From the LA Times, "How's it Playing in Wyoming," by Gil Brady.

"You've taken the last thing we had," said the ranch hand, who declined to provide his name. "We don't get any money, you work us like dogs — then you take our image … and then gay it up."

Fifty videos, with links to watch each, compiled by a far more assiduous and dedicated blogger than ourselves. A good way to kill an afternoon, though appallingly skewed toward wan, flavor-of-the-month indie dribble. The Cardigans' 'I Need Some Fine Wine' effortlessly dominates (great song; weird video), and Nina Persson looks lovely as ever, even while wearing what appears to be a gigantic hemp necklace and doing the Curly Shuffle on a linoleum floor.

But seriously, where art thou Hype Williams?

Okay, so with sneak previews and top tens and advance screenings and all that year-end jazz, whenever I retreat back home to spend the holidays with my family, there's basically nothing left to go see. So I usually end up ensconing myself in joyous Christmas movies. As with every year, this consists of the superlative 1983 George C. Scott A Christmas Carol, Kubrick's uncannily soul-cleansing Eyes Wide Shut, and of course that weirdo Canadian production from 1985 that came out under the Disney banner called One Magic Christmas which starred Mary Steenburgen as an impoverished, pissy mom struggling to make ends meet for the holidays who has to endure, in the days leading up to Jesus's birthday, the shooting death of her husband in a botched bank robbery and the kidnapping and drowning of her two kids in the lake....don't worry, Santa Claus makes it all okay.

This is some sick twisted shit, though, with their rotting ghosts, gun blasts, and masked orgies, so, if I'm looking for purity, it can be found no further than in the wondrous innocence of Jim Henson's fucking fantastic 1978 shot-on-video HBO perennial Emmett Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, which runs a close second to A Charlie Brown Christmas as the all-time least materialistic and jaded Christmas special for kids. Po-dunk, impoverished tub-thumpin' river rats competing in a Christmas day talent show, Ma and Emmett Otter just want to win the cash to buy each other something real special: the snag is that Ma has to hock her dead (snake-oil salesman) husband's tool chest, which her son needs to do odd jobs to make cash, to buy a dress to wear to the competition; and her wee son Emmett has to put a hole in his ma's washtub to make a wash-tub bass to form his jug-band to win the competition. A delicate retread of The Gift of the Magi adorned with almost nonstop lovely folk-tinged music by Muppet composer extraordinaire and general freakazoid Paul Williams, Emmett Otter's Jug-Band Christmas just glides along as lightly and unpretentiously as the very visible strings hoisting up the cast of fabric puppets as they trot along a glorious bayou backdrop.

Now I'm not one to judge other parents, not being a parent myself, but this is the sort of stuff kids should be watching. Bereft of the incessant, empty pop-culture referencing that has completely demolished children's entertainment, and imbued with the sort of values I would like to pass on to my children, Jim Henson's special, like all of his work, haunts me to this day. You can keep your Madagascar and your effing Chicken Little, studio assholes; and anyone who takes their kids to see King Kong better be prepared to have a nice loooong chat about racial stereotyping afterwards...at least we'll always have Emmett Otter to keep returning to.

Well, it’s now Christmas Eve, the war on Christmas (wholly manufactured by lamebrain right-wing pundits with too much time and a sinking administration on their hands—hiya Bill and John!) is nearly over, and I’m snug with laptop and eggnog well within reach of the glow from my in-laws’ Christmas tree, done up in candy canes, red ribbons and starfish. All’s quiet on Boston’s North Shore.

We here at Reverseblog want to thank everyone for reading us in our inaugural year, especially those who took the time to write in and call us morons, idiots, turks, and all the rest. We also want to send a very special thanks to our friends at indieWIRE for graciously offering to host our scattered musings. In the next few weeks we’ll be publishing our thoughts on the best and worst films of 2005 with indieWIRE, followed by our usual in-depth coverage on Reverse Shot itself, so please stay tuned.

