TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY

Oldman’s taciturn performance (he doesn’t speak for the first 20 minutes at least) reminds us that the less an actor “does” the more profound the performance appears because it lets the audience do the work of reading depth into the character (cf. Drive). That isn’t a knock on quiet performances, because not all actors have faces interesting enough or eyes expressive enough to sustain such sustained study like Oldman (and Gosling).

In the central scene Smiley (Oldman) recounts an encounter with another spy which feels a little too actorly only until one recognises that in any other film this scene would have consisted of a flashback — indeed, this film itself employs flashbacks many other times — and the significance of the episode is what it means to Smiley now. Indeed, it implicitly explains his modis operandi and why he is so reluctant to reveal himself through speech.

It is a very good movie whose total absence of genre competition might make it look great by (lack of) comparison. Its most evident accomplishment is recreating the dreary atmosphere of a 1970s cold war thriller — though “thriller” doesn’t seem appropriate given its pessimistic view (despite a Wire-esque concluding music montage) of counter-espionage policies as inherently destructive of trust and relationships. If American cinema in the 70s was charactertized by the Active Paranoia thriller, then this British film by a Swedish director is a portrayal of Passive Paranoia — the life-sapping fatigue effected by suspicion as a professional state of mind.

HANNA

The premise is completely conventional semi-sci-fi material and Joe Wright has tremendous fun with it visually. The strobe effect during the chase through the military base makes one of the best “montages” achieved through lighting since the time-lapse photography sequence of A Zed and Two Noughts. I even got to enjoy another long one-shot that Atonement confirmed as Wright’s trademark.

Hanna’s exuberant style is a welcome relief from the “documentary” self-seriousness of Greengrass’s Bourne sequels. The constant parade of diegetic folk musicians verges on cacophonous, but it effectively forefronts Hanna’s subjective experience and keeps her character in focus. I doubt Soderbergh’s version of this story in Haywire will be as enjoyable.

THE BEAVER

Mel Gibson’s choice for a prospective second comeback couldn’t have been more lucky. Had he filmed this movie after his latest meltdowns, he still couldn’t have chosen a better role given that most audiences would have trouble separating any character from the actor and his many mistakes. So the role of failed husband and father who cuts himself off from his family until he discovers an alternative mode of communication (with a severe suggestion of mental illness) is embarrassingly ideal.

Despite the film’s sincerity, it is still a dark comedy and I laughed out loud at a half dozen moments that I think were intended to be (again, darkly) funny. Ray Winstone’s voice as the puppet has a gravelly quality so similar to Gibson’s that it is quite credible as Gibson’s own voice with Foreign Accent Syndrome.

Anton Yelchin as his son is much better than, say, Ashton Holmes in the comparable role in A History of Violence although, in contrast to Cronenberg’s preferences, there is plenty of Theme to go around in The Beaver. Nonetheless, I thought the son’s ghost-writing subplot nicely underlined his dad’s situation in the vein of Ryan Gosling’s co-workers with their action figures and stuffed animals in Lars and the Real Girl. Since Yelchin never verbally observes that he was being a “beaver” for other people I don’t think the film can be accused of being too thematically on the nose, especially since the whole premise is that the son is exactly like his father and neither of them want to be him.

SENNA

You should see Senna. AKA The Passion of Saint Ayrton. Well, he doesn’t suffer too much, except at the hands of McLaren teammate and arch-rival Alain Prost, especially his political machinations for the 1989 championship, and FIA prez and Machiavel, Jean-Marie Balestre. After winning the penultimate race of the season, Senna was disqualified in a behind-the-scenes showdown, giving the championship to Prost, but Senna avenged himself at the same race the next year in a satisfyingly symmetrical real-life instance of poetic justice.

In the third act of the documentary, we see Senna becoming more political adept, including forcing the Balestre hand in a driver’s meeting by using the FIA’s own regulations against the president who is humiliated by a vote of the drivers immediately after a tyrannical rant from Balestre about the justice of all his decisions by virtue of the fact that they are his decisions. Balestre’s personal application of divine command ethics in his superintendence of F1 contrasts with the devout Senna’s frequent references to his relationship with God, reflected in his apparent humility about his accomplishments and his discussion of racing like an alchemical practice that is a catalyst for spiritual experiences on the track.

