The Next Best Films of 2014

I saw around 100 movies that opened in 2014, which is a pretty typical year for me.  Rarely less than 90, hard to see more than 120.

Of those 100 movies. Boyhood is the best.

Here are the next dozen or so movies that I consider to be my 90th percentile for the year:

2.  Whiplash

This is the one other film from 2014 that I've seen twice, though it's possible there are one or two others I'd try to see again.

JK Simmons won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and the film also won Oscars for editing and for sound mixing.

Simmons is the leader of the top ensemble at a Juilliard-like performing arts school, and Miles Teller is a student who yearns to be playing drums in this ensemble.  And the two are both crazy.  Simmons might be an actual psychopath, or he might just take a little bit too seriously the idea that you've got to tear down in order to build up.  Which, just to say, is the entire premise behind boot camp for the US armed forces.  But what would drive Miles Teller's student to put up with this?  He's obsessed in his own way, firm in his belief in a youthful romanticism where it's clearly better to be famous and dead than a living nobody.  Which belief he'll happily advertise to his girlfriend, to family at a holiday dinner, to anyone -- though there are so few people who want to be around someone so obsessed that his world is defined entirely by the JK Simmons character.

Simmons is a long-time character actor who's done great work in films like Juno and who hits it out of the park here.  Teller is one of the best young actors around, who amazed in The Spectacular Now and amazes again here.

The film's technical excellence is key to its success.  We have to hear the music, the drums, the subtle change in tempo from one playing of the riff to the next.  And its edited to within an inch of its life, especially in the closing ten or fifteen minutes.

It's in those final minutes that we finally come to understand why these two characters are together. JK Simmons' entire life relies on Miles Teller for validation.  If Teller isn't a great drummer, then there's no mark left on this world for all of Simmons' teaching career.  And Teller can only survive if there's someone to appreciate the greatness he yearns to have.  They might hate one another forever and always, but they need one another as deeply as life itself.

3 & 4

American Sniper & Interstellar

Like Boyhood, Interstellar kept me going for some three hours without much looking at the watch.  The story may or may not make sense.  Belay that; like most time travel the story is a mess when you sit down and think about it.  But it's imaginative and different.  The acting might be better than the movie deserves.  The effects are well-done without ever feeling like video games.  Hans Zimmer provides good musical accompaniment.  I'd be interested to see how it holds up on a second viewing.

And American Sniper hasn't quite left my mind in the month since I've seen it.  If anything, its call seems to be getting louder as the days go by.  Bradley Cooper's performance as the Chris Kyle is sensational.  He submerges himself in the role.  There's no trace of the Bradley Cooper in Silver  Linings Playbook.  There's just this man in this role.  The direction by Clint Eastwood does good service to a script that manages to glorify the lead character's actions in Iraq while being unflinching in its depiction of the damage to the character and his marriage on the home front.  As such, it's pro-war and anti-war and can be read as one wishes.  It's quiet, powerful film-making, another demonstration of Clint Eastwood's stature as one of the leading directors of the past three decades.

And in no particular order:

The documentaries Citizen Four, Remote Area Medical, Elaine Stritch Shoot Me and Life Itself.

Citizen Four won the Oscar.  Set mostly in a single hotel in Hong Kong during the days when Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's spying programs were beginning to be reported.  It works on multiple levels.  Snowden is someone who understands in abstract and theory the risks of what he's doing who in a matter of days comes to understand the reality of it.

Remote Area Medical is a little-seen movie which depicts one weekend of free medicine at a NASCAR track by the Virginia/Tennessee border.  Who are the people who'll line up in the dead of night for the opportunity to have someone look at their teeth or their eyes?  Who are the people who'll give up a weekend to provide the necessary services?  The documentary never stops to score political points.  It lets the footage speak for itself.  I'm the kid who grew up fixated on the behind-the-scenes aspect of things, the secret corridors at Disneyworld or the secrets of putting up skyscrapers or bridges, or the secrets of making Kermit ride a bike.  The film appealed to the kid by spending lots of time on the logistics of the clinic while simultaneously appealing to the adult who's thinking about the policy issues of our health care system.