Given the season, we’re all feeling a little misty-eyed and generous, and as the Reverseblog is well-known for pointing out instances of disagreement with other critics, we thought that now might be a nice time to dole out some well-deserved praise. So, thank you Manohla Dargis for your thoughtful, considered writings on Munich and The New World in The New York Times. Calling your articles “reviews” would be to do them a disservice since their overall thrust seems not to just proclaim these films “good” or “bad” but to publicly wrestle with their various conceptual and aesthetic strands in the hopes that if the breadth of intellectual inquest in these films can be foregrounded, that they might somehow rise above all the lazy editorializing, pithy commentary, and hyperbole.

I have not seen Munich yet, but your words have only left me even more eager. And as for The New World, which many of us here hold quite dear, hopefully your shot across the bow of its detractors will help spark the dialogue the film seeks, and keep it from landing in the dustbins of 2005. Thank you Manohla, and Happy Holidays.

filmenthusiast: Hey, can we all sit down and agree not to pretend that Werner Herzog is anything more than a competent, if pretentious curiouso documentarian circa 2005?
clarencecarter: Please, yes. It all needs to end.
filmenthusiast: Srsly. TIME magazine gave Herzog docs Movie of the Year nods.
clarencecarter: Well, you know those guys... was it Schickel who found the "complexity" of Syriana so exciting? Give that guy a couple of ideas to juggle and he’s toast.
filmenthusiast: Everybody just came late to the Herzog party (by about 40 years), and are overcompensating like mad.
clarencecarter: Did everyone forget he dropped a steaming loaf called Invincible just four years ago?
filmenthusiast: It's conveniently overlooked.
clarencecarter: Grizzly's won almost all the regional critic doc awards. Thankfully 39 lbs. of Love won't have to face off against it for the Academy Award. A relief.
filmenthusiast: 39 Lbs. of Oscar Gold.
clarencecarter: There are all sorts of bad bear-feasting-on-small-Israeli jokes that might be (in)appropriate here. You wanna take a crack?
filmenthusiast: Werner Herzog was in What Dreams May Come and Julien Donkey-Boy.
clarencecarter: No way. I knew about Julien, but WDMC really catches me off-guard. Kinda hurts a little.
filmenthusiast: Robin Williams steps on his face.
clarencecarter: Telling.

Fuck you, too, Family Stone!

At Reverseblog, we've become basically softies. Meaning that we've been terribly wonderful at repeatedly praising our holiday favorites, insistently pushing the good films that we feel have risen above the morass of the Christmastime sewage swamp of overscheduled Oscar bait, and yes, sometimes attacking out of frustration those who don't quite agree. Generally, we have only posted on the blog sneak previews and considerations, with some exception, of stuff we really really want you to go and see (Match Point, Munich, Prime, and of course our oft-touted The New World) and tended to completely ignore those films that left us cold. Well, now that everyone's been left out in the cold here in New York City for a few days now thanks to some whiners who want better pensions and earlier retirement ages (newsflash, my dad had to retire at 62, with no pension whatsoever, and on a less personal note, your 50+ thousand salaries are considerably higher than the millions who ride your subway every day to make that meager living to pay for their children's clothes and food. And on Christmas, too? Not that you read film blogs, but fuck you, anyway).

So in honor of the transit strike, here's a sampling of some godawful pieces of shit currently playing at your local movie theater that you'd be wise not to travel countless city blocks in the freezing winter chill to see.

Mrs. Henderson Presents: Stephen Frears sure has come a looooooong way from My Beautiful Laundrette. Gloppy, shrill, smug—translated as warm, hilarious, and quaint for all those still taken in by these twee British, oh so naughty (pinky to corner of mouth) conveyer-belt comedies—Frears’s Mrs. Henderson Presents is one of those 100% worthless winky-winky period pieces that get released at Oscar time in the U.S. only because everyone knows that we’ll suck up any drivel, as long as it comes with upper-crust British accents and features “daring” old ladies and/or tasteful nudity (both is a plus). In this case, the “legendary” true story of a widow in WWII-time England who opened a nudie vaudeville is trumpeted up to ludicrously patriotic proportions: their girls are showing their naughty parts-- and saving England in the meantime! Judi Dench (enough already) hams and Bob Hoskins haws through an endless series of incredibly unclever repartee (featuring some of the year’s worst screenwriting, the film seems to always know how to drain a comic predicament of all humor). Tedious, completely unwatchable junk, but with the protective layer of period importance to separate it from less-sanctified American low comedies like Just Friends.

