Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, 2012)

7.5/10
SLP didn't look particularly great from the thousands of trailers and ads that were crammed down my throat for seemingly the past month or two. The cynic in me has a knee-jerk reaction to those movies Hollywood loves featuring beautiful people whose illnesses are only just so to make them quirky and endearing, as opposed to ugly and offensive. But all things considered, it's a good movie, and it connects emotionally thanks in no small part to Cooper and Lawrence, who are both on the top of their game (although I didn't think Cooper was that amazing. Ahead of Phoenix? No thanks). Robert De Niro was also excellent - no matter how much crap he's been in the last decade, his performance is a reminder of just how good he is.
I found the movie took a turn for the worse right around the "Eagles game" scene (I won't say more for spoilers) - at that point the events lost a bit of their naturalism and started to feel more scripted, with a last-minute plot point shoehorned in to create a false sense of drama. Comparing this to David O. Russell's previous The Fighter, I don't get the sense that he has fully mastered subtlety, but it's a big improvement.
One visual complaint - what the hell was with the sometimes-swoopy camera? Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994)

8.5/10
Definitely my favorite entry, I think it hits really well on all three aforementioned areas - visually great, excellent acting (Trintignant is superb) and an unexpected but perfectly fitting ending. Maybe Irene Jacob is my least favorite of the three actresses in the trilogy, but she still did a better job than I expected from her precipitous first scenes. She comes into her own during the movie quite well, but has her work cut out for herself opposite Trintignant. A great trilogy with a forgiveably lesser middle link. Blue and Red more than pick up the slack, in any case.

Three Colors: White (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994)

7/10
Historically thought to be the weakest of the three, and I agree. It's a nice, very clever movie, but it didn't engage me the way the other two did. The lead actor (too lazy to google his name, Zbigniew something or other?) was great though, and the movie is darkly funny much of the time. Julie Delpy is good, but unfortunately absent for much of the movie...albeit by necessity. Visually this was the least appealing for me, but that ending is pretty remarkable.

Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993)

8/10
Juliette Binoche is always watchable, so that's a big strength. In my opinion, the most visually stunning of the three - I think the image of Binoche standing in front of that blue light/chandelier thing will be burned in my mind forever. Really liked the sudden cutting in of the string sounds...I thought that was a smart way to mirror the sudden pangs of grief. I have to say, though I liked much of the movie, I wasn't crazy about the ending; probably my least favorite ending of the three in fact.

Skyfall (Sam Mendes, 2012)

8/10
Action movies that aren't strong in their middle acts are a rare breed indeed, and it's Skyfall's strength to a fault. It takes a little too much time doing little in the first act, and trots out the woefully overused reluctant hero trope which, after The Amazing Spider-Man, The Avengers, and The Dark Knight Rises, needs to be murdered immediately. The title credits and opening sequence are exhilerating, but after that, some patience is tried - despite the impressively filmed Shanghai fight scene
. But the heart of the movie is when Javier Bardem shows up as Silva, in an incredible role that rivals even his Anton Chigurh in all-around creepiness and psychosis. Amazingly, the most bracing sequence in the film is not any fight or chase scene, but the first conversation between Bond and Silva.
The final act is good, but not great - while I appreciated the "personal" level the movie aims at (Silva going after M for revenge, rather than the head of some evil corporation trying to get megarich or what have you), it necessarily resulted in a somewhat underwhelming ending.
But overall, the movie does a lot of things really well, and several things exceptionally so. The much-lauded photography by Roger Deakins was good, but considering the hype, I was expecting to be a little more blown away. Same could be said for the movie as a whole, maybe.

