You're Next (Adam Wingard, 2011)

7.5/10
As a festival crowd pleaser, You're Next probably would have been great fun. Watched at home, its impact feels diminished, and the disconnect between its existence as both a violent home invasion horror and a borderline-goofy black comedy becomes more emphasized and feels weirdly jarring. It's hard to tell how seriously the movie takes itself, especially when it features an absurd exchange like the following, which may set new highs of brilliant stupidity (spoilers within):
-"You never want to do anything fun. Come on, fuck me on the bed next to your dead mother."
-"This discussion is over."
You're Next mostly comes out looking better than it should the strength of the direction and score, which are both completely on point. The score in particularly is perfectly evocative of some of John Carpenter's best, or the poppy Italian synth stuff that was smeared all over every horror in the late 70's and 80's. The acting is solid all-around too and it's difficult not to root for its central hero/heroine. The humor, when it crops up, is sharp too. But it's not really a scary movie at all and I feel like the ending was a missed opportunity to do something cooler. All in all not bad and does some things very well but not as great as I'd hoped.

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (Morgan Spurlock, 2011)

5/10
Morgan Spurlock, best known as the Super Size Me guy, takes on product placement in movies and television by financing this entire documentary through sponsorships, product placements, brand integrations, and so on. Well, he doesn't really "take on" product placement so much as he's forced to embrace it in order to make his movie. And his movie is, in fact, the making of that same movie. Confused? It's not confusing when you watch it but it's difficult to explain. It's a self-referential exercise, whereby the scenes of Spurlock selling his film form the meat of what we watch here, the finished product. It's clever, and the first time you watch an in-movie advertisement featuring Spurlock pushing one of the products he was paid to push, it sort of clicks in a weird, Exit Through the Gift Shop type of way, where we begin to question everything we're seeing.
By the second and third time though, it feels significantly less clever - after all, watching ads, even of the "wink wink nudge nudge, we're all in on the joke" variety found in Spurlock's film, is still watching ads. And when you get to the end of the movie's lean 88-minute runtime, you realize that Spurlock hasn't said anything interesting or new about product placement in movies. It's almost as if he's afraid actually discussing the subject itself would turn off moviegoers, so he sticks to jaunty montages and scenes of him glad-handing bemused marketing execs. Spurlock has a natural charisma that makes watching him always engaging but I would have found a lot more value if the movie had taken an extra half-hour to actually talk about product placement, its history, its effect on viewers, and so on. Spurlock is definitely on the Michael Moore spectrum of "infotainment" documentary filmmaking but this one errs way too far on the side of "entertainment" than "information" and could have done with a lot more of the latter. Spurlock eventually raised the $1.5 million he needed to make his movie and then used it to say decidedly little after all.

The Hangover Part II (Todd Phillips, 2011)

0/10
I usually reserve zeroes for movies I truly despise, but I didn't despise this one...however, it was so free of content, I can't bring myself to give it any kind of score. By offering up the exact same movie as its predecessor, changing the location, and removing all of the humor, I wonder if Todd Phillips was going for some kind of commentary on the film industry and its constant demand for sequels/rehashes that don't need to exist. He's a pretty smart guy I'm sure, I can't believe he actually watched any reels of this one and thought anything remotely funny or original ever took place.

Cafe de Flore (Jean-Marc Vallee, 2011)

