Irreviews

There are a tiny number of individuals in film for whom I make a point to try to see everything they are involved in. Brit Marling is one of them. She is a bold and talented screenwriter and she is an extremely fine actress with an amazing voice and presence. Her latest film, I Origins, was written and directed by one of her main collaborators, Mike Cahill, with whom she co-wrote the fantastic 2011 science fiction film Another Earth (which Cahill directed). I’ve been excitedly waiting for I Origins, and happily caught it a while back, on its opening night at Sunshine. Sadly, there were only about 15 people in the audience – I guess film dramas about laboratory nerds don’t really pack ’em in.

I Origins is a film about science, about love, about personality, and about the idea of reincarnation approached secularly. As this list implies, it’s quite an ambitious piece of work, and even though it doesn’t hang together perfectly and ultimately lacks the depth and profundity you anticipate from it, one can’t but be impressed by the quality and diversity of ideas present in the film. This web of ideas integrates smoothly, supported by strong dialog, dialog that’s courageous enough to realistically explore some pretty dry, technical and philosophical conversations. The first two-thirds of the film is a lovely character study about the nature of love and attraction, and about the nature of scientific thought and scientific pursuit. In its last third the film makes a somewhat sudden leap into what might be called a mystical paranoia thriller. Although the two sections are connected via various narrative threads, they unfortunately don’t fit together very well, and there’s a noticeable change (for the worse) in pacing, depth, and performances in the later section. That’s not to say it falls apart, indeed the last third is in many ways exciting and surprising. It’s just that as a whole, the film feels a bit discontinuous.

But what is consistent throughout the movie is Cahill’s remarkable ability to capture scenes and moments beautifully and memorably, especially at the various climax moments in the film – they might not fully take your breath away, but they come awfully close! And in addition, the same ubiquitously haunting quality that made Another Earth so intoxicating is also present in I Origins. These qualities are so striking that even with the film’s shortcomings they’re probably enough to make me watch the film again. That’s saying something!

As the scientist at the center of the story, Michael Pitt looks like no other science graduate student ever, with his Suit Supply outfits, his hipster glasses, his immaculate, super stylish hair, and his big, puffy, Thomas Hardy lips. However, he gives a really nice performance, in what strikes me as a rather difficult role. Astrid Berges-Frisbey was effective in her role, and was a near perfect piece of physical casting opposite Pitt.  Brit Marling is, as always, fantastic; I swear, in the scene where Pitt unexpectedly brings his wife (Berges-Frisbey) to the lab, where she and Marling meet for the first time, Marling turns in one of the most perfect pieces of acting I’ve seen in a long time. She takes films to a whole other place, I don’t know how else to describe it. The three leads form a subtle and multi-dimensional triangle that somehow manages to be both invigorating and elegiac at the same time. There really are no supporting players, but the incidental acting is solid.

In the final analysis, I Origins is sort of wonderful, but also a little frustrating. It drips with large swaths of quality – in its writing, casting, acting, scenes, ideas – but it also suffers from a kind of unevenness and discontinuity which puts a ceiling on the overall impact of the film. I would say that the positive qualities of this film clearly outweigh the negatives, and would definitely recommend I Origins. It’s still playing at Sunshine.

I tend to see movies as coming in two basic flavors. There are movies that tell a story and there are movies that somewhat passively invite the viewer to ponder certain ideas, emotions, concepts, or realities. The best films do both exquisitely (e.g. The Lives of Others). It is through this particular lens that I’m inclined to interpret Richard Linklater’s much praised film Boyhood.

Boyhood is an invitation to passively ponder childhood, in particular, an old fashioned, low-tech, small town, broken home, financially strapped childhood. It’s very effective; the main thing I took away from the film was a horrific reminder of why I don’t like to think about my own, wretched childhood as a slacking, misunderstood dreamer type, tormented by fucked up parents, jerky “mentors”, an emotionally and intellectually warped extended family, and a constantly upheaved residency pattern. I can’t say I found this aspect of the film all that pleasant to watch or to think about.