Dr. No (Terence Young, 1962)

6/10
My Bond knowledge is non-existent. I saw Quantum of Solace when it came out and that was my first one. Just not a series that has ever interested me. But my brother got a hold of a bunch of burns of the first 10 or so, so I decided to join in on the viewing. Dr. No is, of course, the first one, and it seems like a pretty tentative start. Nothing overly sexy or dangerous or exciting here, in fact it's got a couple of pretty cheesy moments, even for the 60's. In any event, I hear Dr. No isn't even very highly regarded by Bond enthusiasts. But it's kind of cool to see the origins of the whole thing. I'm definitely more looking forward to the next two, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger. Well, and Skyfall, which I'll be seeing tonight...but that's getting ahead.

Letter Never Sent (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1959)

8/10
What a coincidence - I had watched this a couple of days ago and I come in here to find it a topic of discussion. The camera work and cinematography is indeed the highlight of this movie (I've yet to see Cranes, so no comparisons). In fact, it's been suggested that the plot is just a loose excuse to get the central quartet to Siberia (or somewhere suggestive of Siberia) and film them in all manner of beautiful landscape. But it's never boring, and definitely worth a look, especially if your tastes trend toward the more visual side of things. I grabbed it during a 50% off sale as a total blind buy and I'm not disappointed, but it's not often you get disappointed by Criterion either.

White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)

8/10
Yow. Walsh returns again almost 10 years later and this one is pretty wild. Cagney is in tow again, looking 10 years rougher, and is perfect in the insane, mother-loving ("Made it, Ma! Top of the world!") lead. The plot features a lot of clever twists and turns and it's a lot of fun to watch and to anticipate what shoe is going to drop next. I enjoyed it a lot, might be my favorite in the set (which included The Public Enemy, Little Caesar, The Petrified Forest, The Roaring Twenties and this - good films all).

The Roaring Twenties (Raoul Walsh, 1939)

7/10
Trying to finish off my classic gangster films box set that I bought ages ago. This one from Raoul Walsh features a familiar gangster movie trope - boyhood friends whose lives go in opposite paths. Actually there's three friends here (Cagney, Bogart, and another I don't remember). Cagney of course goes full gangster, the other guy becomes a respectable lawyer, and Bogart is a grey area. It's not bad, but not mind-blowing. It points the finger squarely at the alienation felt by many Americans returning home from the war to an uninterested and harsh society as the cause for this crimewave of the era though, of course, condemns it in the end. I haven't seen that kind of aggressively political stance in many other movies like this, so it was neat.

Room 237 (Rodney Ascher, 2012)

6/10
The Shining is hands down my favorite film of all time. I've watched it at least around 15 times by now, but my level of devotion to it nowhere reaches that of the obsessives featured in the documentary Room 237.
I first became aware of the millions of theories on The Shining via the KDK12 blog by John Fell Ryan, one of the featured voices in the documentary. The film touches on a multitude of crackpot dissections of Kubrick's film - some credible, some laughable. Was the movie, with all its Native American imagery, a metaphor for the American massacre of Indians? Was the movie, with its reference to the number 42, a meditation on the Holocaust? Was the movie, with its moon/Apollo references, an allusion to Kubrick's involvement with the moon landing hoax? If all of this sounds crazy...it is. It's disappointing that so much time is devoted to crackpot, nutty theories when several more interesting observations are dealt with only briefly. One of the voiceovers discusses all the architectural impossibilities of the Overlook - "impossible" windows, hallways that can't logically exist, rooms that seem to loop back onto themselves. Another remarks that, in Hallorann's trip to the Overlook, he passes a red VW beetle crushed by a truck - a reading that suggests Kubrick is openly "crushing" King's source material, for Jack's vehicle in the book is a red VW beetle. These are far more fascinating than any insane observation that, in one of the dissolves of the 1920's picture at the end of the film, Jack's hair fades into his upper lip forming briefly a "Hitler mustache".
Only true obsessives will find half the theories here of any worth - most will scoff and roll their eyes. The only argument some of the crazier notions in the movie have in their favor is the fact that Kubrick was notoriously detail-oriented. Some of what seem like filmmaking inconsistencies (a disappearing chair, Jack's typewriter changing, the clocks being constantly out of synch) could be intentional and an allusion to something deeper. The documentary presents all these with an impartial eye, but more attention should have been devoted to the 'serious' theories. A lot of this winds up sounding like lunacy...admittedly a fitting result for those trapped inside the Overlook, indeed.