7.5/10
I would have to think, that in most reviews of Cafe de Flore, the word "ambitious" cropped up quite a bit. I wouldn't disagree. It's an impressive twisting of two seemingly unrelated stories, one in Montreal in 2011 and another in Paris in 1969. In addition to trying to figure out how these stories will come together, we're also tasked with figuring out the stories themselves, which are presented in jagged and knotted forms. To me, there's a thin line between a movie unveiling its surprises organically, and a director intentionally withholding information from the audience to create these surprises artificially. I felt more often than not, CdF fell on the side of the latter. Both timelines, and the grand connection as a whole, are so obfuscated it made me wish more time was spent on the story and a little less time on the surrounding smoke and mirrors. I was reminded of a very relevant lyric by the end of the movie - "the time is gone, the song is over, thought I'd something more to say".
But I will definitely say that the smoke and mirrors were impressive. I give the movie a lot of credit for telling a couple of interesting stories in a highly unique manner, and for making the way these stories connected credible. A heap of praise is also deserved for the soundtrack (and for the central theme of the importance of music as well). God knows that Sigur Ros don't need any accompanying pictures to evoke emotion, and "Dark Side of the Moon" already carries 40 years worth of baggage with it. But the movie used this and other music in a very authentic, natural, and credible way - rather than feeling like the director is just bragging about the stuff on his iPod, a la Cameron Crowe.
I don't typically get the urge to watch a movie a second time to better "figure it out", but I did get that feeling with Cafe de Flore. Even though I think I got the general idea, a second viewing certainly wouldn't hurt. I'd also really like to see the director's previous effort, C.R.A.Z.Y., as I've been putting that off for ages as well. If it's half as ambitious as Cafe de Flore, I'm sure it'll be worthy of interest as well.

Bobby Fischer Against the World (Liz Garbus, 2011)

8/10
I've always had a mild interest in (maybe 'respect for' would be a better term) chess, and I've always been aware of Bobby Fischer's unique story. So I saw this on Netflix the other night and decided to watch it - it's quite good. Probably best to go in with as little knowledge as possible, as the movie doesn't make any grand discoveries, but it's still a fascinating story. As a bonus, it got me interested in chess again, and I'm currently reading a book on how to improve my game. Good stuff.

Alps (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2011)

8/10
A late screening of Alps interrupted the Ozu binge briefly.
Gyorgos Lanthimos broke out in a big way with the sensational Dogtooth, and Alps is the follow up. Like Dogtooth, it seems to exist in a world that is just a small twist away from reality - pure surrealism, indeed. It bares quite a few similarities to its predecessor (maybe too many?) - awkward dance sequences, sudden explosions of man-on-woman violence, unusual use of pop music, male domination, childlike women playing make-believe...and so on. It's still an excellent, exciting movie, although it does pale some in the shadow of Dogtooth. Regardless, I'm going to keep watching Lanthimos' movies if they keep being in this truly bizarre vein.

Game of Werewolves (Juan Martinez Moreno, 2011)

7.5/10
A Spanish werewolf comedy/horror, I spent a lot of time wondering where the "game" of the title came from (the Spanish title is "Lobos de Arga", Arga being the town hit by the werewolf epidemic). I can only guess it was born of the word's recent media popularity, what with Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games.
The plot is pretty silly, and the movie borrows heavily from the Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz films, but the jokes are pretty funny, the gore is solid, and the werewolves themselves look refreshingly old school and relatively CGI free. It's no masterpiece but as far as crowd-pleasing festival fare goes, it's a good time.

Killer Joe (William Friedkin, 2011)

7/10
In 2010 a movie called The Killer Inside Me came out that, despite its big-name cast (Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba), sank like a stone. It was based on a novel by pulp writer Jim Thompson and featured some alarmingly brutal violence, particularly against women. It also wasn't a great film, which didn't help its cause.
Killer Joe is a better movie, but it's hard to imagine it not meeting a similar fate. It too has very pulpy origins (a stage play this time) and also contains stomach-knotting scenes of raw violence, some involving women. Unlike The Killer Inside Me, it's also savagely funny. At time the dialogue dips into corniness, but it's also smartly self-aware a lot of the time.
The cast is excellent - Matthew McConaughey is nearly unrecognizable as the ice-cold, implacable detective/hired killer of the title, and does a fantastic job with the role. Thomas Haden Church steals virtually every scene he's in (more by virtue of getting the best one-liners), and Emile Hirsch, Juno Temple and Gina Gershon are all strong as well.
My criticisms of the movie are two-fold - sometimes the cheesy dialogue and the actions of the characters are too outrageous to be credible, even for the sake of a pulp story, and in a similar vein, the violence and degradation feels a little too forced. One particular scene involving a drumstick of KFC will be forever seared into my brain, both due to its ridiculousness and how unsettling it manages to be. That's like a lot of the movie - careening back and forth between seriously unsettling and seriously absurd. A little more reining in could have made this a noir masterpiece instead of just "interesting and certainly memorable, but ultimately flawed".
Also worth noting that this is directed by William Friedkin, showing impressive gusto despite being some 40 years removed from his masterpiece The Exorcist.

