Stranger than Fiction

This story about a tax accountant who realizes that he's in a story and about his struggle with and against that story. As stories go, this one is about as good as they come -- the filmic moments where technique overwhelms clarity are balanced by many other moments of beauty and clarity in the diegesis and the cinematography.

++++

Mutual Appreciation

The diegesis of Mutual Appreciation is modest, so modest that someone may be tempted to dismiss it as superficially concerned with inconsequential trivialities, but they would be wrong. While a few of the scenes and the moments feel limited by the youth and the angst of the particular characters, ultimately even those emotions and relationships end up feeling resonant like the rest of the mundane-but-profound story when framed in the confident script and frame of Bujalski

++++1/2

The Puffy Chair

A road trip with two brothers, an almost ex-girlfriend and a puffy chair present for dad lives up to all the potential that you might be able to imagine out of that equation. And more.

++++



(but seriously, this new cinema verite' tradition -- andrew bujalski, joe swanberg, miranda july -- shows some ridiculous realism, and the duplass brothers also don't mind throwing in a pretty enjoyable formula-driven story.)

Happy Together

Not just a movie about being one place and longing for another, and not just a movie about longing for a person you no longer are with (or should no longer be with), Wong Kar Wai manages to make a movie that is so specific about the experience of loss, longing and unhappiness that I believe that any patient viewer can be utterly empathic with a gay Chinese man stranded in a low wage job in Buenos Aires. The lavishly loving way that the camera treats the unromanticized world (a streetcorner, a narrow apartment, a restaurant kitchen, a lamp) sacramentally transforms my eyes just as much as it redeems this specific world and experience.

+++++

Battleship Potemkin

The storytelling sometimes feels belabored, the propaganda factor often feels shrill, but if you're in for the long haul, there are rewards throughout the duration of the movie. I'd either choose the shot from inside the funeral tent of Vakulinchuk (which reminded me of a medieval passion play -- by way of association through Bill Viola) or the overly indulgent montages which have the convincing effect of reconstructing many of the senses of the Odessa Harbor and the deck of the Potemkin by breaking down all the parts into close-ups and panoramas that can be reconstructed into a familiar sensory pastiche.

+++

The Curse of the WereRabbit

As is always the case with Wallace and Grommit, I laughed much more than my kids during this movie. The handcrafted ethos is inviting, the script is packed with such wittty cultural commentary, and my kids not only watch it wholeheartedly but get the cultural commentary.

++++

Rashomon

While the culturally specific stylizations of acting, directing and camera work may bump me out, the big questions in the story keep inviting me back in. By the end, I feel deeply satisfied to have watched a film that has wrestled well with questions like:

- are stories just lies we tell ourselves to feel better about our sins or are they simply a diversion from the relentless disappointments that life offer us?

- is there really any goodness in the world or is all goodness just self-serving pragmatism?