The Top 10 Movies of 2011

by Brett Parker

If there was one thing on the mind of movies in 2011, it was nostalgia. The cinema took every chance it could this past year to dive into the past like a Skynet Robot frantically trying to kill a member of the Connor family. There was a silent film, a look at the very invention of cinema itself, a time travel back to 1920s Paris, a greatest hits package of vintage pulp fiction formulas, a love letter to 70s-80s Spielberg hits, and Spielberg himself even paid glorious tribute to a comic book hero of yesteryear. Hell, one film even showed us the very dawn of creation. Hows that for a flashback?

With an America divided against itself, struggling to repair a broken economy and government, it made all the sense in the world that today’s audiences were yearning to revel in the comfort of earlier, golden times. But whats inspiring is that all this time traveling wasn’t just comfort food for comfort’s sake. Each film contained hidden ideals about how all this nostalgia can help us feel hopeful for the future. With 1920s Paris suggesting that no other time is as glorious as right now and a silent movie reminding us that the future can bring about wonderful creations, the past sure got us pumped to face the present.

The ultimate irony is that these giant reaches towards yesterday sure did a lot more to nail what we’re dealing with nowadays than a bunch of pretentious misfires that proclaimed to say profound things about our current state of affairs (i.e. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Shame). So here are ten films that soared above the rest this year, giving our eyes, minds, and hearts quite the workout:

1) Drive

Armed with subtle candy colors, beautifully synthesized music, and one of the coolest jackets in film history, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive is a pitch-perfect L.A. noir. A dangerously cool and inward Ryan Gosling takes us on a hypnotic and chaotic ride as an enigmatic wheelman out to protect his lady love (Carey Mulligan) from scary gangsters (led by Albert Brooks, doing an expertly sinister spin on his screen persona). Not only does the film dish out some of the most jazzed-up pulp we’ve ever been served, but it shrewdly comments on the World We Live In Now the way action films of the 60s and 70s used to. Whether its highlighting muted loneliness, aching romantic yearnings, or a world haunted by brutal violence, Drive is a unique pop cruise that strikes the bruised heart in all of us.

2) Hugo

Who knew that when Martin Scorsese decided to make a 3D family film based on a children’s book, he would make his most blatantly autobiographical movie since Mean Streets? On the surface, the story of a Parisian orphan named Hugo (Asa Butterfield, looking a tad like a young Scorsese, yet with majestic blue eyes all his own) unraveling the mystery of a sad toymaker named Georges (Ben Kingsley) is a whimsical adventure wonderful in its own right. Yet any cinephile can spot the delightful allusions to Scorsese’s own life: the isolated boy peaking out at the world from a tiny home, a love of the cinema, a world haunted by death and danger, an obsession with a mechanical invention, the complexities of dealing with a tough-minded female (the always-excellent Chloe Grace Moretz). Its only when the toymaker reveals himself to be Georges Melies, the pioneer of early cinema, that the film’s true subject comes in to play and Scorsese reveals his heart like never before. As the film tells the story of the invention of cinema through Meiles’ eyes, Scorsese puts his love of cinema on full display and the result is truly magical. Film restoration is one of the great passions of Scorsese’s life and career, and by finally finding a movie that makes that its centerpiece, Scorsese is able to make a film thats as wildly romantic about movies as he is.

3) The Artist

At a time when new screen technologies are rearing their head and movie theaters themselves are in threat of becoming endangered, it made a certain kind of sense that a silent film revealed itself this year to show us the ups and downs of progressive innovation. In telling the story of a silent film star (the delightful Jean Dujardin) and an up-and-coming sound starlet (the striking Berenice Bejo), The Artist fully commits to the technical formalities of the silent era and miraculously treats audiences to the magic of pure cinema in one of its most primitive forms. Its stroke of brilliance is the way director Michel Hazanavicius depicts the slow rise of the “sound era” from the viewpoint of the silent aesthetic. In doing so, we’re able to contemplate how change can be a very scary thing to deal with, but is absolutely necessary if more beautiful things are to manifest in this world. Its rare to see a love letter to art so nostalgic for the past yet so optimistic of the future.

4) Midnight in Paris

Some people have dismissed this film as just one of Woody Allen’s silly day dreams, but it sure is a fun daydream to get lost in. Allen imagines a hack Hollywood screenwriter (pitch-perfect Allen avatar Owen Wilson) visiting Paris and slipping through a time warp that allows him to visit the 1920s Golden Age, in which writers and artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein indulged in art, ideas, and partying. Allen’s Paris of yesteryear may be a highly-romanticized one, but it captures everything we love and admire about the characters of that era and probably isn’t too terribly off from how we’d hope our own time travel to that very place would be. The real beauty comes in Allen’s realization is that no one living in a golden age ever realizes its a golden age, so perhaps the present is far more splendid that we realize.

5) The Tree of Life

If I were to tell you that the Meaning of Life could be captured in a single film, you’d probably scoff and tell me that such a thing couldn’t happen. Yet Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life damn near proves it can. The film follows the story of a 1950 Texas youth (a terrifically alert Hunter McCracken) who grows into a disillusioned modern man (a melancholy Sean Penn) haunted by the imprints of his graceful mother (a radiant Jessica Chastain) and harsh father (a pitch-perfect Brad Pitt in one of his very best performances). Malick brings a stunning vividness to the peculiar beauty of everyday life while his bold depictions of Earth’s prehistoric creations to its afterlife end prove to be transcendently magnificent. Malick is a cinematic poet who ponders the enormity of nature and the uncertainty of the universe, and this is undoubtedly his masterpiece.

6) The Skin I Live In

With his usual tastes for ambiguous kinkiness and the blurring lines dividing sexual identity, Spanish legend Pedro Almodovar pushes his themes to their absolute breaking point, and the result is shockingly spellbinding. In telling the story of a mad plastic surgeon (a superbly creepy Antonio Banderas) conducting scientific and sexual experiments on a captured human subject (the beautifully mysterious Elena Anaya), Almodovar has made his Vertigo, only he goes to outrageously perverse depths that Hitchcock wouldn’t even dream of visiting. I’ve seen some crazy twist endings in my day, but this one has one of the most jaw-droppingly disturbing ones I’ve ever seen. But since Almodovar is an expert on making the twisted seem poetic, he makes this mad science shocker seem brilliantly philosophical.

7) J. Edgar

Here was one of the trickiest subject matters for a modern day film with one of the most demanding roles for an unlikely actor, and it was pulled off with expert ease so seamless, you can almost miss the grandness of it all. In exploring his usual idea of conservative values growing hip to outside ideals, director Clint Eastwood was able to see controversial FBI pioneer J. Edgar Hoover in a light that both deconstructed his flaws and humanized his ambitions. Leonardo DiCaprio is perhaps not the first actor you’d think of to portray such a pudgy bulldog of a man, but the performance is one of his most convincing chameleon jobs to date. Whats most surprising, and most endearing, about the film is how it turns out to be one of the best love stories of the year. The script, another triumph of history and heart from Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, suggests that the close relationship between Hoover and his live-in confidant Clyde Tolson (an outstanding Armie Hammer) was every bit romantic as most people suspected it was. The result is astoundingly touching. Hoover’s old-age confession to Tolson about how much he always needed him is one of the most blindsided jabs to the heart I experienced at the movies in this, or any, year.