No doubt about it, Kapadia’s documentary is pure hagiography, no more so than in its portrayal of Senna’s final weekend. His sister reports that the night before his death in the San Marino Grand Prix, Senna read the Bible for comfort (after another driver had died during qualifying) including a passage that says the best gift God gives is God himself.

The access to personal video footage provided by Senna’s family probably came with a restriction on the filmmakers’ freedom to delve into Senna’s relationships which are not explored beyond superficial references; neither his wife from a brief early marriage nor his last girlfriend are mentioned at all. But as long as exhaustive biography is not your expectation, then the omission of personal soap opera doesn’t feel like too much of an absence because it leaves more room for the drama of Formula One which is entirely sufficient material for an hour and three quarters.

As it is, there are already lacunae in his racing performances you wish could have been fleshed out, but the choice to focus at length on decisive moments from a few specific races, integrated with coverage of the politics being played behind the scenes, is immensely satisfying. The merciful absence of talking heads in favor of voice-overs from contemporary witnesses — commentators, friends, family members — in turn allows more room for video footage of the subject himself whose face, thanks to his sympathetic personality, is implicitly interesting to watch regardless of whether he is speaking.

This is by no means the final word on Ayrton Senna. But the dramatically perfect arc of his life, especially his rivalry with Prost, ought to make this story fascinating to anyone regardless of their interest in racing for its own sake. Recommended!

BATTLE LOS ANGELES

Someone forgot to give Jonathan Liebesman the memo: “NB: Shaky cameras are played out and dated.” Set in August 2011, Battle Los Angeles (no colon in the screen title) feels like its release has been delayed since sometime in the previous decade. Its relentlessly unstable camera is translated fully intact from that bygone era (for which I can’t necessarily blame DP Lukas Ettlin, who has to take orders himself), and its vocabulary is likewise a vestige of the Iraq War.

Approximately the only interesting thing about Battle Los Angeles is that it is much better than Avatar at making the audience identify with the native resistance of a foreign invading force that TV analysts repeatedly insist is after local natural resources (in this case, water).

It does this rather simplistically but effectively by using all of the familiar cliches of American war movies to re-enact the insurgent exercises of the “other side.” One soldier is called John Wayne after resourcefully blowing up a gas station (the Gulf war’s Kuwaiti oil fires?) and another soldier heroically blows himself up — while in a bus, lest the point be too subtle.

With this subtext, the regular doses of Marine Corps hooah-ing, morale-raising speeches, and inspiring music are not so much ironic, as earnest employments of the familiar tropes of propaganda to inspire sympathy with the perspective of those usually considered to be fighting against the forces depicted.

RARE EXPORTS

The best children’s Christmas movie since 2004 and the best Christmas horror movie since 1974 adds up to the best Children’s Christmas Horror movie of all time! I think this is in my Top Ten of ’10 — best seen without reading anything about it!

Don’t let the horror label put you off: although it teases horrible things about to happen, it doesn’t actually show anything gruesome (unless multiple faraway shots of very old naked men count).

SKYLINE

Just saw this tonight. It’s basically a mashup of War of the Worlds (premise and creature design), Independence Day (anti-UFO violence), and Cloverfield (strict adherence to point of view), with a few sprinkles of The Matrix (creature design) and Starship Troopers (anti-alien violence) for good measure, not to mention Die Hard (unity of place) and District 9.

Even though it’s not as good as any of the movies to which it pays homage — except perhaps Independence Day (I haven’t seen that one in ages) — I still enjoyed it, and the 20-million-dollar special effects are virtually indistinguishable from the 200-million-dollar effects of its counterparts.

Unfortunately the characters have less personality than the ones in Cloverfield (and that’s including Turk from Scrubs). With better characters, dialogue, and actors, this could have been one of the more memorable alien invasion pics, but it is still a respectable contribution to the genre given its (relatively speaking) shoestring budget.

EASY A

Multiple reviews are hailing Easy A as the best high school comedy since Mean Girls (or Clueless, depending on the critic), adding up to a shocking 87% positive of 157 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, with a perfect 100% of Top Critics approving. I too thought that’s just crazy, so I decided to investigate for myself. After the unanimous praise I expected to be disappointed (Juno still smarts like a fresh wound), but within five minutes the movie was winning me over thanks to a montage of a musical birthday card providing the cheesy soundtrack for a stay-at-home weekend. By the end of the film I had laughed many times and couldn’t help but endorse the majority opinion.