The Elaine Stritch movie is very narrowly tailored for people who like showtunes, and isn't quite on a league with the other two.  But the film is such a perfect embodiment of its subject that I feel it deserves mention.

Life Itself is the documentary about Roger Ebert that was overlooked entirely by the Oscars.  It's from the director of Hoop Dreams, another documentary that the Oscars overlooked which was fiercely advocated by Ebert.  In spite of, or perhaps because of, the level of trust between the subject and the filmmaker, it stays just shy of hagiography, taking pains to ask if not to fully tackle questions raised by Ebert's career (prime example, how close to the filmmakers he critiqued should Ebert be?).  Which is fine in the end, because there are people who are better than the rest of us, and Ebert was clearly one of them.

Fault in Our Stars and Edge of Tomorrow

If only every movie for teens could be as good as Fault in Our Stars, and every sf adventure as good as Edge of Tomorrow.

Fault in Our Stars has an excellent cast, in both the primary and supporting roles, holds some surprises to those who haven't read the book, and elicits tears without ever being too (or at least not too too) blatantly manipulative.  Edge of Tomorrow falters a bit in its final scene which is poorly set up, poorly blocked, and thus incoherent, but before then...  Tom Cruise gives a performance with surprisingly little ego, well-matched by Emily Blunt and by a script that is unusually intelligent for the sf action movie.

Locke.

So it's basically a guy talking in a car for 90 minutes.  And I don't think you'll ever find the concept done better than this.  Tom Hardy shows he's much more than Bane.

Nightcrawler

Fierce acting by Jake Gyllenhaal and Rene Russo helps cover any ethical uncertainties in the script.  And from a co-writer of Freejack!

Gone Girl

Good performances, a surprisingly puckish sense of humor, Hollywood gloss at its best and most powerful.

Pride

Surprisingly good, based on a true story of gay & lesbian Londoners coming to the aid of striking miners during the Thatcher era.  Paint-by-numbers as based-on-true-story movies often are, but the quality of the performances and of the script put it well above average in the genre.

Oscars 2013

My reviews of some of the Oscar-nominated movies:

Argo, Flight

The Master

Life of Pi, Anna Karenina, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Skyfall

Wreck-It Ralph

Silver Linings Playbook

Lincoln, The Impossible

Django Unchained, Les Miz, Zero Dark Thirty

Amour and No

And my Live Blog of the Oscar Telecast:

12:20 am -- the telecast

In recent years I've felt as if the Oscars were often a little bit perfunctory, checking boxes and doing what you do without any thought or passion.  There will never likely be the perfect Oscar telecast.  It can't redeem itself like the Grammys or the Tonys can with live performances.  I'm fairly certain the Academy will be respectful enough of the art of film that the awards nobody cares about will continue to be on the show.  There's only so much you can do and still do the show.  Within those limitations, I thought this year's broadcast was quite well done.  Like Argo, there were things the people making the show wanted to do, and for the most part they did them well.  They wanted to focus on music, they did that, they did it well. The transition to Barbra's number from the In Memoriam.  Doing the music with taste and respect.  Seth McFarlane wasn't fantastically great, but he was fairly solid all the way through, and for a first time doing a a gig like this I thought quite a respectable job of it.  There were weak moments with some of the presenter patter, aren't there always, but also nice touches like having the college kids helping out on stage and seeming really happy to be there when we got those little glimpses of them along the way.  Simply put, I felt something coming back from the show, I felt some love and appreciation and happiness for people to be doing what they were doing, and I haven't felt anything like that from the telecast itself in years.

12:10 am -- and so to close...

If you want to think on the art of acting, look at the people who won this year.  I did not warm up to Daniel Day-Lewis early in his career, My Left Foot wasn't that good in my opinion and was so much one of those "play disability, win award" movies.  But can you look at two performances in two movies like There Will Be Blood and Lincoln and think that you're seeing the same person?  Can you watch Lincoln and not feel like you're watching Abraham Lincoln? His acceptance speech was brilliant. And oh, he completely submerges himself in his roles, and leaves only the role behind.  Or Jennifer Lawrence, in The Hunger Games and in Silver Linings Playbook or in Winter's Bone ??  These people know what they are doing, they do it beautifully.