The film’s artistic gimmick – shot over 12 years, with the entire cast aging naturally – turns out to be amazingly impressive. It’s very true that this film has a sense of continuity to it that no other film could possibly have; it’s like physically living with the same family for 12 years, only compressed to under 3 hours, and honestly there is something incredibly and uniquely beautiful about this aspect of the film. But the pleasingness of that continuity comes from Linklater’s fantastic direction and well-defined artistic vision; shooting the same cast over 12 years is one thing, but making a movie out of it that is almost perfectly consistent visually and tonally is quite another. It’s this technical aspect of the film that makes it so pleasing and fun to watch. Linklater is one of the best and most original filmmakers out there, and it’s not surprising that it would he who attempts this kind of bold enterprise, and pulls it off so brilliantly. The film’s acting is superb across the board (again a testament to Linklater’s direction), and in particular the quality of performance and interaction of the two siblings as young children is simply fabulous.

I should also point out that the hauntingly moving song (Hero, by the band Family of the Year) that made Boyhood’s trailer so awesome is also featured, in full, in the film itself, again very movingly, as a kind of capstone montage, an emotional summary of the ideas and images in the film. It’s interesting how a movie and its music or a particular song can sometimes just merge so perfectly that you’re really not sure how much of what you liked about the film was actually how it set up the power of the music. I’ll always remember this film quite positively through its synonymousness with that particular song, even though I probably will never watch the film again.

But there are aspects to Boyhood which are less impressive. It is, again, very much a passive invitation to ponder the emotions and realities of boyhood. There’s no real story, and the main character Mason is, quite strangely, a bit of a non-participant in the film’s action. You get a better sense of many of the supporting characters than you do of Mason, and the result is a somewhat censored view of childhood. The kid is presented as a drifting leaf, blown this way and that by various assholes in his life (some belligerent, some insensitive, some benign-but-ineffective), but there is no sense of, and little detail concerning how he actually comes to be the young man he does in the end. For most of the film he’s a low-energy child who does very little except play video games, and then one day he “wakes up” as a confident, super-articulate, impossibly laid-back, hiply philosophical dude. Open questions abound about how this kind of super-self-possessed individual with cast iron emotional control and a profundity way beyond his years could emerge from a cold, empty, poor, disrupted, and violent childhood like the one he suffered. I’ve know various young people who emerged from such childhoods – some managed to mature in quite impressive ways, but they nevertheless still clearly bear the scars of their past struggles. In the final analysis, Boyhood’s main character just doesn’t seem that real to me, even though I kind of liked him in the abstract.

Boyhood is an egghead phenomenon here in New York City. IFC has had it on all screens for weeks, and it’s still selling out. We showed up an hour before the film on a Wednesday, only to find a line all the way down sixth avenue to get into the showing. It’s great for Richard Linklater, an immense talent who has always deserved widespread recognition as a one of the greatest filmmakers of his era. I personally think Boyhood is in many respects no where near his best work, as either a writer or a director – films of his like Before Sunrise, Waking Life, and School Of Rock eclipse Boyhood so thoroughly it’s hard for me to not feel a tad disappointed by this film. But setting aside that somewhat hypercritical feeling, Boyhood is very enjoyable to experience, and its 165 minute run-time does not feel overly long. I would definitely recommend it, but wait until the lines at IFC die down – it’ll be there forever, so there’s no particular rush.

My wife and I were resisting seeing Obvious Child but two things broke down our resolve. First, it was hanging on at Angelika for weeks and weeks, still drawing large crowds of hip, excited New Yorkers, almost as if word had gotten out in some fashion; this in itself is of course not full-proof evidence that it’s a decent film – New Yorkers did the same thing last year at IFC for that wretched piece of shit Francis Ha. But then we noticed in the lobby of Angelika a short, poster-board review of Obvious Child which had a very strange and provocative piece of its text printed in bold type: referring to the film’s star Jenny Slate, the bolded text said “her hair is phenomenal”. Naturally this made Obvious Child irresistible, and the very next day we were in there watching it.