8) Warrior

Director Gavin O’Connor likes to explore masculine archetypes through the device of old-fashioned melodrama, and with Warrior he’s crafted his most complete and exciting work yet. O’Connor’s bruising and painful tale of estranged brothers forced to do battle in a Mixed-Martial-Arts match was greatly assisted by true grit performances from Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton as the toughie brothers and Nick Nolte as their wistful, recovering-alcoholic father. As one brother fights to atone his actions in war and the other fights to save his home from the effects of the Great Recession, O’Connor comments on today’s America in shrewd ways the Hollywood of yesteryear used to favor. What that leaves us with is a sports film with the crowd-pleasing draw of a Rocky picture, yet with deep, unrelenting wounds that makes this an East of Eden with fists.

9) Super 8

J.J. Abrams makes no secret about the influence that Steven Spielberg has had on all of his work, and here he sets out to honor the popcorn thrills and childlike wonder of his idol’s earlier works. The result is an uncanny resemblance to the late 70s-early 80s Spielberg thrill-rides, with an exhilarating zippiness and sneaky heart that is all Abrams. Abrams exudes a giddy, autobiographical joy as he depicts a group of adolescent cinephiles who try to make their own homemade zombie flick and accidentally stumble upon a real-life monster the government is racing to keep under wraps. Abrams shows impressive control as he fuses alien wonder, monster movie horror, and jolly childhood exuberance into his Spielberg Greatest-Hits package, yet the real surprise is the way the ending reconciles adolescent pain and supernatural wonder in a way that, yes, outdoes Spielberg himself.

10) The Adventures of Tintin

Speaking of old-fashioned Spielberg, he also decided to get in touch with his old-school-self by treating us to one of his adventurous roller-coasters basked in the latest 3D, motion-capture technology. Inspired by his longtime love of the inspiration comic, Spielberg brings the candy colors and elaborate dangers of Herge’s classic comic to eye-popping life with an animated performance-capture zest thats honestly more fun to look at than anything in Avatar. Spielberg gets back in touch with his inner-Indiana Jones as his camera whooshes through irresistible cartoon landscapes with the reckless abandon of a classic B-movie. The actors tear through their animated disguises with breathless glee, the camera circles frantically and doesn’t let up for one minute, and the film’s centerpiece chase scene, a frantic race through a Bagghar town, is one of the most thrilling chase scenes I’ve ever witnessed on the big screen. Some have dismissed Tintin’s big screen outing as nothing more than a big screen comic book, but most of the time, comic books can mean more to us than pretentious Oscar bait, and there is simply no denying that the child inside me was thrilled out of his mind.

STAND-OUT PERFORMANCES

This is usually the part where I highlight the “Honorable Mentions,” exceptional films that almost made my Top 10 list. Yet looking over the films of 2011, I couldn’t help but notice that there were an abundance of films in which the key performances were better than the actual films themselves. So I’ve instead decided to pay tribute to those knockout performances that shined ever so brightly this past year. For these gifted actors reminded us that you should never underestimate the power of movie star wattage:

Michael Fassbender, X-Men: First Class

Ryan Gosling, Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Andy Serkis, Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Justin Timberlake & Mila Kunis, Friends with Benefits

Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn

Exclusive Interview: Filmmaker Jon Russell Cring

by Brett Parker

Most people wouldn’t usually consider upstate New York to be a thriving haven of independent film, but over the past decade, there have been an increasing amount of passionate cinephiles who have taken to the latest video technology to bring cinematic labors of love to cheerful life. Around the Capital Region area, an underground community has certainly grown of technical devotees who network endlessly with each other to take big screen ideas from obstacle-ridden drawing boards to cheerful cinematic life. One of this happening scene’s most prominent figures is Jon Russell Cring, a writer/director originally from Centerburgh, Ohio whose been making movies in upstate New York for the past 2 years under his production banner, ExtraOrdinary Film Project. His latest project, Creeping Crawling, is being planned as an independent horror anthology in the vein of Creepshow. The first installment, R.I.D., will be premiering February 1st in Albany, NY at WAMC’s The Linda @ 7 P.M.

I met with Cring to talk about his career, his filmography, and his latest film. From one conversation with Cring, its clear that he’s not only a dedicated cinephile, but one of the more clear-headed and wiser independent filmmakers I’ve encountered in my experiences. His enthusiasm for directing, his fine knowledge of film history, and his eager willingness to share significant tips of the trade gives off the delightful vibe of a man who relentlessly pushes himself creatively and genuinely loves what he does. As we sat down one chilly January afternoon to discuss Creeping Crawling, we touched down on everything from the richness of ordinary lives, why E.T. is inferior to Pink Floyd The Wall, and how sex and bugs can co-exist in the same movie:

BRETT PARKER: When most people think of independent film, they tend to think of films that were made around L.A. or New York City. What most people don’t realize is that theres a prominent underground film scene thats been slowly developing over the past few years in upstate New York around the Albany area. How would you describe your personal experiences within that scene? How do you feel about its cinematic output?

JON RUSSELL CRING: I do see that there are mechanisms in place that have been created by some really very cool people, like Kevin Craig West and the people at Upstate Independents, where you have an opportunity to meet with other filmmakers, you have someplace that you can show what you do on a regular basis. And that’s great! Thats absolutely fantastic! As far as the quality of whats actually going out, you know, I’ll let smarter people than me give their opinion on that. All I know is, we have to reach a certain kind of a standard that people accept. You know, that its not a Hollywood film. The sound, the acting, the writing basically have to reach par before you can actually start to be judged and if it doesn’t do that, then we can’t just pretend, you know, ‘well we’re in Albany, it doesn’t really make any difference if its good enough!’ Yeah, it does make a difference and you have to feel like you’re competing not with the people around you but with the people in Hollywood and New York City.

BP: Well it does seem like so many people are interested in getting into the film game yet are completely oblivious to all the hard work that goes into it. Based on your own experiences, if someone were starting out in independent filmmaking nowadays, what advice would you give them to start off with?

JRC: The first thing I tell anybody is to go make something! Don’t plan it, don’t think about it, don’t talk to your friends about it, just do it! There are a lot of things that are going to try and stop you from making your movie. I’m of the opinion that everything in the world is conspiring against you when you’re making an independent film. There’s timing issues, there’s people interest level, there’s money, obviously. The only way you’re going to learn is by doing it. You’re not even going to learn by going to school, you’re not going to learn by taking classes, you learn by making movies. And watching movies. If you’re not a cinephile, if you’re not somebody who love movies that, you know, knows things older than ten years old, if you’re not somebody who loves talking about film, then you’re going to make a bunch of mistakes that you didn’t need to make if you had just watched what Stanley Kubrick had done.

BP: Are there any specific genres you gravitate towards or are there any filmmakers who directly inspire your own work?

JRC: I’m inspired by anything thats story-driven. The movies between 1968-1978 were pretty much the greatest films in almost every genre of filmmaking. You had the greatest horror film, which is considered by most to be The Exorcist. You had the greatest war film, which for anyone smart would be Apocalypse Now. It goes on and on: the Clint Eastwood westerns, obviously The Godfather movies. It’s because the director was king. It’s because they didn’t necessarily care about what the public wanted, they gave the public what they wanted, and I find when you give the public what you want, usually thats what they want, too. People will see movies. They will see Transformers: Dark of the Moon if thats what you give them. But if you give them Last Tango in Paris, they’ll see that, too.

