Antichrist

The films of Lars von Trier exist in a kind of nether world where cinema and delusions of grandeur merge. I like Antichrist, but I can also see how the buttons von Trier pushes may be too much for the average bear. The film features Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg only, although there are brief appearances from a stunt baby, a fox, a crow and a deer.
The film opens with a beautiful black and white sequence that unwinds in super slow motion. While the couple (Dafoe and Gainsbourg) make love their baby crawls out of his crib and somehow manages to scale an open window and fall to his death. Many times during the movie von Trier slows down the motion to the point that the image is more than static, it's like staring at a painting while hallucinating. von Trier also plays with movie conventions by using old time techniques like body doubles during the sex scene (for an insertion shot).
Antichrist starts like a psycho drama but rapidly escalates in the last part to an out and out thriller. Or maybe Antichrist is a horror film in sheep's clothing. The couple, distraught after the death of their child, retreat to an idyllic cabin in the woods. Only their idea of harmony with nature and a rest cure in the forest is turned on its head.
Throughout Antichrist horrific imagery crops up. You hardly expect a fox to devour itself much less exclaim "Chaos reigns." Likewise the therapeutic dialogue makes you think the whole affair will be a nod to Ingmar Bergman. Surprise, we're in a surreal twilight zone of human manipulation and the couple start hurting each other with abandon. Once again von Trier shows his mastery of genre filmmaking and thus the scissors/clitoris scene looks like something out of a 70s exploitation drive-in movie right down to the cut away shot that would be stock and trade in any B-movie.
Antichrist is anything but boring. The film has a gentle pace that contradicts its subject matter. Sometimes the action flows so hypnotically the effect is trancelike, and perhaps von Trier has found the correct chord structure to his Strindberg Dream Sonata.

(Untitled)

The jokey title of this film owes as much to avant guard music as it does clever marketing. Although in a particular universe putting a film's title in parenthesis will mean that a store clerk puts it in the "w" section and a computer registers it with a numeric symbol.

(Untitled) director Jonathan Parker, speaking to Free Press Houston, mentions that before he was a film director he was a musician in bands, "playing music from symphony to punk." In Untitled Adam Goldberg plays a hard-to-get-along-with composer while Marley Shelton, always wearing clothing that makes noise when she walks, is an art gallery owner and the object of his affection. Untitled takes the audience into the world of commissioned art and music pieces and also explains the difference between the front room and the back room of art galleries.

'You encounter plenty of ego with this type of music," Parker remarks about the Adrian (Goldberg) character. Adrian's character composes music that involves kicking buckets and random attacks of sound. At one point in Untitled we see a performance of a piece of music called "So called laws of nature" a beautiful melodic work that involves bells, composed in the late-50s by David Lang.

"Lang is representative of the kind of music figure Adrian aspires to be," says Parker. "We use Lang's Third Movement of his Laws of Nature for that part of the film." Untitled has a hip feel, even while delineating relationships that are anything but hip.

(Untitled) opens exclusively in Houston at the Angelika Film Center.

The Blind Side

Foremost a football film but with a message wrapped in yummy nougat The Blind Side will appeal to sports fans foremost with some ancillary interest from Sandra Bullock fans. Blind Side tells the true story of a hulking teen who lives on relatives couches, outcast from his crack addicted mom. Bullock lives on the other side of the tracks but her compassion demands that she help this gentle giant and her dutiful family falls in line with her game plan.
The Blind Side starts off a winner but slows down and fumbles towards the end. The resonance of Bullock's turn as a Southern belle, Old Miss grad and just plain loving mom strikes a chord. But her cutesy son mugs too much and Tim McGray is merely a second banana as her husband. The producers should've had McGraw sing a song during the movie rather than over the ending credits. Quinton Aaron gives a winning performance as Michael Oher (pronounced Oar), often taking his character to the edge of confusion while maintaining a veneer of solemn quiet.
The main irk I have with Blind Side is that dramatically the film doesn't mesh with the arc of the true life story. While we confront Oher's various demons like seeking out his mother such moments are never as heavy as say a similar scene in Antwone Fisher. Then director John Lee Hancock (I've always admired his screenplay for A Perfect World and liked his take on The Alamo) spends the third act doling out cameos from southern university football team coaches and makes the crux of the movie hinge over what school Oher will choose. The Blind Side executes its plays with precision but comes to a grinding halt long before the end.

Planet 51

You want to steer your spaceship in the other direction of Planet 51 unless you're a pre-teen in search of anal probe butt plug jokes. Funny thing is while watching Planet 51 a couple of things occurred to me. How unfunny cartoon movies that aren't stamped by Pixar/Disney/Dreamworks really are. Planet 51 is kid's stuff.
A world of green creatures enjoy Earth-like comforts only everything's green and a clever set design element rounds off all corners. An astronaut from our planet arrives and he's considered an alien sent to take over Planet 51. Our hero, a teen with relation problems, attempts to hide the astronaut and help him return to his spaceship now surrounded by Planet 51 military types. Even kids are turning off their brain at this point.
The other thing that struck me while watching 51 has to do with those annoying commercials that run before movies in theaters. You know the cell phone warnings that involve an animated hedgehog and the producer who wants pants on the critter. Well in Planet 51 the green creatures all wear tops but no bottoms.

