Category: Film/TV/Etc. Blog

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They Wuz Robbed! The 2015 Oscar Nominees Revealed

It’s time for the annual ritual of complaining about the Oscar nominations, and I’m here to help. Or at least, throw fuel on the fire.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

2014 was a great year for movies. The two frontrunners, Birdman and Boyhood, both of which have nine nominations, are great movies, but to my mind, the Best Picture category is wide open. The Grand Budapest Hotel and Selma are both equal to the two frontrunners, and since Clint Eastwood has been an increasingly inexplicable perineal Oscar favorite in the twenty-first century, American Sniper could be a surprise winner. If you held a gun to my head, I would probably go with The Grand Budapest Hotel as best picture from the choices given, but I would be happy with any of the top four.

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Boyhood

To me, the Best Director category is clear: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is an unprecedented directorial achievement. Movies can be derailed by tiny choices early in the production, and since Linklater’s Boyhood shoot stretched over 12 years, he had plenty of opportunity to mess up, but turned instead a perfect movie. The biggest omission from the Best Director category is Ava DuVernay for Selma, which is just inexcusable, especially when Bennett Miller is nominated for the mediocre morass that is Foxcatcher.

Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything

The Best Actor category also has two inexcusable snubs: First is John Lithgow’s career high performance in Ira Sach’s Love Is Strange. I think Love Is Strange should have been in the running for all of the top-line awards, but Lithgow, Alfred Molina, and Marissa Tormei’s performances in the film were simply unequalled this year. The second, and perhaps more glaring, snub is David Oyelowo, who is exceptional in a really difficult role as Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma. Steve Carrel’s name recognition got him a nomination, but his performance in Foxcatcher is a one-note disappointment. Among the nominees, I’ll take Eddie Remayne’s perfectly calibrated, physically demanding turn as Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything.

Reese Witherspoon in Wild

Without Tormei in the Leading Actress category, it’s going to come down to between Reese Witherspoon in Wild and Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl. Both are fine performances, but I’ll have to go with the empathetic naturalism of Witherspoon.

Michael Keaton and Ed Norton in Birdman

My knee-jerk pick in the Actor in a Supporting Role is Ethan Hawke in Boyhood, but all of the nominees seem strong. Mark Ruffalo was the best thing about Foxcatcher, and if you watched the trailers for Whiplash, J.K. Simmons seemed like the lead actor, so he’s got a good shot. And don’t count out Ed Norton if a Birdman wave builds.

Patricia Arquette in Boyhood

Suporting Actress, however, should be a runaway for Patricia Arquette, who lays it all out there in Boyhood. Emma Stone greatly exceeded my expectations for her in Birdman, but this is Arquette’s trophy.

Inherent Vice

The screenplay categories are also pretty clear for me. Original Screenplay should go to The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is as tight and original piece of screenwriting as Wes Anderson has ever done. My Adapted Screenplay pick is Inherent Vice for pulling off the seemingly impossible task of adapting Thomas Pynchon’s prose. But it probably won’t win, because it has divided audiences so much, so this category is wide open. I wouldn’t be surprised if American Sniper got it, because the book it was based on has been extremely popular. I was surprised that Gone Girl didn’t get nominated, but the category is admittedly pretty stacked.

Guardians Of The Galaxy

I was stunned to see The Lego Movie snubbed in the Animated Feature category, but directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller should console themselves by rolling around in their giant piles of money. In the Editing category, Boyhood is the clear winner for the effortlessly clear and inventive way it strung together 12 years of one boy’s life. The visual effects category, however, is wide open. My pick is the photorealistic Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, but Guardians of the Galaxy and Interstellar are both very strong contenders, and Magneto lifting RFK Stadium with his mind in X-Men: Days Of Future Past is among the year’s indelible images.

In sum, the Oscars have given us lots of stuff to argue about this year—which is pretty much their function, right? 