Easy A is sort of the Kiss Kiss Bang Bang of the high school movie genre, likewise featuring a narrator who self-consciously comments on the conventions (and cliches) of the genre as the present film re-enacts or rejects them. Some of the film’s more illustrious predecessors are even shown in clips, distinctly shown in digitized form as if excerpted from low-quality uploads to YouTube. As the film also belongs to the subgenre of classic-literature-reset-in-high-school as epitomized by Clueless, other cinematic versions of The Scarlet Letter are both shown and discussed, with knowing reference to the looseness of their adaptations.

It’s not an insult to the rest of the movie to say that Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson absolutely steal the show whenever they appear as Emma Stone’s parents. A lot of the credit for these scenes does go to the script, which is not just funny but also refreshing to see a parent-child relationship that is not defined by embarrassment or resentment. (I’m trying to think of the last high school movie in which parents are not depicted as buffoons… help, anyone? Even the otherwise sophisticated An Education made this elementary blunder.) Tom Haden Church also deserves recognition as yet another sympathetic adult. (Something’s fishy here — almost as if this movie is not trying to patronize pre-teens!)

The movie’s not perfect: the usually resourceful Amanda Bynes (herself a veteran of the literature-adapted-to-high-school premise) is wasted, not given much to work with as the self-righteous Christian obligatory to the most recent iterations of the genre. Either her performance or the material (or both) lacks the depth of Mandy Moore’s character in Saved!, but Bynes’ role has more to do with the film’s appropriation of The Scarlet Letter than anti-Christian stereotyping. At one point Emma Stone actually opens a Bible in a rare non-sarcastic moment, though it feels a little like a CYA scene to pre-empt criticism that the film depicts religion negatively.

One of the film’s delightful touches is the unambiguous identity of its setting in Ojai, California, as opposed to a generic suburban Everytown. Even more unconventionally, it was filmed entirely on location there.

In any case, to classify Easy A as a “teen comedy” would be unfair, though the teens in my audience did enjoy it. Rather, it’s a worthy contribution to the Hollywood tradition in which the American high school is a microcosm of adult society, or its petri dish. Easy A has one thing in common The Expendables: the quality of each film is accurately indicated by its title.

THE EXPENDABLES

Before seeing this film I thought the brevity of Bruce and Arnie’s cameos was lame but after seeing it I realize they were the smartest actors in the film. By limiting their involvement to the bare minimum, they don’t escape unscathed — the worst script of 2010 is no respecter of persons — but they do limit the damage to their reputations.

When Arnie walks out of the scene (or walks out on it?) he shows how to make a gracious exit appropriate to one’s age, in stark contrast to Stallone, at 64 the oldest man in the film, whose plastic surgery has made him look more like his mother instead of younger. Behind his back Stallone jokes that Arnold wants to become president — a reprise of the same joke in Demolition Man — but the rest of the movie backfires in the face of the mocker, making Arnold’s third career look dignified by comparison.

In terms of the 80s Nostalgenre, The A-Team has everything The Expendables doesn’t: characters with actual personalities, dialogue that makes sense, jokes that are funny, inventive action scenarios, and the most delightfully detestable villain of the year.

Mercifully I had a 40%-off voucher for my ticket.

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE

To say this movie resembles a made-for-TV thriller would be an insult to the quality of TV drama in the past decade. Also to the verb “thrill.”

Visually this film is lazy, and dramatically it is never suspenseful nor exciting. At least the first film in this trilogy, directed by Niels Arden Oplev, unspooled a moderately interesting mystery punctuated by some dramatic sequences of investigating, especially one of homemade cinematic detective work. Not to mention that it featured actual relationships between characters that developed over the course of the film! Daniel Afredson’s sequel contains no such elements.

The fact that Alfredson has also directed the third film does not bode well for the conclusion of this series. At least this time, the decision to remake the trilogy in English can credibly claim artistic integrity, and with David Fincher in charge, there’s no doubt it will be the superior product.