39: Inception (2010) (but not really)
I’ve already written about Inception a little bit, in noting how director Christopher Nolan segregates different formalist filmmaking techniques in order to control the dream space of the movie. I’ll only add here that Inception works best as a puzzle box of film technique first, a bombastic action movie second, and an actual story a [...]
38: Winter’s Bone (2010)
One of the best things about the expansion of the Best Picture category is that it seems to have allowed the Academy to remember films that they would have otherwise forgotten to recognize. Winter’s Bone (directed by Debra Granik, adapted from the Daniel Woodrell novel by Granik and Anne Rosellini) was released near the beginning of [...]
37: True Grit (2010)
Fully tapping into the aesthetic they were appropriating in No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers’ remake of the 1969 John Wayne vehicle True Grit (adapted from the Charles Portis novel) is a retribution story that plays out on that resonant backdrop of the American psyche — the wild West. 127 Hours (#31) also [...]
36: The Social Network (2010)
A deluge of words have been written about the The Social Network and how it plays fast and loose with actual events and how it sounds a clarion call about the power of the Internet to alter the fabric of our lives and “What does it all mean?” — so I won’t even bother with that [...]
35: The King’s Speech (2010)
In my entry on Let Me In (#22), I discussed the frailties of fidelity discourse, and how adaptations and remakes face extra baggage to uphold unattainable ideals. But this notion of fidelity discourse also comes into play when discussing films that are based on true stories. Of the current Best Picture nominees, The Fighter (#33) [...]
The Jasmine Revolution Comes to China
It seems that the seeds of the Jasmine Flower, the symbol of the Tunisian Revolution, have spread beyond the borders of the Middle East, wafting through the air and touching down in the Far East.
In Beijing on Sunday anonymous calls for protest sent across social media and micro-blogging sites resulted in a demonstration outside a McDonalds in the busy downtown shopping district of Wangfujing. By 2PM hundreds of police were on scene. 25-year-old Liu Xiaobai was apprehended for placing a jasmine flower in a planter in front of the McDonalds but was released after the commotion drew attention from photographers and journalists.
34: The Kids Are All Right (2010)
Although I’ve been keeping this Film Journal, I still gravitate towards television as a critical métier, and it’s interesting to see the comparisons when television and film map out the same areas in terms of theme and subject matter, and not just in the case of direct adaptations like Friday Night Lights, which recently ended [...]
33: The Fighter (2010)
The Fighter is a male melodrama in its own way, the spear to Black Swan’s (#32) distaff, except because it has the structuring element of boxing it gets to be grouped with the whole constellation of sports films that have come before it. Director David O. Russell charts a similar path to what Darren Aronofsky [...]
32: Black Swan (2010)
There’s a perverse pleasure in watching Black Swan, and not for the obvious reasons. There are so many things wrong with this film: the imagery is overwrought and disturbing in its implications, most notably the notion that a woman isn’t complete until she is penetrated and made to bleed (although maybe a piece of jagged glass is just a piece of jagged glass). The cast consists entirely of catty divas and wilting hothouse flowers and screeching harridans and brooding male predators. They’re not even recognizable human beings but grotesques designed to be beaten and broken for the audience’s amusement.
And yet the movie is… undoubtedly fun to watch.
A Cautionary Tale
Everyone is imprinting their hopes on the revolution in Egypt. China and America have both stressed the need for a peaceful and stable transition of power; and though both hope that this transition will swing conditions in the region in their favor, no one knows what the country or its government will look like after the dust settles.
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