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25. Bright Star – Jane Campion (2009)

The unlikely romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, one whose epistolary manifestations have become infamous, is the subject of “Bright Star,” Campion’s best film in over a decade. Keats’s abridged life is given to us mostly in summer hours spent looking through or standing near windows, pursued by light. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” begins “Endymion,” a perfect explanation for the endurance of both Keats’s and Campion’s art.

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24. Brick – Rian Johnson (2005)

A highly-stylized, hard-boiled noir set in high school shouldn’t work, but its resounding success in Rian Johnson’s “Brick” makes it even more enthralling, and is a testament to the director’s unique and fully realized vision. As Brendan (played with a tight-lipped smolder by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) navigates the seedy underbelly of his hometown to find his ex-girlfriend, he runs up against more than a few unsavory, if larger-than-life characters.

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23. The Hurt Locker – Kathryn Bigelow (2009)

One of the best movies about war ever made, Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” erupts onscreen, bringing both humor and sense to a situation (the Iraq War) which seems to have neither. Sgt. William James, a bomb squad leader played by the phenomenal Jeremy Renner, could so easily have been a cliché―the new guy who plays by his own rules, jeopardizing his life and others―that when everything goes well (and it does), the audience can breath a sigh of relief. But even when bombs and situations are diffused, the sense of urgency never leaves the screen.

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22. La Niña Santa – Lucrecia Martel (2004)

Lucrecia Martel is the best Argentinian filmmaker working today, and her labors stands alongside those of Lynne Ramsay and Jane Campion (or, in literature, Alice Munro), who specialize in the quiet, often uncomfortable business of chronicling the lives of marginalized, lonely, or lost women. In “La Niña Santa,” a young girl takes it upon herself to save the soul of a middle-aged man. Heat, sexuality, and even faith itself complicate this process.

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21. Punch Drunk Love – Paul Thomas Anderson (2002)

Colors. Lens flares. Harmoniums. “Punch Drunk Love” is, like many of Anderson’s films, long stretches of quietness interrupted by loud, often violent conflicts. It’s also one of the only watchable movies with Adam Sandler. (In a moment of rare onscreen instinct, Sandler decided to play something other than “Adam Sandler.”) Philip Seymour Hoffman as the “mattress man” makes the film alone.

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20.  Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – Shane Black (2005)

Struggling through Michael Hoffman’s 1995 film “Restoration” recently disproved my oft spoken claim that I could “watch Robert Downey Jr. in anything,” but “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” is such a smart comedy that it could have succeeded (in execution; the film did terribly in theaters) without him. But much better for the film, and for us, that Downey Jr. was able to bring his quick charm to Harry Lockhart, a down-on-his-luck thief who soon gets way over his head in a self-aware murder mystery.

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19. Shotgun Stories – Jeff Nichols (2007)

Jeff Nichols’s “Shotgun Stories” is more frightening than most horror films, and it achieves this through tense human drama and in the stoic face of Michael Shannon, behind which lies the trouble of an entire family. Two feuding families, joined by the recently-deceased father that left one to start the other, rush violently towards the film’s climax.

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18. All the Real Girls – David Gordon Green (2003)

David Gordon Green, until his associations with the Apatow camp, was a small filmmaker. He was concerned with small lives, small towns, and small moments, all of which bundled together to form significant changes in his characters. Green’s portrait of the American South, with its simple and direct dialogue, will break your heart before you’re sure what to make of it.

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17. Revanche – Götz Spielmann (2008)

After things go wrong in a bank robbery (do they ever go right?), Alex takes refuge in his grandfather’s country cottage, chopping wood and carrying a heavy guilt on his shoulders. What starts out being a film about love and crime soon transforms into a meditation on melancholia, and the abbreviated daylight of Austrian winter wraps its characters and their problems in a single, tragic bond.

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16. O, Brother Where Art Thou? – The Coen Brothers (2000)

George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson play escaped convicts in this reimagining of the Odyssey, encountering a number of fantastic elements along their journey home. Trudging through the South with a police at their backs and treasure out on the horizon, these three sing, dance, and laugh their way through one of the Coen brothers’ best films.

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15. The Station Agent – Thomas McCarthy (2003)

Thomas McCarthy’s films are primarily concerned with radically different and lonely people coming together to form an unlikely but surprisingly cohesive familial bond. “The Station Agent” follows Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage) as he moves to rural New Jersey, reluctantly befriending Joe (Bobby Cannavale) and Olivia (Patricia Clarkson) and discussing trains, the weather, and irreparable loss.

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14. In Bruges – Martin McDonagh (2008)

Martin McDonagh is a name well-known in the realm of theater, but relatively unknown in that of film. His first feature, “In Bruges,” is a dark comedy filled with hilarious non-sequitur and politically incorrect slurs rattled off in thick accents. As two hit-men hide out in Bruges (of all places), one (Colin Farrell) gets increasingly annoyed with his location and increasingly guilty about his last job. Brendon Gleeson (the other hitman) and Ralph Fiennes (their boss) prove invaluable at dispensing McDonagh’s persiflage as well as his strange, somehow serious jocularity.