The Family Stone: Promising indie gay auteur makes good…comes to Hollywood…sells out in approximately 20 minutes. There’s the kernel of something very worthwhile here, as Thomas Bezucha (pronounced Bazooka) so casually thrusts you into the cacophonous void of a wealthy, self-satisfied, liberal, completely insular family as they wait to tear apart gold child Dermot Mulroney’s uptight new fiancee, played by resolutely TV-acting actress Sarah Jessica Parker. A family’s own interior communication, the offhanded cruelty they display to those outside of their perfect circle; not a bad premise. Unfortunately, Bezucha deserves a big smack in the mouth for the film’s rapid degeneration into cutesy romantic comedy; the siblings arrive, and everyone pairs off and finds their perfect partner, all while matriarch Diane Keaton presides, hoping her children will find happiness on this, her last Christmas before the cancer eats her. Sanctimonious and tone-sloppy, yes, but also actively offensive in its propensity for tidy resolutions and easy outs for conflicts. Basically it succumbs to all the mistakes that Jodie Foster’s superlative Home for the Holidays, which resigned itself to pain and agitation as a way of life, avoided with deftness. By the way, the homo son here is also DEAF…talk about not letting the gay character speak for himself.

The White Countess: It pains me twofold, both because of Ismail Merchant’s sad recent death, and also because I am resolutely not one of those Merchant-Ivory bashers, a group that has grown exponentionally with each passing year. Howards End and Remains of the Day, wonderful films, are often dissembled for nothing greater than their stateliness, a pretty vacant criticism, seeing as how their interiors and exteriors are perfectly wedded. Even some of their lesser films, like A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries and The Golden Bowl, are wonderfully odd, engagingly lopsided narratives that seem to break rules of storytelling even while playing by the rules. Sadly, their last film, coming out finally, rightfully unheralded, is inert and simplistic. Ralph Fiennes has his touching moments as a blind American diplomat living in Shanghai right before WWII, but he also has just as many laugh-out-loud humdingers (remembrance of his beloved horse-race pastime is awkwardly depicted as he wistfully impersonates a solitary jockey…hard to explain now, but impossible to forget once you’ve seen it). Natasha Richardson chews on her accent like peanut brittle as the aristocratic Russian expatriate living in poverty with whom he falls in love. Dialogue like “I’m just a blind man in this crazy world!” follows.

Special shut-out also goes to the ass-scaldingly long King Kong…the T-Rex fight is fucking cool, but the film’s overall concept (as a supposed revisioning of an exploitation movie as an epic romance) falls apart due to its univestigated, jaw-dropping racism (more on that later in RS). Revisionism this ain’t. And as Oscar season approaches, let us not forget that last shot from Walk the Line, of Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, surveying the pond-side idyll of his extended family, caught in an awkward freeze frame which made him look like he had just sniffed a butt. There’s treasure everywhere!

Fuck yeah.

In anticipation of the critical lambasting of Terrence Malick's exquisite and altogether dazzling The New World, a brief reflection on how some things never change:
What follows are quotes pulled from 1) Pauline Kael's review of Badlands, 2) The New York Times's Harold C. Schonberg on Days of Heaven, 3) Charles Taylor in Salon on The Thin Red Line, and 4) Todd McCarthy's brand-spaking new Variety review of The New World. Guess which quote belongs to which review! Winner gets nothing. Answers after the jump.

a. "Either by incompetence or willful perversity, dispenses with plot, characterization, dramatic structure and emotional payoffs in favor of...painstakingly composed pictorial diddling"

b. "It is full of elegant and striking photography; and it is an intolerably artsy, artificial film... Back of what basically is a conventional plot is all kinds of fancy, self-conscious cineaste techniques. The film proceeds in short takes: people seldom say more than two or three connected sentences. It might be described as the mosaic school of filmmaking as the camera and the action hop around, concentrating on a bit here, a bit there."

c. "Flat and colorless... exalted visuals and isolated metaphysical epiphanies are ill-supported by a muddled, lurching narrative...sprawling, unfocused. More than once, one is made to recall the old saw about how, if a scene isn't cutting together, you cut to a seagull flying overhead."

d. "They are kept at a distance, doing things for no explained purpose....as if [Malick] had taped gauze over their characters, so we wouldn't be able to get a reading of them."

