At the end of the year, movie slides upon movie. Release dates in theaters and on DVD are shuffled about like chess pieces; the PR circuit buzzes and hums. Matt Damon imitates Matthew McConaughey as part of the tour to convince us to see him in a history of the CIA; McConaughey drops by Regis and Kelly Lee to talk about We Are Marshall. The Rocky Balboa world premiere. Or, as I like to call it, "The movie I'm going to hear a lot of jokes about." Movies I can't stop thinking about won't get nominated by the Academy, and some will. The DreamGirls soundtrack is on my Ipod, not a bad thing at all. I saw Eragon, knowing it was not a good idea to do so. If you can't say anything nice about a film, don't say anything. Certainly don't compare it to a mix of The Lord of the Rings, Dragonheart and The NeverEnding Story. (Watching Eragon felt like watching Dean Venture's mental breakdown -- Yes! Most obscure refrence possible!) Last year, during San Francisco rain, The Best of Youth was playing at The Balboa, and that provided the film-screen counterfeit of sunshine, and demonstrated firmly the existence of everything -- love, kindness, regret, tragedy and wonder -- that you hope exists in the human condition.
Watching Dreamgirls -- about which, of course, more later -- found myself watching Beyoncé more than I would normally watch the biggest-money star in a huge Oscar contender. And let's not kid ourselves: She is. I mean, Eddie may have been top of the world back in the day, and Jamie may have the Oscar, but if you did a person-in-the-street poll to name the star of Dreamgirls, I think you'd get back 'Beyoncé' - and, of course, the fact that people call you by one name is another good indicator of big-money starpower, too. And I think that, watching Ms. Knowles, I've realized what it is about her, and why movie stardom (as a subset of super-superstardom) may elude her. It's sort of this weird incorporeal attribute she possesses -- without the gleaming bright light of the spotlight on her, she doesn't exist. I mean, she does, of course, but just humor me and imagine the following things in secession: 1) Beyoncé winning a Grammy. 2) Beyoncé winning an Oscar. 3) Beyoncê enjoying a cold drink and playing some Nintendo Wii with Jay-Z. I'm serious in suggesting it's the last one that throws me -- and that may ultimately be a good thing for her Dreamgirls role as Deena Jones (inspired by, of course, Diana Ross), also a public persona who seems a bit lost without the public. And I don't think I'm confusing the player with the role -- Ms. Knowles didn't exactly ignite the screen in Austin Powers: Goldmember, either. (Although, God, who did?) Dreamgirls is, in many ways, a musical about people who don't know how to live when they're not singing, and looking at Beyoncé -- up there, larger than life and that way to begin with -- you get a glimpse of how that must feel.
Wondering about what the buzz is in the world of film? Well, why not download this newest edition of Coming Distractions -- Cinematical's weekly podcast? This time around, I'm joined by Cinematical's Managing Editor Kim Voynar. Kim and I talk about the box office performance of Apocalypto, awards-season mania, the decline of kid's filmmaking and our picks and pans on DVD for the week as well. As ever, you can download the podcast right here -- and don't hesitate to let us know what you'd like to hear in future broadcasts! Plus, be the first person to mail us the name of my and Kim's DVD pan for this week to jamesDOTrocchi@cinematical.com, and you'll win a Cinematical T-shirt -- how cool is that?
It's a Wonderful Life has an odd place in the American canon: Well-known but half-remembered; dismissed as mawkish but revered as moving. It may be one of those dream-films we only recall as images -- the haunted stumble into Pottersville, the exultant return to Bedford Falls, a small, ringing bell -- but it's worth watching with your mind as well as your heart. Here are seven things you may not know about the Frank Capra / Jimmy Stewart classic, from where it began to its reverberations in the here and now.
1) Familiarity Breeds Content
Contrary to popular belief, It's a Wonderful Lifedidn't enter the public domain in 1974; rather, it fell out of copyright -- a subtle distinction, but regardless, it certainly wasn't expensive to show on TV for a span of several years -- during which it attained cultural ubiquity. (In fact, the legal status of It's a Wonderful Life meant that at one point, a po-mo variation on What's Up Tiger Lilly was planned by The Upright Citizen's Brigade.) A mix of re-asserted copyrights and a weird kind of veneration mean that these days it's only shown on network TV on a limited basis -- but it's made it's way into the Christmastime zeitgeist nonetheless, thanks to years of the kinds of repeat airing where, as a pre-semi-stardom Woody Harrelson put it on Cheers, "From now until Christmas, It's a Wonderful month. ..."
