Erik Moe: Critic at Large

I’m happy to report that with The Fantastic Mr. Fox Wes Anderson seems to have turned things around. The chart above is probably a bit unfair, but his films have definitely had diminishing returns for me over time. I’ve always loved the aesthetic of his films, but I’ve been less and less patient with his stilted characters, relationships, and plots. Animation is a great match for his his visual language, and adapting Roald Dahl’s children’s book gives him a simple enough story to tell that falls in line nicely with the families and teams-on-a-mission he’s chronicled from the start.

Movie posters for Food Inc, Fresh, King Corn, and Julie and Julia

I’m not going to defend Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia as Oscar-worthy when that season comes around, but I think it has an important lesson for Documentary filmmakers. Watching it made me a lot more excited about eating good food than any food-policy documentary I’ve seen. I’m thinking specifically of Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., Ana Sofia Joanes’ Fresh, and Aaron Woolf’s King Corn. With various degrees of success, each aims to educate Americans on the ills of industrial agriculture by weaving a storyline or four around an interview with Michael Pollan.

Julie & Julia does not mention corn subsidies or perhaps even the word organic. It simply tells two true stories about people who love food. It makes you want to go home and cook something wonderful in your kitchen. This is the radical action that the food docs (and Michael Pollan) aim to accomplish. If you get excited about cooking, it won’t be long before you start seeking out fresh vegetables at your local farmers market and learning about evil corn lobbyists.

Cinema (especially activist nonfiction) succeeds when it remains focused on showing through storytelling.

This year proved unusually difficult to distill down to a pure top two for my annual exercise in list minimalism. I saw a lot of good movies this year, but few fiction films that stood out as excellent. In the end, these are the two:

1. Synecdoche, New York - I’ve seen Charlie Kaufman’s epic on the ultra-examined life only once, but I desperately want to see it again. It’s the only film this year that left me feeling that way. The befuddling layers of the surreal and the mundane make Synecdoche an exhilarating experience (at least for those of us who are exhilarated dry humor, implausibility, and gradual bodily decay). Philip Seymour Hoffman is a twisted pleasure to watch, as usual.

2. Un conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale) - I saw quite a few French films in the last half of 2008, largely owing to AFI’s European Union festival, which occupied much of the post-election calendar at the Silver Theater here in DC. I considered awarding the collective experience of viewing several* in close proximity this slot. But no! I hate it when critics list seven films as “tied” for a single slot in their best-of lists. We’re in the business of comparing and contrasting, and some films are simply better than others. Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale is a wonderfully complicated movie about a family gathering at Christmastime. The characters are well written. Their relationships are filled with palpable love and hate. The acting is superb. Until today I hadn’t bothered to look up Desplechin’s filmography. Upon doing so, I was pleasantly surprised to see that he was also behind Esther Kahn, which made a strong impression on me after plucking it from other critics’ year-end lists in 2002.

Also notable:
Sean Penn’s performance in Gus Van Sant’s remake of The Times of Harvey Milk is very good. I hesitate to give much praise to Milk as a whole – largely because I found it far less powerful than that now-classic documentary.

The other performance-driven film on many year-end lists is Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler. Micky Rourke’s turn as a veteran on the small-town wrestling circuit is at least as deserving of an Oscar nomination as Penn’s performance. However, the film overall often seemed like it wasn’t rising to the level of Rourke’s acting. I enjoyed the simplicity of the plot. I liked the parallels with his off-screen career and on-screen love interest. The film is certainly a must-see, but simply not in my top two.

I almost placed Vicky Christina Barcelona in my top two. I was extraordinarily entertained watching Woody Allen riff on François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim using the stunning trio of Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, and Penélope Cruz.

*Fine. I’ll name two more French flicks here: Bertrand Bonello’s De la guerre (On War) and Idit Cebula’s Deux vies… plus une (Two Lives… Plus One).

At last night’s Oscars, Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side won the Best Documentary prize. I finally had a chance to catch the film late last week at the National Archives* and think that (for once) the best – and most important – of the nominated films definitely won. Taxi is a well-researched and troubling look at the expanding use of torture in the U.S. military since 9/11. Gibney builds a strong argument that very specific methods of torture have come into use through a carefully orchestrated fog of conflicting demands, intentionally leaked documents, and purposefully vague orders from the Department of Defense and the White House. These indirect orders leave low-ranking troops vulnerable to court marshalls while shielding top level officials from war crimes trials. The film takes its title from the case of an innocent taxi driver named Dilawar who was captured along with his passengers at an Afghan army checkpoint and eventually died as a result of repeated beatings while in U.S. custody at Bagram Air Base. Taxi goes on to explore the suspension of habeas corpus rights – unprecedented in U.S. history – that make it impossible for detainees to find out why they are being held and tortured. The film can be tough to stomach for its use of footage of physical abuse and sexual humiliation at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo, but since these crimes are being done in our name and in violation of our own Constitutional principles, the film is essential viewing.

UPDATE: *Yes, I appreciate the irony of watching a film about the Bush administration’s abuses of the Constitution in the very building that the executive branch displays the Constitution.

Once you do something twice, is it a tradition?