Resolution (Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead, 2011)

5/10
There seems to be a disturbing trend in horror lately of movies that take a good premise, and build it to go absolutely nowhere. I think most immediately of Paranormal Activity, Hollow, and now Resolution.
The plot is solid, if unspectacular: crack addict Chris is squatting in a shabby shack in the woods, and his self-righteous, good-guy best friend Mike tracks him down and forces detox upon him by handcuffing him to the wall. A variety of troubling things occur - two junkies threaten Mike and Chris for drugs Chris owes them, a group of nasty looking Native Americans extract hush money from them when it's discovered that Chris' shack is on Native land, and most disturbingly, Mike keeps stumbling upon a variety of media (records, books, slides, CDs, VHS tapes) that depict events involving Mike and Chris that haven't happened yet. Through some murky plot detailing, Mike determines that the woods is home to some disturbing folkloric tales and they're part of the next story - and the woods is demanding a 'resolution'.
First-time directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead do a lot of things right - the handheld camera work lends a tense immediacy, the friendship between Mike and Chris is genuine, the performances are naturalistic, the woods are ominous enough, and the horror device (the mysterious media) is pretty cool, enough so to keep us interested. But that can only propel a horror movie desperately short on scares so far. It's kind of like being impressed by the direction in a comedy - I can appreciate good directing, but I want to laugh. Resolution has so many possibilities for great scares but frustratingly does nothing with them. It would be more accurate to say this is a buddy movie with something of a creepy/supernatural bent.
In all of the aforementioned slow-building but ultimately disappointing horror movies, there comes a moment where the tension dissipates as you pass from "wow they're really building this thing up slowly" to "wow, is anything ever going to happen?". Resolution does a lot of little things right but misses the big picture, and I can't recommend it for that reason.

In the Family (Patrick Wang, 2011)

7/10
Patrick Wang's directorial debut (which he also wrote and stars in), he was actually here in person to present it yesterday, but I couldn't make it. So I went tonight instead. Wang stars as Joey, a man who loses his partner Cody in a car accident. An old will from his partner gives custody of their son Chip to Cody's sister Aileen (Cody is Chip's biological father), who absconds with Chip. Joey has no legal right to Chip despite co-raising him for six years, and the movie's primary thrust deals with Joey trying to reunite with his son. If it sounds like a dozen Hollywood "one person's impossible fight" courtroom dramas, it really isn't. At 3 hours in length, the movie is composed of long, static takes (sometimes a little too long). Wang refuses to play on the audience's emotions, but it's restraint to a fault. Despite losing his partner and his son within a week of eachother, Joey is never once shown crying or even really angry...or anything at all. I admire Wang's decision to go in a less "weepy" direction, but it dehumanizes his character and the movie, despite such heavy subject matter, seems emotionally vacant. One thing I did especially enjoy, however, was the way Joey and Chad's sexuality impacted the movie. A more ham-fisted writer would have used homophobia and discrimination to throw obstacles at Joey in his struggle. Although Joey's sexuality is what leads to his unique legal situation involving his son, nothing that happens to deter him is attributed to homophobia. Cody's sister is, more than anything, trying to do right by her just-deceased brother, while the litany of lawyers who won't touch Joey's case are doing so not because he's gay, but because according to the law, he has no case. It was refreshing and interesting to see a movie focus on two gay men yet refusing to use their sexuality as a crutch. It's a very intelligent movie, well-written and strongly acted, but I wish Wang would have indulged the audience's emotions a bit more because it's much more dry than it should be.

