TFC Journal at TheFilmChair.com

The Ape (2009)–***1/2

Director Jesper Ganslandt says that his film The Ape was inspired by the true crimes he read about in newspapers. But he didn’t want the fiction behind those stories. For 81 minutes, Ganslandt thrusts us into the life, and the psyche, of a man dealing with the aftermath of a violent act of his own making. It’s not an easy experience, and by the end of the film, you question how rewarding it was at all. Yet, Ganslandt, whose clearest objective may simply have been to unsettle the audience, succeeds in intimately tying the character’s psychology to our own.

The film opens with Krister (Olle Sarri), a man in his mid-to-late 30s, waking up on his bathroom floor covered in blood. You don’t immediately get the sense that he has done anything, but something terrible has definitely happened. About the time that Krister, who works as a driving instructor, flips out on one of his students, you realize that he knows what happened and he knows he did it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Avatar (2009)–****

Avatar goes far beyond simple entertainment, transporting audiences to an exotic new world in a bold new way. It’s a film that must be seen in 3D. Yes, if you see Avatar in 3D, you’ll have experienced something that’s not just groundbreaking, but could very well change the way you watch movies.

Of course that’s what James Cameron set out to do, wasn’t it? He’s been talking about it for years. That this early proponent of digital 3D cinema succeeds here is astonishing enough. But that he does it in such a glorious fashion is a testament to his skill as a filmmaker and to the power of the medium.

Read the rest of this entry »

Up in the Air (2009)–****

When I walked out of Up in the Air, I had a feeling I don’t often get after seeing a Hollywood motion picture. As a matter of fact, I can honestly say I’ve never really had it. The closest thing I can remember to it is when I watched American Beauty on DVD in late-2000, almost a year after I had seen the film in theaters.

I’m relatively young, so American Beauty’s release was early in my self-education in film. On the occasion of that home video viewing, which followed a solid year of cinema consumption, I felt I had seen something. And with Up in the Air, I felt it too. It’s the feeling that I had just witnessed an American classic.

Up in the Air is a rarity, a picture of depth and substance with charm and humor. It has indie spirit and Hollywood swagger. For cinephiles, it’s a film to be celebrated. For all audiences, Up in the Air is a motion picture worth more than the price of admission.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Blind Side (2009)–**1/2

There’s an argument to be made to whether The Blind Side, an unsentimental tale of inspiration, should have been made into a movie at all. There isn’t much conflict. There’s very little drama. And the protagonist, a young man from the wrong side of Memphis, isn’t someone you find yourself rooting for, but rather casually wondering what may derail him from making it.

He does make it, of course. Anyone who has caught a recent Baltimore Ravens game may have seen Michael Oher, the real-life inspiration for the film, on the team’s offensive line. What’s inspiring about Oher’s tale isn’t his dramatic rise out from the projects. It’s how that rise became as undramatic as possible. That’s where Sandra Bullock comes in.

Read the rest of this entry »

An Education (2009)–***1/2

Five or ten years from now, when people tell you what their favorite movie is, don’t be surprised if someone says An Education. It’s not a movie that will speak profoundly to everyone, but this sophisticated coming-of-age drama is one that will make those who can forgive its weak, rushed third act fall passionately in love with it.

An Education tells the story of the clever, beautiful schoolgirl Jenny (Carey Mulligan) in a London suburb in 1961. Her father (Alfred Molina) is desperate to see her go to Oxford, where she will read English. And Jenny is well on her way to achieving his goal. That is until she meets David (Peter Sarsgaard).

Read the rest of this entry »

A Serious Man (2009)–****

It goes against conventional wisdom to even suggest that the Coen brothers could make a better film than Fargo. Their latest comedy, A Serious Man, however, comes daringly close. It’s more fiercely moralistic than any other Coen brothers film, without the brute force. And it’s more intensely personal than anything we’ve seen them produce, with moments of comic sadness that even regular Coen audiences won’t expect. A Serious Man brings clarity to the Coens’ filmography, but even this single film, which feels like a culminating work, delivers, in itself, on a level only the brothers could achieve.