BP: Living in this time we call The Great Recession, people aren’t so enthusiastic these days to throw their money around on film projects. Have you found it more difficult to get projects funded these days? Has it put certain limitations on what you can achieve cinematically?

JRC: [sarcastically] Not for me, Brett, I’m independent wealthy! I have all the money I need to make movies! I don’t know what you’re talking about! [laughs] No, man, are you kidding me? I’ve had to do a Kickstarter for this movie Creeping Crawling, and I’ve never done that before. I’m trying to raise $7500 so that I can get a ‘name’ for the film, because whether you like it or not, there are two things that people notice when you show them a film: 1) what the story is, 2) who’s in it. And when you take away one of those things, you lose half their interest. If they don’t know thats in it, you’ve lost half the interest. So you’re trying to take fifty percent of their attention span and get them to go ahead and watch your movie. Thats the way its always been. Obviously, people don’t have a lot of money, and what they have they don’t want to give up to making a movie, so I try to give people as much value as I possibly can. I try to give them bells and whistles and a whole lot of fun, and hopefully people rally behind it and we can get this thing made. But if you let money stand in your way, then you’re never going to do anything.

BP: Most of your film work can be found on the website for ExtraOrdinary Film Project. There’s a nice quote I found on the site which reads, “people considered to be ordinary, everyday folk often have extra-special stories to tell that are even more captivating than the ones produced in Hollywood.” This quote really serves as a key to your films, for you seem to be compelled by the idea of everyday people having their lives challenged by unpredictable circumstances and trying to hold onto their ideals. What is it that draws you to these kinds of stories?

JRC: Brett, everybody’s life is Ben-Hur! That’s something that people have just forgotten! Every single person has an epic, EPIC experience in their life! They just think ‘oh yeah, yeah, I went through that...’ But when they’re at parties and telling stories, people are enthralled, like ‘oh my God, how did you get through that accident?’ Or, ‘I can’t believe you were able to survive that molestation!’ ‘How did you make it out of Europe alive?’ They tell those stories and that to me is the fodder for great filmmaking. If you can take your worst pain, your worst experience, and turn that into art, thats exactly what it becomes...it becomes art. A lot of my films have contained personal tragedy...there’s one about my brother being hit-and-run by a car and we never found out who hit him. The film is basically about what that person’s life could’ve been like after he hit him and we basically say that he had a downward spiral that led him to becoming a homeless person. Thats the power of art! That probably didn’t happen, but thats a cathartic experience to imagine that that might’ve happened to this person.

So I always tell people to start with their own personal experience. Start with a conversation you had, start with something that already happened to you. Creeping Crawling actually started with my house being infected with fleas. [laughs] Thats how the movie began! We’re planning it as a entomological trilogy of terror, so this is an anthology film right now. Our cat came in and got the whole house completely covered in fleas! My wife was just being driven crazy by it because she couldn’t get rid of them! There was something sucking on her and biting on her all the time! She goes in the shower and fleas are in the water! They were coming out of her hair! It was maddening! And that sort of quality, that maddening quality, led us to coming up with the idea for this first story R.I.D. Your horror, your experience is the straw that we spin into gold.

BP: As I looked over your filmography, I noticed that your earlier work tended to deal with rather religious themes such as sin, repression, guilt, and morality. Yet with your later works, such as Tattitude and now Creeping Crawling, it feels as if a darkness and edginess is creeping into your work. There’s a certain sense of chaos present, with more ambiguous motivations. Do you feel yourself now wanting to explore more uninhibited and darker territory?

JRC: You’re absolutely right! My first thirteen films were written by my father [Jonathan Richard Cring], a man who traveled around the country and was a very spiritual man. But I kind of realized that while I loved my earlier work, I wasn’t making the kind of films that I wanted to see. You know, I was making the kind of movies that he wanted to see. Even though I really enjoyed those films, there was territory I wasn’t getting an opportunity to explore. So I’ve been a little bit more collaborative now, working with a guy by the name of Joshua Owens who is one of the writers on one of the Creeping Crawling stories and who also wrote Tatititude.

You know, there are no black cats in white hats...that is one thing I absolutely believe. There is no good, there is no evil, we are all capable of amazing generosity towards each other or we’re capable of cutting each others throats. We need to stop portraying in film that there’s always a right and there’s always a wrong in every situation. Creeping Crawling to me is a horror film, but nothing supernatural happens in it. All of the horror is self-inflicted. Plus, there’s a lot of fetish in this film because I was interested in seeing more eroticism. That was something I enjoyed in the 1970s well into the 1980s and we sort of lost that. Sexuality sort of became like a joke. Think of the girls in the Friday the 13th movies who would take off their shirts then get stabbed. I think sexuality and nudity should be taken seriously because its part of life, just like spirituality is part of life. So I want to mix those ideas and explore a lot of different themes and make the movies I want to see.

BP: Whats interesting is that the themes you explored earlier are still there, its just now they’re being explored from the view of the sinners. Tattitude, for example, highlights certain morals and sins by showing characters who rail and rebel against them.

JRC: I think there is a certain segment of society that doesn’t really get their stories told. You know, you can call them the working-class, blue-collar, what-have-you. They get forgotten, except maybe for comedies. Tattitude appealed to me because I couldn’t think of a movie about tattoos artists. You’d literally have to go back to The Illustrated Man with Rod Steiger to see a movie that featured tattooing or tattoo artists. And that was all the way back in 1969. Are you kidding me? So that was really kind of an interesting idea for me.

In Creeping Crawling, there’s the story of a model, an unsuccessful one who has to pay for her own pictures and struggles. A beautiful model, but she also had to grow up with an eating disorder that was given to her by her father. And that came from my wife [Tracy Nichole Cring, who is also the film’s Cinematographer/Editor]. She doesn’t have an eating disorder, but her father used to literally not let her off a treadmill until she did 30 miles a day. And he would say things to her like ‘a man doesn’t care if you’re smart, he cares what you look like,’ or ‘if you ever want to get a husband, you better lose that ass.’ When my wife told me that, that went in the script. I mean, that’s the fodder right there! There’s something horrible that somebody says and what is the root of horror but the horrible? So in this story, the model eats tapeworms in an attempt to lose weight. Thats the interaction between human and insect that highlights perversion and feelings of never being good enough. I wanted to do those kinds of stories about the have-nots and the forgotten people. I guess in a way, Orson Welles sort of felt that way, he was trying to do it....but I want to be a little more entertaining than that. I don’t think you have to make The Grapes of Wrath necessarily, I think you can do something thats fun and has a Hollywood mindset. I don’t have a problem with summertime films, I really don’t. I love entertaining films. I just think they could be a little more relatable.

BP: I wanted to delve more into the basic ideas behind Creeping Crawling. The title and the basic premise would have you expecting a gross-out creepfest, but there’s a raw eroticism in the film I think will surprise most audiences. Its almost as if Adrian Lyne directed a Roger Corman production.

JRC: [laughs] Well you mention Roger Corman....he’s a very classy filmmaker. What he did on those Edgar Allen Poe movies has never really been beat. If I could fashion a successful career for myself after anyone, I’d fashion one after Roger Corman. You know, the idea of making yourself available to all these other filmmakers. I never really made a horror film before, I’ve produced them. One of the things you may not know about my background is that I was the founder of something called Ghost Ship Films in Tennessee where we did four or five horror films that I basically produced. I learned a lot from that, mostly about what I wasn’t interested in doing. All I was really doing was giving amazing locations for really, really crappy movies and I got totally sick of that. That’s why I wanted to get involved in directing my own movies, writing my own scripts, and that type of thing. With this film, I was inspired by The Legend of Hell House, Burnt Offerings, and Don’t Look Now. I wanted something that was beautiful, aesthetically creepy....its not a gross-out movie, its not even necessarily a ‘scary’ movie. Its a moody movie and a sexy movie. I wanted to put all those elements together and I think we really achieved that.