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The Interview

Have you ever heard of The Streisand Effect? Back in 2003, Barbara Streisand somehow spotted her Malibu home in one of 12,000 aerial photographs of the California coast on a photographers’ website and sued him because she didn’t want anyone looking at her house. But here’s the thing: If she hadn’t pointed out that her home was the subject of one of 12,000 pictures, no one would have known, or probably even cared, that it was there. But now, because of Striesand’s attempt to suppress the photograph, it has its own Wikipedia page. The act of trying to suppress something brought more attention to it than it would have gotten anyway.

Diana Bang, Seth Rogan, and James Franco in The Interview.

You’ve probably heard the story of The Interview by now: Seth Rogan, the “stoner king of Hollywood”, and his friend from the Freaks and Geeks days, James Franco made another of their middlebrow comedy movies to be released last Christmas. The plot involved Franco’s character, talk show host Dave Skylark, getting a chance to interview North Korean leader Kim Jon Un. The CIA, represented by Agent Lacey (Party Down vet Lizzy Caplan), makes them an offer they can’t refuse: Assassinate Kim. Will they do it, or are they too stupid to pull it off?

There are a few times in history when a group of filmmakers have made big, lasting political statements or captured the zeitgeist just right. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, lampooned Hitler on the eve of war. The backdrop for Casablanca’s love story was a community of political refugees from war-torn Europe, a description that fit many of the actors on the screen. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove skewered the insanity of a world preparing to destroy itself with nuclear weapons. Now, to this rarefied list of films, we must add The Interview. And you can blame the Streisand effect for that, because The Great Dictator, it ain’t.

Donna Dixon, Dan Ackroyd, and Chevy Chase in Spies Like Us.

Don’t get me wrong. The Interview is not a bad film, per se. It has some funny moments, and some decent performances by Franco, Rogan, and Diana Bang as Sook, the North Korean handler assigned to Skylark.  It’s a surprisingly old fashioned action comedy in the John Landis/John Belushi/Dan Ackroyd vein. It wants to be The Blues Brothers, but its nearest antecedent would be Spies Like Us, the 1985 John Landis comedy that was originally supposed to star Ackroyd and Belushi but ended up replacing the deceased half of the duo with Chevy Chase. Like Spies Like Us, The Interview has its comic duo (Rogan plays Franco’s producer Aaron Rappaport) as untrained, and none too bright, field agents thrown into a totalitarian Communist dictatorship on a perilous mission of international import. The only reason the filmmakers chose North Korea as a target for humor is because they’re the only totalitarian Communist dictatorship still around 25 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, and their internal propaganda looks ridiculous to the West. 

Randall Park as Kim Jong Un

But some movies are born great, and some movies have greatness thrust upon them. That’s what happened to The Interview when Kim Jong Un ordered a cyber hit on Sony Pictures after hearing that Hollywood was imagining his assassination. One of the many intertwining ironies of this whole affair is that the actor who plays Kim Jong Un, Randall Park, gives the best performance in the entire movie. Sure, his Kim is a privileged buffoon, but so are Rogan and Franco’s characters. Had the North Korean dictator simply ignored the movie’s provocation—if it can even be said to rise to the level of provocation—it would have made some money providing cheap laughs to theatergoers over the holidays and then been flushed down the memory hole with Spies Like Us.

But as it is, The Interview will have repercussions far beyond the multiplexes of the world. It’s an attack on a private company inside the borders of the United States by a state actor, and the United States has decided to respond. We still don’t know exactly who did it, although I find it unlikely that anyone but Kim was ultimately behind it, no matter who was hired by whom to do the dirty work, for the simple reason that the movie is so innocuous. Equally implausible is the theory that it was all a publicity stunt by Sony, as the damage to that studio is real and likely to be lasting, depending on exactly how many people Sony owes money to that have their lawyers and accountants pouring over the studio’s leaked financial information right now. The decision to pull the movie from release in the face of anonymous terroristic threats makes more sense if you consider that the theater chains were likely more concerned about their IT infrastructure being turned inside out than a physical attack.

