Honeydripper

This film works on so many levels. It celebrates life, song, diversity, and the birth of rock and roll. Honeydripper is simply one of John Sayles' best films. The structure allows for an ensemble cast, mostly black, with a couple of storylines that converge on a night of music at a backwoods gin joint in 1950s Georgia. Sayles has always had a way with words, with his best films examining the micro within the macro: think Eight Men Out or Matetwan. Really just insert your own favorite Sayles film because even his least seen, say The Secret of Roan Inish, are magic when compared with your typical movie du jour.
The Honeydripper Lounge will close unless its owner and piano player Danny Glover can come up with a miracle. In the rural cotton country where the Honeydripper stands the relation between black and white is tolerable if not cautious. Local sheriff Stacy Keach picks up a wandering musician who just happens to carry a homemade electric guitar with a prototype amp. The sheriff hands the man off to the judge as a vagrant and he's sentenced to work with pay on the judge's cotton farm. Oh yeah, if Glover's wife will make Keach some of her famous fried chicken a quiet truce will prevail in the county.
Naturally the film culminates with a show to end all shows at the Honeydripper. How the liquor is scammed, how the law is paid off and how about a dozen characters (everyone from Charles Dutton to Mary Steenburgen) resolve their various conflicts provides the grist for Sayles mill. The movie just unwinds in its own time zone and takes the viewer to a place you want to absorb completely.
By the way, Sayles also doctors a lot of studio films, his credit can be found on the current Spiderwick Chronicles. Sayles began the current wave of indie cinema with Return of the Secaucus Seven in 1980, a film he did everything on in the manner that Robert Rodriguez does on his films. He financed the film with money he made writing scripts for films like Alligator and Piranha. Whether Sayles is grinding out genre pulp or creating nuanced serious dramas his films stand the test of being cinematically engaging.
Don't fail to give Honeydripper some love as it was soundly ignored by the Indie Spirit Awards, the Oscars and everyone else. Honeydripper shares some resemblance to the Denzel Washington directed The Great Debaters. Both films take place within black communities in the era of Jim Crow in the South, and both were released late in the year. Honeydrippers is only playing in one theater locally, the downtown Angelika, but the experience is worth seeking. In fact you should be visibly stoked to see this movie - it unwinds so smoothly.

The Have and Have Nots

Even thought Oscar season has wrapped real movie mavens know that world class films pop up all year round. For sure, don't miss the contenders, the Coen Brothers, the vision of P.T. Anderson and Diablo Cody-esque language tweaks. But there are quality films that never raise the eyebrow of the casual movie goer.
The Band's Visit hails from Israel and resembles the milieu of a Jarmusch film. The laughs are an afterglow of the dialogue. and the situations linger with deadpan humor. A group of Egyptian civil servants, on tour in their alter egos as a brass band, get lost in a suburb in Israel while looking for their gig. People come together in friendly and touching ways throughout the night when the band, without enough money for proper lodgings, crashes out in various people's apartments. This film was actually selected as the Israeli entry of foreign film but ruled ineligible because it contains more English than Arabic or Hebrew.
City of Men continues the stories of the impoverished in Rio de Janeiro. The film City of God was a sensation of early 2000 cinema and launched the international career of Fernando Meirelles and was followed by a Brazilian television series called City of Men. This film, Cidade dos Homens, continues in the tradition of City of God in the sense of vast plot development and lot of characters, although there are two central friends and the main action revolves around an all out drug war. That the whole thing works as pure crime drama without the flair of Meirelles is just fine.
Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day made me squirm for the first hour, but then it grew on me. The story unfolds over the span of a day. The director starts out with badly staged screwball antics that come off as purely theatrical. The film seems at odds with itself. Miss Pettigrew (Frances McDormand), a governess, finds herself homeless and penniless after her employers kick her out on the street. She scams her way into the apartment of kept women and aspiring singer Delysia (Amy Adams way, way over the top). Delysia isn't so much a slut as gullible yet she has three constant boyfriends and Pettigreww earns her keep by keeping them at bay. Miss Pettigrew kicks up the style in the third act and at least from then plays pretty well. Okay not as well as Charlie Bartlett or Definitely Maybe. But that's last month's flavor and we're already looking forward to spring.

10,000 B.C.

If you took the square root of 300 and divided by 1,000,000 B.C. (the DeMille version natch) and add a touch of Apocalypto and a dose of Land of the Pharaohs and you have 10,000 B.C. This is a live action ice age epic that delivers convincing CGI effects while keeping the audience awake with a tale of tribal loyalty.
Instantly this film's effect work better than they did in the same director's last film, Day After Tomorrow. Roland Emmerich has a firm grasp on themes of wide general interest even while twisting them with science fiction. I actually prefer Stargate to the more popular ID4, and it's anybody's guess whether the 1998 Sony version of Godzilla is remembered at all. Global warming, construction of the pyramids, the year 2012 (Emmerich's next project) are all subjects that flow into the current zeitgeist. Specifically Emmerich mixed some spectacular imagery with a really bad script for Day After Tomorrow and that film's wolves running around Manhattan were as shiny fake as the CGI creatures in the recent Last Man on Earth (the one film I have mentioned here that Emmerich didn't direct). But in 10,000 B.C. when the wooly mammoths stampede it looks very cool and photorealistic. And when a saber tooth tiger gets rescued from a pit and climbs out it only looked fake for a second, as compared to the entire sequence. These are the things that occupy my life.
10,000 B.C. follows a tribe who live surrounded by mountaintops as they travel from their frosty lair through a verdant Africa and into the lush sands of Egypt. At stake is the very future of the tribe and thus mankind. Along the way many other tribes are revealed, most friendly. but some corrupt. The wide vistas offered for view also include shots of stars and even constellations that figure in the plot.
We should be hearing a lot more from the two leads, Steven Strait and Camilla Belle, the latter I couldn't quite place while watching her writhe under her captors cruel will. Belle was also in When a Stranger Calls and a small indie called The Quiet and Strait will appear later this month in Stop Loss. 10,000 B. C. arrives this Friday from Warner Bros., and before the film other WB trailers - Speed Racer, The Dark Knight, and Get Smart - unreeled. This is a line-up that would be very hard to fuck up.