So there you go: thirty years, four films, and the same old tune. The critics can have their gay-lovin' "cowboys" and their chain-smokin' Murrow. If the afterlives of Badlands, Days of Heaven, and The Thin Red Line are any indication, people will be grappling with The New World, in all its indelible mastery and dizzying complexity for decades to come, long after the Brokeback Mountains and Good Night and Good Lucks have been consigned to film history as the somewhat flat oddities they actually are.

Riding on approximately seven months of Cannes hype, Woody Allen's Match Point still manages to impress. God knows why Dreamworks' idiotic release strategy has played out in the manner it has (the film should have been released a couple of months ago, at least, both to more proficiently capitalize on its festival buzz and to avoid all the competition of the other "serious" and "adult" holiday releases that come about for Oscar time), but if it gets the proper exposure it could burst out of its niche audience easily. Fluid, trenchant, elegant storytelling, told with a devilish mastery that not only have we not seen from Woody Allen for quite some time but just about any filmmaker either, Match Point has been compared to Flaubert, to Barry Lyndon, and of course to his own Crimes and Misdemeanors, which of course refers back to Dostoyevsky, but let me add another reference to the hype: for me, this was Woody's Chabrol film. Classical and class-dissecting (in broad, novelistic terms...certainly not new but compelling nonetheless, especially after Melinda and Melinda's wine-clutching nonchalance), with some surprisingly suspenseful subjective discomfort that would make even Hitchcock nod in delight, Woody's film is, as we've been promised, one of the season's delights.

And odd for Woody: all of his main players are young and gorgeous, both Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Scarlett Johansson, while perhaps not our greatest thespians, are utilized brilliantly, their bee-stung lips and increasingly frenetic brows caught up in a wonderfully melodramatic whirlwind of infidelity. It's been called most un-Woody-like, but it seems to me like the same gift, different wrappings. Just as philosophical as any of his more chamber-like dramas yet with a strong genre grip and a propulsive forward motion, Match Point like his greatest, darkest works, surveys with the lightest of touches, a world borne out of incident and chance. Woody keeps returning to the word "luck," but what he really means is "chaos." In fact Match Point would match up nicely on a double bill with Herzog's Grizzly Man...two species duelling it out for supremacy, both stories told with a clinical eye disrupted by violent passion.

How is it that “three years late” can simultaneously be “right on time”? Had Michael Almereyda’s lovely, ambient Happy Here and Now found its way into theatres immediately after its 2002 Toronto Film Festival premiere, the film might have seemed all wrong—too self-consciously odd, too much a part of the science fiction genre that it’s only flirting with to really fulfill its aspirations to minor prophecy. Three years later, with the American Atlantis in which it is set fast receding into the realm of the mythological, this unintentional time capsule represents a devastating elegy for a lost way of circa 2001 life, even as its more obviously generic element, crafted in that other time, is rendered by the intervening space more fully relevant to our here and now. If Almereyda nailed (mostly, Happy Here and Now seems to exists in some time without cellular), and with a whiff of freshness, our increasingly ambivalent infatuation with and hyper-reliance on technology as a means to assuage loneliness and ennui in advance, but produced an elegy for New Orleans (and for the departed Ernie K-doe, a local celebrity playing himself who’s featured) only in retrospect, well, even the greatest soothsayers didn’t get it right all the time.

Featuring the barest of narrative, but an abundance of moody set pieces, portentous camera movements, and ambiguous dialogue Happy Here and Now stumbles through its lost sister/quest narrative with a discursive organization that’s still, thankfully, barely legible after two viewings. Thankfully, because December seems with each passing year the month of ossified topic sentence movies pre-packaged with Import but lacking surprises. It’s refreshing after the monolithism of something like Syriana to curl up with a film unsure of its own ideas and eventual destination and that seems to care little for cementing either. Lest it sounds disorganized, or worse, trendily hermetic—as some have critics have labeled Almereyda’s other films—HH&N somehow achieves a feat that few manage: It creates an aesthetic system airtight enough such that disparate narrative stopovers like an exploding building, a grainy, B&W internet video chat room, and the set of an amateur (porn, sorta) film about Nikolai Tesla can exist safely within the same 89 minutes. But mostly, Happy Here and Now is a quiet film, and if it feels like a Almereyda’s nonsensically reciting notes and half-thoughts from a sketchbook sotto voce and you’re only halfway comprehending, don’t feel left out.