Rogan and company didn’t do anything but set out to make a funny movie, and they were reasonably successful. The filmmakers were just artists doing their job, until they got swept up in something bigger. Maybe that’s how art is supposed to work. 

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2014: The Year Television Kicked The Movies’ Ass

Television continues to be the narrative televisual storytelling medium par excellence. It allows you to identify traits with human faces over a longer period of time, instead of for two hours, and thereby more easily dupes you into believing fictional people exist.

Game Of Thrones

This year Game of Thrones continued to get better and better at being subtly modern, showing us a world in which major problems are ignored for short-term politics. It was nowhere near The Wire, but still unique in using the medium to create a complex, multilayered world, more than any large scale cinematic shared universe. The show’s problems continue to be its backwards treatment of women and women’s bodies. Women are naked in traditional male gaze fashion, while penises are mostly off limits. Elsewhere, the show added a sexual assault to the adapted storyline and seemed to be confused about whether there actually was one and why it was there. The director and showrunners gave different answers in interviews, and the character in question blithely pursued his heroic arc.

True Detective

True Detective also had problems writing its female characters, but was distinguished by a beautiful opening credits sequence and fun Matthew McConaughey monologues set in a generically miserable Louisiana. McConaughey’s philosophy wasn’t anything you couldn’t find on the atheist section of Reddit, but it was operatic, poetic and accurate. Almost everyone else around him was cardboard. The series undercut this exciting pessimism by ending with action scenes and hope, not horror, with all the resounding tonal shift of a wet fart.

Orange Is The New Black

The show that was best at humanizing even its most minor characters was Orange Is The New Black. Although it may not be the most accurate depiction of the prison industrial complex, wherein we throw everyone possible in prison and make money off it, it certainly stressed the dehumanization of our system and treated the prison population with empathy. Despite all the stand-up routine style jokes, that made it a political show. Those politics were a rarity even as mainstream attention to the way police and prisons can treat civilians (murderously or corruptly) came to the forefront of newscycles this year. Television is a landscape of cops eternally breaking rules to throw criminals away. As public discourse changes, media companies sometimes allow politics that actually concern us to appear on our screens, and this is an example.

Probably my favorite cringeworthy horrible show of our modern era, 24, a show that actively and aggressively tried to act as an apologia for torture and once cast Janeane Garofalo so that its main character could yell at her, returned this year, as stupid as ever. The few episodes I watched seemed slightly more tasteful and less likely to suggest that torturing the hell out of someone is a superheroic act, but it had also lost its campy, 80’s action movie vibe.

Agents Of Shield

A lot of shows are mostly concerned with cross promotion —for example, Gotham which was mainly meaningless call-forwards to Batman characters. Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD had the 24 aspect of praising rule-breaking government agents with no oversight, but when it tried to be morally gray it just came off creepy. It got better this year, but was still most clear about its goals when advertising other products or films.

A procedural I did like was Happy Valley, a Netflix British import, because of the strength of its acting and writing, with only a little War on Drugs paranoia thrown in.

Attack On Titan

Other standouts included the anime Attack on Titan, widely available in the U.S. this year. The actual writing was horrible but whenever its overtly psychological monsters appeared it was wonderful. Hannibal’s Grand Guignol improved its procedural, and Transparent took Jeffery Tambor’s crossdressing from Arrested Development and remixed it humanely into the story of a transgender woman coming out to her family.