For Best Picture.  I don't know if Argo is exactly the best picture of the year, sometime over the next week maybe I'll blog on that subject.  But it was certainly the best for what it was of the films it was competing against.  A studio product as that used to be meant in the best sense of the word.  Suspenseful, not a movie to have you looking at your watch, filled with good actors (Victor Garber was also in the previous Best Picture winner Titanic, just to say), reflective of its vision.  Every other movie that was nominated, I can think of something not to like.  Amour, lost of things.  Beasts, lots of things.  Zero Dark Thirty was over-long, Silver Linings too dependent on its cast, Lincoln a bit long and sometimes dull, Pi had a bit of a weak spot in Rafe Spall and less to say than it thought, Les Miz was imperfect and Django as well.  But I can't think of anything about Argo that I'd wish to have been different than it was, not at the time I saw it and not in hindsight or retrospect  Best is such an objective thing, but I think Argo was certainly the best and fullest realization of what it was intended to be.  The acceptance speech was very well handled, with George Clooney content not to say anything and the omission of Ben Affleck from the Director nominations handled well

11:39 pm -- I like Bailey's, their ad makes me never want to drink it again, it so isn't anything about the drink that makes me interested in it.

11:37 pm -- Why is Seth McFarlane making so many jokes about how late it is or how ong the evening is going on?  This is no longer or shorter than pretty much any Oscar show, in fact shorter than many.  And for the most part, going down pretty smoothly.  This isn't the time for self-denigration.

11:35 pm -- Life of Pi and Argo were both director's movies, and Argo wasn't an option in this category, so it's nice to see Ang Lee winning.  This was a movie about finding the right writer and approach to the adaptation, about the craft of the movie in every way, about the integration of technology and old-fashioned story-telling, about the sense of wonder that great movies can provide.  I wouldn't have minded if Spielberg won, Lincoln wasn't as good as Pi but was a director's movie.  Silver Linings Playbook, you need a good director to put actors in all four of the acting categories.  But Life of Pi feels right for this.

11:34 pm -- Jane and Michael walk out to a few bars from Nobody Does it Better !!

11:30 pm -- OK, as a fantasy fan I should appreciate all the mentions of unicorns in this Samsung Galaxy ad, except that I'm not sure what the connection is between unicorns and cell phones.  Unless unicorns are regular creatures that used cell phones too much and got horn cancer as a result of having all that cell phone radiation too close to their horns?

11:26 pm -- Django and Argo each take 2nd Oscars in the Screenplay categories.  It is so nice to see the happiness and excitement on the face of a Chris Terrio as he accepts for Argo.  Django was nothing if not original, so that's a deserved win, and I'm glad to see Tarantino recognize the importance of the actors who bring his roles to life.  Looking over the nominees in both categories, I'd say best man wins, certainly in the Original Screenplay category where I don't think any of the scripts other than Django were that powerful.

11:19 pm -- As we head into the final categories, the love is being very well sporead.  3 each for Life of Pi and Les Miz, 2 for Skyfall, Argo and Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty and Django all have one award.

11:18 pm -- Samsung has spent so much money on such awful ads during the Oscars.

11:12 pm -- I can't complain to have Michael Danna win for Score.  He's done a lot of nice music with not a lot of recognition, especially for director Atom Egoyan and more and more in recent years for other directors.  I still wish Wreck-It Ralph were in the mix, but I am genuinely pleased that this composer is going to have a little gold guy on his shelf.

11:10 pm -- Original Score is one category where I feel a strong snub, that the score for Wreck-It Ralph wasn't nominated.