Obvious Child was way better than either of us thought it would be. The film managed to build a very sweet love story around an abortion, as well as unabashedly advancing the idea that abortion is a good thing, both for individuals and for society. The attitude toward abortion is extraordinarily sane, and there is not one single jerk in the movie talking about “murder”. This take some guts, as well as a good deal of skill, to pull off as well as they did. I didn’t find the film hilarious, but it is extremely cute and enjoyable, and did have many funny moments. What I liked best about it was that it was not the same old recycled comedic crap that is regularly pumped out of the Hollywood bilge pipe. The story and the dialog, while not spectacularly innovative, are well-written, fresh, diverting, and fun to experience. Jenny Slate gives a wonderful and very natural performance, and my wife and I agreed that her hair was indeed “phenomenal” throughout the entire movie, which is a undeniable bonus.

I totally recommend Obvious Child. It’s a lot of fun, and very sweet.

Sociopolitical science fiction has been all but dead for a long time now. For fifty years, there’s been no successor to the horrifying visions of writers like Orwell, Bradbury, and Huxley, and at the same time those visions have somehow become redefined in the popular consciousness as passé. Prophetic works like 1984 are taught in school curriculums which nevertheless turn out generations of unfeeling, unthinking consumers completely at home in totalitarian structures and welcoming of uncountable tyrannies. But in the last few years, science fiction cinema has started to come to life, with a new set of prophetic messages, not as subtle or profound as their predecessors, but definitely more narrowly focused and direct. They range in quality from quite good (In Time) to piss-poor but well-meaning (Elysium, The Matrix), and many layers in between. Snowpiercer is the latest. I would place it solidly at the good end of the spectrum.

Like these other recent, sociopolitical sci fi films, Snowpiercer is a pretty straightforward allegory, one that uses the issue of global warming as a narrative catalyst. Basically, the greed of ultra rich corporate fuckers drive the earth’s ecosystem right over the edge, and then in desperation, science creates a compound to be released into the atmosphere that will bring the warming of the earth to “manageable” levels. But the scientists miscalculate its effects, and the earth freezes, killing everything on it. This scenario strikes me as entirely plausible, even rather likely the way we’re going, and this instantly predisposed me to like this film. The story takes place on a perpetual motion train (invented around the time of the disaster) circling the world endlessly, which becomes the only habitable place on earth, sustained by a variety of technological innovations. It’s one of the most unusual and coolest setting concepts I think I’ve ever seen.

The train society is set up like feudal society: everyone in their proper place – the rich on top, owning all the wealth, privilege, and luxury; a class of administrators who manage the society (meaning: keep the rich in power and keep the scum face down in the mud), and the “scum” themselves, the untouchables, who have nothing. This lowest caste, who ride in the very back of the train in super-horrifying conditions, decide they want to break out of their station and change train society forever. Of course, this train society is exactly like the global manifestation of modern capitalist democracy (except there a lot more of us “scum” riding in the back of our train!), and I think that’s partly the point of the film. But the film also shines as a straightforward action thriller, one that is so fresh and unusual you have no idea what is going to happen, second-to-second, for the entire length of the movie. The film is paced rapidly and jam-packed with ideas, character development, and genuine surprises. There’s no trace of laziness in this writing, in fact it’s remarkable how few loose ends there are in the story. The arc of the narrative is very satisfying, and although no one would call this film an “upper”, in the end it leaves a surprisingly good taste in your mouth, a tribute to the excellent execution of this very cool and original story idea.

The main character is played extremely well by Chris Evans, who before all his mindless, trashy, comic-book movie rolls, was in the very interesting and subversive film The Perfect Score about the horrors of the SAT. The film’s many important supporting performances are uniformly strong, especially Octavia Spencer, who breaks out of her unfortunate Hollywood type-casting to play a marvelously warm, tough and confident heroine. (I wish poor Viola Davis could somehow find a film in which to do the same thing!)

I’m going to stop here, so as to not give anything away. Snowpiercer is really fantastic! I highly recommend it!