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13. Vanilla Sky – Cameron Crowe (2001)

Anyone who’s taken an introduction to philosophy class or seen “The Matrix” has been asked to wonder about the importance of reality in regards to happiness, and that if a machine could simulate happiness at a higher rate than we encounter it in our daily lives, would that machine be a good or a bad thing. “Vanilla Sky,” a remake of the “Abre los ojos,” evaluates what happens when that simulated happiness, that dream, becomes a nightmare. Bittersweet, the film came along in Crowe’s career before his love for music prevented him from making a watchable film.

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12. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – Michel Gondry (2004)

Nobody can explore the human mind so forwardly and with as much poignancy as Charlie Kaufman. Michel Gondry’s masterpiece “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is a confluence of talents, emotions, and stunning visuals, one that evaluates the necessity of memory, pain, and loss. Gondry has proven to be far less rewarding a filmmaker after Kaufman stopped writing his scripts, but this 2004 gem remains a strong case for both of their talents.

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11. The Royal Tenenbaums – Wes Anderson (2001)

Wit and whimsy abound in Wes Anderson’s third film. Detailing the lives of two divorced parents and the three child prodigies they raised (who have become less remarkable upon entering adulthood themselves), “The Royal Tenenbaums” shows Anderson at the height of his cinematic fluency, with wide-angle lenses and shots borrowed from the French New Wave circling around his brilliant ensemble.

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10. The Wind that Shakes the Barley – Ken Loach (2006)

The Irish war for independence was not exactly characterized by glory, and Loach’s harrowing film “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” does not try to change that. It is dark, it is depressing, and even in the small and fleeting moments of sweetness or heart, there is a pressing danger that surrounds each and every one of the film’s characters. Even when an uneven truce is met, more problems arise. It is a tough but entirely rewarding film, one that speaks not only to the cause of history, but to the lives that endured it.

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9. Adaptation – Spike Jonze (2002)

Instead of adapting Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief,” Charlie Kaufman wrote a screenplay about how difficult it was to adapt the screenplay, writing himself into the movie in the process. In the hands of anyone less capable, this could have been a disastrous first-year film school mistake, but in Kaufman’s, aided by the deft direction of Spike Jonze, it is a complete success. Dealing with the difficulty of transposing a work across mediums as well as several-hundred neuroses that blaze through Kaufman’s head in the film, “Adaptation” is life-affirming in the strangest ways possible.

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8. After the Wedding – Susanna Bier (2006)

Susanna Bier’s films are not exactly happy, and “After the Wedding” is no exception. Melodrama at its very best, the film follows Jacob Pederson (Mads Mikkelsen) as he returns to his native Denmark to secure a grant for his orphanage in India, only to learn that it has several strings attached. A powerful performance by Rolf Lassgård grounds the film, even when he is thrashing about and yelling at the top of his lungs.

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7. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – Julian Schnabel (2007)

Julian Schnabel practically reinvents cinema in order to tell the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former fashion editor who was stricken with “locked-in syndrome,” able to move only one eye. The film grabs the viewer from its first startling moments, locking them in with Bauby for much of the film. Our only escape as viewers is found in his only escape as a man: in memory. The film crashes back through moments of his life, some profound and some deceptively banal, but all undeniably beautiful.

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6. The Barbarian Invasions – Denys Arcand (2003)

The Barbarian Invasions,” which continues 1986’s “The Decline of the American Empire,” may be the best sequel ever made (next to, of course, “The Empire Strikes Back”). Catching up with the ensemble cast that made the first one a success, “The Barbarian Invasions” focuses on the last weeks of Rémy, a college professor who learns he has cancer and gathers his friends at a cabin in French-Canada, essentially, to say goodbye. The film, like its predecessor, is one big, lively conversation, and is as funny and as genuine as it is heartbreaking.

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5. There Will Be Blood – Paul Thomas Anderson (2007)

Is there anyone better at creating larger-than-life, terrifying Americans than Daniel Day-Lewis? Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” adapted from Sinclair’s “Oil!,” is reasonable proof against the possibility. With discord both in the clashing strings of the soundtrack and the nervous, sweaty desperation onscreen, Anderson presents a portrait of the furiously emerging country and the egomania that shaped it.

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4. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou – Wes Anderson (2004)

Anderson’s films have always been about reluctant, struggling fathers and the complexes they give their children, as well as all the people they surround themselves with to fight loneliness. Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is perhaps the most solipsistic protagonist Anderson has put forth, and he’s certainly the most concerned with abstractions like revenge and legacy. Diving through dead-pan and David Bowie, Anderson’s send-up to Jacques Cousteau is essential viewing.

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3. Children of Men – Alfonso Cuarón (2006)

Dystopian fictions are a tricky breed, but Cuarón’s masterpiece is able to make the end of the world feel not only jarringly real, but immediately human. During astoundingly long takes in a world massaged, not inundated, with digital enhancement, Theo (Clive Owen) tries to make sense of what’s going on around him, where, in a world where women have stopped being able to give birth, one suddenly has. Amid fascism and anarchy, the dangers of the world loom and threaten the new young mother, the first beacon of hope in almost two decades.

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2. Synechdoche, NY – Charlie Kaufman (2008)

The scale of “Synechdoche, NY” is almost indescribable; it spans almost half of the life of Caden Cotard, a theater director who feels himself hurdling towards death and, what’s worse, irrelevance. He loses his wife, is estranged from his daughter, and he feels every other meaningful relationship he has slipping through his fingers. The narrative speeds up as the movie progresses, and we lose larger and larger bits of time. Kaufman’s film, his directorial debut, is tough, and certainly depressing; it is among a handful of films that has the power to truly change the way you think about life and how you live it, and is one of the most valuable contributions to cinema, to art that’s ever been made.