11:06 pm --  My last screen memory of Ernest Borgnine is watching him sit bemusedly on the couch of "What's Up With That" on Saturday Night Live.  Three people who helped bring SFX along to a new era in the 1970s and early 1980s, Ralph McQuarrie from the Lucasfilm empire, Carlos Rambaldi who made ET live, Matthew Yuririch of Close Encounters.  Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head is one of the first film songs and film montages to imprint itself in my mind, the bicycle ride on the screen while the words came from the speakers, that was just one of many Hal David songs.  Tony Scott who directed Top Gun.  Herbert Lom, who did many other things than just the Pink Panther movies.  Charles Durning, from Tootsie and so many other movies.  And Marvin Hamlisch.  My song with Marvin isn't The Way We Were and Barbra, for me it's Carly Simon singing "Nobody Does it Better" from the Spy Who Loved Me, one of the great James Bond songs.  And for all those in memoriam, indeed, Nobody Does it Better.

10:53 pm -- While we watch a broadcast from the Dolby Theatre, I want to give a nod to the new Dolby Atmos sound system.  The movies I've seen using this new iteration at Auditorium #6, the ETX screen at the AMC Empire 25 in Manhattan, sound fantastic.  This is the best I can ever recall movies sounding.  If you live near any of the theatres in this list of Atmos-equipped, check it out, call and see if the movie you wamt to see is on an Atmos-equipped screen.  I remember how impressed I was the first time I saw movies in 70-mm 6-track sound, and then after that the first time watching the Dolby Digital train rumble thru theatres in the early days, or when the sound at the Loews Astor Plaza got upgraded.  We've grown to expect very good sound now with Dolby Digital or DataSat/DTS sound now standard just about everywhere.  Dolby Atmos is the next major advance in making the theatre experience better than your living room.

10:48 pm -- Production Design? Either Pi or Anna Karenina in my playbook, but it goes to Lincoln.

10:45 pm -- I know three groups of people, the ones who haven't seen Silver Linings Playbook, the ones who love it, and the ones who hate it.  I don't know anyone who's seen it who has a neutral or "enh" or "meh" relationship with it.  Very polarizing.

10:44 pm -- But we just saw the musicians in the Capitol Records building.  Where did the Skyfall string section come from?  Did they walk or take a shuttle bus over from the Capitol Records building?  Were they not good enough?  Or are the ones in the Capitol Records not good enough?  How many more musicians are hiding in the Dolby Theatre?

10:43 pm -- The Skyfall number was very good.  In general, I think the production team this year has been doing a very good job with the musical numbers, doing them with class and elegance when the tendency is too often toward the bombastic and overblown and overproduced.

10:41 pm -- I liked this Joe Fresh/Penney ad more, it is probably the same ad I didn't like an hour ago.

10:33 pm -- And it does go to William Goldenberg for the very well-cut Argo.  The same William Goldenberg whom I was not rooting for in Zero Dark Thirty.  Michael Kahn, who was nominated for Lincoln, has been working with Spielberg since Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

10:32 pm -- In the editing category, first and foremost not Zero Dark Thirty, which is long and feels it in spite of the good final sequence.  Argo was very well edited.  This is also a good category to think Life of Pi.

10:30 pm -- the new Academy museum will be going into a beautiful old department store building on Wilshire Blvd.

10:27 pm -- The Coke ad is interesting.  Should I be watching Nashville?

10:24 pm -- Happy as I am to see Anne Hathaway get her first and most likely not last Oscar, her acceptance speech is kind of blah, I wish some of her time over 30 seconds had gone to the winners for the Documentary Short.

10:21 pm -- My own favorite in this category is Jacki Weaver.  There's just something about her performance in Silver Linings Playbook that I can't take my eyes off of her even when someone else is speaking.  But Anne Hathaway is expected to win.  And does.  And I can't complain.  She's a great actress, and has done a lot of great work in the early years of what should almost certainly be a much longer career.  Rachel Getting Married, have you seen that, you really really should if you haven't.

10:20 pm -- Christopher Plummer presents the Supporting Actress award with class and dignity.

10:19 pm -- The nod toward Sound of Music is a wonderful non sequitur.

10:18 pm -- And even though I liked Skyfall less than some other people, the movie holds up in my mind better than a lot of other movies, and I'm very happy to see it taking an Oscar in a deserved cateogry.

10:17 pm -- I like the speech from Paul N. J. Ottosson for Zero Dark Thirty.

10:15 pm -- A tie!  How exciting!!!

