Erik Moe: Critic at Large

Fish Tank = highly recommended

Of the many, many films I saw during the days (Weeks? Months?) of extreme snow here in D.C., Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank was most striking. I went into the film not knowing much about where the film would take me. It turns out this is exactly the situation Arnold threw her actors into: no pages of the script beyond the currently-filming scene were made available. The resulting meandering film about sixteen-year-old Mia’s life in an English housing project with her non-parenting mother has been aptly compared to The 400 Blows.

• The White Ribbon is also about poverty and parenting. German pre-WWI feudal poverty and deeply conservative parenting. Highly recommended.
• The Cove is going to win this year’s Oscar for best documentary since it is an informative, engaging, advocacy doc about cute animals in danger. Nonetheless, I consider it recommended
• Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 = Fine
• Inglorious Bastards = Recommended
• Niloofar = Recommended (finally caught part of the Iranian film series at the Freer-Sackler).
• The Hurt Locker = Highly recommended. I feared this would just be a series of classic MacGuyver bomb-defusing scenes. Instead it paints a fairly nuanced portrait of the modern soldier technologically (and otherwise) insulated from war.

I have no problem with the Academy’s choice to expand best picture nominees to ten this year. It is high-profile exposure for great films. Unfortunately, I’ve seen most of the just-announced ten and they are not great. A look at Metacritic’s assessment of Blind Side inspired me to highlight that site’s clearest critical insult of each nominee.

Avatar

“Avatar clears the hurdle in terms of being optical candy. Its story, though, is pure cheese.”
—Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News

The Blind Side

“…peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of African-Americans who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them.”
—Melissa Anderson, Village Voice

District 9

“It’s a bad joke that District 9 will be hailed for its ‘originality.’”
—Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun

An Education

“…a third-act tonal shift makes for an incongruous, excessively moralistic fit with everything that’s preceded. Most insulting, though, is the way in which the climactic passages miraculously tidy up every frayed edge of Jenny’s life.”
—Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

The Hurt Locker

“Stretched both timewise and for plausibility.”
—Kyle Smith, New York Post

Inglourious Basterds

“The only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did “Springtime for Hitler”: because it’s so bad they think it’s good.”
—Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun

Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire

“In its eagerness to drag us through the lower depths of human experience, Precious leaves no space for the audience to breathe or to draw our own conclusions. For a film about empowerment and self-actualization, it wields an awfully large cudgel.”
—Dana Stevens, Slate

A Serious Man

“All the Coens come up with is a movie about bad things happening to limited people.”
—Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun

Up

“Save for a few inspired canine gags and a handful of very pretty visual details, Up left me cold. Its charms appear to have been applied with surgical precision; by the end, I felt expertly sutured, but not much else.”
—Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

Up in the Air

“[Writer/Director Jason Reitman] feels the constant need to “deepen” his characters, granting them wants and motivations–especially during the moralistic third act–that are totally alien to how they’re initially portrayed.”
—Keith Uhlich, Time Out New York

I’ll probably try to see The Hurt Locker and Up in the Air before the 22nd, but so far I’m not excited to call any of these films the best of 2009. The big winner this year might end up being The Baltimore Sun.