Sidewalls (Gustavo Taretto, 2011)

6.5/10
Quirky Argentinian romantic comedy from 2011 that I caught as part of the on-going Latin American Film Festival in Montreal. It focuses on two of those modern movie staples, the quirky-and-alone-but-not-sociopathic-or-ugly male and female. They live in Buenos Aires and the city's architecture is a big focal point as one of the numerous impediments keeping our two strangers of destiny from crossing paths. As usual in these Sundance-ready films, there are a couple of genuinely funny moments surrounded with a lot of groan-worthy spots of trying-too-hard. Overall the story is cute and it's passable entertainment, just nothing particularly remarkable.

In Darkness (Agnieszka Holland, 2011)

7/10
In Nazi-occupied Poland, a Polish sewer-worker uses his knowledge of the sewer system to shelter a group of Polish Jews from the Nazis. In Darkness details not only the excrutiating 14 months the group spend underground, but focuses largely on the sewer-worker and the dilemmas and dangers he endures while keeping this secret. It's based on a true story and at 2 and a half hours, there's more than enough story here to keep audience interest. Credit goes to the director Agnieszka Holland (and the DP) for making a film largely set in the darkness of the sewers watachable on a purely visual level. That said, however, this is a starkly grim film and sometimes feels more like a history lesson (a very interesting and neglected part of history nonetheless) than the tense, emotional ride it should be. It's hard not to feel a lump in your throat at the end, but that kind of emotion was absent for much of the rest of the running time for me. It's a good movie, but not the kind that rouses any deep feelings in me as a movie-goer, even given its subject matter.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)

6/10
I read a review or saw some hype piece about this movie that posed an interesting question as a result of viewing the film itself - what do you do, as a mother, if you've given birth to or are raising a child that you don't like? I wish this movie was made more about that question. I watched this and can't help but wonder at the end of it what the point of it all was, if not to depress the viewer. Kevin as a character is a complete blank slate - his lone characteristic is that he hates his mother (Tilda Swinton, great as ever) and has hated her from birth. We never see him interacting with anyone outside the family, so it's hard to get any real sense of him. Although that's obviously the point - giving him friends, outside influences, even showing what the hell he does during the day, would ostensibly lead us down the path of easy answers. Fine, but it doesn't make for a fair or even remotely realistic portrait. The whole movie in fact seems out of step with reality. When the mother of one of Kevin's victims punches Swinton in the face on the street, it almost seems comical - what mother would act that way? Why has no one else aside from Swinton seen in 16 years what an absolute asshole Kevin is? Why do incidences caused by Kevin that lead to the death of a household pet or the blinding of his sister seem brushed under the rug? Lynne Ramsay directs with immense visual flair and there's a great movie somewhere in here, but this one has too many problems to fully cohere for me.

The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011)

5/10
There really isn't much to say about a movie like The Help - if you've seen the commercials, you've seen the movie. About the only worthwhile thing here are the performances - Octavia Spencer, Viola Davis and Jessica Chastain are all very good. I like Emma Stone in comedy roles but I thought she seemed kind of out her element here - like a kid trying to play grown-up. In terms of the white guilt films Hollywood loves to churn out, this isn't nearly as offensive or braindead as The Blind Side of a couple of years ago, but it has zero artistic merit and doesn't strive to convey any more of a message than can conveniently fit inside a 2-minute trailer. So watch that instead and save your self 2 and a half hours.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Stephen Daldry, 2011)