10:12 pm -- Not a surprise to see the Sound Mixing award go to Les Miz, which is a musical with music and voices and stuff.  I might have inclined to Skyfall or to Life of Pi if I were voting in the category myself.

10:08 pm -- Not a car ad fan, but the Hyundai battery ad was pretty good.  Did Chris Pine spend some time in a tanning salon, or on the beach in Santa Monica this afternoon?  Or is it my TV?

10:06 pm -- The American Express ad for Small Business Saturday is very good.  I will not rush to see the Oz movie.  Just read an article which suggests that on-line learning isn't as effective as the in-person variety, which if true wouldn't be a shock, so I'm not beguiled by the University of Phoenix ad.

10:04 pm -- Rather to my surprise, the Les Miz number is fantastic and totally deserves the standing "O" from the audience.  Danged good.

9:57 pm -- Using this musical medley to start in on a blondie with chocolate chunks from the Magnolia Bakery branch at Grand Central Terminal.

9:53 pm -- I like the sheen of John Travolta's tie, but the outfit is way too monochromatic.  Even his hair is the same color as the jacket and shirt and tie.

9:51 pm -- Two straight winners thinking Tom and Michael, the masterminds at Sony Pictures Classics, who've been at the specialty film business for decades and know their stuff.

9:50 pm -- Another good iPad ad.  Foreign film goes to Amour as expected, I walked out of the movie.  Just cracked open the orange flavor of Zevia, and am not liking it.

9:44 pm -- The Documentary Oscar goes to a film I mostly slept thru, and don't think I missed all that much in doing so.

9:41 pm -- So it was aruond 50 seconds for each of the Best Picture montages in this trio of Argo, Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty.

9:36 pm -- I know I'd like to hear more than 30 seconds from the people up there to accept the award for Inocente for Documentary Short.

9:35 pm -- Very nice acceptance speech from the Live Action Short winner.

9:32 pm -- If I ever have to wear a tux, I so want to wear the one Jamie Foxx is wearing.

9:31 pm -- I hated the Penney ad, but I liked the ones that nobody else seemed to that introduced their new pricing plans a year or two ago, so what do I know.

9:24 pm -- The Bond montage was awful.  My eyes are full of circules.  No context.  No flow.  Just an awful mess.  But it is awfully nice to have Shirley Bassey reprising one of the most classic of classic Bond songs.  It's a paid distraction for an hour or two.

9:21 pm -- One of the winners in the hair design category had very interesting hair.  What was it holding up, exactly, in the back ??

9:20 pm -- I only saw Les Miz of the nominees in the Hair/Makeup category.

9:18 pm -- I didn't like Anna Karenina very much, other than as a nap vehicle, but looking over the full list of nominees in the category I'd say this is the right movie for this Oscar Award.  Weren't there other better designed movies to have been nominated in this category?

9:16 pm -- I think Jennifer Aniston would look better with a wrinkle or to.  Preternaturally smooth isn't a great look to me.

9:14 pm -- The Diet Coke ad was not new but is a very god ad, especially in this setting.  The iPad ad was fantastic, Apple's always done some excellent advertising during the Oscars.  Brad Pitt won't make me try a perfume!  Maybe a cologne.  I watch some ads when I'm watching things on DVR because people pay good money for my eyeballs, but I generally fast forward past car ads and cell phone ads because I just don't give a hoot about either product line.

9:11 pm -- And Pi does win, deservedly here for all the same reasons as in the Cinematography Award.  Beating what are likely more over-CGI'd effects from Peter Jackson in The Hobbit, which I didn't see, and don't want to see.  I wasn't such a big fan of The Avengers, and didn't see the other noineees, and I wish they gave more time for the multitude of winners in this category to speak instead of enforcing the 30-second rule to tightly.  Humbug on that.

9:10 pm -- After more painful presenter dialogue we get to the Visual Effects category.  I'll pull for Life of Pi here, as well.

9:06 pm -- Lots of good nominees in the Cinematography category.  When I think of Skyfall I think of the wonderfully filmed scenes at Skyfall, Lincoln looked fabulous, Django Unchained was a cinematic feast. And Life of Pi?  This was a triumph of filmmaking that required a lot of effort to film on the water and make it look beautiful, to film in a way that blended the humans and the CGI. to film in a way that made some of the best use of 3D you're going to find.  So it wins, and it deserves to.