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1. The Squid and the Whale – Noah Baumbach (2005)

Many of the best films are aggressively personal; Noah Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical work “The Squid and the Whale” is a perfect example. Caught in the center of his parents’―both writers―bitter divorce, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) tries to circumvent the pains of adolescence by imitating his father (see: poor role model) and reaching after some kind of literary precocity. He lies, he cheats, and he struggles against the anxiety of influence as his world makes less and less sense. At under 90 minutes, every single scene is essential; Baumbach’s wit has never been sharper than it is in this film, as the former lovers lob insults at each other behind walls of emotionally-detached double-speak and joint custody. With nods to Rohmer and Truffault, “The Squid and the Whale” articulates the difficulty of growing up and growing apart.

Like “Juno” and “Thank You for Smoking” before it, Jason Reitman’s third film “Up in the Air” is a light, surefooted comedy rooted in moments of genuine heart. Like Juno MacGuff and Nick Naylor before him, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), the film’s protagonist, lives a lonely and somewhat troubled existence before he’s able, by uniting around his family, to transcend it. And like his previous work, “Up in the Air” is an achievement in technical filmmaking rather than one of emotional resonance; it is a solid, enjoyable indie film, but it is not as valuable or as enlightening as it purports to be.

The movie begins with a series of people being fired by the yet-unseen Ryan. Reitman presents these people, sobbing and stuttering, as a flip-book of corporate decline, using mostly non-actors who had recently lost their jobs. This casting choice never feels cheap or exploitative, instead imbuing the film with a sense of urgent verisimilitude. Once these first few are dispatched with, Ryan packs his things, glides through airport security, and flies―always American―to another city to repeat the process. His job, which keeps him on the road well over 200 days a year, is to remove others from theirs, to stand in for weak-willed bosses and help employees “transition” out of their old positions.

It’s thankless work, being the harbinger of unemployment―lonely too. With Ryan’s wry smile and graceful, almost floating steps, it’s easy to think that he regards his profession with a kind of unrealistic levity, but his commitment to doing it right reveals the respect he has for the people he terminates, even if he has to force himself to forget about them soon after he boards the next plane. When Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), a recent graduate who plans to cut travel costs by championing video-conferencing rather than face-to-face encounters for firing employees, enters Ryan’s life of solitude, it feels like an intrusion. Not only is this bright-faced, serious-minded woman looking to interrupt his life’s rhythm, but also to rob him of the only other contact he has which are, strangely enough, the firings. Natalie lives behind a similar facade: outwardly confident but inwardly conflicted, even frightened. When Ryan asks her about the sound of thudding keystrokes that fills the cabin of their first flight together, she defensively quips “I type with purpose,” and we get the impression that this is not the first time she’s had to explain it.

Time stands still for Ryan. A slave to boarding passes and mini-bars, he isolates himself from meaningful human contact. His profession and demeanor have estranged him from his sisters―the youngest of whom is getting married―and he has no real friends to speak of. He treats family and coworkers with the same charming superficiality that he extends to those he fires on a regular basis. The soft smile, the even timbre, the compassionate eyes: all of these things, like Ryan, are fleeting. Though Natalie’s video conferencing idea is a clear signal of Ryan’s obsolescence, his static alienation is felt most poignantly in smaller scenes. When his sister refuses his offer to walk her down the aisle or when his neighbor, an old flame, gently rebuffs his once welcome advances―“I’ve started seeing someone”―we see that while Ryan has been living a routine, the world has moved on without him. During one of the motivational lectures he gives during the film, which identifies non-attachment as the key to successful business, he confidently asserts that “moving is living.” Ryan has, unfortunately, taken his own advice too literally; though he spends his days moving from city to city, he always stays in the same emotional place.

Reitman’s film, while not extraordinary, is worth your time. It is a sweet, funny look at a lonely man realizing he’s lonely, finally reaching out for all of the things he used to think weighed him down. Until the last sloppy and unnecessary 20 minutes, the film is comfortably paced and confidently rendered, moving Ryan through life and love (his on-the-road fling, Alex, is played by the irreplaceable Vera Farmiga) with relative ease, soaked in soft light and a grey-blue hue. Reitman’s auteurist presence is not, however, firm enough to make the film into something enduring.  “Up in the Air” is well-made, but will not necessarily be well-remembered.

Are you cussing with me?

“Honey, I’m seven non-fox years old,” Mr. Fox (George Clooney) tells his wife as the camera pushes in on them sitting down to breakfast, “My father died at seven-and-a-half. I don’t want to live in a hole anymore. And I’m gonna do something about it.” Then, after a pregnant pause, he tears full force into his meal, arms flying and jaws snapping, with the voracity of, well, a wild animal. This early scene stands in for a remarkable whole; “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” adapted from Roald Dahl’s beloved book of the same name, succeeds by oscillating effortlessly between complicated, even adult concerns and downright fun. Not carefree enough to be shallow and not serious enough to be tiresome, Wes Anderson’s latest is a triumph of balance, at once enjoyable and meaningful.