Moulin Rouge! (Baz Luhrmann, 2001)

7.5/10
Not one of my picks, but I'd never seen it, so what the hell. I hate to use the phrase "I enjoyed it more than I thought I would" because it makes me seem like I was out to hate it, but really, it's just because musicals and romance are not my go-to genres. It was pretty good, though it can't hope to sustain the frantic, breathless pace of the first third or so...so the rest of the movie seems a little slow in comparison. Ewan MacGregor was good and Nicole Kidman impressed me a lot with a range I'd not seen from her. The story is more something to get people into singing and dancing situations and less anything substantial to hang on to (especially when the end is revealed at the beginning) but that's OK. The costumes and sets are eye-popping enough on their own.

Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)

8.5/10
This deceptively simple documentary about actor/director Sarah Polley's family (I don't want to say any more for fear of spoiling a movie that should be seen with as little beforehand knowledge as possible) brings to mind the old onion comparison - the more layers you peel, the deeper it gets. Or something. It is a remarkably clever way to tell what is not only a fascinating story, but what could have easily been told in a much more ho-hum, straightforward style by a less interesting filmmaker. It's warm, heartfelt, funny, emotional, courageous and entirely engrossing. Highly recommended.

The Man with the Iron Fists (RZA, 2012)

3/10
Not my choice for Saturday night at the movies, but what the hell, I'm no stick in the mud. Thought it might be fun. It's not. Most of these "neo-exploitation" flicks that are coming in the wake of Tarantino (producer here) and Rodriguez's Grindhouse - Hell Ride, Machete, Hobo with a Shotgun - simply sound better on paper than in practice and the RZA's directorial debut is no different.
What's most depressing about the movie is that it doesn't even try to stick to any kind of aesthetic - the opening and closing credits are straight out of Tarantino's school for kitschy 70's style B-movie credits, while Wu-Tang Clan and other hip hop permeates the soundtrack of a movie set in some kind of feudal Japan (?) where Russell Crowe dresses alternately like an English general and a Western gunslinger and the main villain (who reminded both me and a friend individually of Dave Chappelle doing Prince) wears John Lennon sunglasses...lest we forget RZA's ridiculous narration ("the motherfuckers had a gatling gun"). The fight scenes aren't bad - sometimes too chaotic and overreliant on the kind of absurd weaponry that seems to be the norm since Rose McGowan's machine gun leg in Planet Terror - but the terrible acting, juvenile script (courtesy RZA, who might not have known any better and Eli Roth, who should have) and overall laziness make it a chore rather than a good time. I'm bummed I wasted my time here instead of at Wreck-It Ralph, Flight or the Cloud Atlas, any of which surely would have been more interesting in some way.

The Sessions (Ben Lewin, 2012)

7.5/10
The Sessions is a good movie that deserves a better marketing ploy - the word "triumphant" is plastered all over posters and trailers and the phrase "the festival success of the year!" only invites irritation. John Hawkes is quickly building a reputation for remarkable consistency and Mark O'Brien is certainly his most challenging and accomplished role to date. A story like The Sessions (a true story, incidentally) seems ripe for Oscar mawkishness and histrionics, but I give a lot of credit to writer/director Ben Lewin for avoiding those pratfalls. The film is surprisingly comedic, which makes up for its rather rote direction. It also deserves credit for impressively detailing all of its minor characters - even those with little screen time feel integral and human. The movie was a little too frenetic at times - with cuts jumping around and narration coming and going, it could have benefitted (and I rarely say this) from a longer running time as it did feel a little rushed and, well, jumpy. Overall though it's a likeable movie with very good performances, an emotional resonance and a surprising amount of laughs.