9:04 pm -- Just in general having these little puff pieces in groups of three doesn't exactly give lots and lots of prominence to the nominees.  But really, they're just Best Picture nominees, it's not like theyshuld have their little individual moments in the sun.

9:02 pm -- In this batch of Best Picture nominees, Life of Pi was a pleasant surprise, I didn't like Beasts of the Southern Wild at all, you will know why as you hear the blaring music playing in this little snippet.  Les Miz was Les Miz.

9:00 pm -- Wreck-It Ralph was the only nominee I saw, so I don't know if  Brave should or shouldn't have won.  I do somewhat regret not seeing Brave, which puts it above the other nominees that I didn't see, don't regret not seeing, will die happy never to have seen them.  I am no longer the target audience for most animated movies.

8:58 pm -- Paperman was shown before Wreck-It Ralph, is very good, and was touted to win in part because of its melding of computer and hand animation techniques.

8:57 pm -- this thing with Paul Rudd is truly painful to watch.

8:50 pm -- I'm not going to complain about Waltz winning.  He gave a great (lead) performance.  He was also very good in last week's Saturday Night Live, which was the first episode of 2013 that was any variety of good.  A salute to Quentin Tarantino is not out of place, because this is an actor that really became someone because Tarantino has that knack for finding actors kind of like I find fantasy authors.

8:47 pm -- Supporting Actor has three deserving nominees, Christoph Waltz in Django Unchained, Robert DeNiro in Silver Linings Playbook, and Tommy Lee Jones in Lincoln.  The consensus is that it will go to Tommy Lee Jones.  Which would be hard to complain about.  I disliked The Master intensely.  I'm not sure how Phillip Seymour Hoffman or Christoph Waltz have been nominated in this category instead of in the Best Actor category. And the consensus is wrong.

8:46 pm -- the orchestra this year is off premises.

8:40 pm --  Channing Tarum can do anything.  He can even dance with his clothes on!

8:38 pm -- OK I love the production number that CaptainKirk has provided us with.

8:34 pm --  Seth McFarlane isn't laying an egg, but he isn't scaling the heights.

8:26 pm -- I will attempt to live blog the Oscars.  This is my first time trying to do it since Google updated its Blogger web interface, and it sucks.  I tried to post some of my reviews, but because I was pasting in from the Notes program on the iPad, the fomating was off.  And there is no way to get it to fix itself.  Not even walking into the other room.  Select all, change the font, change the style, change it back, try whatever you want to do the format won't come out correct.  The act of coming back here to update the blog as I go along is near impossible, because it's very difficult to click in the box where you are supposed to update text.  It's no fun doing a live blog if it takes 30 seconds of intense effort just to try and get the cursor to where it needs to be.  I downloaded Google's Chrome App to see if maybe the blogger interface will work better in a Google browser than in the iPad-native Safari.  But no, it's as sucky there as it is in Safari.  I looked at the Blogger app, by the reviews for that look pretty bad, so I'm not in the mood for experimenting there.  So we'll try, we'll see how it goes.  But it's typical, and when Google does things that don't work there's nobody who's ever there to complain to, they hide, they don't care, Google is as evil as everyone else on the internet.

7:55 pm -- Settling in for the annual live blog, a half hour to showtime.  Going to post some reviews of recently soon movies between now and then.

Grown-Up Movies

There are two really good movies for adults playing right now, Argo and Flight both of which I'd recommend, with perhaps a slight bias toward Argo.