The film opens in a similar fashion: Mr. Fox walks his wife (Meryl Streep) along a country road discussing her recent doctor’s visit. Satisfied with her explanation that the results were “just a bug” and unable to notice that she still preoccupied by it, he continues to chat, to comment on the landscape, and to overrule her opinions after asking for them. They arrive at a chicken farm and, after a brief squabble over strategy, they make a dash for the coop. This is the first of many scenes where Anderson plays with shifts in scale and perspective, lifted lovingly from Studio Ghibli, to produce beautifully rendered and engaging action. This lifestyle of danger and bravado that Mr. Fox enjoys comes to a screeching halt, however, when he learns that he and his wife are unexpectedly expecting.

With a child on the way, Mrs. Fox implores her husband to settle down and accept the responsibilities of fatherhood, a theme present in nearly every one of Anderson’s films. From “The Royal Tenenbaums” to “The Life Aquatic,” his films have been concerned largely with solipsistic men and the children they somewhat reluctantly raise. Offspring, for these men and this fox, represent the unfortunate sacrifice of oneself for the benefit of others. When Mr. Fox remarks “I used to steal birds, but now I’m a newspaperman,” there is a measure of defeat in his voice, a yearning, masked by his outward insouciance, for surrendered independence. He moves into a tree slightly out of his price range, despite unsavory human neighbors―Boggis Bunce, and Bean―and against the advice of his lawyer, Mr. Badger (Bill Murray). (Anderson’s wilderness is anything but wild; the animal world in “Fantastic Mr. Fox” exists within a kind of hyper-personification, with established societies, meticulously crafted furniture, and Anderson’s trademark sartorial flair.)

Faced with an unfulfilling literary career and heaps of vulpine ennui―“Who am I, Kylie? […] I’m saying this more as like, existentialism, you know?”―Mr. Fox plans a series of raids on his neighbors’ farms. These heists, carried out with bandit masks and carefully-scrutinized blueprints, increase in difficulty and in daring, drawing suspicion from the farmers and, more importantly, from Mrs. Fox. Meanwhile, their son Ash (voiced with a precise deadpan by Jason Scwhartzman) fears that in the battle for his father’s affection, he is losing out to his taller, more athletic cousin Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson), who is staying with the Foxes while his unseen father recovers from “double pneumonia.” As both Mr. Fox and his son grasp at forms of validation, they endanger everyone around them and force a climactic stand-off between man and animal.

From here, the film twists and turns through underground passages, hostage situations, and even death. The characters change and grow in significant ways by experiencing and overcoming obstacles, including interpersonal ones. Anderson, with co-writer Noah Baumbach (“The Squid and the Whale,” “Kicking and Screaming”), crafts a heartfelt fable, one that is able to maintain a reverence for its source material without idolizing it, embellishing upon rather than obscuring its meaning. The film has an endearing familiarity (due in equal parts to Dahl’s rich story and Anderson’s distinct way of telling it) while at the same time emerging as something completely new and different. In short, it is exactly what it needs to be.

As she stumbles, panting, through thick underbrush at the beginning of “New Moon,” Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) comes face to face with that which she fears most. No, she doesn’t encounter a villainous monster (series author Stephenie Meyer has defanged or declawed most of these); instead, she sees herself grow old. Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson)―her pale, sharp-browed Adonis―also appears in the clearing, striding toward her senescent self. This nightmare, one of many Bella has during the film, exposes, as a central theme: her fear of aging, which she perceives as her romantic obsolescence. Will their awkward, mumbling love stand the test of time; or will Edward, when met with (as Yeats put it) “the sorrows of [her] changing face,” turn and fly? “New Moon,” an overlong mess of hormones and heartache, is not sure.

This dream serves as a presage for what awaits her in the morning: her eighteenth birthday. After witnessing her forage for gray hairs and rattle off a few self-deprecating remarks in the school parking lot, it’s clear that age, or more accurately the advancement of it, weighs heavily on her mind. Now a year older than Edward looks, she struggles to avoid being reminded of it; she coyly utters “I thought we said no presents” no less than four times in the first 15 minutes. (Methinks the lady doth protest too much.) While she is unhappy with its occasion, Bella is no doubt pleased with the attention she receives. She accepts the presents she was not expecting, and from Edward, the only person who obeyed her wishes, she demands one: a kiss. This small contradiction points to the dangerous reasoning behind her mortal fear; namely, that without her youth and beauty she would lose the attention she craves from Edward, thus surrendering a large part of how she defines herself.

And I can’t say I disagree with her. Their love can’t be based on much else at this point, as all that we’ve seen onscreen so far is a series of spoken devotions, pronouncements of love rather than the presence of it. Bella, though 18, is far from anything resembling an adult. She is not able (nor is the audience, it seems) to differentiate between her mawkish exchanges with Edward and what she will one day, hopefully, come to understand as love. She sacrifices the actual for the imagined (an action Meyer silently and irresponsibly condones), replacing any substantial form of love―the immediacy and small moments required to connect with someone in a meaningful way―with an abstraction they jejunely refer to as “forever.”

After a scuffle with Jasper, the perpetually constipated member of the Cullen family, Edward begins to doubt his ability to protect Bella. Though she is eager to file the incident under ‘bloodthirsty misunderstanding,’ Edward’s not taking any chances. He tells her that he’s leaving, and that they will never see each other again; what’s more, he adds a few lines of feigned scorn―go on, get!―to their break-up which, inexplicably, takes place deep in the woods.