Precious

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire unwinds as despairing a story as you'd want to see. To the credit of Precious by the time the tale ends we've been moved and uplifted rather than defeated. The film premiered with the title Push and changed to the longer title so as not to be confused with a sci-fi title from earlier in the year.
Director Lee Daniels introduces Gabourey Sidibe in a powerful acting debut as the lead character, a 300-plus pound mess of a teenager. Precious faces abuse, shame and despair on a daily basis. Throw in being raped and impregnated, for the second time, by her father and you have ingredients that would make a ruined life for most people. Precious works best as a character study in alienation, always seeing the story from her viewpoint. Any kindness shown by teachers or social workers is negated by the constant maltreatment at home from her evil mother Mo'Nique.
All of the acting is superlative with Sidibe and Mo'Nique front and center playing out a bizarre mother-daughter relationship that's more psycho drama than fairy tale. Support from Paula Patton matches in compassion the anger wielded by Mo'Nique. Other musicians (Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz) appearing in roles are unrecognizable unless you know beforehand they're in the movie.
Precious tales place in 1987 in Harlem and Daniels imbues the film with garish colors that emphasize the harshness of the environment. A couple of scenes that conclude the film, set in a social worker's office, confront the motives of the characters in a manner that hammers out redemption. In Precious it's the individual who makes the change, not society.
Daniels previously directed a tawdry crime thriller called Shadowboxer that while not without its merits is miles behind Precious in terms of passion and accomplishment.

Pirate Radio

Pirate Radio reinvigorated my sense of radio and the art form of listening to same. Pirate Radio details a fictionalized account of a mid-60s effort to expose rock music to a virgin audience via a freighter reconfigured as a radio station sitting off the coast of the UK. The BBC barely played contemporary music and this was a way for music from the Kinks to the Beatles to be heard late at night. Just like the nascent civil rights movement of that time seems inconceivable in light of the modern status quo so too is it hard to believe that what today constitutes a top 40 of golden oldies was all but banned during its initial release. Whenever "You Really Got Me" comes on the radio I hardly listen because it seems so cliche. But when it launches a sequence in Pirate Radio it's like rocking out to the song for the first time.
There's a longer international version of the film with more scenes and perhaps a bit racier. The UK title is The Boat That Rocked. Just thinking about Pirate Radio makes me want to revisit all the great movies (Play Misty For Me, FM, Pump Up the Volume, Talk Radio) or television shows (Good Morning, World or WKRP in Cincinnati) that are primarily set in the world of a radio broadcast booth. The radio station setting and multiple characters makes a perfect match for writer/director Richard Curtis who used converging stories with individual players to great effect in Love Actually, his previous and first film. Curtis made a name penning shows like Blackadder and films like Four Weddings and A Funeral.
Cast includes Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rhys Ifans who battle for alpha male status on the air waves and on the mostly men populated cargo ship. Nick Frost, Bill Nighy and Kenneth Branagh also make the most of their pivotal scenes. But it's the dozen or so other characters who pop in and out that keep the boat sailing smoothly. Music soundtrack of 60s hits never let me down.

2012

Are you ready to rumble? There are so many CGI payoffs in Roland Emmerich's 2012 that the paisley plot pales in comparison. Another more wise acre on a blog said if you want to guarantee a successful movie either kill Jesus or kill Earth.
In 2009 a scientist deep in a mine records evidence of the sun's emissions creating a new kind of neutrino that is basically microwaving the Earth's core. In 2010 the White House chain of command has secret committees doing analysis on the potential outcome, Along the way we're introduced to a few of the ensemble cast including heavyweight politico Oliver Platt and sincere scientist Chiwetel Ejiofor. When the clock turns to 2012 we meet John Cusack, a failed novelist working as a chauffeur, his separated wife Amanda Peet, a couple of cute eyed kids, and Peet's new boyfriend, plastic surgeon Tom McCarthy. There are some other brief turns provided by President Danny Glover and his hottie daughter Thandie Newton, and a wacky Woody Harrelson (compare this to his serious turn in The Messenger), as a radio talk show celebrity who broadcasts from his RV and efficiently supplies all the surprisingly quick Mayan connections to this movie via his website. As far as polar shifts and other physical anomalies those are quickly brought up and dispensed with in an enlightening but expected manner. There's also a Russian billionaire and his creepy twin kids, plus his girlfriend and her pekingese.
Since the world leaders have had a couple of years warning they have amassed a project to construct and deploy a series of lifeboats, or arks, capable of holding thousands. Makes sense, you want to save humanity you assemble the best of the world and finance it with billion-dollar-a-ticket passage from the world's richest people.
Approximately two-and-a-half reels into the movie Emmrich throws in one of the greatest scenes in cinema history. Cusack and family haul ass in his limousine through a 10.3 earthquake and manage to both drive and then fly a plane out of the destruction. Check out the reaction shots of Cusack in particular, intercut between destruction porn and driving mayhem, wide-eyed as the ground swells and buildings and highways collapse.
Whatever you could desire of a big budget destruction epic 2012 organically delivers. That being said, there are similarities with the deconstruction of the world in this film and other Emmerich films like ID4 or Day After Tomorrow. I doubt you want to go looking into them.