BP: The funny thing with watching the movie is that you don’t know whether to be creeped out by the insects or turned on by all the pretty people getting it on....

JRC: And that’s what I wanted! The bottom line is that I want the audience to have a good time and for them to have an emotional connection to the film. We’re dealing with dark subjects, like madness and perversions of sexuality....but if the character is not humanized, if the character is not someone I can relate to and understand, all of it kind of goes out the window. One film I really, really enjoy is Angel Heart, a great film but kind of a forgotten film because it got all wrapped up in the whole Lisa Bonet thing with the sexuality and whatever. But you want to talk about a gorgeous movie, one with a fantastic performance by Robert DeNiro, whose one of the best devils you’re ever going to see in a movie! Although it does have a really bad ending....

BP: I always thought it was a nice showcase for Mickey Rourke’s talents. Plus, Alan Parker is such an underrated director....

JRC: I was talking about Pink Floyd’s The Wall the other day...did you know it only has a 65% Fresh Rating on Rotten Tomatoes? I was like, are you kidding?

BP: Well it certainly is a polarizing film. I remember that famous story where Steven Spielberg saw it at the Cannes Film Festival [the 1982 one where E.T. premiered] and was extremely perplexed by it, allegedly exclaiming ‘what the f--k was that?’

JRC: Ok, Steven Spielberg can suck my c--k, because The Wall as a film is so far superior to E.T. in the history of film...I mean yeah, a lot of kids still watch E.T. and that’s cute, but The Wall, you wanna talk about the combination of imagery, music, and ideas, and its just BIG filmmaking, and I love BIG filmmaking! I love the idea of someone pushing the envelope so far and totally captures what Roger Waters does, which is explore these wonderful issues of money, power, sex, religion, all the issues you should be exploring in art. He does that in his music, they did that in the film, and I aspire to do that, too.

BP: Well at this point in your carer, you’ve made over 20 short films, you’ve dabbed in television and music video projects, and Creeping Crawling marks your 14th feature in the independent film world. Where do you see your career heading? What trajectory do you feel it on?

JRC: Right into the toilet! It’s over, Brett! I peaked! [laughs] No, I feel I’m in the right place right now. I don’t know how long I’ll stay in Albany, if I’m supposed to stay in Albany. I’m starting to get some interesting offers, stuff that often surprises me! I got an offer to act in a movie, two offers actually. I have some really interesting work that we have some scripts for that are not huge films as far as budgets are concerned, there in the $50,000-70,000 range, but that’s still a ridiculous number to me right now. So I’m always looking for the Angel, you know, that person who gets interested in what we’re doing...the one big step I have to take is getting a semi-big name actor into one of my films. If you don’t take that step, you’ll never get beyond that step. If you never make a $7,500 film, you’ll never make a $70,000 film, or onto a $700,000 film, and on and on and on. Right now, every film I’ve ever made has been within the $1,500-2,000 range. Even our first Creeping Crawling installment cost $1,000 to make, although it doesn’t look like it. I know how to stretch a dollar, I know how to find a location that can blow people’s minds and make it look like something Hollywood came up with themselves. You call in a lot of favors! I know how to collect favors! [laughs]

For more information about Creeping Crawling, check out its official movie site at www.creepingcrawling.com

For more information about Jon Russell Cring's work, check out www.extraordinaryfilmproject.com

Wahlberg Offers Up Some 'Contraband'

by Brett Parker

In the traditional Bruce Willis vein, the appeal of Mark Wahlberg as an action hero comes from his effortless fusion of tough guy gravitas and everyman appeal. From one angle, Wahlberg has a lived-in, rugged exterior that gives off an authentic vibe of testosterone, yet one can’t also deny his guy-next-door vibe, which is the tip-off to his likeability. From his rough-and-tumble upbringing to his mature ascent into fatherhood, Wahlberg is like a guy whose a delight to have over at a suburban BBQ yet could handle himself aggressively in a gritty bar brawl. He’s a thinking man’s brute avatar, and that makes you want to follow him into almost any action-movie enterprise. The proof of this appeal is evident in Contraband, a vapid yet sustainable action product that ultimately overcomes its frivolous nature with a great assist from Wahlberg’s no-nonsense professionalism.

Contraband stars Wahlberg as Chris Farraday, a former contrabandist who now lives a quiet life in New Orleans with his beautiful wife, Kate (Kate Beckinsale) and his two children. Chris used to be an expert at smuggling illegal goods in shipping boats, but now spends his days installing security alarms for paying customers. Things take a turn for the worst, however, when its revealed that Kate’s brother, Andy (Caleb Landry Jones), was involved in a smuggling job gone wrong. While smuggling drugs on a cargo ship, he was forced to drop the product in the ocean to avoid pressure from customs. This infuriates Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), the psychotic gangster who recruited Andy for the job, and he demands that Andy pays him back for the lost goods or he’ll be killed. Chris realizes that he must return to his old criminal ways to save Andy.

The plan: smuggle $10 million in fake bills from Panama to New Orleans with the help of Chris’ old crew. Soon enough, Chris finds himself and his comrades on a cargo ship under the strict, watchful eye of Captain Camp (J.K. Simmons). Once the ship docks in Panama, Chris and his crew will have very limited time to obtain the money and sneak it onto the ship without anyone noticing. Of course, things don’t go as originally planned, throwing Chris into the clutches of a ruthless crime lord (Diego Luna) and in the midst of a personal betrayal he didn’t see coming.

Compared with other flicks in the pantheon of heist films, Contaband is pretty dense, but its rarely boring or obtrusive. It’s not the most exciting play on the One-Last-Heist picture, but its quite far from being the worst. One unique angle here is the use of the cargo shipping world as the backdrop for the film’s shenanigans. The day-to-day life of a ship crew and the clever ways Chris and his cohorts hide their ulterior motives on the boat adds crumbs of interest, yet this angle probably isn’t as lived-in and atmospheric as it could be. Plus once the complicated time table of this heist starts counting down, the race-against-the-clock isn’t as tense and dangerous as it should be. If the heist had the pulse-pounding urgency of, say, Inception’s head-spinning time frame, then a serious jolt of adrenaline could’ve livened this routine exercise up.

One odd tidbit of Hollywood deja vu reveals that the film’s director, Baltasar Kormakur, was also the star of the original film that inspired this American incarnation, Reykjavik-Rotterdam. Why would an actor repeat himself in the same movie scenario, with a Hollywood actor filling his shoes no less? Perhaps Kormakur wants to finally make his mark on Hollywood and he figured indulging in a world he was ultra-familiar with would make him look like a confident pro. I personally enjoyed Roger Ebert’s theory that Kormakur is using this remake as “a demonstration that many stars believe they could direct this crap themselves if they ever had the chance.” As an action director, he proves to be competent and inoffensive. He moves things at a brisk pace, never lingering or dragging things out. He gets the logical economy out of each scene, then hurries along to the next one with little fuss. Even the script’s action-junkie indulges seem surprisingly grounded. He has quite a ways to go if he wants to reach Kathryn Bigelow’s status, but at least now he’s sobering and sensible.