Edge of Tomorrow is Groundhog Day, set in a futuristic battle with aliens. The gimmick dominates the whole movie, together with Tom Cruise doing his “charming” thing, and it keeps you interested for at least two-thirds of the film, after which you start to glaze over a little bit. But there are additional problems. The aliens look kind of fake, and all the action concerning them happens so fast you can’t even see what’s going on – it gets tiring. And once the novelty of the gimmick wears off (about half way through), it’s perfectly clear what the rest of the movie will entail, and so in the end the film feels quite long and unsurprising. (A good contrast would be the concurrently playing  Snowpiercer, where you have no clue what’s going to happen the entire course of the movie, and are thus completely riveted.) Plus, Edge of Tomorrow has no ideas and nothing to say about anything; it’s a narrative gimmick, combined with CGI robot fighting scenes, nothing more. Tom Cruise is passable in a familiar roll for him: arrogant goofball turned hero. The magnificent Emily Blunt has absolutely nothing to do in this movie, but in Hollywood terms this film is (sadly) a big step up for her, so I guess congratulations are in order.

It’s a summer popcorn movie. Enjoy it for what it is.

Begin Again is a movie about the joy of making music and living a life enriched by music. It’s a movie that captures the roll pop music used to play as a bonding agent between humans, especially romantically, and offers up the happy and encouraging idea that music could still play that role in people’s lives. And it’s a movie that has the balls to make a declaration about where pop music has “gone wrong”, who is to blame, and what is to be done about it. It has its flaws to be sure, and I’m not at all certain its theories are correct, but it was a pleasure to watch a film that actually caused real, honest-to-goodness thoughts in my brain afterward – after what has been the most uninspiring and dispiriting six months of movies that I can remember, this film lifted my spirits quite a bit, and I actually felt some excitement about the prospect of reviewing it.

Some may dismiss this film as strictly a “feel good” enterprise, but it makes you want to start a rock band and record music, so it must have done something right. The various scenes of recording music have a great deal of charm and energy, and are fun to watch. The architecture of the story is quite good, with interesting characters and lots of opportunity for substantive interaction between them. And the film’s theme – the power of music, and more generally of artistic expression, in people’s lives – is not only very compelling, but also rarely explored in films. Where Begin Again is less successful is in the writing particulars. Dialog and scene structure frequently come across as clunky and amateurish, and although it manages to create a lot of would-be powerful emotional moments between characters and for characters, it doesn’t earn those moments, and thus they fall flat and disappoint. It also rides its music a bit too much, both the original score and the soundtrack.

This film benefits tremendously from the electrifying presence of Mark Ruffalo and Keira Knightley. People are finally becoming aware now of how great Ruffalo is, not just his acting talent, but his whole fabulous persona of the sexy-seedy, middle-aged stud with awesome hair. But Keira Knightley has long been an unsung favorite of mine who I felt had never gotten a true chance to shine. This film might be as close as she’ll ever get, and that incredibly natural, inviting energy that she emits on-screen is both fully evident and well-exploited. Supporting performances are on the whole quite solid. So this film is something of a mixed bag – fantastic stars, fun music and great themes, but sub-par writing and execution. As my wife summarized it: “It’s hard to see a film with this much going for it fail to rise up and be truly great”. I completely agree.

What gives Begin Again a bit of additional weight as a movie is that it also has the guts to make an unambiguous statement about the record industry and the future of pop music. Its statement is that record companies are nothing but parasites on artists, and it proposes a guerrilla approach to music making, exploiting powerful music software on laptops, and centered ultimately on selling music direct to the consumer. I’m certainly sympathetic to this basic idea, especially as a guerrilla composer of pop music myself. But where this film gets a little confused is in what it thinks record companies are not doing. In the beginning of the film, there is some lip service paid to the idea that record companies no longer develop and nurture musical talent, instead focusing on identifying pieces of visual human product to market to tweens. This idea is quickly dropped, however, in favor of a “fuck-em, do it yourself” attitude that posits that the music industry is not merely broken or corrupt, but actually an outmoded and moribund concept, rendered archaic and pointless by consumer music technology. This makes no sense in the context of the story, of course, because Ruffalo himself is a highly skilled part of the record industry, working pro bono, as it were, and the band’s fabulous bass player and drummer were only involved via his considerable connections within in the music industry. Sure, Keira Knightley can say “fuck the music industry”, because she’s getting its considerable fruits totally for free!

