Buck

Religion, in its purest form, is improvised virtuosity in the face of everything. Buck is a virtuoso with horses, and by extenstion, people; consequently he shows us there's no difference between a horse and God. You don't need words to get there––in fact, its often best not to use them. Instead, "be gentle with everything you do, and firm in how you do it." A

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50/50

Any movie that is about death has a lot going for it, bravery-wise, since its not the most entertaining of topics. Then again, not every movie has Seth Rogen making jokes about skydiving with hookers, which, come to think of it, sounds like an awesome way of dying (if you're gonna go, go in style). This Bro-Com has its share of sentimental moments but they're balanced by characters who are self-centered, messy, and not particularly fun––Rogen excepted, obviously. Which is good, because making people look glossy in the context of our hardest question would be an egregious no-no. Seth Rogen needs to be in more movies being the moral. B

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Bill Cunningham New York

Fashion and socialites and hats: and yet every moment of this documentary gleamed with a joy that is the joy of living life with passion and ease, as does Bill Cunningham. The man is 80 years old and has been whisking around manhattan on his bicylce, morning, day, night, for decades, taking photographs of skirts and shoes and dresses and colors and the people who coincidentally wear them. Like a Zen Master who knows there's no such thing as enlightenment but only enlightening activity, he lives in a closet because "having a kitchen and dining room would be just two more rooms to clean." Instead of telling us that life is beautiful, Bill shows us, laughs, then gets on his bike to take more photos. A stupidly delightful film. A

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All Quiet On the Western Front (1930)

Leave it to Beaver meets sheer terror, of which some scenes are as awfu and numbing l to watch as anything filmed with much fancier Spielbergian gizmos. Guess that's because war is impossible to either describe or understand either in words or in moving pictures or in any way whatsoever. Yet between scenes of carnage the best reason given for war in the first place is "some mountain in France offended some field in Germany." The film won best picture and then nine years later... B 

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Rise of the Planet of the Apes

The first half was all about how big-brained apes think they're better than slightly-less-big-brained apes. The second half was The West Side Story––lots of Revenge, zero compassion and understanding. A good treatise, I guess, on why apes like us think war is the answer.  B- 

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Drive

What the fuck is wrong with L.A.? Always this tension between lizard-veined-humanity and a mammalian warmth trying to cross the street without getting run over.

Drive is voilent and rough but in a fetishized way, and, in the end, the violence is besides the point, though I could understand wanting to walk out because of its verging on flagrant gratuitousness. (If you think you want real violence, see Irreversible instead.) Yet it survives its own caricatures because it doesn't blink away the question of manhood. The extra-textual hot-pink lettering and an 80s soundtrack that would simultaneously feel at home in a German nightclub at 4am as it would in Miami, mixed with a smile from The Goz when he's not busy making things bleed reminds us that being a Man is full of all sorts of confused expectations. As an action movie for dudes, it's about a B-, but as a metaphor for living in the metaphor of L.A., it's an A. 

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Friday Night Lights: Season 2

Season 1 of Friday Night Lights was good television. Realistic. Dramatic. Inspiring. Entertaining. And still "television" because it didn't completely trust its viewership  to be smart enough to understand the more poetic elements, of which there were plenty. Tough being smart and entertaining, both, but season 1 did as good a job as possible, given the network framework. Which is why Season 2's shitting itself was so utterly dissappointing. Like breaking up with Tyra only to get stuck with Tyra's mom, who, to extend the metaphor, spends the entire season shitting herself–– as does every character. Every character began to stutter to announce ambivalence. Drama was replaced, in each and every episode, by melodrama, which is like replacing Prince Hal and Falstaff with the cast of Twilight. Complexity was replaced with easy resolution. Tension was replaced with characters slapping, punching, wrestling and running from and into each other. Sometimes they played football.

