JUNO

artwork courtesy of Fox Searchlight

 

RECAP:  Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) and her boyfriend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cena) are bored and decide to have sex, but Juno winds up pregnant.  At first, 16 year-old Juno opts for an abortion but gets freaked out; so, she decides to look for some adoptive parents in the local Pennysaver and finds Mark & Vanessa (Jason Bateman & Jennifer Garner).  Naturally, Juno and Bleeker have their share of teen angst to deal with on top of Juno’s unexpected pregnancy.  Unfortunately, so do Mark and Vanessa…. 

 

THE LOWDOWN:  Overall, I liked the eccentricity and sharp wit of this dialogue-driven film.  I just didn't like it enough to agree with the Academy's decision to nominate it for best picture.  The biggest problem is that the dialogue is too damn pretentious to be coming out of the mouth of a 16 year-old.  It's funny as hell, but people don't really talk like that.  As for the story itself, it's cute but not very noteworthy.  The sequence of events aren't blatantly predictable, but it's not very hard to figure out where things are headed either. 

 

Another thing working against Juno is some sloppy cinematography.  If you're going to use a slow tracking shot out to end the film and distance the audience from the characters; for the love of God, use the rule of thirds!  Apparently, cinematographer Eric Steelberg forgot about this golden rule of photography when his framing squished Juno & Bleeker like a couple of bugs in front of that looming house in the last shot.  Not really a good way to wrap it up guys. 

 

BOTTOM LINE:  Over-hyped and too smart for its own good. 

 

 

artwork courtesy of Warner Brothers

MICHAEL CLAYTON

 

RECAP:  Michael Clayton (George Clooney) is a “janitor” (i.e. a lawyer paid to clean up his clients’ dirt).  Even though he’s $80,000 in debt, recently divorced, has a shaky relationship with his son, and his colleague Arthur (Tom Wilkinson) is a bipolar nudist, all the other characters keep telling you that Mike is one bad-ass lawyer.  Whatever.  There’s also a stupid subplot (pretending to be a real plot) about a class action lawsuit threatening to expose some chemical foul play on behalf of the firm’s biggest agricultural client.    

 

THE LOWDOWN:  How in the hell did this piece of shit get nominated for best picture?  It's utterly predictable, there's no originality, the narrative progression is stupid and confusing, and there's no supporting cast worth mentioning other than Tom Wilkinson.  But, what really makes the movie fall apart is just overall bad writing, plain and simple…especially the character development. 

 

I can see where director Tony Gilroy was trying to go by initially playing up Clooney's character as some loser to make the climax more dramatic, but he went about it the wrong way.  If the change in character element was supposed to be the "real" climax of the film, Michael Clayton should've been portrayed as a typical, inept/loser stereotype that the audience could identify with up until the very end….then pull the old switcheroo.  Instead, the character seems to have a type of swarthiness about him that he's not trying very hard to cover up.  

 

BOTTOM LINE:  I really wish the Academy didn't have so much of a hard-on for Clooney.  Michael Clayton bites the big one. 

 

 

No Country for Old Men

artwork courtesy of Miramax

 

RECAP:  While hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across $2 million and a mess of dead Mexicans as a result of a drug deal gone awry.  Not long after Llewelyn takes off with the money, local Sheriff Ed Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) arrives to investigate the aftermath.  Later that night, Llewelyn’s conscious gets the best of him and he returns to help the only survivor of the bloodbath.  Unfortunately, the killer, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) has also returned to the scene of the crime, triggering an elaborate game of cat-and-mouse between Llewelyn, Anton, and Sheriff Bell. 

 

THE LOWDOWN:  Compared to the other 4 films nominated for Best Picture, No Country has the best developed characters, the best plot structure, and the best overall cinematic effect.  The Coen brothers are definitely on top of their game here.  I loved how they were able to offset the slow West Texas pace with classic Hitchcock suspense and weave it through the film's central themes of chance, free-will, circumstance, and fate without losing any sense of direction or level of intensity. 

 

The main reason the film works so well is because No Country is the epitome of ambivalence:  it's a Western without all of the bullshit Western mythology, it's a crime thriller that's not thwarted by an unrealistic gumshoe, and its black comedy elicits laughter from sadness without mocking the ignorance of simple characters.  Like Fargo before it, No Country accurately captures the idiosyncrasies of life in a rural town and knows how to play them like a violin. 