It’s easy to see where this “fuck-em” attitude comes from, when you ponder the astronomically expensive studio time and production talent that is showered on the revolting, auto-tuned rubbish of the last 15 years. But this war between soulless record companies and rebellious artists is actually a trilateral war, featuring a third camp whose views are left out of this film’s theories: this third camp feels that record companies are broken and corrupt, perhaps irredeemably so, but feels that guerrilla music making on no budget does not really solve the problem, because although it’s clearly possible now to make music that way, you’re never going to make Rumors that way; you’re never going to make Songs in the Key of Life that way, or Thriller, or Aja, or Sergeant Pepper, or Born to Run, or Hotel California, or Dark Side of the Moon, or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. You might make Nebraska that way, but you’ll never make Darkness on the Edge of Town.

I actually reside in this third camp, and feel that Begin Again itself contributes toward proving my point: that the problem with pop music is both deeper and of a different sort than the view put forth in this film. Consider: the music in this movie might be better than auto-tuned dog-shit like Katy Perry, Beyonce, Demi Lovato, Lady Gaga, or whoever. But it still shares the exact same advanced state of decay that all modern pop music has for the last 15 years: lazy repetitiveness; lack of lyrical structure and cohesive integration with the music; reliance on a tiny and ever-shrinking set of harmonic and melodic motifs, hooks and tricks; extreme rhythmic banality; uninteresting and unoriginal vocal technique; and so on and so forth. The film’s songs are okay, I guess, but they all sound basically the same, they use the same tiny handful of musical ideas, and they are, in the end, kind of boring, in pretty much the same way a Katy Perry song seems catchy at first and then quickly winds up being boring.

Try an experiment. Watch Begin Again in a movie theater so you can really hear its music, and then go home and listen once through to Traci Chapman’s Revolution or Baby Can I Hold You through really good headphones, and then see if you can still sing one fucking song from this movie! Try it with The Pretenders’ Human or Back on the Chain Gang. Try it with 10,000 Maniac’s Hey Jack Kerouac. Try it with Kirsty MacColl’s Halloween. Try it with Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Rhythm of the Blues. Try it with Blondie’s Dreaming or Union City Blue. And I’m limiting my list to golden-age female pop acts that are roughly comparable to Keira Knightley and her band. Trust me, if you try my experiment you will be absolutely shocked. I sat there alternately laughing and crying as I listened, sadly, to how great pop music used to be – lyrically, melodically, thematically, sonically – and thought about just how much has been lost. Getting it back is way harder than John Carney realizes, and is not simply a matter of everyone recording their shit on laptops and giving it away on the net.

Begin Again: It’s entertaining and thought provoking. I recommend it!

My wife and I finally caught up with The Fault in Our Stars at the 19th St. theater last night. We had been avoiding it (even though my wife loved the book) because of its poor critical reception and uninspiring trailer. It turns out that once again those two barometers are very questionable measures of whether a film is worth seeing. The Fault in Our Stars is actually an enjoyable, decently-made film; it’s not spectacular, but it’s definitely worth seeing.

I was expecting The Fault in Our Stars to be a real tearjerker – indeed, I was looking forward to a good cry – but although the story was fairly compelling, I didn’t cry or even choke up once, and even though the audience all around me was blubbering, I attribute this mostly to their over-excitement at watching movie that was not centered around robot combat or middle school potty-humor. Or perhaps it was simply the formidable bond that’s forming between Shailene Woodley a large numbers of young women in society. The story seems to be architected really well, with wonderful and interesting main characters, but somehow the film doesn’t quite gel emotionally. It’s partly because the screenplay lacked a certain sophistication and depth, partly because the pacing seemed a bit off at key moments, and partly because its manipulation of its soundtrack was a bit too conspicuous (a Cameron Crowe soundtrack would have done wonders for this film).

On the way home after the film, I found myself fondly remembering the almost identically-themed My Life Without Me, an absolute masterpiece of cinema which I would consider to be the ultimate, perfected form of this kind of story; I started to cry right on the street just remembering the incredible scene where Sarah Polly has to let Mark Ruffalo go, right after his amazing “I’m classically in love” speech, a scene so emotionally devastating it tears your heart out. The Fault in Our Stars is very, very far from achieving this depth of emotional resonance, somehow.