For those of you who don't know, which shouldn't be many, Argo is a new movie directed by starring Ben Affleck about an effort to "exfiltrate" from Iran six workers at the US Embassy who were able to escape and find their way to safety with the Canadian ambassador during the hostage crisis of 1979-1981.  It shouldn't work as well as it does, and certainly not from a contemporary standpoint where movies tend to be so loud and action-packed and overwrought.  But it wasn't always this way.  Before everyone spent so much money on special effects it was common to really cast a movie up and down the line.  Which Argo does, with Alan Arkin and John Goodman and Bryan Cranston all having major supporting roles  And even smaller roles filled very reliably, as an example the Canadian ambassador being played by Victor Garber (the captain in Titanic) or one of the hostages quietly filled by Tate Donavan.  And it's possible to generate a lot of tension very quietly, which this movie does.  There's a scene of a van carrying the "film crew" to "scout locations," when this van full of "Canadians" has to make its way through an angry crowd of demonstrating Iranians.  No money in the scene. Just a street in Istanbul (doubling for Teheran) and some extras, it could have even been done on a backlot Arab street in Hollywood.  But it's so well done, so well edited and the sound mixing so good and the quiet fright on the actor's faces so good that you don't need any much more than that

And because all of these little things are so well done, the film works even though the six hostages aren't well-developed chapters, and the CIA exfiltrator is a cipher with the most basic character traits (child he never sees).  That's the main reason why I'm surprised the film works as well as it does, because it doesn't develop the characters very much.  And yet the filmmaking so so muscular, so quietly powerful, taks such good advantage of the inherent drama of the situation, that it all works beautifully.

In its opening weekend, the "Cinemascore" service that polls audiences, came up with an A+ for this movie, which hardly ever happens.  And it wasn't a figment of something.  These days, it is common for a film to drop 40% from its first weekend box office to its second weekend.  Some genres like horror films will be happy to drop less than 50%.  Argo dropped more like 15%, which just doesn't happen at all any more.  It's a lot of good word of mouth and well deserved.

Flight, directed by Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future or Forrest Gump in the good old days, more recently motion capture like Polar Express) and starring Denzel Washington, shares one key trait with Argo.  It doesn't stint on casting where it needs.  John Goodman is in this as well, as a friend and dealer to Denzel Washington's drunkard airline pilot, who knows how to use coke to level Denzel off from his drunken binges.  Bruce Greenwood (brilliant in Mao's Last Dancer and good in many other things) is a rep for the pilot's union, Don Cheadle an attorney hired by the union. And while the film centers on a dramatic airline crash sequence that's hardly quiet at all, there've been lots of movies with well-depicted disasters in them.  The film works because it backs that up with all sorts of quieter scenes that let the actors shine.  There's as much will he - won't he tension to wondering what Denzel Washington's going to do with the connecting room mini bar as there is to that van ride in Argo, and this is even quieter.  Just one actor, and the actor not even in camera, just lurking there while we look at a single bottle of booze in a hotel room.

The film doesn't glorify alcoholism.  The alcoholic is played by Denzel Washington, so he's charismatic.  But he's also a drunk, and often not a very likeable one.  This isn't something Hollywood does well, very often. I didn't feel like I was being asked to like the guy, but I wasn't being asked to revel in wallowing with him either.

The one thing that doesn't work for me is the ending.  How do you end the movie?  You can't send the audience out with Denzel Washington still being a drunk, who would tell their friends to see that movie.  You can't end the movie with some kind of miracle cure because it just isn't true to the character in a movie that is trying to be very true.  So where do you find the balance?  There's a valiant attempt to find the third way, but it didn't work for me.  Back in the '60s or '70s I think the movie would have been a little darker and would have worked for back then but recently watching the ending of Marathon Man, which I'd never seen before, you realize that those endings just don't work any more unless you want your $3M film to have a highly regarded run in art houses.  Here, it's not $3M film, that won't even cover the star and director.

But these are both really good films, and worth going to a theatre to see.

British Cinema

I saw 3 movies while I was over for London Book Fair in April.