Months pass, cameras spin, and still Bella seems no closer to dealing with the break-up in a healthy way. She wakes up screaming and pounding her chest so often that her father suggests she move back to her mother’s and start therapy. But Bella soon finds two ways to dull the heartbreak, at least enough to keep her father from noticing. The first, and by far the most disturbing way, is by putting herself in situations of increasing danger―crashing motorcycles, cliff-diving, almost being date-raped by a biker―in order to summon up an incorporeal version of Edward that, like a semaphore, seeks to flag her in the right direction. What she calls being an “adrenaline junkie,” the process of inflicting pain upon herself or placing herself in close proximity with danger, is practically a stand-in for cutting. If you hurt yourself, the film suggests, he’ll HAVE to notice you.

Her friend Jacob (Taylor Lautner), the second and less physically compromising distraction, is also growing up. His affection for her, which has been apparent since the first film, is channeled into a pair of motorcycles she saves from the junk-yard with her disposable income. They fill up their afternoon hours with this project, giggling through grease and bad puns. And though Jacob now sports an impressive set of abs, the gratuitous exposure of which left theatres nationwide in a damp frenzy, Bella keeps him at arm’s length. Her feelings for Edward wrestle down her budding feelings for Jacob, and triumph for the better part of the film. She, however unintentionally, keeps him interested, satisfying her emotional need for companionship while denying him his. Keeping his advances at bay with a combination of darting downward glances and lip biting, she reasserts her wish to preserve the friendship as is, regardless of her own mixed feelings. Even her speech patterns mirror her indecision; Jacob is “sorta beautiful,” his birthday gift is “kinda perfect.” These equivocations are less a result of fumbling teenage ineloquence as they are of deep romantic confusion.

Plodding onward from here, “New Moon” contrives minor dangers for Bella to encounter, from revenge-driven vampires to hot-tempered werewolves, all of which barely elicit a batted eyelash from the unintentionally stoic Ms. Stewart. After her cliff-jumping escapades, she makes for Italy―Virgin Air―to save lovesick Edward from provoking the wrath of the Volturi, an order of anachronistically dressed vampire royalty.

If this all seems a bit rushed, that’s because it is. Director Chris Weitz doesn’t know quite what to do with the material he’s given, nor does he know where to place narrative importance. The result is a nearly shapeless film, made solely to wend the way for the rest of the series, establishing a rival for Bella’s affections and complicating the notion of love eternal which has, until this point, been a cinematic fait accompli. The film’s best moments come not from any of the romantic leads, but from Aros (played by the ceaselessly dependable Michael Sheen), the de facto leader of the Volturi who, flanked by two decrepit fops, interrogates Bella with unblinking eyes and a crooked smile. When she leaves, she passes by a group of tourists being led in, like calves to slaughter, to the Volturi’s chamber. For Bella and for us, their cries, echoing through the hallway, are a crude intrusion of the actual―the first sign of genuine danger in a series that has, till now, presented only the absence of it.

Bella the Vampire non-layer angsts her way into theatres.

Admin Note: In honor of the release of “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” and to whet your appetite for our forthcoming review, reprinted here is Kevin’s original review of “Twilight” from the UCR Highlander.

On atheism, the Belgian poet Émile Cammaerts wrote that “when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing — they believe in anything.” In the wake of Harry Potter, a global fascination that lasted over a decade, millions of people needed something to turn to. In many cases, that something was “Twilight.” It’s not hard to find the appeal, either. The characters are written broadly: Bella, the story’s protagonist, seems to be the perfect blend of what female readers are and what they wish they were, giving her an “every girl” feeling. Edward Cullen is dark and mysterious, sculpted out of stone, but also sensitive and protective; he’s James Dean getting your kitten out of a tree.

At the start of the film, Bella is transplanted from her Arizona home, making the long journey to the small town of Forks, Washington. She moves in with her father, and matriculates into the local school toward the end of her junior year. Though she assures us more than once, through narration and one of many awkward conversations with her father, that she prefers to be alone, she quickly makes friends with a group of thinly drawn stereotypes that serve as plot points and quickly fade into the background. The film then shifts to Edward, the pale, brooding loner. After watching him have what seems like twenty minutes of staring contests with Bella underscored by ominous music, they finally have their first encounter in biology class. When he first sees her, he appears to gag, and remains painfully silent the rest of the class period before disappearing for days.

But their love is inevitable. We’re not sure where it comes from — the staring, the physical attraction, the Clark Kent theatrics, the classy breaking-into-a-house-and-watching-a-girl-while-she-sleeps move — but when phrases like “I’d rather die than to stay away from you” come out of the mouth of a 17-year-old girl who’s had limited interaction with a boy over the course of a few weeks, we’re nothing if not convinced.

After a suspenseless guessing game over what Edward really is, he takes Bella up a mountain for the big reveal. With all the evidence stacking up against their “love,” they proceed unafraid. Bella soon meets Edward’s vampire family (who, because they do not eat humans, consider themselves “vegetarians”, a frustrating misnomer), who are quick to like Bella, and even quicker to trust her. On a particularly stormy day, they even take her out to the middle of nowhere to witness them play the great vampiric past-time, baseball (a.k.a. muggle Quidditch). It is in this absurd setting that the first real conflict of the film begins. A trio of vagrant vampires stumbles upon their game, and a chase ensues. The family for some reason separates, sacrificing their greater numbers in an attempted ruse, which unsurprisingly doesn’t work. Fearing for her mother’s life, Bella is drawn out from protection by James’s battue and led to her old dance studio and the film’s climax.

