“Bill Cunningham New York” and “Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop” – Portrait of the artists

BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK
Dir. Richard Press
(2011, Not Rated, 84 min)

CONAN O’BRIEN CAN’T STOP
Dir. Rodman Flender
(2011, R, 88 min)

Bill Cunningham New York is a film not quite as compelling as its subject. Following eccentric New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham as he attends fashion shows, covers society events, and films average men and women on the streets of the Big Apple, it takes a scattered approach to his life, showing us snippets without a strong guiding focus. What is most interesting about him is his egalitarian approach to clothing. Anything that can’t be worn in normal life doesn’t interest him, and wild styles and colors excite him. He values creativity above all else and prefers the delightfully gaudy to the rigidly presentable. Watching him work made me want to dress more boldly, and as a New Yorker I now find myself hoping to be photographed by him, because if you can catch his eye, you’ve really got something.

“In the Land of Blood and Honey” – Love and war

Dir. Angelina Jolie
(2011, R, 127 min)

Angelina Jolie could hardly have chosen a more ambitious project for her directorial debut. In the Land of Blood and Honey is a large-scale, wartime romance in a foreign language with a lot of moving parts, in both the story and the production, and given the film’s mixed reviews, I’m surprised by how well Jolie acquits herself behind the camera. Though well known for her international humanitarianism, she directs with an even hand and avoids turning the drama into bleeding-heart mush. Where the budding filmmaker could use more refinement is in her writing.

“Pariah” – The difference of Alike

Dir. Dee Rees
(2011, R, 86 min)

Pariah hasn’t received as much attention as Precious did two years ago, though they have much in common, from their subjects – struggling black teens in New York’s inner city – to their tone, and even the support of prominent black entertainers: Precious was championed by Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, and Pariah is executive-produced by Spike Lee. Perhaps their similarities are precisely the reason it has flown under the radar, though I like this film slightly more than I liked Precious. It’s subtler and more life-size. In place of the monstrous physical and sexual abuse of Precious is a more recognizable parent-child dynamic, an uneasy stalemate built on silence and denial.

“A Dangerous Method” – Sexual healing

Dir. David Cronenberg
(2011, R, 99 min)

The characters in A Dangerous Method are petty and neurotic, but they hardly seem to realize it. The fascination of David Cronenberg‘s film – adapted by Christopher Hampton from his stage play The Talking Cure, which itself was adapted from the book A Most Dangerous Method by John Kerr – is how the refined intellectuals of the early 20th century – specifically, pioneering psychologists Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) – mask their insecurities in the kinds of jargon they invented to describe other people’s insecurities. I don’t know how accurately this reflects the real relationship between Freud and Jung, but Cronenberg has made of them a fascinating portrait of repression so deep, it seems, that they developed an entire discipline to think their way around their feelings.

“The Iron Lady” – The abridged Margaret Thatcher

Dir. Phyllida Lloyd
(2011, PG-13, 105 min)

The Iron Lady plays like a 105-minute trailer for a ten-hour miniseries about British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. At times it seems to be told entirely in montages and exposition, moving briskly through the 20th century, covering a little bit of everything but not revealing much of anything. Dealing with Thatcher’s upbringing in World War II-era England, her rise to power, her marriage to Denis Thatcher (Jim Broadbent), her physical and mental decline, and so on, and so on, and so on, the film skips like a stone over the surface of her life, but in doing so achieves little more depth than a high school essay on British political history. It would have been better to narrow the story down to a particular period and invest it with details we couldn’t as easily learn from Wikipedia.

“War Horse” is a horse, of course, of course

Dir. Steven Spielberg
(2011, PG-13, 146 min)

War Horse feels like Steven Spielberg trying on a nice-looking pair of shoes that don’t quite fit him; he walks with an awkward, uneven gait (unlike the steady confidence of his Adventures of Tintin, which was released on the same weekend in the US). I could sense him affecting a style not entirely his own, channeling an old-fashioned sentimentality. Make no mistake, Spielberg has his own brand of sentimentality, but to me this feels broader, more artificial, applied self-consciously to achieve an effect that doesn’t quite work … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.

“The Future” – Time is not on their side

Dir. Miranda July
(2011, R, 91 min)

I saw Miranda July‘s first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, when it was released in 2005, and I was enchanted by its unique perspective on human connection. But six years passed before July wrote, directed, and starred in her second film, The Future, which flew under the radar when it was released, appropriately enough, last July. It’s not as good as Me and You. Expanded from a one-woman performance piece she developed, it’s even quirkier, to the point of sometimes getting in the way of its characters and themes – for example, the narrator is a terminally ill cat named Paw-Paw. One has to push through walls of strangeness to get to the film’s humanity, but once we do we find a resonating compassion.

“Melancholia” – The end is on the horizon

Dir. Lars von Trier
(2011, R, 135 min)

Death is the only certainty in life. I believe that’s the core idea of Lars von Trier‘s Melancholia, a breathtaking film that crept up on me slowly, and when it was over I stayed in my chair, alone with my thoughts. For a while it seemed that the director was using imminent extinction as a metaphor for mental illness – there’s a planet on a collision course with Earth called Melancholia, because calling it Clinical Depression would have been too on-the-nose – but it’s not only the depressed Justine (Kirsten Dunst) who struggles with the end times. Von Trier shows that ultimately all of us must, at one time or another. Whether this particular planet hits us doesn’t matter. One day our planet will come.

“Pride” – Waterlogged

Dir. Sunu Gonera
(2007, PG, 104 min)

I’m usually lenient towards films with their hearts in the right place, but is Pride‘s heart really in the right place? It is such an assembly line of cliches that it doesn’t seem like its heart is anyplace. No genuine feeling seems to have been involved in its making. It’s ostensibly based on a true story, but funny how so many sports movies based on a true story end up being the same story, with the same characters and the same story arc, the same conflicts and the same resolutions. Reality serves as the raw material, is stripped of what makes it unique, and then is delivered into the marketplace as comfortable, “feel-good” product. It is to movies what artificially flavored fruit drink is to juice.

“Weekend” – Sweet sorrow

Dir. Andrew Haigh
(2011, Not Rated, 97 min)

The UK drama Weekend joins a tradition of ships-passing-in-the-night romances that also includes Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and the great, under-watched In Search of a Midnight Kiss, which are about couples who forge brief, intimate bonds and then part ways for reasons of circumstance. A time limit raises the emotional stakes even as it lowers them; there’s no need to guard yourself from someone you will only know for a short time, yet there is also an urgency to make the most of it and a feeling of melancholy for what must inevitably end, so during that period the relationship burns hot and bright, but afterward it stays warmly lit in the embers of memory. I have never had such a relationship, though having seen such films I almost feel like I have, and I think I’d like to someday. It’s not exactly something you can plan for.