But The Fault in Our Stars definitely has its merits. The first is Shailene Woodley, a compelling young actress with an easy, natural talent and a great voice, who thankfully is so far eschewing Batman and Spiderman movies in favor of rather small, gutsy dramatic roles. She provides a very appealing and stable center for what is a lovely, moving and completely uncynical depiction of average kids falling in love and dealing with life’s difficulties. Her co-star Ansel Elgort gives a very interesting, unaffected performance that takes a while to grow on you, but which totally wins you over in the end. The Fault in Our Stars is a good story, charming and funny at times, somewhat surprising, sad but uplifting, and always very human and honest. It’s quite enjoyable, even though it never quite achieves the emotional peak it was clearly striving for.

If you like this genera of movies, I would ignore the critics and give The Fault in Our Stars a chance.

I caught a sneak preview of Hellion at IFC last night, which featured Aaron Paul and director Kat Candler in a Q&A afterward. I guess I’m a little out of it, because I didn’t anticipate it would be such a scene, with ecstatic hipster groupies forming an endless line up Sixth Avenue to see Jesus. It was quite funny to observe them, actually, because most clearly had no idea what this movie was about, and upon discovering (part way into the film) that it was this gritty, depressing tale of fucked up parents and children in poor, southeast Texas, and that Aaron Paul hardly had any lines and didn’t look particularly cute, they were leaving the theater to visit the bathroom at a rate I’ve never seen equaled in all my years of movie-going. Afterward, though, they happily got what they came for, and Aaron Paul was gracious and generous with his time, even taking many “selfies” with the audience.

The movie itself was basically entertaining, with good performances, a well-plotted and sometimes exciting narrative, a good sense of place, and a gritty, direct approach to tough, emotional subject matter. Pacing was a bit slow overall, but not unbearably so. But like so many modern indie films, it also suffers from an overemphasis on literal realism, and a minimalist attitude to dialog and character development, together with a corresponding lack of narrative texture and idea exploration. The father is pretty much a total mystery man with almost nothing to say, the nature of his relationship to everyone else in the film (his sons, his sister-in-law, his best friend, and even his deceased wife) barely sketched. The film’s main character – the “hellion son” – while developed nicely in certain ways, is himself a bit of a mystery, with key things like his interest and skill in racing, his prior relationship with his dad and his aunt, and the nature of his attitude toward his younger brother left unspecified and unexplored. And the key supporting character of the fat, violent kid is for the most part undeveloped, rendering his actions (and their effects) a bit confusing. This lack of detail limited the film’s impact considerably, as there was relatively little information to serve as a bonding agent between the main characters and the audience.

Basically, the story holds your attention and you admire this film’s honesty and integrity, but at the same time the characters are not as compelling as they should have been, and the film is not all that rewarding to watch. Compare this film to the identically-themed film In a Better World, for example, which managed not only to paint (through fabulous dialog, of course) a very satisfying psychological portrait of all the characters, children and adults alike, but also managed to take its various character-based plots and simultaneously extrapolate them to a commentary on universal themes of human existence. In a Better World stays with you, powerfully, and can be watched over and over, whereas with Hellion you watch it once and you’re done with it. This is not to heap abuse on Hellion, but the comparison does highlight the inherent limitations of the various tropes and fads which currently plague the indie scene (mainly: excessive realism and dialogic minimalism.)

I should also mention that the music in Hellion was a problem. It has a loud, irritating death-metal soundtrack, chosen to make the film more intense, but the film is already quite intense by virtue of its hard-hitting subject matter, and I think in the end it was overkill. The music alone is enough of a reason for me to avoid seeing this film a second time – whatever they think was was gained by choosing this particular soundtrack, it was not worth the price of further grating their audience’s already jangled nerves.