Wahlberg, as usual, proves to be a worthy tour guide through a tough guy enterprise. He’s a lot more stoic and relaxed here than usual, but thats part of the appeal. He is keenly aware of the fact that trying too hard to look tough very much produces the opposite effect, so his levelheaded focus is rather refreshing. What obviously got him jazzed about this project is the fact that his smuggling soldier is also a devoted family man. Planning a heist can resemble planning a Hollywood production in more ways than one, so Wahlberg here gets to work out his stresses of being both a Hollywood player and a loving patriarch. A scene in which Chris discusses details of his heist plan while helping his kids with their homework definitely holds a special resonance with him. It takes a delightful cinematic understanding to find real life resonance in a preposterous heist scenario, and Wahlberg’s dedication to the material makes things all the more enjoyable.

Wahlberg is also helped by the fact that he’s surrounded by supporting players who are trying on generic roles and overcompensating with their efforts. Giovanni Ribisi is in full method display as a southern fried sleazebag, and his dedicated sliminess makes him a lot more fun here than he is in most pictures. Ben Foster is a troubled head-case as always, but he’s more lightened-up here than usual. It’s always wonderful to see Diego Luna in anything, and him convincing us he’s a psychotic crime lord just allows us to delight in his resourcefulness. Of course Kate Beckinsale is beautiful and effective, for she’s way overqualified to play such a thankless role. I kind of wonder why the producers didn’t just give the role to an up-and-coming pretty face who could have used the screen time.

January is notoriously regarded as a dumping ground for mediocre releases, allowing Oscar-hopefuls of the previous year room to breathe at the box office. If you’re a sentimental moviegoer like myself, then you probably can delight in such hokey nonsense the way Quentin Tarantino used to relish grindhouse garbage. As far as early-year trash goes, you can do a whole lot worse than Contraband. You can’t say it was made without motivation, and you kind of dig its aspiration towards dignity. When he’s out to be a serious actor, Wahlberg can dish out treasures like in The Departed and The Fighter, yet Wahlberg with a gun can be a hell-of-a-lot-of-fun as well, something Contraband effectively vindicates.

A Romance That'll Drive You 'Crazy'

by Brett Parker

Like Crazy purports to be an honest look at genuine love pummeled by the hardships of life, but from where I sit, its about a miserable dude who doesn’t know what he wants in life and puts not one, but two beautiful women through emotional hell because of it. And since the one girl poised to be the love of his life is as close to a modern-day Audrey Hepburn as you’re most likely to find, you wonder what the hell his problem is. Perhaps he holds some of the same issues Clint Eastwood highlighted in J. Edgar Hoover? Here’s a movie that wants to hold the final word on young romance in a post-millennial world, yet finding out what exactly that word is turns pretty befuddling pretty fast.

The film tells the story of Anna (Felicity Jones) and Jacob (Anton Yelchin), college students who first meet in Los Angeles. Anna is a British exchange student studying journalism in the states. Jacob is a design student who hopes to design chairs one day. After encountering him in one of her classes, Anna gives Jacob her phone number and the two begin a courtship of infatuation which consists of conversations over coffee, montages at the beach, and plenty of pillow talk. Anna falls so hard for Jacob that she decides to overstay her visa and spend the summer with him before returning to the U.K.

This decision turns out to bring serious consequences to their relationship. Overstaying your visa is a big no-no with immigration officials, so when Anna returns months later to visit Jacob, she is denied entry into the U.S. Anna is so in love with Jacob that she’s determined to find a way for them to be together. So Jacob visits her in England, but seems reluctant to move his entire life over to another country. Jacob tries marrying her into America, but immigration rules don’t exactly make it that simple. Fate keeps tearing these youngsters apart, and the fact that they occasionally fall into the arms of other lovers doesn’t exactly help matters either. Both parties wonder (and so does the audience) if this delicate love is meant to last in the real world.

There are some movies that are such realistic slices-of-life that you wonder why they even bother being movies in the first place. Director Drake Doremus wishes to strip a young romance down to such a nitty-gritty, naturalistic style that you wonder why he just didn’t hire a documentary crew to follow a real-life couple around. Even then, he’d probably get more livelier dialogue out of that couple instead of the one he’s got here. Jones and Yelchin reportedly improvised their own dialogue based on broad outlines, but nothing they say reveals any true wit or imagination. The result is like endlessly watching that lovey-dovey couple you used to hang with in college, and how entertaining is that? The film lacks the finesse and inventiveness of smart romantic fiction.

So the set-up is True Love facing difficult obstacles, but the uneasy realization that Jacob may not be fully-invested in the relationship harmfully contradicts the initial tone of the film, and not in a terribly insightful way either. Jacob is curiously reluctant to say “i love you” back to Anna for reasons that are never made clear. There’s really no tangible reason why Jacob can’t move to the U.K. so they can live happily ever after, yet he quietly dismisses such an idea. Even after getting married doesn’t get Anna into America, Jacob instantly goes running back to his blonde and leggy ex-girlfriend (Jennifer Lawrence) he went to the last time Anna and him were having issues.

The film leaves us clueless as to what makes Jacob so special in the first place. He’s a self-absorbed mope who doesn’t know what he truly wants and doesn’t have the courtesy to inform the women in his life about this realization. He holds no wit, minimal charm, and no emotional stability. The only thing he’s passionate about is his chair-making business, but even that seems like a contrived trait cooked up by desperate screenwriters. The film makes it very clear that Anna is the pursuer in this relationship, but we can’t figure out for the life of us what she sees in this guy. The biggest mystery within the film is how such a humorless downer of a man could pull both Felicity Jones and Jennifer Lawrence into his orbit (life must be so tough, right?). I have nothing against Yelchin, but not even Paul Newman could act like this with women and expect to get away with it.

At least the performances are spot on though, and not even ill-conceived characters can bring these performers down. Felicity Jones proves to be a real treasure here. With a winning smile and a fragile beauty, you can see why any man would cross an ocean for her. In a time when phony screen-love can be dangerous for any action, she completely sells us on deep romantic-yearning, even if the guy she’s yearning for isn’t worth a damn. A scene where she empties her emotions on a phone-call to Jacob, proclaiming how desperately she needs him, truly is gut-wrenching and touching. And for as useless as I found the Jacob character, I must say that Anton Yelchin is more relaxed here than he is in most films. Yelchin has always come packed with a built-in sensitivity that makes it hard not to like the everyman characters he typically inhabits. I must admit that his gifts here make Jacob less insufferable than he probably deserves to be.

Aside from the performances, and some impressive editing by Jonathan Alberts, theres really nothing of any true substance to take away from this film. There are certain arthouse zealots who reject any traces of commerciality in their art and think that true cinema is films that are as realistic as humanly possible without any technical bells and whistles at all (which is sort of a contradiction when you think about it, for movies inherently can never be real life, ya know?). Those people will probably find much pleasure in this film, although Blue Valentine, a more realized and intelligent flick on the same idea, is actually the movie they’re looking for. Believe me, I can appreciate a film that observes the downside of relationships, but when the characters’ actions defy reason, empathy, and true heart, things can be more baffling than insightful.