 

Granted, the abruptness of the film's ending has probably caused more than a few audience members to scratch their heads in confusion; but, that's what the Coen brothers want us to do.  They want us to stop and reflect on the dialogue in the final scene between Sheriff Bell and his wife when he says, "...and then I woke up."  It's their final act of ambivalence – an ambiguous ending full of loose ends.   

 

BOTTOM LINE:  Yes Llewelyn, Chigurh is the ultimate bad ass…and, No Country for Old Men is the only one of the 5 that's worthy of the title 'Best Picture.' 

 

[Another reason I'd like to see No Country win is because a friend of mine, Eric Reeves, has a small speaking role in the film….and, an Oscar win means I can goad him about it for years to come.] 

 

 

artwork courtesy of Focus Features

ATONEMENT

 

RECAP:  13 year-old Briony (Saoirse Ronan) witnesses an intimate moment between the housekeeper’s son Robbie (James McAvoy) and her older sister Cecilia (Kiera Knightly).  Because the aspiring writer is too young to understand what she saw, Briony falsely accuses Robbie of a crime he did not commit, and Robbie and Cecilia are forever torn apart.  Briony spends the rest of her life trying to make amends with Cecilia, who is unable to forgive her. 

 

THE LOWDOWN:  Even though it's slow and should've been 30 minutes shorter, I didn't completely hate this 2 hour embodiment of miscommunication.  By contrasting a couple of different POV segments (Briony's vs an objective one) in the first half of the film, director Joe Wright gives the young girl some real character depth while also tricking the audience into thinking they've got the story figured out.  However, once the three central characters (Briony, Cecilia, and Robbie) are torn apart, the story doesn't seem to know which one of the three to follow, making the plot wander as aimlessly as the characters do. 

 

As is, the narrative structure literally forces the audience to view the film in only two acts:  what happened before the character split, and what happened to the characters after they split…each part being an hour long.  The story would have flowed much better if Wright had: A) developed Cecilia and Robbie as much as he developed Briony, B) utilized the emotional triangle between the three to structure the 1st act and fill out the 2nd, C) placed Briony's false accusation (and resulting character split) as a big dramatic climax at the end of the 2nd act, and D) only spent the first 10-15 minutes of the 3rd act showing what happened to Briony, Cecilia, & Robbie during the war before revealing the epilogue as the film's true climax in the last 5 minutes. 

  

BOTTOM LINE:  Premature ejaculation and an extra-long refractory period keep Atonement from being a serious contender. 

 

 

There Will Be Blood

artwork courtesy of Paramount

 

RECAP:  Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a Texas gold prospector who decides to try his hand at the oil biz in California after an accident leaves him the sole caretaker of his young son.  A few years later, Daniel becomes an established oil tycoon; and, when he attempts to follow up on a promising oil lead, Daniel crosses paths with evangelical preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), whose faith lies more in money than God.  Eventually, Daniel learns that with power comes corruption, murder soon becomes old hat, and neither leave him with much of a soul. 

 

THE LOWDOWN:  What does it say about a film when I damn near fell asleep 20 minutes in, only perked back up when it looked like everything was about to go up in flames, then spent the last hour laughing at all the cheesy camp elements?  I can't believe how bad this film sucked!  There Will Be Blood doesn't just embrace America's tired ideology of white patriarchal capitalism…it marries it, has all kinds of nasty sex with it, kills it, buries it, digs it back up, then commits necrophilia with it over and over and over again. 

 

Honestly, I don't even know where to begin bashing this atrocity because nothing about this film made me care about its characters or their plight.  First of all it's a Western.  I hate Westerns because they're based on the ridiculous mythology of the 'American Dream.'  George Carlin was correct when he said, "it must be a dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."  Apparently, Hollywood thinks I'm still asleep if they expect me to adulate a film that has only one female character (without any dialogue), doesn't include any ethnicity other than 'whitey,' and preaches to us there's "more money in jugs (i.e. oil) than God." 

 

Ultimately, Lewis' performance is compelling and the film does address the tendency for power to breed corruption.  However, I just can't buy into a message that’s delivered via a soulless oilman who sounds like the fake Sean Connery, a teenage evangelist who rolls around on the ground like a moaning cow, some idiot who calls himself the 'brother from another mother,' and a bunch of grown men who go around bitch-slapping each other like little girls.  Not that it matters, but I would have liked it better if Hollywood didn't think I was stupid. 

 

BOTTOM LINE:  The only way this one will win is if the Academy is still asleep, dreaming the unattainable American dream ... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. 

 

 

© Left From Hollywood 2008