ShaunHuston filmblog

Under discussion:

Dakota Skye  (2008)

My review of the Dakota Skye DVD posted to PopMatters yesterday. Because this is a small film that many will not have seen, here's a one-line synopsis and excerpt from the review. It's essentially a young adult romantic comedy, but low-key and with a particular wrinkle: the female hero has the power to discern when people are lying. While this conceit creates some problems for the narrative, it also opens up some interesting possibilities:

Indeed, the most important function of Dakota’s truth-seeing is that it gives the filmmakers the freedom to develop her as a complex teen/young adult, and not reduce her to a girl looking for love. During the course of the movie, she engages in a number of behaviors largely forbidden to female romantic leads. She ditches her friends. She cheats on her boyfriend with his best friend, and does so without any overt displays of guilt. She continues to act as a dutiful girlfriend after the infidelity. She appears to enjoy sex.

In the moral economy of teen romantic comedies and coming of age films, any one of these acts would usually be enough to mark her as a bad girl, or at least as too blemished to be the hero. Here, her power not only makes her, by definition, extraordinary, but the particular nature of her ability means that she always has her own, good and demonstrable, reasons for what she does. She knows, in a real way, that Kevin’s feelings for her are shallow, that her friends are aggravated by her, and that people, boys and men in particular, will say all kinds of things if they think it will result in sex. All of these insights, and the fact that they are shared with the audience, make her behaviors understandable in ways that they normally would not be on screen, even though in the real world of teenagers, they are all common enough.

Under discussion:

2001: A Space Odyssey  (1968)

Star Trek  (2009)

The Brothers Bloom  (2009)

Public Enemies  (2009)

Sugar  (2009)

The Girlfriend Experience  (2009)

Moon  (2009)

Picking up more pieces from this summer of non-blogging. Now, summer films.

• Star Trek. Like, well, pretty much everybody, I found the new Trek film to be well-cast and thoroughly entertaining. Structurally, I think that the intro for Kirk could have been tighter – the joyride scene in no way needs to be as drawn out as it is, especially not when followed by the bar fight. For me, the movie really gets started when Spock shows up. And yet, I do agree with Chris Wisniewski at Reverse Shot about the lack of philosophical ambition in JJ Abrams' reboot. Trek's creators have always strived to make the franchise about something, and while this hasn't always led to good film or TV, it does, I think, help explain the durability of the storyworld. The new movie is not only the first installment that seems to have been made purely for thrill and spectacle, but allows horrific genocide to go by with hardly more than a nod in the direction of the profundity of such an event. I still enjoyed the movie, but after the fact, I felt myself missing the typical moral and intellectual earnestness of the series.
• Sugar. An interesting and sometimes beautiful film, particularly in its handling of cultural juxtapositions and the deftness with which it wraps an immigration story in a sports movie. I need to watch it again though to fully develop my thoughts; my expectations were pretty high going in and sometimes it helps to see a movie like that once, with those burdens, and then again later, without them to gain some perspective.
• The Brothers Bloom. Another film I was looking forward to, and enjoyed, but need to see again. I mentally composed, but never wrote, a post on the movie's production design, which I think works well to shift the core cast into their own version of reality, one where Stephen's elaborate and literary cons might actually work. Motivated quirkiness of this kind, which is probably most often associated today with Wes Anderson's movies, works better for me than unmotivated oddness, as in Juno (2007), where the quirks are pretty much their own arguments, and not in the service of anything of consequence.
• The Girlfriend Experience. Not sure what to write here; a film I'm glad I saw, but can't say that it left much of a lasting impression.
• Public Enemies. This is a movie I like and appreciate more now than when I first saw it. I am compelled by the use of HD for a period piece like this, a device that clearly announces itself as a product of now, a movie about the 1930s, not of or from the period, which is the more conventional way of approaching historical material.
• Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince. As the film franchise has progressed, I am less enthused about seeing these movies. In part, this is because the films are becoming more what they should have been to begin with, which is directed at fans and readers of the books, which I am not.
• Moon. The best film I've seen this summer, easily. Beautiful, cool, provocative, anchored by a surprisingly understated lead, almost one-person show, performance from Sam Rockwell. Love the way the film quietly and cleverly plays with the memory of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Many times when I add a new item to my delicious account or LibraryThing or to Spout, etc., I have a moment when I pause to think about my tags. I go back-and-forth about adding new tags to items that I know ought to be applied to ones already in my account. With tags I use commonly, I sometimes can't remember my original construction (lower case, upper case, and so on; services vary in how easy it is to check this kind of thing). And there's frequently the temptation to apply unique, virtually one-of-a-kind tags to items. Sometimes I resist this temptation, why create something you're only going to use once, but at other times I know I'll want a label that will give me virtually certain one-click access to the item. So, some days I tag very conservatively, and on others I tag with abandon (hee). But today I've been wondering how much of this is beside the point. Maybe tagging is about the moment and then discovery later? On the other hand, doesn't there need to be some kind of order if you're going to actually find things in the future? Maybe the best idea is to apply and create as many tags as possible for each item to maximize your chances of finding it in some later search? Librarians? I know you're out there.