Getting to Know 'Marilyn'

by Brett Parker

Its not difficult to see how perhaps Colin Clark lionized one of the most noteworthy passages of his entire life. In two of his memoirs, he claimed to have an affair with Marilyn Monroe while working as an assistant on her film, The Prince and the Showgirl. A glamourous movie star cozying up to a low-level assistant is the kind of fantasy only a rabid romantic could conceive of, or perhaps even a Hollywood screenwriter (which can be the same thing sometimes). Watching My Week with Marilyn, the film adaptation of Clark’s memoirs, one realizes that it doesn’t really matter how true his story is or not. For he arrives at the very same conclusions about Monroe that most modern cinephiles have: she was a breathtaking bombshell who concealed a quiet dignity, a crushing vulnerability, and an enigmatic inner-life.

The film follows the events that took place during the 1956 summer filming of The Prince and the Showgirl, a Studio concotion produced, directed, and starring Sir Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh). Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a privileged young chap with a love for the movies, finds his way onto the film’s set as a glorified errand boy, thrilled to be working on a major studio picture. Through his eyes, we see how him and everyone else on the set was entranced by the film’s dazzling star, Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams). With her sex-kitten mystique and bouncy charms, its not hard to see how anyone on that set could resist falling in love with her. Yet tensions arrive as Olivier grows frustrated with Marilyn’s notorious flakiness with lines and tardiness. While she undoubtedly held an electrifying screen presence, Monroe wasn’t the most secure with herself as a serious actress and felt intimidated in the presence of an acting legend such as Olivier.

In the midst of Monroe’s increasing vulnerability, Clark finds himself striking up a curious friendship with the movie star. Marilyn frequently begins requesting his presence whenever she’s feeling down, and pretty soon she's whisking him away to her countryside cottage for a getaway. After heavy flirtation and a bout of skinny dipping, Clark starts to convince himself that he just might be the guy Marilyn’s been looking for, in spite of her famous husband, Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott). But pretty soon, the rest of the cast and crew catches on and warns Clark relentlessly that such a movie star will only break his heart. Clark himself also sees the crushing anguish and severe depression that lurks beneath Monroe’s beauty, not helped much by her constant pill-popping. How far can their “courtship” realistically go? Does Clark have what it takes to reach Marilyn as a person?

In telling the story of how a classical Monroe picture was made, My Week with Marilyn slightly takes on a classical Hollywood tone itself. Although showbiz stories can have a certain stuffiness about them, Director Simon Curtis pours a wide-eyed innocence into the tone, completely turning the camera’s gaze into Clark’s giddy own. This heart-bursting romanticism may come as a jolt to an era that knows nearly all of Hollywood’s inside dope, but it sure keeps the plot breezy and snappy. We quickly realize that a more sobering tone could make this seemingly tall-tale more insufferable and take the air right out of Clark’s claims. His sunny optimism absorbs the film’s membrane so much that even if you don’t believe he romanced Monroe, you believe that his situation was spellbinding enough to inspire two memoirs.

Its easy to see how Clark’s gaga naivety could grow corny on a modern audience that knows well enough not to trust a movie star at first sight, so its rather impressive that Eddie Redmayne sells us so much on the character. With a strapping joy that avoids being pathetic, Redmayne brings as much sensibility to Clark’s wild desires as possible, gaining a surprising sympathy as he tries to convince Marilyn, and himself really, that they can run off and be happy together. Another welcome surprise is Branagh’s performance as Olivier, one that superbly showcases the humility and inadequacies within the thespian-god image we remember him for.

Playing Marilyn Monroe seems like such an impossible task because she was such a one-of-a-kind creature (in spite of Tony Curtis’ claims). To dismiss Monroe as a simple blonde is to admit that you’ve been worked over by a magician without noticing any slight-of-hand tricks. She had the curvaceous come-on of a sex object yet possessed an unmistakable feminine independence. She had a bubbly comic persona paired with a self-contained intelligence. Very few actresses with a pin-up body had such precise calculation and exuberant command of the screen. So its some kind of miracle that Michelle Williams embodies Marilyn so flawlessly. Not only does she bear an erie resemblance to the icon, but she nails every single mannerism we remember from her screen image, all while masterfully hinting at the undercurrents of depression that plagued her heart. The beauty here is that you quit that biopic habit of grading the performance with a red pen and just fully accept that you’re staring at Marilyn. Even the most die-hard of Monroe obsessives have to admit that Williams delivers all the goods you could possibly hope for.

Whats ironical here is that watching men fall head-over-heels for Marilyn hints at why most men never really understand most women in the first place. With Monroe, men projected onto her their hopes, desires, and fantasies without really stopping to regard the true human being underneath it all. When you project idealism onto a person, its more a reflection of your needs for the person instead of what that individual actually wants for themselves. Even Clark, who passionately believes he loves Marilyn, maybe more concerned with the idea of being her romantic hero than digging into the depths of her troubled soul. The biggest insight the film delivers is how men so desperately wanted to see Marilyn as a movie star, a sex fantasy, a business product, and a romantic ideal instead of the lost, helpless woman she truly was.

If you consider yourself something of a dedicated Marilyn Monroe scholar, you’ll probably know more about her than the film reveals here. But you can’t help but notice how phenomenal Williams’ performance is and how tactfully the script handles Monroe’s legacy. For average moviegoers, the jolly behind-the-scenes peak at classical studio filmmaking will be damn near irresistible to them. Especially considering how limiting and tiresome a showbiz-weary cynical version of the same story would be. There are virtually no bad reasons to simply regard Marilyn Monroe, a fact Michelle Williams all too wonderfully reminds us of.

A Boneheaded 'Heist'

by Brett Parker

While no one will ever mistake Brett Ratner for Orson Welles, I must admit that I have a certain fondness for the man’s films. The major crimes he’s been charged with by most cinephiles is his broad tastes for commercial formulas and the lack of any depth, or even focus, in his execution. But I find that in his sloppiness, a certain liveliness and color comes shining through in a way that a more serious director would be too self-reserved to let loose. While his empty romps are predictable from start-to-finish, that usually doesn’t stop him from dishing out nifty character bits, outrageous gags, and inspired uses of pop music. With formulaic trash, you have to find the fun wherever you can, and Ratner isn’t without a few treats in his bag.

His latest film, Tower Heist, reeks with crowd-pleasing studio calculation. We’re talking big stars in a big heist film, with a New York City backdrop and working-class timeliness to burn. In this time we call the Great Recession, with working-class protestors occupying Wall Street, Ratner is clearly hoping to dish out a blue collar Ocean’s Eleven, with a big entertainment that speaks to the hardships of the masses. Yet in trying to nail a sociological empathy, I’m afraid Ratner ends up limiting Tower Heist from the cockeyed fun he’s typically at ease with. The film is seriously lacking in comic inspiration and it doesn’t help matters that the film’s big heist is too clumsy and preposterous to stand on its own feet. Of course asking for clever wittiness in a Brett Ratner flick is like asking for no violence in a Quentin Tarantino film, but given Ratner’s adolescent need to please, as well as the fact that the screenwriters here were responsible for some of the finest crime capers to ever grace the screen, we expected a little more than what we’re ultimately given.

The film takes place in “the Tower,” a luxury high-rise residence that bears a thinly-veiled resemblance to the real life Trump Tower. Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) is the building manager who looks after all of the staff and rich residents who make up the Tower. The wealthiest resident is Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), a Wall Street businessman who once helped Josh put his staff’s pension plan into a lucrative investment opportunity. This proves to be a troublesome decision the day its revealed by FBI Agent Claire Dunham (Tea Leoni) that Shaw is being investigated for a Ponzi scheme and all of the Staff’s investments are perhaps lost for good.