2) The Premise Works
And does it ever -- you can click yourself stupid doing on-line research on pop-culture re-iterations of George's guided tour of a George-less universe. (And researching how George Bailey and Mr. Potter both owe a debt to a Mr. Crachit and a Mr. Scrooge can take the same amount of time.) There's an entire essay in parsing whether the easier question would be 'What bad sitcoms have done It's a Wonderful Life episodes?' or 'What bad sitcoms haven't?" When a movie influences high and low art, that's a kind of eternity in and of itself -- even if one of your standard-bearers is MST3K.
Say what you will about San Francisco's public transit, but it gives you time to read. Part of today's N-Judah outbound was spent reading Antony Lane's profile of Walt Disney in the current issue of The New Yorker -- a piece heavily indebted to, and no doubt inspired by, Neal Gabler's massive Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. Still, it was a great reminder of a somewhat peevish fact -- namely, that I prefer reading Mr. Lane's pieces about movie-makers more than I like reading his pieces about movies. And then I was reading Phillip Lopate's American Movie Criticism : From the Silents Until Now (because I am a huge dork) on the 21 Hayes, and came across the following, from A.O Scott's New York Times review of The Passion of the Christ: "Mr. Gibson has constructed an unnerving and painful spectacle that is also, in the end, a depressing one. It is disheartening to see a film made with evident and abundant religious conviction that is at the same time so utterly lacking in grace." And, really, take that sentence and swap the phrases "religious conviction" with"film making skill" and take out "grace" and replace it with "basic storytelling skills," and yeah, you're summing up Apocalypto.
There are plenty of reasons to dislike Blood Diamond -- it's over-long, over-earnest, and over-hyped, just for starters. But Blood Diamond is handsomely made; it features at least one interesting performance; it is actually trying to be about something. In an end-of-year film season crammed with pious nonsense like The Pursuit of Happyness and insane vanity projects like Rocky Balboa, that's enough to reveal it as, well, something like a diamond -- multifaceted, rough and all the more brilliant viewed against its contrasting background. And, of course, like a diamond, it has no real value beyond what the viewer is willing to ascribe to it.
Directed by Edward Zwick (Glory, The Last Samurai), Blood Diamond takes place in civil-war torn Sierra Leone. A fisherman, Solomon (Djimon Hounsou) wants the simple things -- peace, order, a better life for his son. He's not going to get them. Rebel forces tear through the village -- killing many, mutilating some and pressing others into service as diamond miners. This is Solomon's fate, although he's soon rescued and taken to jail. Sierra Leone's rebels finance their attacks on the government through selling diamonds; the jewelry industry doesn't want to have a potential customer ready to punk down the recommended three month's salary turned off by the ugly political realities of Sierra Leone -- crimson blood clashes with wedding white -- so most of Sierra Leone's diamonds are smuggled into neighboring Liberia; this is where Rhodesian-born, South African-bred smuggler Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) comes in.
Mel Gibson has had a bad year. Apocalypto isn't going to make it any better. Gibson's outline for the piece -- a lengthy, action-filled run-or-die story set in the midst of ancient Mayan culture -- didn't exactly sound like a rousing crowd-pleaser, and his DUI bust and subsequent rantings took even more of the luster off his star power. But Apocalypto isn't as atypical as it may seem -- from Braveheart on, Gibson's directorial efforts have been fairly blood-soaked historical exercises -- and Apocalyto isn't just more of the same, it's entirely too much of the same.