After looking at Movie City News’ masterful chart of 2007 critic’s lists I realized just how many good films I did see this year, despite feeling like I was in something of a film-free coma as I learned the ways of Washington campaigning. Still, there are plenty of foreign and indie movies in the “class of 2007″ that didn’t play D.C. or Chicago (where I lived until May) in a timely manner (or at all). With that, please consider the following in-exhaustive list thoroughly and unnecessarily disclaimed:

1. I’m Not There – Todd Haynes’ experimental Bob Dylan biopic was far and away the most incredible thing I saw on the screen in 2007. Not only did Haynes create six unique personas loosely based on the life and times of Mr. Dylan, but he adapted and invented lush visual languages to go along with each storyline. So what if the average viewer might not get all the references from Dylan’s career? I can’t say for sure how the film reads to audiences unfamiliar with Ginsberg, Pennebaker, Baez, Guthrie, or even Bringing it All Back Home, but I suspect it stands as a whirlwind lesson in how myth and art blurred to form our new national pastime: deconstructing celebrity. And besides, is a little cultural literacy too much to ask of an audience?
2. There Will be Blood – Daniel Day-Lewis is riveting as usual in his performance as pioneer-turned-oilman Daniel Plainview. Paul Thomas Anderson’s depiction of the emerging petroleum economy circa 1900 is a fine reminder that the energy industry we have now has been an all-corrupting mess from the start. Plus, it’s loosely based on Oil! by Upton Sinclair, with whom I’ve been obsessed since reading Chris Bachelder’s U.S.! early in ’07 (in which Sinclair has the ability to rise from the grave and keep on muckracking through the 20th Century). So Blood tidily brings it all back home.

UPDATE: Paul Dano’s supporting role as the creepy, hapless, opportunistic preacher in There Will be Blood means he is two-for-two in supporting roles in second place films on my two annual exercises in list minimalism (he played the quiet brother in last year’s number two, Little Miss Sunshine).

Werner Herzog’s has dedicated his latest film, “Encounters at the End of the World” to the senior statesman of film criticism. Roger Ebert has published an eloquent letter to his friend in response.

You often say this modern world is starving for images. That the media pound the same paltry ideas into our heads time and again, and that we need to see around the edges or over the top…. You are the most curious of men. You are like the storytellers of old, returning from far lands with spellbinding tales.

Herzog’s films are remarkably consistent in their ability to transfix and inspire wonderment, even if the nitpickers among us might point out his liberal use of artistic license in depicting “truth.” As a licensed Liberal artist, I have no problem with Herzog’s versions of reality. The full text of Ebert’s letter is well worth the read.

Three quick items posted from DC on a lovely September day:

1. My old stomping grounds at documentaries.about.com are up and running again. Stop by and say “hi” to to Jennifer Merin, your new guide to documentary film.
2. Good luck to Agnes Varnum, who is moving to Austin to work for the Austin Film Society.
3. I’ve been pondering A.J. Schnack’s About A Son Soundtrack Challenge for the past week or so. Perhaps I take these things too seriously. 14 songs to score a biopic about yourself? Maybe I’ll have the answers before Thanksgiving.

Roger Ebert fell ill several months before I came to Chicago, so I haven’t yet crossed paths with him in my journeys through the Chicago film scene. Still, every week it seems I hear another anecdote about how amazing and down-to-earth the guy is. With the ongoing trial of Canadian media magnate Conrad Black comes disclosure of recent emails between Ebert and Black articulately expressing the film critic’s solidarity with his less famous brethren at the Sun-Times and the newspaper guild. Last week, Ebert made his first public appearances since his illness at his Overlooked Film Festival in Urbana-Champaign. In advance of his appearance he wrote a quick column warning that he wasn’t a pretty-boy anymore, but that he didn’t want to be part of the culture of hiding illness and wasn’t going to miss his film festival for the sake of avoiding the paparazzi. Go Roger!

Having recently posted my picks for best documentaries of 2006 over at About.com, I feel the need to praise some fiction. Either my memory is shot or it wasn’t a great year for Hollywood/Indiewood, so I’m keeping this list short:

1. The Science of Sleep – A delightful portrayal of the life of an artist struggling in the “real world” of work. I wonder why this one appealed to me. Fun stop motion animation and imaginative art/machines. Irresistible acting from Gael Garcia Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Directed by Michel Gondry.
2. Little Miss Sunshine – I really wasn’t all that excited by this film’s child beauty pageant premise going in, so I probably wouldn’t have gone to see it if it hadn’t been playing at the much-loved, cheap, and retro Riverview Theater when I went home to Minneapolis. Little Miss Sunshine really made me laugh out loud a few times and despite its absurdity and quirky Wes Anderson-esque family, it felt true to life. Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.

That’s it. I’ve mentally processed about three hundred top ten lists in the past month, and don’t feel like I’m missing anything here. There was plenty I didn’t see since I spent much of my viewing time on nonfiction, but I don’t see any prominent films that come close to these. Most of what I saw this year was just O.K. That includes Borat. You may, of course, disagree in the comments.

Following last month’s disheartening news about Philly’s International House, an alarming note hit my inbox yesterday from SaveTheOakStreet.com in Minneapolis, and I would like to take this opportunity to ask any and all of my readers to consider their noble effort to save a remarkable repertory cinema. The Oak Street Cinema is one of my favorite institutions, and favorite film venue anywhere. It hasn’t been around since the days of French fur trappers, but it was invented at least a few years before I needed it and has been around ever since. Sometimes I wonder if I really spent an entire summer bicycling to and from Oak Street’s screenings of the complete works of Francois Truffaut or if I invented the whole thing out of some desire for the Minneapolis of my imaginary memoirs to be a little more like the Paris of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers.

I’ve always thought that in the not-too-distant future I’d be better able to repay the Oak Street for all it gave me. I can’t do much as a struggling freelancer living a thousand miles away, but maybe some of you are better positioned to help out.

Update: You’ve gotta love Minnesotans