Read the rest of this entry »

Paranormal Activity–1/2*

Paranormal Activity delivers on low-budget thrills. If that’s what you’re looking for from this sleeper hit of the fall, you can stop reading now. You’ll get what you want here, especially in the final 10 minutes. Enjoy.

For anyone else (and I don’t know why you would want to see Paranormal Activity anyway), know this: you’ll be spending 86 torturous minutes with two people you wouldn’t even talk to at work, let alone root for.

Watching Paranormal Activity, I understood every criticism I’ve ever read about the mumblecore film movement. How can we watch people of a certain age (mine) on film and not want to walk out of the theater, appalled by just how self-involved these people are?

But mumblecore films work on an intellectual level, pointing subtle criticisms at the culture that this (my) generation has been brought up in. Paranormal Activity instead is a supernatural thriller, one that’s light on serious thrills and heavy on two-people saying stupid things.

The gist of the film is this: a woman named Katie (Katie Featherston) has been followed by a demon since she was eight-years-old. When she moves in with her longterm boyfriend, Micah (Micah Sloat), the demon gets jealous and starts throwing regular hissy fits that escalate in response to the boyfriend’s macho posturing. (If the demon was more “woe is me,” it’d be the perfect mumblecore character in its own right.)

Micah is stupid. He’s Sarah Palin stupid. He’s “I’m not getting the swine flu shot” stupid. He’s stupid. He spends most of the movie ignoring expert advice and avoiding further expert opinion. This is a guy who prefers picture books to Wikipedia. He’ll he won’t even rent a season of Supernatural to watch on his over-sized TV.

While I’d like to say that Micha’s willful ignorance is some sort of cultural criticism, I can’t because Paranormal Activity doesn’t give me a reason to. The filmmakers spend so much time on cheap tricks to make people jump out of their seats that the moments with Katie and Micah are worse than simple afterthoughts. They’re deliberately ignored, as if story itself is a nuisance.

I never had that problem with other blockbuster found-footage thrillers. The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield had characters that you could care about. With Paranormal Activity, there isn’t an endearing “marshmallows” moment to start things out right. There isn’t solid melodrama in the end, two people clutching each other as the world falls apart around them. There isn’t much of anything. And when you go to the movies, that’s the scariest thing you can ever encounter.

Paranormal Activity, directed by Oren Peli, is now playing in select cities. The film opens wide on Oct. 16.

Irene in Time (2009)–***

Were it not for Tanna Frederick, Irene in Time, Henry Jaglom’s most recent indie effort, wouldn’t be nearly as watchable as it is. But that’s the brilliance of Jaglom. He’s a smart enough director to realize he has a good thing when he’s got it. That’s also the allure of Frederick, a talented, emotionally limitless actress who could easily exit Jaglom’s world, but seems so perfect in it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spoiler Alert (2009)

Boy, am I glad that I liked Spoiler Alert. Something tells me that the film’s director, David Rakowiecki, would have a few ideas for what to do with an online film writer who has he gall to write something negative about his debut feature.

Rakowiecki’s film tells the story of Brad Zuhl (Daniel Bartkewicz), online film critic and webmaster of the uber-influential TheGeek-Cave.com. On the night this geek opinion leader’s dream of becoming an actual filmmaker comes true, he gets an unexpected visitor to his basement apartment: Hollywood director Harrison Kane (Lars Stevens). Kane is a little sore about his Bones of the Dead being eviscerated on Zuhl’s site. So sore, in fact, that he’s come to kill the geek master.

Read the rest of this entry »

Inglourious Basterds (2009)–****

All of Quentin Tarantino’s films are about cinema, but Inglourious Basterds may be his first to harness cinema’s power to show us cinema’s power. This isn’t just a film about a group of Jewish-American soldiers killing Nazis guerrilla-style. Basterds is a film about movies–and one of the greatest at that. From the casting of superstar Brad Pitt in the lead role to moments where images flicker on the big screen in a theater filled with Nazis, Inglourious Basterds has one great conceit: Cinema can change history.
Read the rest of this entry »