If someone walked in on me watching Season 2, I would explain, in unmitigated shame, "This isn't what it looks like." Even though it was exactly what it looked like. Were these like even the same writers that did this to me? So after two seasons of FNL, here's my plea to all television shows: if you're gonna be a crazy-melodramatic bitch, do it on the first date and spare us both from hope and the inevitable. D+

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Hugo

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Hugo is sweet and tender and trite and saccharine; its visual exhuberance is beautiful but its sentimental nostalgia overpowered me, like a young man who's spritzed himself a few too many times with his father's cologne. I, too, want to fear for my life druing a movie if a train is coming off the screen frame and right at me, but in Hugo, it only appears to be doing so––maybe I need to see the 3D version. But, regardless, isn't the art of the greatest magicians that which hides the illusion and avoids the temptation of self-referentiallity viz. you don't need a scene on a Parisian bridge where the characters say, earnestly, "Cinema is Special Place." Don't the great magicians know that any mention of their craft as illusion turns wonder into mechanical know-how, a metaphor made too literal throughout Hugo? Most people who didn't like Scorsese's Shutter Island thought it was too messy and weird; I loved that about it and dove right into the indulgences because suspension of disbelief is a viewer's responsibility. Avoiding explicit lectures about the greatness of movies is likewise the director's, and in Hugo, Scorsese too often mistook his director's chair for a podium. B-

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L'Age D'Or (1930)

1930 was just about the beginning of the modern era of film, though this one felt more like a silent picture that just happened to have some abstruse and lip-sync-esque dialouge every so often, not that it meant anything whatsoever. But however dated from a technical perspective, its subject matter was much naughtier than whatever came out of Hollywood for decades afterwards. Viz.: Cause and effect are unnecessary. So are the bourgeoisie and their lust for themeselves. Still, I like some things to kinda-sorta maybe not be really fucking weird. B- 

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Tabloid

Truthiness is Errol Morris's thing and he's great at relegating "truth" to the role of the diminutive. But unless the tabloids tricked me into believing too much of what they captured (viz. the porn shots, the bizzaro outfits) the virgin-whore who was our protagonist was less an ebodiment of the Far Edges of Truthiness than she was of Bat-Shit-Craziness. Which ropes us, the viewers, into the chair of voyeurism, tossing back popcorn while watching the horribly grotesque, sans any bit of compassion whatsover. Which consequently renders this documentary into the very eponymous thing it questions. B-

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Friday Night Lights: Season 1

How good can a show be that 1) takes place in the hell-hole of melodrama, i.e. highschool (in small-town Texas, no less 2) relies on football as its extended metaphor for life 3) contorts itself into the 45 minute arc with messy beginnings and clean resolutions and 4) asks its actors to stutter everytime they're conflicted––I'm talking to you, Saracen, Julie, Landry, Riggins, Street, Lyla--hell, everyone not named Mrs. Coach. So how good can a show like that be? Well, Slothrop was hootin' and hollerin' at the season's conclusion, nearly falling off his treadmill and breaking his face. So must be plenty good... somehow. B

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Seven Chances (1925)

With women in the role of Hitchcock's The Birds, this film Makes Kanye's "Golddiggers" look polite. And just imagine if we could hear what they were saying! A modern sensibility throughout despite appearances to the contrary. B 

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Kundun

A Christian version of Buddhism––e.g. "Lord Buddha"–– is entirely unappealing. So was the first half and its focus on reincarnation or How to Confuse Coincidence With Miracle. The second half, however, offered an important historical dramatization of China's aggression against Tibet, though given the liberties the film takes with religious interpretation, how's one to know the historical events were portrayed fairly? One of those boring and flawed films that is nonetheless necessary on that never-ending quest of getting edumacated. C 

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Page One

When Junior, who was born on Jan 1st, 2012, asks him what "newspapers" were, show him this film. Worth watching for David Carr alone, he being the paragon of journalism and truth, seems like. B/B+

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Friends With Benefits

It would take a sourpuss of dangerously epic proportion to complain about a movie in which Mila Kunis pounces around in her panties for just about the entire duration. B

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Poetry

A Korean grandmother signs up for poetry classes. You're bored already, aren't you, you judgemental ass. But yet this profound and difficult film is tender and so unapoleticaly harsh in its donkey-like refusal to look away from the tragedies that make up grandma's journey, that it demonstrates, cinematically, why art often must be difficult if it has any hope of being beautiful. This review comes with a serious slap upside  B+/A- 

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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The atmospheric concoction of a snowy white mixed with a gothy black makes for a sludgy gray mood that was the strength of the movie. Less heroic was a feminist philosophy that suggests, more or less, that "do unto others as they have done unto you" is the way? B

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Mission Impossible 4

Tom Cruise plays a fast processor for an audience clearly comprised entirely of slow processors. But how often do you get to watch porn with the whole family on Christmas? B-

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The Illusionist

If you've ever wondered what Bruce Springsteen's "Downbound Train"––i.e. the saddest song in the world––what it looks like in Cartoon form, wonder no more. A- 

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The Muppets

Bittersweet, this longing for the past. B- 

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