Depressed and devastated by his mistaken judgement, Josh grows desperate for a way to make things right for his staff. Agent Dunham lets it slip that Shaw may have millions of dollars secretly stashed away in his apartment. This allows Josh to hatch a plan: he’ll enlist the aid of his disgruntled staff, which includes his brother-in-law (Casey Affleck), the bellhop (Michael Pena), the Jamaican maid (Gabourey Sidibe), and a bankrupted squatter (Matthew Broderick), to help rob Shaw’s apartment. Since Josh’s crew appears to be incompetent as criminal masterminds, he also enlists the aid of a neighborhood criminal (Eddie Murphy) to help teach his staff the art of the steal. With this ragtag group of would-be thieves, Josh dives headfirst into a plot to rob Shaw’s penthouse, yielding outrageous and life-threatening results.

Its obvious this film wants to play on the working class stresses of most moviegoers, as well as the duped enragement of Bernie Madoff victims, to deliver a wish-fulfillment fantasy of sticking it to greedy big wigs. The problem is that the filmmakers play all this up without any insight whatsoever. They keep highlighting blue collar grievances without articulating the mechanisms or personal afflictions that come with such a situation. Nor is any of the characters’ hardships used for significant laughs. Little-people scrappiness and yearnings for revenge can be aptly harnessed for hilarious laughs, but the film does very little to even get a snicker out of this angle.

We at least look forward to the climactic heist scene being a complicated spectacle, but it turns out to be one of the sloppiest and dumbest heist scenes I can remember. Most cinematic swindles are preposterous by definition, since rarely could they actually happen in the real world, but at least most filmmakers create their own precise logic and shrewd calculation to make them feel involving. The big heist here is completely useless, skirting between tired slapstick and vapid burlesque. The details of the heist prove highly vague and implausible, and the main characters, except for one, don’t appear to have any visible skills or humorous personality traits that would serve them in a giant scheme. Of course the film is trying to (ineptly) poke fun at well-calculated heist flicks, but considering that Ted Griffin wrote Ocean’s Eleven, one of the finest heist films ever made, and Jeff Nathanson wrote Catch Me If You Can, one of the finest con capers in film history, its shocking how little brain power they show when they wrote this script together.

The big news with this film is the return of Eddie Murphy in a role that can showcase his edgy humor and allow him to, you know, swear quite a bit. Unfortunately, Murphy’s outing proves to be mediocre at best. His role is a victim of diminished screen time-a lot smaller than advertised-and a lack of powerhouse one-liners. Aside from a hilarious bit about lesbians, Murphy’s role doesn’t deliver the big laughs we expected. I think the problem is that Murphy’s street-wise criminal is made into too much of a zany weirdo where as most of Murphy’s best material pits him as the Smartest Man in the Room who has the stones and resourcefulness to tell off the bozos surrounding him.

Although Murphy fumbles, the rest of the cast skillfully conveys a delicate balance between working world anxiety and comfortable comic charm. Stiller brings a nice tension and weight to his usual shtick of a befuddled fool, although I wish his unhinged zaniness busted out here a lot more. Of course Alan Alda could teach a master class on loathsome condensation and pretty much does so here. Matthew Broderick does his best work in years as a canned-and-penniless Wall Street Insider who masks a lived-in intelligence under a shell-shocked self-pity. Tea Leoni is surprisingly lively as an FBI Agent, proving that she's at her most fun when she works with Ratner. And it must be said that Michael Pena playing a lovable goofball here gets more laughs than Murphy does.

Since Ratner has indulged in a bromance (Rush Hour), a crime procedural (Red Dragon), a star-wattage ensemble (X-Men: the Last Stand), a silly romp (Money Talks), and a heist flick (After the Sunset), even the most bitter cynics could hope that Ratner has grown as a filmmaker and could put everything he’s garnered into Tower Heist and make it an absolute blast. But even a casual fan like myself, who fully braced himself for a mindless romp, can’t help but notice what an empty experience this flick turns out to be. While most audience members may take some pleasure in the sticking-it-to-corporate-greed subtext, too many moviegoers will be rolling their eyes over the action and yearning desperately for more laughs.

'Moneyball' Strikes Out

by Brett Parker

The beauty of cinema is the way it can take ordinary and mundane things and make them more exciting than they appear in real life. What’s curious about Moneyball is the way it takes a fascinating subject matter and drains it of any serious kicks or vibes for the big screen. As far as baseball stories go, this one offers a very complex and meditative reflection on the modern state of the game. It’s just too bad that the filmmakers bog down the story’s perceptions with a tiresome vibe of self-importance.

Moneyball tells the story of Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), the General Manager of the Oakland A’s who was once a promising player but couldn’t buck his talents on the major league fields. Beane once again suffers wounding defeat after his team loses to the New York Yankees in the 2001 postseason. To make matters worse, the Yankees end up buying three of the A’s star players once they go to free agency. At the time, the A’s have one of the lowest payrolls in baseball and can’t afford big name players like the Yankees can. For the 2002 season, Beane struggles to assemble a team that can actually win on a bargain budget.

Beane finds hope in the form of Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a Yale economics graduate with a gift for mastering baseball statistics. Brand points out that players are better to be evaluated by their on-base percentage as opposed to their position performance. For walks and singles can lead to on-base runs, runs can lead to good numbers, good numbers can lead to high rankings, and so forth. With this newfound philosophy, Beane decides to fill his roster with cheap and flawed players who at least have the ability to get on base. Not only is this strategy unorthodox, but it threatens years of traditional baseball scouting. Can Beane pull off his newfound science in such a rigorously structured institution? Will this crazy new plan actually help the A’s obtain significant wins?

Although its a story composed mainly of stats and numbers, Moneyball is endlessly compelling in the way a traditional system was uprooted and changed on outlandish new terms. Even non-baseball fans can marvel at the shrewd calculation in which this system challenged the big business mentality of its own sport. So it’s a real shame how much this film slugs along, never realizing how lively its membrane could actually be. It’s clear that the film aspires to the system-changing excitement of The Social Network (obvious from Aaron Sorkin’s re-write of this script), but it lacks the wit, energy, and sparkle of that earlier film. Both movies take detailed looks at revolutionary systems of information, but The Social Network had a wicked humor and breathless inventiveness that Moneyball crucially lacks.

Perhaps the problem lies within the direction of Bennett Miller. Miller’s previous directorial effort was Capote, which also examined the bruising emotions beneath an America-shaking story. Miller highlighted such harrowing gloominess within that material, he made a disturbing story even more unsettling. Unfortunately, he appears to bring that same downer attitude to this movie. I noticed there were an abundance of shots featuring Brad Pitt sitting alone in turmoil. Miller sees Moneyball more as a disintegration of a pure game rather than a liberating rage against the cash machine. Too bad his vision doesn’t seem as entertaining as the latter avenue would be. It doesn’t help matters that Miller trucks in doses of sentimental profundity that befalls most baseball flicks. It’s movies like this that make me realize why Bull Durham is the Great American Baseball Film: it understands that baseball is typically more quirky and ironical than it is profound.

