The movie carries an air of astonishing veracity while wearing its moments of blatant dubious historicity garishly and without shame (the idea that Mary of Guise died because she took Walsingham into her bed is preposterous, but so satisfying a turn in the story that we cheer it). And it is not just Blanchett's Elizabeth who shines, but everyone, from Christopher Eccleston's intimidatingly charismatic Norfolk to Geoffrey Rush's strangely likeable Walsingham, down to the smallest handmaiden roles.

But when I revisit it, as I have again recently, it is not for these factors but for one particular segment which emits a sort of siren's call for me: the bit in the middle with Eric Cantona and Vincent Cassell.

This was the first I ever saw of either (I was never, and, with all due respect to Sir Alex, never will be, a Manchester United fan). Who can resist the ridiculous charm of Cassell's impish and completely unsavory Duc D'Anjou, come to court the maiden queen? ("Yes, yes, I am wearing a dress.") Cantona, as the unfortunate French ambassador tasked with igniting passion between these two unlikely royals, strikes just the right notes of strength and subtlety.

Which brings us nicely round to the point about Cantona: that he's a good actor. Remember, this was long before I fell in love with football, and, as an American, I was easily ignorant of his massive celebrity and august skill set. He was a French actor doing a good job, and that was all. It was only in retrospect, after I read Roy Keane's memoir and watched an old Cup final, that the weight of it hit me.

French Film (2008. dir: Jackie Oudney) proves that his turn in Elizabeth was not a one-off: that in a completely, unjustifiably unfair way, this man who was one of the great strikers of his era, maybe of all time, is also a very good actor. Not the Joe Namath kind of good, where you go, "That guy does OK for a football player," but the kind where he a) seems like a real actor, and b) is good. His pretentious French director is spot-on here. The other actors are also very good, incidentally, and the film itself has surprises and good writing, but I am sufficiently jaded now against films about finding and keeping love that I cannot be bothered to care. Except about Cantona. He has a particularly adept way with a sly, sidelong glance.

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

The Cantona-est of all Cantona films is, of course, Ken Loach's Looking for Eric from 2009. Another movie from a genre that generally leaves me cold, this is the story of postman, Manchester United fan, and all-around good-hearted loser Eric (this is an example of England's cottage industry of heartwarming underdog-makes-good-but-it's-his/her-mates-that-really-count movies) on the verge of a breakdown who gets his life together with the help of imaginary playmate Eric Cantona. The family stuff is hit and miss, but at least unconventional (the postman is single parent to two teenaged boys, both stepsons abandoned by his second estranged wife), but I'll tell you what this film gets exactly right: the mindset of the football fan. It flames brilliantly to life when Eric the Postman is walking around reminiscing with Eric the Footballer about great moments from the latter's career, which Loach very kindly shows us. The football is exciting, and the moment Cantona chooses as his greatest ever ("It wasn't a goal. It was a pass. A gift.") is so beautiful as to take your breath right away, a Messi/Fabregas type of chipped pass into the box, perfectly weighted and brilliantly aimed to the foot of his full-speed team-mate, who fires it into the corner of the net where the keeper has no chance of stopping it. The best joy of this movie is in its love of football, and that's a thing to celebrate. It's hard, as well, to resist the climax, in which three caravans full of Man U supporters in red shirts and rubber Cantona masks take on the wicked wide boys who have been endangering the postman's family. Or its denouement, when the celebrating lads are reboarding their buses and the leader calls out to a laggard, "Come on, Cantona, you dozey git. I hope you haven't been robbing." We, of course, know what this fellow does not, that when the Cantona mask comes off, the real mccoy will be beneath it.