In The Loop (Sat. evening Apr. 18, 2009, Odeon Kensington #4, 1.5 slithy toads) was a British movie that had gotten some decent reviews.  I decided to go in part because I'd walked by the Odeon Kensington on every trip to London without ever actually seeing a movie there, and I decided it was high time.  In that regard, I was able to peek in to the big screen (#3) and see that it is a very nice and very big balcony theatre that will be worth keeping in mind for the future.  I wasn't sure I should go because this was a late show on the same day as my castle walk, and I was tired.  And in that regard, In The Loop did not help keep me awake.  It's a political satire spun off from a British TV show.  A cabinet minister puts his foot in mouth about the war in Iraq.  The media minister scolds him.  Efforts to improve situation only make it worse.  Minister is exiled to DC to a study committee on the war.  Only makes things worse.  The media minister curses up a storm wherever he goes, he's modeled after some minister in the Tony Blair cabinet but maybe for us in the US think of a minister who's Dick Cheney talking about Pat Leahy or Rahm Emanuel with his famous temper and then taken not just to 11 but to 18 on the dial.  Most of the laughs (and not just to me but also the handful of other people in the audience) are from this one character's abundantly foul language.  Otherwise, I don't want to say it's bad, but it's not very good either.  It's just a little flat, the occasional chuckle or wry observation but badly in need of something more.

I've had good luck seeing movies at the Odeon Covent Garden, what used to be the ABC Shaftesbury Avenue.  In fact, I believe the very first movie I ever saw in London was the delightful comedy East is East in 1999 at this theatre, and Arlington Road is another film I quite liked which I saw here.  So let's add The Damned United (Sun afternoon. Apr. 19, Odeon Covent Garden, Aud. #1, 3 slithy toads) to that list.  This is a sports movie with an excellent pedigree that is unlike any sports movie you might have seen in the US in the past 30 years.  Michael Sheen, who plays David Frost in Frost/Nixon and Tony Blair in The Queen, here plays Brian Clough, a British football (i.e., soccer) coach who gets his dream job taking over the Leeds  United team from his arch-rival, well-played by Colm Meaney.  The script is by Peter Morgan (also Frost/Nixon, also The Queen) and director Tom Hooper did the highly regarded John Adams mini-series for  HBO.  So as I said, good pedigree, and I should also single out Timothy Spall who adds wonderful supporting work as Clough's right-hand man and Jim Broadbent is in the cast as well.  So we all know this script, new coach takes over from arch-rival and it leads up to the big game where the new coach goes up against the old coach and wins dramatically.  And since I wasn't familiar with Clough's real-life story (and this movie is adapted from a novel based on Clough's story by David Peace, said novel all over bookstores in the UK), I kept waiting eagerly for the movie to tick off all of the sports movie cliches I am so fond of and so used to.  The big moment when the new coach goes up against the inherited players and makes the team his own.  But you know what, that's not what happens.  Clough fails miserably, the holdover players mutiny, management sides with the players, and several weeks into the season Clough is booted off the job and forced to beg his right-hand man whom he'd abandoned to take his dream job to re-up on their pairing.  It's not really a sports movie at all but rather a fascinating character study of a man in need, who has to have someone or something to balance his insatiable drive and lacking that drives himself off a cliff.  It's an excellent movie.  I don't know if it will come to these shores, but if it does you should seek it out.

My final UK movie would be a treat no matter how the movie was because it was playing on the main screen at the Empire Leicester Square.  This is one of the nicest movie theatres in the world, I feel safe in saying.  It's a somewhat small scale version of Radio City, with a huge huge screen and wonderful sightlines and excellent sound.  There are multi-colored lights in the auditorium that cycle thru so you can just admire that while you wait for the movie, and then as the film is about to begin the lights in the auditorim give way to a twinkling firmament above the screen.  I love going to this theatre.  It is a true Cinema Treasure.  The movie was State of Play (Wed. eve. April 22, 2009, 2.5 slithy toads).  This is a well-acted and well-made thriller with a frisson of old-time All The President's Men excitement and lots of appeal to a newspaper sentimentalist such as myself.  The ending starts to tie itself up in a few knots too many.  But Russell Crowe good, and Ben Affleck, and Helen Mirren, and Rachel McAdams, and Jeff Daniels.  I could find quibbles, and I'm giving this only a moderately favorable rating instead of a very favorable one, but bottom line is that it is well-acted, it does entertain, and I would say to see this when it comes out on video.

If I were in London today, my ambivalence about seeing Terminator Salvation would resolve, because any movie you have even the tiniest desire to see, when  you can do it on the big screen at the Empire you want to do it because the evening will be a special occasion regardless.  I love the Empire.