“How is that someone can go missing with all the means at hand to stay in touch?” is the unspoken question underlying Isabel’s (Liane Balaban) increasingly frantic search for her lost sister Muriel (Shalom Harlow). The equally unspoken answer’s another question: “Given all the means we have to keep in touch with each other, why don’t we go missing more often?” In retrospect, we could also ask the former in relation to disappeared New Orleans. Except that unlike in Almereyda’s film, there probably won’t be a return ticket, no postcard in the mail. Perhaps strangest of all the strangeness in Happy Here and Now is that somehow, in the midst of all of these discontinuities and missed connections, Almereyda, miraculously, answers both of his questions, and shapes a cast of characters worthy of the emotional resolution granted them.

This opens tomorrow (12/14) at the IFC Center in NYC.

The love affair continues.

I could call The New World the best film of the year, but that seems somehow an impotent gesture. For, inasmuch as it is largely unlike any recent films (it’s probably closest to Malick’s own The Thin Red Line, even though it doesn’t feel much like that either), existing instead on its own plane, with its own thoughts and rules, somehow avoids hermeticism and is instead rather welcoming (mostly), and staggeringly emotional, it remains in a class by itself. Images from it have been pleasurably tumbling around in my head since last Tuesday, but given all the film’s grandeur, it still surprises how none stun so much as one of its simplest: a hand reaches up to take an arm and in an instant ties all of the film’s various strands together with all the power of the best silent cinema. That James Horner’s pillowy score is there to buttress this quietest of gestures pushes the moment into the realm of the ecstatic sublime—a cinematic state always to be treasured for its rarity. But, even though my favorite instant of The New World does comes close to its denouement, that isn’t to say that there aren’t twenty or thirty more that approach it in the wash of the preceding two-plus hours.

Expecting a heady probing of the legacy of the New World’s early settlements, a la portions of William Carlos Williams’s In The American Grain, I was a bit surprised to find that The New World is, at its heart, a love story. Perhaps even more surprised at how Malick uses such a simple, basic narrative arc to reach his grand conclusions, and just how far they fall from Williams’s. If American Grain attempts the literary re-reading of figures lost to history’s cruel misrepresentations as a way of illuminating those places where the promise of America became infested with the detritus of Old Europe, then Malick goes further. By taking two of American history’s more recognizable names and stitching together a narrative built from suppositions, legends, and half-histories, he’s succeeded in rendering the record strange, which allows him the chance to travel time and invent his own idealized version from the ground up, one wholly organic, de-intellectualized (but not unintelligent), engrossing and deeply felt.

How much of this is “true” history? It’s quite unclear, but that seems a largely unimportant question in the face of the work itself. Even if every moment were pure fiction, I like a vision that attempts to recuperate a certain history and the types of American cinematic representations that have spun from it (specifically of Native Americans) in order to present a more viable option for cultural discourse. Even though the film may be a poem, the construction of its thesis is a political act (and Smith’s musings on the possibilities of America which we can all look back on and realize have been soundly dashed cement this), more so than even The Thin Red Line’s cry against war. Early reports from Jackson’s King Kong suggest it as a film that could reinvigorate the increasingly moribund cinema-going experience, and I don’t necessarily believe that it won’t. But I’d like to humbly add Terrence Malick’s The New World to any lists keeping track of such things. Impotent or not, calling it “Best of ….” may be a necessary evil to help elevate it above the din.

