#16 Stories We Tell
This absolutely fascinating documentary by Sarah Polley (Away From Her) is a family history--hers--told by juxtaposing dramatized versions of her family shot on super 8 footage, and interviews shot in normal digital film. The story revolves mostly around her mother, Diane (who died when she was 11), her relationship with her children, and the men in her life, which included her first husband, her second husband (Polley's father Michael), and her acting buddies. When an astonishing family secret comes to light, the storytelling ramps up and the real sparks fly. It is a wonderful commentary on how different events are perceived even by the closest to you, and how feelings and yes, stories, can change over time. A must-see.
#15 Don Jon
With widespread worldwide access to the internet, the porn industry these days is eclipsing the billion dollar mark and then some. It is a difficult topic to address for many reasons. One major issue, tackled head-on in Joseph Gordon Levitt's debut as a writer and director, is how pornography damages the notion of intimacy. It tends to, for men anyhow, idealize sex as an act of power and not an act of love. The first cut of the movie struggled to even get down to a R-rating, but with some careful editing, it became a hard "R".
Joseph Gordon Levitt stars as Jon, a Mike "the Situation" Sorrentino clone who covets his pad, his ride, his boys (Rob Brown and Jeremy Luke), his girls and his porn. He watches porn multiple times a day, each sequence shown ending with him throwing a balled-up kleenex into a little trash bin with a clamoring sound effect. He's a good ol' Roman Catholic boy who eats Sunday dinners with his crazy family (fronted by tank-top sporting Tony Danza), goes to church, and hits confession at least once a week; these sequences are always hilarious as the "hail mary's" and "our fathers" are doled out depending upon how much porn he's watching and how much sex out of wedlock. But for Jon, it's just sex. Thanks to his porn addiction, he can't feel a real connection with anyone.
Enter Barbara Sugarman (Scarlet Johanssen), a woman he sees out at a club and begins to target. As their relationship blossoms, she convinces him to go back to college and get his life back on track. Enter Esther (Julianne Moore), a woman he meets in college courses who catches him watching porno on his smartphone. She is different, an older woman who challenges him and his very notion of intimacy. This movie didn't work for everyone. He uses sequences in a repetitive fashion, which bothered people, but I took it as a means of expressing how devoted to routine Jon is. Both ScarJo and JuMo are great as his muses, but the show belongs to Gordon-Levitt, who brilliantly manages triple duty as actor, writer and director.
#14 42
I am nuts about baseball. Always have been. For years, I thought would be the one to finally write the Jackie Robinson biopic. I even bought his autobiography used at a bookstore and cranked through it. And yes, I was dumb enough to think I was the only who had wanted to do this. There have been dozens of cracks at this-even Spike Lee almost got a Robinson project off the ground in the 90s with Denzell Washington as the hero. This one, written and directed by Brian Helgeland, was a very good crack at it, so to speak.
It's anchored by Chadwick Boseman as young Jackie, who is scouted aggressively by the eccentric and revolutionary general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey (Harrison Ford; in my perfect version it would have been Gandolfini as Branch Rickey, who had the same imposing body type). The story is zoomed in on just a 4 year period of his life, which in hindsight, was a good choice. We see Jackie work his way up through the Negro Leagues by utter domination, we see him have the famous meeting with Rickey in which he tells Robinson "I want someone with the guts not to fight back," we see him get taunted and threatened by fans, thrown at by pitchers, screamed at by managers and players alike. And the whole way, he keeps his composure in public, only losing it in private moments. Helgeland intentionally ended the arc before his circumstances changed and he was given license to fight back. Things inevitably got more interesting, but less heroic. The performances, especially by Boseman and Ford and Christopher Merloni as Dodgers manager Leo Durocher, are top-notch, and there is plenty of great cinematic and highly orchestrated baseball to watch. You won't hear me complaining.
#13 Philomena
Dame Judi Dench, in a true story , stars as Philomena Lee, an Irish school girl who gets pregnant and loses her son when she is raised by, and subsequently sold off by, the nuns at her school. In the present, she is now much older and has never quite come to terms with the situation. Journalist Martin Sixsmith (Steve Coogan), in a period of flux, takes on Philomena as a human interest story. What starts as a road trip with two opposites getting used to each other turns into an air trip to the United States as the search for her son gets more and more complex. It is a blast to watch Dench and Coogan spar and ultimately come to understand each other. They're both brilliant, and if it wasn't for Cate Blanchett, the statue would end up in Dench's capable hands. Who knows? It still might.
No comments:
Post a Comment