Candler got great performances from all five kids, none of whom had acted before; their group scenes, their easy banter and chemistry, were for me the most enjoyable and impressive part of the film. Aaron Paul gives a quiet, serious performance, but the aforementioned cursoriness of his character worked against him, his lines almost entirely limited to grunted banalities like “come here”, “sit down”, “you need to eat something”, “watch your language”, “we gotta do better”. Juliette Lewis was quite good in her limited role as the boys’ aunt.

I would sort of recommend Hellion, as long as you don’t mind a really grating soundtrack. It’s a pretty well-made film and a good story, certainly worlds better then the shit that Hollywood is churning out this year.

My wife and I went to Night Moves at Angelika with fairly limited expectations. Jesse Eisenberg is not a favorite of ours, but Dakota Fanning is a favorite of ours, and Peter Scarsgard is usually a pretty good quantity in films as well, and we hoped it would at least be a somewhat tense and exciting thriller. Night Moves actually exceeded our expectations by a good bit, but not in a way we expected.

The film was actually not that much of a thriller, but it wound up being a nice little portrait of earthy-crunchy, social activist hippies (both crazy and sane) living in yurts the middle of nowhere, struggling to survive, and resenting almost everyone. The three main characters become fixated on a small, aging dam on a local river, and decide to blow it up as a way to strike back at yuppies who, in Eisenberg’s words, only care about powering their iPods. It’s a ridiculous notion, to be sure, but one that both contains a (tiny) gain of truth, and which also comes across as very believable sentiment for rural, agricultural people living a disconnected, oppressed existence. When they do bomb it, something goes wrong, and their little world starts to unravel.

There are some really nice things in this film. The mental dissolution of the three is captured really well, as are their varied attempts to cope with their horrible situation. The culture of life out on a self-sustaining bio-dynamic farm is even more beautifully captured – indeed, the juxtaposition of this life with the violent political delusions of the three main characters is quite fascinating to ponder. The dialog is a little skimpy, but what is there is well-written, and Eisenberg, Fanning, and Scarsgard give excellent, understated performances, as do all the supporting actors.

Night Moves is well worth catching, if you like a slow, brooding sociopolitical movie that is also an interesting character study. I definitely recommend it.

Cold In July is a story set in 1989 about a small-town picture framer (Michael C. Hall) who kills a nighttime intruder in his home by shooting him in the head, then gets stalked and terrorized by the dead man’s crazy father (just out of prison), and who then learns that the guy he killed was not the crazy guy’s son after all, a revelation which leads them both on a journey into a world of lies, crooked deals, corruption, insanity, violence, and mayhem. It’s an outstandingly fun and unusual film, one that I highly recommend.

This film’s spirit, and to a certain extent its story, owe a strong debt to the 1980s masterpiece Body Double by Brian De Palma, an inspiration that it lives up to (and even quotes, at one point) without ever spoofing or ripping off it’s partial predecessor. I would even say that Cold in July is a bit of a paean for that bygone era. 80s cultural icons Sam Shepard and Don Johnson were disintered for two of the three leading roles, and they are both fabulous in their parts, especially Shepard, who really deserves some kind of award for his performance. The film has a 80s synthesizer score that reminds you just how marvelous and effective those old synthesizer scores were (and how surprisingly well they’ve aged). It even looks like an 80s movie – the graininess, the color saturation, the inspired camera angles, the cool visual composition of scenes – a look that is a welcome contrast to the grey/brown video-game look of modern Hollywood movies. I should add that Michael C. Hall was outstanding in the lead role, delivering a performance that reminded me so much of particular people I grew up with in the 1980s it was unreal.

This film is remarkable in so many ways! The screenplay is paced with a brisk perkiness, and despite the dark, violent direction the film takes it somehow never becomes ungrounded (indeed, it’s even a bit moving in the end,) nor does it ever lose its very pleasing, 80s artistic flair. They somehow managed to make it stylized without ever seeming so, really funny without overreaching or overplaying anything, surprising and ironic without being manipulative. Plus, it’s just plain fun, start to finish. It’s the first movie of the year that I really found myself thinking about for days afterward, the first movie of the year I would even consider for an award. I dragged my wife to it two days later, and she loved it as much as I did.

Cold in July is still hanging on at IFC, and I encourage you to catch it on the big screen while you still can! It’s really great!