Liberals. Conservatives. Cynics. Kubrick-worshippers. Add another to the ever-growing cadre of contradictory Spielberg detractors: Zionists? Unthinkable for anyone who has actually seen Spielberg’s coda to Schindler’s List, no? Well, while Spielberg’s new film, Munich, may not break any new political ground, even for medium-budget Hollywood spectacle, it is nevertheless undeniably as much a thinkpiece as a genre work. Naturally, many have their knives out already, no one more vociferously than New Republic’s literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, whose article this week puts forth that Munich is “consistent with Tony Kushner's view that Zionism, as he told Ori Nir of Haaretz last year, was ‘not the right answer,’ and that the creation of Israel was ‘a mistake,’ and that ‘establishing a state means fucking people over.’” While there’s a lot of truth to Wieseltier’s piece—no more so than in his statement that Spielberg’s even-handed account of the Israeli response to the 1972 Munich olympics massacre perpetrated by a group of Palestinean terrorists is too strategically balanced, too eager to condemn all to truly offend anyone—he ultimately relies on the same old canard eternally trotted out to smackdown the erstwhile “Boy Wonder”: “The makers of Munich seem to think that it is itself an intervention in the historical conflict that it portrays.”

I would argue this is precisely what Munich, surprisingly, does not do. “When Spielberg gets serious,” (that should be a bumper sticker--often said whenever Spielberg doesn’t make sci-fi, but honestly, can anyone think of a movie more “serious” that came from a studio in the past 10 years than A.I.?), many are quick to charge him with grandiose historical finality, that Schindler’s List, Amistad, and Saving Private Ryan were meant to be the ultimate statements on Holocaust, Slavery, and WWII, respectively, and that Spielberg’s hubristic end result was to wrap historical trauma up in resolution. What his detractors here do not realize is that this is a scholarly invention as a means to rationalize imagery so powerful and epochal that it seems like finality. Spielberg’s technique is so acute and primal that cinema bends in its wake.

Therefore, expectations, from those who want it as well as those who don’t, may dash Munich, which is, ultimately…a thriller. A genre piece imbued with a searing sense of morality. Once again, Spielberg goes farther than one would expect in terms of violence, and some moments (a knife haphazardly puncturing a stocking-clad forehead, bloody bullets richocheting off a white wall creating cloud formations, neck bullet holes gurlging blood with a decidedly delayed reaction) are impossible to shake. But this time, what’s most remarkable is a symbiosis even stranger than the much-discussed, underappreciated Kubrick/Spielberg connection: Kushner/Spielberg. Though I can’t say after one viewing if the fruits of their labors quite meld into something completely harmonious or coherent, I can say with assuredness that the in-your-face combo of Kushner’s verbal loftiness and Spielberg’s visual flamboyance,yields something altogether welcome: a Hollywood thriller distrustful of its own narrative thrust, a confused self-loathing action pic that all but dissolves into sweaty panic and regret. There’s a lot here that works and some stuff that really doesn’t, but Spielberg is most impressive when he (often) lets his actors just speak. Or spout, as the case may be.

Which brings us back to Wieseltier: he saves his strongest condemnations not for Spielberg’s manipulative suspense tactics but for Kushner’s pro-Palestine stance. This coming so soon after ideologues thrashed War of the Worlds for white supremacy. Therefore, do Spielberg’s twin terror narratives of 2005 ultimately function as definitive political assertions or as blank slates on which to project all contemporary fears? The last image of Munich leads me to believe the latter, yet Kushner, who cleverly devises dramatic queues for debate, simply won’t leave well enough alone, interrupting Janusz Kaminski’s glossy-grim knockout work at every turn. Thank God for that. And how about this for Spielberg: vibrant, volatile homoeroticism (not just for the five sweaty Mossad team agents bunking together in close quarters for years on end but for a sincerely omnipresent fetishizing of Eric Bana’s perfect-specimen physique) and the most memorable image melding sex and death I can recall seeing this year at the movies. Munich, as expected, is a force to be reckoned with…yet at this point I’m still reckoning.

There were about twelve of us at the final screening of the Brattle’s weeklong engagement of Darwin’s Nightmare last night. The irony was thick: A bunch of folks settling in on a cold, blustery Wednesday in a last-of-its-kind theatre flirting with extinction watching a terrific documentary (for the record, I’ll echo robbiefreeling’s assessment with a few slight qualms) that details the terrible results of a different kind of economic cannibalism half a world away. One of these situations is obviously more dire, (yes, Tanzania) but without the Brattle, the twelve of us might have only the chance to read about these distant horrors, rather than coming face to face with the devastating images Hubert Sauper collected around Lake Victoria. Needless to say, the mood was appropriately grim as we exited the theatre into Harvard Square.