The worst part of this film and no doubt the source material is its message. Its heroine is nothing of the sort: she’s not strong, she’s not particularly capable of much else besides frowning, and she’s entirely, unapologetically co-dependent. Meyer creates one of the weakest female characters in recent memory. “Twilight” instructs female readers to define themselves not by their actions or their intellect, but through another person. In many iterations throughout the film, Bella reassures Edward and herself that without their relationship, she is nothing. Edward does the same, going as far as to say “you are my life now” to Bella.

The film’s producers have been trying hard to sell “Twilight” as a Romeo and Juliet story, but the forbidden love aspect doesn’t seem all that forbidden. Both families seems to accept the other and aside from Edward’s jealous “sister” and the old hat protective father routine, there doesn’t seem to be anyone standing in the way of their love outside of their own grandiose view of it. Theirs is an affectation of youth, the desperate need to make things more important than they are, to give weight to otherwise insignificant things. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, it is not a timeless love story, and Stephanie Meyer is no Shakespeare. The phenomenon of “Twilight,” in the end, is about lowered standards. The book asks less of a reader, the movie asks less of a viewer, and Bella teaches girls to ask less of a female lead – and perhaps themselves.

]]> http://barackobamanaked.com/2009/11/review-twilight-2008-or-tween-of-the-damned/feed/ 2 http://barackobamanaked.com/2009/11/review-bright-star-2009/ http://barackobamanaked.com/2009/11/review-bright-star-2009/#comments Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:38:03 +0000 Kevin Longrie http://barackobamanaked.com/?p=277

A needle and thread, pushed and pulled through muslin, are kept in shallow focus during the first few moments of “Bright Star.” Their movements, rendered by the calm and certain hands of Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), mirror those director Jane Campion took with her subject. Rather than juggle all the years of John Keats’ life, she weaves gently through the last three, anchoring her film in the love and correspondence between Keats and Fanny. Though other aspects of Keats’ life―financial hardships, mixed critical reception―can be found on the film’s periphery, “Bright Star” concerns itself largely with hushed affections shared in summer hours, with words spoken and celebrated in the soft light of late-afternoon.

The film is tender, but never mawkish, sweet, but never saccharine; avoiding the missteps made by so many costume dramas, it never allows its romance or its drama to collapse into parody. Campion advances the narrative fluidly, meeting their quiet love with a quiet confidence. She also escapes the haughty didacticism that pervades period pieces (especially those with star-crossed lovers), trusting her audience with the complexities of love and poetry and creating a series of slow but meaningful scenes; each shot elaborates, but no shot instructs.

Though the film deals with Keats, his poetry, and his friendship with Charles Armitage Brown (Paul Schneider), his loyal, if territorial fellow poet cum patron, its primary focus―as is expected from Campion (she has, as Amy Taubin wrote, “devoted her career to exploring female subjectivity”)―is Fanny. Initially uninterested in poetry, Fanny firmly believes that life should be lived in a practical manner. “My stitching has more merit and admirers than your two scribblings put together,” she tells the pair of poets, “And I can make money from it.” Slowly, however, as she finds herself spending more time with Keats the man, she becomes more interested in Keats the poet. She commits to memory the beginning of “Endymion,” as well as a smattering of other lines.

Though their friends and family make clear the social and financial incompatibilities of such a pairing, the couple are content to spend their time in the tender grip of young love, through kisses stolen in the bowers of the Brawne estate and, when Keats finds himself reluctantly away, through passionate letters. The film often places Fanny near a window, bathed in natural light, languidly reading, writing, or awaiting a letter. These vignettes, reminiscent of Vermeer’s “The Mikmaid,” punctuate the film, adding weight to the films actions by highlighting the spaces between them.

Complications build up, between Keats’ deteriorating health and the scandal building around their relationship, but even as things threaten to fall apart, Campion’s film does not. The mise-en-scene remains lush and the film dense, maintaining the pain of Keats’ tragedy without allowing it to become melodramatic. The cast, particularly the two young leads, ground the film with remarkably strong performances, wielding such verisimilitude, such a command of human emotion that the story is uniquely affecting, almost painfully so.

Though “Bright Star” cannot erase what we know about Keats’ untimely death, it does allow us, for a few short hours, to inhabit “a sleep/ Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.” The love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne is infamous, but Campion and her cast are able to make it very honest, and very real.

America, meet your sexiest new star.

Where to begin. “The Box” doesn’t really make any sense, the acting is inconsistent (with the notable exception of Frank Langella), the score is abominable and Richard Kelly doesn’t seem to understand how unintentionally funny some of the images he puts on the screen are. That being said, there’s a certain charm to such a ridiculous movie taking itself so seriously. And underneath the silliness, it does seem like Kelly has important things to say. He’s just not sure how to say them with his chosen medium.