Apocalypto's plot is simple, and you can sense the mythic ideas the script was formed around; a man, captured by killers, has to escape them and race home to save his family. Films about early cultures are always tricky, but you can feel the desire to keep it simple: In many ways, Apocalypto is a pretty stripped-down affair. Our hero is on the hunt, he pauses at home, and then he is in peril and in flight. And yet, the resources brought to bear here and the decisions made -- to shoot in the original Mayan dialect, in Mexico, for a finished film with CGI-effects and huge practical stunts -- bloat that premise up with the kind of excess that money, in fact, can buy. (Shot for approximately $40 million, it's nearly impossible to imagine Apocalypto making more than a quarter of that investment back.)
I'm trying to write up Apocalypto this afternoon, and I stepped out to go to the cafe to find the streets full of cops: Apparently somebody gave a a 9mm-salute after a funeral a half-block away. So, I'm thinking about violence. And violence in movies. I mean, one of the ideas that drives me crazy in the cultural discourse is the idea that violent films lead to violent acts. But you know what? If violent popular culture led to gunfire, there wouldn't be anyone alive in Japan. And within a week, I've seen two films, both incredibly violent -- and one of them excited me and engaged me and challenged me, and the other just left me bored and unhappy and angry.
I think that violence in movies is like film in movies, or music or color or costumes; it's an element, and the question isn't how much of it you've got, it's how well you use it. (If you look at them closely, I contend that Pulp Fiction is a much more moral film than Forrest Gump. ... Which is a story for another day.) But my pick for the best film of the year, Children of Men, is full of violence -- upsetting, real, grim stuff that's still depicted with artistry and vigor; my least favorite film of the year, Apocalypto, is also full of violence, but it's clammy and silly stuff -- boring and blood-soaked and incredibly obvious. (And again, more on that later.) But as violent as Apocalypto was, it didn't make me want to kill anyone by committing human sacrifice. Or using poison-frog darts. Or a club. Or whatever. Or, if someone's going to be pointing anything out of their window on the street where I live, I'd much rather have it be a movie than a gun.
Well, awards season has officially begun -- while film critics nationwide have been trying to cram in screenings of movies before their respective critic's awards nominations close (BFCA members, for example, have to file their nominations before Midnight Friday), one group has already made it's choices. The National Board of Review has named Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima as the best film of the year. Other surprises can be found on the full list of winners, including Martin Scorsese winning Best Director for The Departed, and Forrest Whittaker winning Best Actor for The Last King of Scotland; at the same time, The National Board of Review is easily one of the most mysterious of all critic's groups who hand out gongs at the end of the year -- as David Poland concisely points out at his blog, The Hot Button, the New York-based NBR isn't exactly the most accurate Oscar predictor. Add in the fact that the NBR is notoriously troubled by accusations of corruption and incompetence, and Iwo Jima's win may seem more like a blessing than a curse for Warner Bros, who moved Iwo Jima up to be released and eligible for awards consideration in 2006 after the critical and box-office disappointment of Flags of Our Fathers, Eastwood's first World War II epic of the year. ...
Does hearing about this award spark your cuiosity about Letters from Iwo Jima? Or leave you wondering more about who the heck the National Board of Review actually are?
I may have seen the best movie of 2006 on Friday. I mean there are plenty of caveats above and beyond the "may" in that first sentence: The best movie of 2006 in my opinion, of course, and frankly I want to watch the movie again on a big screen before I decide. Of course, the fact I want to watch it again is interesting. The fact that it has me cross-referencing and re-contemplating half the rest of the year's films, from United 93 to Pan's Labyrinth is also interesting. I'm not being coy by not naming the film -- I just, again, want to be sure. I mean, I was insanely fired up over the trailer for The Good German, and that didn't exactly work out. (More details about that on Wednesday, in my The Good German review. ) But if I've seen a trend in this year's films, it's that many of them are what for a lack of a better term I'll call fables -- evocative and heartfelt dream-like tales that are long on imagination and vision but short on rigorous story. Some of the more impressive films I saw all year were fables in that way -- Brick; Pan's Labyrinth; The Lives of Others; Lights in the Dusk and, yes, the film I saw on Friday -- they may not be coherent narratives (or, rather, they may not be conventionally coherent narratives) but something in them sticks to your heart and dreams and head in a rare way. The movie I saw on Friday is ugly, harsh and wrenching; there's something mutedly hopeful in it, like slow strings coming through harsh bass notes. Yet at the same time, as the credits roll, there's no guarantee those strings will be ultimately be heard instead of the blank silence of death. And that's what makes this time of year exciting for a film critic -- although, really, it's what happens every time the lights go down and you sit hopeful in the darkness: Maybe you'll see something worth talking about and re-assessing. Maybe you'll see something worth thinking about. Worth feeling for.