I ran into the Brattle’s programmer, Ned Hinkle, on my way in who told me that their fundraising drive was going well, that the staff is optimistic, and that there’s still much to be done. If you haven’t given yet, please do.

No idea what I'm talking about? Read this.

Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory is ending its two-week run at NYC’s Film Forum tomorrow (assuming it doesn’t elbow out that Hymn to the Enduring Spirit of Art for the bluehair crowd, Ballets Russes), and if you haven’t seen the thing yet, you should really give it a go. I’ll spare you a blizzard of quantifying adjectives or the oft-repeated canard “as relevant today as ever”—the sort of fallback journalistic banality that mostly encourages over-simplified historical compression (“Bush=Hitler,” “Algiers=Iraq”). But this is capital filmmaking, and Kubrick’s often quibbled-with perfectionism has created something close to perfect here. The movie’s death-driven structure is clean and complete as a classical equation worked out a millennia ago, but that rigor creates compelling friction against the hoarse, passionate outrage of Kirk Douglas and the ill-fated soldiers he tries to protect from a scapegoating military tribunal: Brooklyn boys Joe Turkel and Timothy Carey (who seems to be in a different performance every time he’s on-screen), and quintessential mensch Ralph Meeker, together the most all-American batch of movie Frenchmen you’ll ever meet. Universal, ever-relevant, sure; but it’s the squalid specificity of the casualties that gives Paths its emotional heft, and lays the foundation for that final, non-sequiter sentimental song from a captured fräulein (the future Mrs. Kubrick) to resonate with the simple, smothering sense of what it is we lose a war.

The soul-deadening, colon-twisting hype machine has made its choice. Walk the Line is a new classic (and destined for TNT’s The New Classics, if we’re lucky).The fact is that James Mangold (pronounced Mangled) has Mangold another dull flat piece of movie garbage, yet because this opportunistic hack job has been enshrined, it’s well on its way to awards heaven. Critics seem to have been equating this slavish cocksucker of a biopic with Johnny Cash himself: as though to insult the film is to demean the memory of the subject. Yet, the problem with Walk the Line is as old as the Hollywood hills: easy soundbitish psychological portraiture, flat succession of cause-and-effect events, daddy problems that come wrapped with a nice finishing bow so we can go home with the calming sense of resolution. Joaquin Phoenix brings some welcome modesty to what could have been insufferably larger than life, and Reese Witherspoon puts on her best Reese Witherspoon pointy face. And they can both sing… on tune. But are their slight charms really enough for all of this?

Wesley Morris: “Reese Witherspoon plays Carter, and it's a pretty amazing movie-star moment.”
Peter (giggle) Travers: “Witherspoon has nailed it before, but her portrayal of June is astounding in its vitality and richness”
Ebert: “What adds boundless energy to Walk the Line is the performance by Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash.
Anyway, why belabor it? It goes on and on and on. Witherspoon, the little firecracker, is gettin’ her Oscar. It’s her time! It’s been designated. Done deal. Forget the fact that her role is little more than Jennifer Connelly’s in A Beautiful Mind: Completely without an independent mind or spirit, her June Carter Cash exists in Walk the Line only to ail, nurse, and love her self-destructive, pill-popping loverboy.

So, if many mainstream press critics were told to soil their pants before the credits were done rolling on this digestible bit of twang-sanctified hagiography, then they already had their knives out for Rent. Yes, the Broadway musical has always been a mystifying Sesame Street of sexual equality, bad rhymes, and horrid plotting. Yes, it’s hard not to wag a Williamsburg finger at the bald-faced earnestness on display. But guess what? It was the only salve for a night at the movies tainted by Walk the Line. A half-welcome double feature as it turned out, Rent and Walk the Line represent two sides of the same machine, and both may forcefeed, but the biopic is the one for the dustbin. “Forcibly maudlin” and “mawkish sentimentality” were two phrases bandied about by press critics for Rent. And how does this derision not apply to Walk the Line, a film in which Johnny Cash falls face down in the mud in the middle of the forest, wakes up the next morning, sees a house with a For Sale sign before him, mutters “That’s a nice house,” and then cut to Johnny moving some boxes into his new abode.