0/10
I tried to watch this one with an open mind, but it felt like the movie was fighting me the entire way. Starting with the protagonist Oscar, who may be the most irritating character since Jar Jar Binks and I say that with no hyperbole whatsoever. Oscar lost his dad in the 9/11 attacks and according to the movie, this is all we need to feel unending sympathy for him - despite the fact that he's obnoxious, rude, and downright unlikeable in almost every scene he's in. Losing a parent is tragic, but when it's used as lazy screenwriting shorthand, its impact is greatly diminished. One starts to wonder why Oscar deserved such a great dad in the first place.
But that's par for the course in a movie where no one acts like a human being, save maybe for Oscar's charming/dorky dad, played by Tom Hanks. The rest are a compilation of screen writing clichés, either with quirks that are supposed to be somehow endearing, or devoid of logic altogether (the explanation for why Oscar's mom lets her 12 year old son traipse around New York either by himself or in the company of a mute recluse is truly mindboggling and hilarious).
The movie's use of the 9/11 attacks to wrench an emotional response out of viewers is manipulative, but generally inoffensive for most of the running time...until at the very end, after Oscar finally comes to terms with the fact that his father is gone and won't be coming back and this is something that he'll have to live with (reflecting indeed the lives of many children who lost their parents in the attacks, a rare moment of realistic human feeling in the film). Immediately after coming to this conclusion he finds a note his father had hidden all along for him, congratulating and confirming his pride in and love for his son, providing him with a measure of closure that virtually no child who actually is in Oscar's situation ever benefitted from. It's cheap, cloying, and downright offensive, and makes an already bad movie that much more worthy of contempt.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

6.5/10
Considering how tepid I usually find his films, I've seen an unusually large amount of David Cronenberg's works. ADM is probably the most restrained I've seen from him, but falls squarely into the same "it's not bad, I guess" realm as the rest of his movies do for me. The best thing about this is the acting - Fassbender is endlessly watchable, again dragging a film up to higher levels than it's worth (see also Shame). Knightley's performance is over the top, and a little awkward in those more hysterical moments, but she settles into her role quite nicely. Mortensen never really seemed to get a full grip on Freud, but he has less to work with than the other two.
It's hard to really see what the movie is going for most of the time. It dances around Freud and Jung's psychoanalytical theories, Freud and Jung's friendship and falling out, Jung and his patient/mistress relationship with Sabina, Sabina's evolution from mental patient to psychiatrist to mother and wife...but it can't coalesce these themes into anything coherent and the movie suffers from a serious lack of focus, made worse by some horribly choppy and almost comical editing. But the subject matter is always interesting and the performers make it so it's never a chore to watch either. Just doesn't reach the pedigree you might have expected given who's involved.

Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes, 2011)

7/10
Ralph Fiennes' directorial debut if I'm not mistaken, an adaptation of a lesser-known Shakespeare play. It isn't hard to see why this is one of his lesser-known works indeed - it's pretty simple fare. And it's not hard to see why Fiennes' cast himself in the lead, as he gets to sink his teeth into an insanely over-the-top performance, which he does rather masterfully. If it's a good-but-not-great adaptation of a good-but-not-great play, it still does plenty of justice to its source and makes no real missteps along the way.

Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog, 2011)

8/10
A very respectable, easily watchable Werner Herzog documentary as straightforward as anything he's ever done. At times it feels like a kind of by-the-numbers A&E special, but that's the cynic in me. There are enough Herzogian touches to make it feel original enough, particularly the very last line of the movie. It's a very interesting, heartfelt study into humanity above all else, and it ends up being quite moving, if not devastatingly original.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011)

7.5/10
As far as action movies go, this one was pretty much everything you could ask for. Tom Cruise did all kinds of crazy stuff, and put in a very good performance too (better than the movie demands, at least). I thought the second half was a bit more boring than the first, and one action sequence was badly botched (Cruise and his nemesis chasing each other in a sandstorm, the constant brownish blur of CGI surrounding them serving only to mask the fact that they weren't really in Dubai and little else). But I was entertained, so I was happy.

Carnage (Roman Polanski, 2011)

9/10
Adapted (and probably virtually unchanged) from a play, Carnage features two sets of parents in one room of one house for its entire running time, discussing the fall-out from one parents' son hitting the others' in the face with a stick. In very Bunuelian fashion, things eventually descend into chaos and hysteria. If the trajectory is predictable, it's a heck of a lot of fun getting there. John C. Reilly, Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet are all fantastic, perfectly cast, and clearly revelling in what is patently an actor's movie. I'm giving it extra marks for being that most rare thing - an English-language comedy that appeals to adults without being juvenile (mostly). I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard in the theatre.