What's the best movie you've seen all year? And seen any good fables lately?
Anytime a film like The Nativity Story comes around, I feel a slight frisson of -- well, not worry, per se, but a slight tightening of the mental shoulders -- primarily because, while it seems obvious that when you review a film based on a book, you're not actually reviewing the book, that fact seems to twist and distort a bit when the book is The Bible. I had a few nice things to say about The Nativity Story in my other gig, but the cardboard nature of Ciaran Hind's' portrayal of Herod and the Three Wise Stooges kinda killed the film for me, so I give it two out of four stars. Now, this obviously doesn't represent how I feel about Christianity -- which is not really anyone's business but mine, frankly -- but the fact of the matter is that I felt myself hedging a little. I'm going to be curious to see how The Nativity Story plays at the box office -- because while The Passion's box office was taken as an indicator of a 'hunger' for Christian-themed films, the box office performance of The Gospel -- released at the exact same time as The Passion, and with similar material and a more theologically correct approach to depicting The Passion but to far, far less box office -- suggests to me that there's a hunger for Christian material as long as it's backed by Mad Max more than anything else.
Are you going to see The Nativity Story? And do your beliefs affect how you watch a film?
There are a lot of things I get tired of -- people who spit in the streets, swearing in front of kids, waiting for the cannibalism to break out on Jericho. And one of the things most likely to make me roll my eyes back in my head is the tiresome, never-ending self- congratulation of the Baby Boom generation. Yes, yes, we get it -- you were really special, you truly were. If by 'special,' you mean 'numerous and annoying and in love with your own mythos.' I mean, I saw Bobby at Toronto; I fell into a bored, listless coma, snapped to attention only by the musical-hallucination number (and God, I wish I were kidding) featuring Ashton Kutcher in a bad hippie wig saying 'No, you shut up. ..." over and over to an orange. To an orange. I got up and walked out, figuring that anyone with a shred of self-awareness would recognize it for what it was -- yet another round of Hollywood's aging leftist dinosaurs, Liberalsaurus Rex, dislocating their own shoulders to pat themselves on the back. But then I read San Francisco Chronicle reviewer Mick LaSalle calling Bobby " ... one of the year's best films." (In the interests of disclosure, I know Mick, see him all the time at screenings, and he's one of the warmest, brightest and most considerate guys you could ever meet. But then again, he also thought Click was one of the year's best films.) I don't know if people are flocking to see Bobby -- Rotten Tomatoes has it at a paltry 44% "Fresh" rating, and the box office is abysmal; it's made six million dollars in 12 days on 1,600 screens. At the same time, I know it's going to be crammed down our throats this awards season -- and hey, if everyone who was in it votes for it, it might actually have a shot. That's one good thing about a movie with such a nonsensically huge cast, I guess: When you've made a miserable failure, at least you have lots of company.
Sick and tired of talking to family and loved ones this Thanksgiving? Well, if you're looking to hear something other than Aunt Ellie's sweet potato pie story for the umpteenth time, why not download this newest edition of Coming Distractions -- Cinematical's weekly podcast. This time around, I'm joined by Cinematical's East Coast Editor Erik Davis. Erik and I talk about whether or not the D will be Tenacious at the box office with Pick of Destiny, the passing of Robert Altman and our picks and pans on DVD for the week as well. As ever, you can download the podcast right here -- and don't hesitate to let us know what you'd like to hear in future broadcasts!