To commemorate the site's 10th anniversary, PopMatters is rolling out a special feature on the sixty-two most memorable films of 1999. This entry will link to each day's selection.

Monday: January-May.

Tuesday: May-August.

Wednesday: August-October (includes my entry on The Limey).

Thursday: October-November.

Friday: November-December.

(Cross-posted on Spout).

Under discussion:

Touch of Evil  (1958)

I have a feature on directors, marketing, auteur-ship, Orson Welles, and Touch of Evil up at PopMatters. It will be on the front page for another day or so.

PopMatters begins its extended look at the Best TV, Film, and DVD of 2008 with the Top 30 television shows and Ten Best Guilty Pleasures. I contributed entries on the Top 30 at #27 and #6 (the one at six is too low, btw). You can see the top ten I submitted here.

I'll use this post to keep a running set of links during the roll out.

From M 1/12:
Best TV (Best Guilty Pleasures).

From T 1/13:
Top Ten Film Guilty Pleasures
Top 30 DVDs

From W 1/14
Top 20 Female Performances (on film)
Top 20 Male Performances (on film)
Best Television Performers

From Th 1/15
Top 20 International/Indie Films
The 20 Worst Films

From F 1/16
Top 30 Films (I contributed the entry at #9)
Best Complexities

Cross-posted on Spout.

Last week, figuring that we had seen all of the films we were going to see in 2008, Anne-Marie and I held our annual review of our year in movie watching. We each come up with a list of the five best. Our ground rules are pretty simple. We only consider films seen in the theater during the calendar year. We only list five because we don't see enough films to merit a top ten, or, at least, given the number of movies we do see, coming up with five is more of a challenge than would be ten or more. This year we saw a paltry twenty-seven, barely more than one every two weeks. The fewer films we see, the more personal and basically arbitrary our lists are (they are always so to be sure, but the more movies we have to compare, the more informed our selections). Here is my personal best five for 2008, in order seen, from least to most recent:

• There Will be Blood
• Girls Rock!
• Redbelt
• Man on Wire
• Rachel Getting Married

This is very different from last year's list, which had uniformly wonderful, even transcendent, films, not to mention the cachet of our having attended the Toronto International Film Festival. This year's list is composed of flawed, but interesting movies.

My favorite here is probably Rachel Getting Married, although it has the advantage of being the last I saw. I love Demme's use of long takes, the persistent irritating music, the way it feels like a wedding weekend, and how the filmmakers take the complexity of family relationships seriously. For me, it is a film that shows one direction for cinema, even as TV and other visual storytelling media exceed it as a form of expression for certain purposes. The necessarily finite nature of the story makes it ideal for film. Further, as I argued in my DVD review of My Blueberry Nights, there's a kind of visual intimacy that is best experienced in a theater, on a big screen, and Rachel is that kind of film.

There Will be Blood is also natively cinematic, but because of its bigness, rather than its smallness, and because its character arcs are complete and perfect. The same could be written of Man on Wire, although I'm not sure how different my viewing experience would have been if I had seen that film first on OPB or HBO rather than at the Darkside. I have no question that I could have seen Girls Rock! on TV or online and still been affected by the kids the filmmakers chose to focus on. That Redbelt is on this list comes as a surprise. I would not have thought that when we saw it. It is kind of a silly movie, but Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance has stuck with me like no other this year.

There are, as always, movies that I saw for the first time on DVD and at Western Oregon's French Film Festival that would have been contenders for the list had I seen them in the theater. On DVD, I saw the strange and wonderful Last Night, the amazingly compelling King of Kong, the beautiful and provocative About a Son, and the Canadian classic, Goin' Down the Road. I'm fairly certain that the first two listed here would have been on my list. From the Tournées Festival, I certainly would have thought about The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

You can see all of the films I saw in the theater last year here and those I saw on DVD here. Anne-Marie's list is here.

Under discussion:

Persepolis  (2007)

The annual French language film festival at Western Oregon University begins tomorrow with Persepolis at  7:00 pm in ITC 211. See the rest of the schedule on the WOU Film Studies blog.