To understand that Steven Soderbergh was the original director of Moneyball is to understand the playful inspiration his version could’ve been loaded with. Soderbergh specializes in systems of manipulation and tends to enjoy the rogues and outcasts who get off on playing with them. While being a rebel can be isolating and taxing, Soderbergh understands that it can also be electric and exhilarating. If Beane and his cohorts held the smirking joy of Ocean’s Eleven or the goofball audacity of Mark Whitacre, then Moneyball would truly be a hoot of astonishing uniqueness.

What Miller does, in fact, get out of his version is fine performances from seasoned pros. Pitt always enjoys showing cracks in seemingly golden boys, and he’s superb here at exploring Beane’s wistfulness and desperation to win. Philip Seymour Hoffman is wonderfully convincing as A’s Manager Art Howe, conveying a poker-faced masculine authority thats great to relish. The best performance here comes from Jonah Hill as the shy-but-brilliant statistics nerd. It’s easy to see how Hill could’ve played up his usual geeky-shtick routine to milk laughs, but he instead puts forth a thoughtful performance based on masterful nuances and restraint. A scene in which he must break the news to a player that he’s been traded is a thing of subtle beauty.

The initial story and great performances would almost be enough to recommend this film, but its hard not to imagine the funny and liberating movie lost in translation. As it is, Miller’s Moneyball holds a competent bottom line that tells a complicated story in a thankfully coherent manner. I can imagine die-hard baseball fans getting a significant fulfillment out of this. Yet if the filmmakers were able to recognize the anarchic spirit and bruising humor apparent in the material, this could’ve been one of the finest baseball movies ever made.

A Movie That Needs 'Help'

by Brett Parker

Norman Jewison was the original director slated to take on Malcolm X, but a public outcry from the black community demanded that a black director take on a film regarding one of its biggest cultural heroes. Spike Lee eventually took the helm, stating that black stories should be told by black filmmakers. Indeed, whenever white directors take on stories of minority struggles, it feels as if touches of human experience seem to be somewhat lacking. There’s a certain authenticity that isn’t exactly there. White filmmakers can sympathize, empathize, and preach all they want, but at the end of the day, they’re still going home to a white world. There’s nothing wrong with a filmmaker stepping outside of his ethnic zone, but since there are many talented black filmmakers who would kill for a chance to tell their own stories with a Hollywood budget, why in God’s name would you not let them do so?

I propose these thoughts because they seem to represent the fundamental problem with The Help, a Hollywood-produced peak into racial struggles during the Jim Crow-period of the South. Here’s a movie centered on the hardships of black women thats been directed by a white man. Sure, Spielberg pulled off such a feat with The Color Purple as did Jonathan Demme with Beloved, but director Tate Taylor has only one other feature-length credit to his name (the comic dud Pretty Ugly People) and hardly seems experienced enough to pull of the tricky nuances this material demands. Taylor reportedly got the job because of his close friendship with the source novel’s author, Kathryn Stockett. It’s always great to help out your friends, but thats usually not the ideal way to have your writing translated to the screen. I love my friends, but if Hollywood ever comes knocking for my material, I’ll be begging for Crowe, Coppola, or Scorsese to helm.

The film takes place in 1960s Mississippi during racial segregation. Aibileen (Viola Davis) is a black housekeeper who looks after white families in the town of Jackson. Aibileen notices a pattern in her work: she raises her employers’ children with all the TLC she can give, yet they grow up to become ungrateful and obtuse adults like their parents anyways. Worse off than Aibileen is her best friend Minny (Octavia Spencer), who works for the cruel socialite, Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard). Hilly regards Minny as a soulless entity and heartlessly fires her over some racial nonsense.

Most of the white homeowners don’t regard their black staff as human beings with souls, a fact that catches the attention of Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone), a young aspiring journalist from the town of Jackson. In spite of opposition from her white peers, Skeeter decides to write a book about the everyday trials of the black maids, exposing their racial hardships to the world. The maids would love to finally tell their story, but they’re afraid it may anger their white bosses to the point of termination or worse. Can the maids vent their anger and concerns without endangering their well-being?

All the materials for a powerful film are staring us dead in the face, but Taylor has no clue how to make them pop with any cinematic energy. To be fair, the screenplay does bring dimensions to the Maid characters and highlights their amorally corrupt dilemmas rather adequately, but the film has a curious lack of urgency in presenting this story. Taylor claims that he grew up in Mississippi and was “co-raised” by black housekeepers, but the film doesn’t burn with the passion of a man who has seen a lot and has an important story to tell. He treats it as a familiar period story that should play out to its natural course with little fuss, as if Brett Ratner were directing a Henrik Ibsen play. Even a made-for-TV version employing maudlin sloppiness would grab a better reaction from us. Perhaps Taylor is trying to avoid racial awkwardness by being subtle, but it just makes the film more of a bore as it slugs along.

Whats telling is how excellent actresses with ace performances to burn occupy the forefront, yet are left hanging by incompetent direction. At a time when actresses complain about a lack of intelligent roles, here’s a bundle of them delivered with fierce independence yet without significant shape. Emma Stone, the patron saint of down-to-earth beauties, has all the pluck, wit, and irrelevance to pull off Skeeter, but too little a point is made of her rebelliousness and resourcefulness. Bryce Dallas Howard, who’s carved a career out of playing fragile sweethearts, excels impressively as a racist meanie, but she is simply drummed up to be a White Devil. Jessica Christensen shows wonderful comic timing in a very clunky creation of a not-all-white-people-are-bad role. Viola Davis shows grace and dignity as Aibileen, but the film only hints at the wells of her resentment and perceptions. The best performance comes from Octavia Spencer as Minnie, allowing the smarts, humor, and resentment of her soul to come shining through in a graceful manner you wish the film understood more.

Whats frustrating about Taylor’s incompetence is the fact that there’s an over-qualified candidate out there who would’ve made The Help way more entertaining than it turned out to be. Her name is Kasi Lemmons, and not only would her experiences as a black woman better serve the material, but so would her affectionate eye for dramatic material and the lyrically superb ways she presents them. Her work on the wonderful Talk to Me serves as a prime example of all the energy and identification she could’ve brought to this adaptation. Talk to Me was also a period piece revolved around black identity that was hilarious, bold, irreverent, insightful, heartbreaking, and enormously touching. These are traits The Help’s screenplay cries out for and Lemmons surely would’ve turned it into a powerhouse dramedy.

Of course the cinema would be a very boring place if filmmakers stuck only to stories centered around their own races and ethnicities. Since empathizing with other people is what cinema is all about, it can be vastly interesting when people bring their point-of-views to other races, pointing out certain specifics we may never have brought attention to. I’m just mystified that there’s a shortage of working female and black filmmakers at a time when great female and black stories are getting their chance to be told (is anyone else bothered by the fact that the Sex and the City movies were directed by a man?). There appears to be a curious double standard at play in Hollywood. No one made a fuss when Taylor Hackford decided to make Ray, but, as Charles S. Dutton pointed out, “if Spike Lee wanted to direct the story of Jackie Onasis, the idea would never make it out of the office where it was proposed.”

At the outset, The Help proposes healthy ideas about racial tolerance and does, in fact, put the audience in another person’s shoes. It’s how it puts you in those shoes that I have a problem with. If you like seeing live-wire actresses strive for great performances, then perhaps you’ll find some interest here, but a more heartfelt and provoking film could’ve come from this material. The most pleasure I took from this film is knowing that it will probably fuel one of Spike Lee’s kick-ass rants in the future!