It's inevitable, over the Thanksgiving weekend: At some point, you're going to be full. And I mean full -- loaded up with happy memories and a whole bunch of pie. What better time to throw on a long, long movie? I always wind up watching something huge during Thanksgiving weekend -- I particularly recall a carb-coma afternoon with Spartacus washing over me like a river of gravy, rich and flavorful -- and this year is no exception. I don't think I'm going to have enough time to watch The Best of Youth again -- I don't think I have that much time -- but I have been circling my copy of Nashville with a certain avaricious eye towards re-enjoying it. (Oh, and to the commenter yesterday who noted that A Prairie Home Companion is a film more worthy of Best Picture consideration than Crash, well, I have film on my teeth more worthy of Best Picture consideration than Crash. And maybe it's just my hatred of Garrison Keillor, but Prarie Home Companion drove me mad. ...) Then again, I might throw on Boogie Nights for the umpteenth time -- or even the Criterion disc of Dazed and Confused. Much like Nashville, they're both American stories, too. ...
What are you planning to watch over the Thanksgiving weekend? And what's your secret for pumpkin pie?
I was talking this weekend with some folks about film and, somehow, we started talking about people's last gigs -- and how often they don't really reflect the life that came before. I've always thought that Raul Julia probably woke up in what James Lipton would call 'Actor's Heaven' a little upset about his last appearance on the big screen: "You mean I go out on Street Fighter?" And I'm sure that Orson Welles is somewhere in the afterlife, grateful that Henry Jaglom kept his last ever big-screen credit from being the voice of Unicron in Transformers: The Movie. Talking with some other friends at a brunch, A Prairie Home Companion came up -- they'd rented it, and discovered that, as they said, "11:30 at night is not a good time to throw on A Prairie Home Companion." I actually suggested that there was never a good time to throw on A Prairie Home Companion -- which, to me, feels like the most expensive Hee Haw episode ever made, featuring multi-millionaires playing 'jes' folks' and the tiresome, soporific drone of Garrison Keillor, America's least funny humorist. And now, of course, Robert Altman is dead. And I hope to God that the Academy -- maudlin and mortal as they are -- don't choose to commemorate his passing by larding attention onto what may be one of Altman's least deserving films. I don't think that you do people any favors by turning them into saints; Implying that every film anyone's ever made was an unparalleled masterpiece denies their life the richness of struggle and effort and inspiration -- and really, is Quintet as good as M*A*S*H? Is Pret-a-Porter as good as Short Cuts? No, and I think that Altman would be the first to suggest that some of his films worked better than other; to me, that means he never quit trying -- and that, to me, is the measure of an artist, and a human. We don't get to pick the last thing we do, because we don't know what that'll be; we can choose what we do next, even in the face of death. And so that's what I'm going to think of today when I think of Robert Altman -- his choices, his efforts, his unceasing forward motion.
At the end of the year, movie slides upon movie. Release dates in theaters and on DVD are shuffled about like chess pieces; the PR circuit buzzes and hums. Matt Damon imitates Matthew McConaughey as part of the tour to convince us to see him in a history of the CIA; McConaughey drops by Regis and Kelly Lee to talk about We Are Marshall. The Rocky Balboa world premiere. Or, as I like to call it, "The movie I'm going to hear a lot of jokes about." Movies I can't stop thinking about won't get nominated by the Academy, and some will. The DreamGirls soundtrack is on my Ipod, not a bad thing at all. I saw Eragon, knowing it was not a good idea to do so. If you can't say anything nice about a film, don't say anything. Certainly don't compare it to a mix of The Lord of the Rings, Dragonheart and The NeverEnding Story. (Watching Eragon felt like watching Dean Venture's mental breakdown -- Yes! Most obscure refrence possible!) Last year, during San Francisco rain, The Best of Youth was playing at The Balboa, and that provided the film-screen counterfeit of sunshine, and demonstrated firmly the existence of everything -- love, kindness, regret, tragedy and wonder -- that you hope exists in the human condition. 
Wondering about what the buzz is in the world of film? Well, why not download this newest edition of 
Well, awards season has officially begun -- while film critics nationwide have been trying to cram in screenings of movies before their respective critic's awards nominations close (
There are a lot of things I get tired of -- people who spit in the streets, swearing in front of kids, waiting for the cannibalism to break out on Jericho. And one of the things most likely to make me roll my eyes back in my head is the tiresome, never-ending self- congratulation of the Baby Boom generation. Yes, yes, we get it -- you were really special, you truly were. If by 'special,' you mean 'numerous and annoying and in love with your own mythos.' I mean, I saw 