“The Box” stars Cameron Diaz, James Marsden and most of Frank Langella and is very loosely based on a short story titled “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson. Matheson was an experienced writer of print and screen who wrote many of the old episodes of The Twilight Zone, and the original plot reflects the same kind of sensibilities (it was also turned into an episode of The Twilight Zone during the brief 1980s revival). The basic story is that a couple in financial straits receives a box with a button on it. The mysterious man who gives them the box tells them that if they press the button, they will receive a million dollars, but someone they don’t know will die. Predictably, they press it. The mysterious man gives them the money and departs telling them that he’s off to give the box to somebody else – and he’s sure it will be someone that they don’t know! It’s a formulaic and fun short story in the tradition of O. Henry and it features a great twist, but it is not something that could be turned into a 2 hour movie. Realizing this, Kelly gets the original plot out of the way in the first half hour and uses the rest of his film to ponder deeper box-related questions: how the box works, why the guy with the box keeps going around giving it to people, who the guy is, and so on. Guess what Kelly’s answers are! Seriously, just guess. Even after watching the film I’m not sure, but they involve lightning, the NSA, the Viking program, weird looking water and aliens or god or something. Kelly’s answers are often as surprising as they are nonsensical.

Beyond the original box story, I’m still not sure I quite get what was going on this film. The film, too, does not even seem to be sure of what is going on, or even really care. In light of this apparent approach to film making, it would be easy to dismiss Kelly as a lousy second pressing of David Lynch; after all, they both deploy a set of idiosyncratic tropes in the framework of an abstruse story in service of some “greater message” that challenges the audience. But Kelly differs from Lynch in that he appears to actually want to do something more than just challenge the audience. The incoherence in the story comes off less as a Lynchian cinematic pretension and more as a simple failure to effectively communicate his ideas. With The Box, I believe Kelly tries to suggest something about free will, determinism and the nature of redemption. He just needs a better editor to bring that out of the jumble that he presents the audience with. More importantly, he also needs to find a better person or group to score the film than the members of Arcade Fire, an otherwise very talented band that composes a truly awful score.

The serious tone that Kelly cultivates throughout the film is constantly undermined by its bombastic and melodramatic score. Taken alone, the score sounds alternately like the soundtrack to a soap opera or a lost Tchaikovsky composition; as a part of this film, it intrudes on and ruins nearly every scene. The only meaningful purpose I could figure for having such a hamfisted score is that Kelly intended it to function sort of like a laugh track. Without hearing sad and mournful strings wailing away in the background, the average moviegoer would probably be confused by the sight of Cameron Diaz’s deformed foot (”Is this supposed to be arty? Creepy? Oh, there’s the sad music, I’m supposed to feel sorry for her!”). Worried, perhaps, that his metaphysical mumbo jumbo and scatterbrained plot would leave audiences confused and unsure how to interpret various scenes, Kelly beats the viewer over the head with the musical equivalent of a sledgehammer just to make sure that we “get” it.

I walked out of the theater unsure of whether I liked this movie or not. Perhaps that’s not even the right way of looking at it. The plot was certainly muddled and at times outright preposterous, but ultimately more satisfying than watching some David Lynch monstrosity where you slog through 2 hours of “provocative” imagery to find out that the secret behind the film is that some guy bought a bag of chips at a gas station in Beverly Hills – and that that “symbolizes something.” The Box, though it does occasionally entertain, is worthwhile moreso because of the issues that it prompts the audience to contemplate. There is indeed something meaningful in the core of this film, though it might not be quite as profound as maybe Kelly thinks it is. I’m just not sure whether the privilege of considering that something is worth the 9 dollars admission. It is a decent effort, and irrespective of its many flaws, it holds the audience’s attention. When an extremely ambitious film fails, it at least fails while trying something new and original. And that’s more than can be said of most movies from large Hollywood studios.

]]> http://barackobamanaked.com/2009/11/review-the-box-2009/feed/ 0 http://barackobamanaked.com/2009/11/review-the-men-who-stare-at-goats-2009/ http://barackobamanaked.com/2009/11/review-the-men-who-stare-at-goats-2009/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:34:46 +0000 Kevin Longrie http://barackobamanaked.com/?p=226

Goats, lies, and videotape

“The Men Who Stare at Goats” is a fatuous, if harmless farce, one that, while it is vaguely likeable, is far from interesting. The first half―meandering and overly expository― does little to legitimize the unconventional story and even less to set the foundations for the painfully anticlimactic scenes that follow it; not sincere enough to be dramatic and not confident enough to be funny, even the final montage attempts to eschew our disappointment with swelling hordes of Hollywood strings, but, like the film itself, falls flat.

The film follows Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a journalist struggling to be taken seriously by both his wife and his editor, a pair whose romantic collusion (and Bob’s furniture-throwing overreaction to it) soon negate that possibility. He, like any crestfallen journalist faced with a crisis of validity, decides to report on the newly emerging Iraq war (a majority of the film’s action takes place in 2003). Though bound for Baghdad, Bob never makes it any further than a hotel room in Kuwait until he meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a former member of the New Earth Army―a top secret, experimental division of the U.S. military formed after the Vietnam War that sought to create psychic warriors―who takes him across the border. With his sweat-stained shirts and his frenzied searching eyes, Lyn looks like a man who is “off the grid,” or at the very least, one who would readily employ the phrase.