Fact is, there isn’t an ounce of the joyous, goofy exuberance found in Rent in any frame of Walk the Line, yet Johnny Cash is untouchable, lionized subject matter, while transvestites with AIDS are just so 1995. Rosario Dawson has as much “boundless energy” and “stage presence” as Reese Witherspoon…but well, we like our kewtie pies slightly less threatening, don’t we? (White is a plus, too). Rent can be derided up and down for its naïve, earnest bellow to the clouds, but the oft-poo-poohed Chris Columbus proves himself a far more visually thoughtful filmmaker than Mangled ever had (I’ll still take Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Home Alone over Kate and Leopold, Heavy, and Girl Interrupted any day of the week) The response to these simultaneously released pop-song extravaganzas shows us where our priorities are…not that there’s any surprise there at all.

The first snow on the ground in New England means that it's nearly time for every cinephile's most favorite, and most pointless, yearly activity: List making! Come 2006, we'll all look back at whatever public declarations of love we made in the year prior and cringe a little, but that never stops us from stepping up to embarrass ourselves again just a few months later...

I'm usually hugely disorganized in my list-making, so in a year where I felt I saw a bunch of things that caught my eye, I sat down with a list of every film released this year and cobbled together this group to be whittled down over the next few weeks. In no particular order.

The Contenders:

Bad News Bears
Breakfast on Pluto
A History of Violence
Oliver Twist
Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
War of the Worlds
2046
In My Country
Junebug
Look at Me
Pride & Prejudice
Yes
Funny HaHa
Kings & Queen
Mysterious Skin
Nobody Knows
Saraband
The Squid and the Whale
Tropical Malady
The World

Oddballs that might make the cut:

Sky High
Separate Lies
Dear Wendy
Corpse Bride
The Devil's Rejects
Lord of War
Where the Truth Lies

Haven't seen:

The New World
Matchpoint
Munich

#2 on the list of favorite cinephile activities is, of course, carping about other lists, so let the mudslinging commence!

So subjectively complex and structurally rich, Terrence Malick's undoubtedly great new film deserves more space and consideration than this mere sneak preview can afford, which of course will involve further viewings—both to sort out its inscrutable strands and luxuriate in its staggering visual and aural tapestry. The most necessary thing to clear up at this point is that The New World completely belongs to newcomer Q’orianka Kilcher; whose delicately emotional gravitas as Pocahontas anchors the film wholly, and the script (as moved along by philosophical voiceover as any Malick film) focuses almost entirely on her, even when it’s often from the point of view of Captain John Smith, played by a (purposely?) ineffectual Colin Farrell.

Most surprising about The New World is that it’s first and foremost a character piece; all of Malick’s usual philosophical concerns (man’s connection to nature, the cohabitation of different earthbound civilizations, the question of what ‘civilization’ really means) are implicit and intact, yet unlike Malick’s other protagonists, Pocahontas becomes less of an abstraction, even as she is dealt with, by John Smith and Malick simultaneously, as Other. Kilcher is more than up to the challenge of having a 160-minute, ostensibly historical epic revolve entirely around her, and in a year of such pathetically meager best actress candidates (front runners include Reese Witherspoon, Keira Knightley… and Charlize Theron, again), Kilcher should rightly be seen as the Oscar front-runner when voters finally get their eyes on it.

Then again, this is still a Malick film, as challenging as ever in its ambitions, even while perhaps functioning as his most accessible narrative. Less historical revisionism than resolutely personal, transcendentalist tone poem (not much of a surprise there), Malick’s fourth picture is adorned with almost nonstop natural beauty, inventive cutting that invites disorienting chronological leaps, and a career-best score by James Horner that swells like the opening strains of a grand symphony that never quite gets started. The New World is technically at least, most like Thin Red Line, and therefore will not likely be met with across-the-map huzzahs and certain commercial success. Yet I can say without qualm at this early stage, that it’s doubtful there will be a more gorgeous Hollywood film for a good long while—at least until the next Malick movie comes out (circa 2015, if we’re lucky).