Any momentum the film tries to build, however, is interrupted by the tedious narration Bob provides (rendered in McGregor’s flat and unconvincing american accent). He repeatedly and unnecessarily describes things apparent in the footage he talks over, a nervous overcompensation made by Peter Straughan, the film’s screenwriter whose previous credits include little more than last year’s equally unfunny and unmemorable “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.” First-time director Grant Heslov, a character actor and close friend of Clooney’s, seems similarly disoriented, leaving the film a hillock of unrealized ideas. Heslov, like “Goats” itself, lacks focus; the divergent threads he provides might, under the sure footing of a more experienced director (or, say, a goat), have proved a more involving narrative.

As the movie plods on through the desert sands of Iraq, it also shows, in haphazardly placed montages, the origins of the New Earth Army. This is where Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) and Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), Lyn’s father-figure and arch enemy, respectively, are seen most. The histories of the men, their organization, and their idiosyncrasies are divulged piece by piece; Bob is, after all, a reporter, and when he gets answers, we get answers.

But the problem is that we’re not too concerned with the questions in the first place. While Clooney’s onscreen eccentrics―the stares, the tics, the pain inflicted―are amusing for a time, they cannot hold the movie together. “The Men Who Stare at Goats” is not a bad film; in fact, the source material―Jon Ronson’s book of the same title―might even be an interesting story, but Heslov’s bland, wandering debut does little to convince us.

With 2007’s Death Proof, I was certain that Tarantino had lost the ability to write good dialog. Sitting through that film’s torturous first act, it struck me that maybe Tarantino set out to write dialog so mundane or obscure so as to set himself apart from the proliferation of designed-to-be-quoted-by-douchebags  Tarantino ripoffs like Boondock Saints. Whatever his intent, hearing a group of women talk about whether they wanted to get Mexican food or not for fifteen fucking minutes was a lot less compelling than Jules and Vincent’s ruminations on McDonalds.  Or any character in Pulp Fiction’s ruminations about anything.  Death Proof was ultimately redeemed in its second act by what I regard as the best car chase ever filmed, but it lacked the elan and pop of Tarantino’s earlier movies. Maybe my feelings are thrown into sharper relief because Basterds comes on the heels of the disappointing Death Proof, but my feeling is that Inglourious Basterds represents the high-water mark of Tarantino’s career and showcases the filmmaker’s talents (dialog and violence) better and more evenly than any of his films since Pulp Fiction. The dialog is once again snappy and memorable, most of the performances are crisp, and there is a decent helping of stylized violence (though not to sublime degree that he had reached in Kill Bill).  Basterds also demonstrates that Tarantino can actually write dialog that isn’t embedded in present day pop cultural sensibilities, and that is what puts it above Pulp Fiction.

I forget where I found this picture.

Broken up into chapters after the fashion of Kill Bill, the plot of the movie revolves around an intersection of two independent plots by different groups of people to kill higher-ups in the Nazi administration at a gala event. The weakest parts of the film, oddly enough, are the ones centered around the eponymous Nazi-killing unit. While it’s certainly fun to see the Basterds brutalize Nazis, and Brad Pitt & company pull off their accents well enough, most of the characters are relatively two-dimensional and evoke little emotional investment by the viewer. Almost every other character in the film is more compelling. Michael Fassbender as the British officer Archie Hicox does an outstanding job with his comparatively small screen time. Mélanie Laurent as Shosanna Dreyfus, a Jewish refugee hiding in plain sight in France, delivers a performance that is emotionally authentic. The true standout that has been identified by almost every review of the film (and by the Cannes Film Festival, where he earned the best actor award), though, is Christoph Waltz as the as SS Colonel Hans Landa. I was worried that his multi-lingual abilities were going to be used for pure novelty. They are not. The fact that he can seamlessly glide through 4 different languages while acting is never what drives a scene, but it underscores the tension that Tarantino skillfully builds and then sustains in almost every extended scene of dialog in the film. While it is satisfying to see a theater full of Nazis get burned, blown up and shot, it is the expertly paced and snappy dialog (and the tension that it often masks and reflects) that make Inglourious Basterds a very rewarding watch.

From Dead Snow’s zippy trailer, I expected a stylish and somewhat tongue-in-cheek zombie romp. What I got instead was, finale notwithstanding, a monotonous boilerplate zombie picture larded with stock characters and cliches. The only thing that really distinguishes it from any other zombie movie is the Norwegian setting and the German military regalia of the zombies. More than anything else, Dead Snow is disappointing. As a filmmaker, if the story you write is this uninspired, then you shouldn’t even bother with one at all. I would certainly have been more satisfied with 90 minutes of unadulterated zombie-Nazi killing with the same visual panache as the trailer. That’s actually what I sort of expected. I won’t bother recounting the plot, because there really isn’t any point. A standard Tales from the Crypt episode offers more intricate storytelling.  It is pure formula down to its very core. Tales from the Crypt, it also merits pointing out, never pretended it was anything other than a distracting and fun diversion. If you watched Dead Snow with the sound off, the fairly accomplished cinematography might convince you that the movie isn’t all that bad. But it is. The showdown with the undead Nazis near the end is on youtube in various pieces, and rest assured you will probably enjoy it just as much without the hour of filler that precedes it in the film. You might actually even enjoy it more, since you won’t be plagued by the inevitable “I sat through a long, boring 70 minutes for this?” sentiments that can obscure how fun that one scene actually is.