Black Mirror

Another import, Black Mirror, was accessible previously in the U.S., but just became available to most U.S. consumers via Netflix less than a month ago. Its scant six episodes are nice modern Twilight Zone parables, none better than the science fiction worldbuilding in “Fifteen Million Merits,” which dramatizes how the emptiness in working towards buying meaningless things does not go away when consumers recognize it. A consumerist system persists because it is easy to co-opt rebellion against it as a critique. Here, that means a dystopian society composed of people looking at computer screens from elliptical bikes get no catharsis when they watch an America’s Got Talent show. Their attempts to disrupt it only upgrade its edginess.
In terms of direct politics, one half of Comedy Central’s continuous critique of mainstream news, Stephen Colbert, abdicated for CBS. Given how David Letterman lost most of his verve upon decamping there, it is not a good sign. Meanwhile Aaron Sorkin’s humorless but passionate retelling of news from a few years ago, The Newsroom, finally died. From what I’ve seen of the show it seemed to be so mired in Sorkin’s voice that its political opponents were strawmen.

Finally, one of America’s most beloved television dads was revealed to be a serial rapist. This was a fact long ago: we’re just learning it. It is better to know, and for a corrupt, powerful person to be shamed if they cannot be prosecuted. His downfall was brought about in part because his handlers did not understand how new media works. For as long as it takes them to learn it, the world will change.

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In Re: 2014 In Film

[Flyer Film Editor Chris McCoy and frequent Flyer film contributor Addison Engleking had the following email exchange to discuss the 2014 Year In FIlm article in this week’s paper.]

Chris,
First, congratulations on the new gig. Second, how’s the new job going? Are there any unexpected perks or problems with your new writing/editing workload? More specifically, how does your own experience as a real, honest-to-God filmmaker influence what you see and what you’re looking for in movies now that you have to write about them every single week? Third, we’ve never spoken: what do you think my voice sounds like?
-Addison
 

In Re: 2014 In Film

Addison,
I imagine your voice to be like God from The Ten Commandments.

So far, so good on being the Flyer’s Film/TV Editor. I think I am most surprised by how difficult it’s been to get reviews in the paper in a timely manner. Studios have decided they don’t have anything to gain by previewing big budget movies to critics like us, so I’ve had to pay to see them on opening weekend and then run the reviews the next week. It’s also pretty time consuming: There were more than 600 movies in wide release this year, which would be almost two a day all year long. So it’s very difficult to see everything. like Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert did back in the day.

As you said, I am a filmmaker with three features under my belt over the course of ten years. I have also done a lot of screenwriting and consulting over the last few years, and I’m shopping a screenplay in Hollywood right now. So I’ve got skin in the game, as they say. I think it gives me an appreciation for the complexities of filmmaking. If you can get the fundamentals right—good acting, good pacing, looks good, reasonably coherent script—you’re going to get a good review from me.

I see my job as being a consumer advocate. The first and foremost question everyone is asking when they read a review is, “Should I go see this movie?” So somewhere in all of the pontificating about theory and stuff, I have to answer that question. And that’s regardless of genre. I’m not a big fan of Westerns, but if I review a Western, I have to let fans of the genre know if it’s a good Western or not. Likewise, if I’m going to be reviewing a science fiction movie, I can’t let my geekdom get in the way of telling a general audience if they’re going to like it.

My two questions for you are, 1) do you have any advice for me as to how to be a better critic, and 2) Was 2014 a good year for movies? 
-Chris

Alia Shawcat and Sophia Takal in Wild Canaries

Chris,
First, as a sci-fi geek you need to mainline all of Black Mirror ASAP. Second, if you can imagine God sounding like Bob Oedenkirk, then you’ve pretty much nailed the sound of my voice.

Anyway, I’m not surprised that studios aren’t pre-screening films for critics as often as they used to. But in a way I’m glad it’s happening, because it means I’m still useful to The Flyer: I can see a movie when it premieres in my hometown of Minneapolis and then send you a review that remains timely and relevant whenever that movie resurfaces in Memphis.

On the other hand, the notion of “timeliness” w/r/t film reviewing is surprisingly tricky. Take your job description: as much as I respect and appreciate the consumer advocacy element of most film criticism, I’m always struggling against it. For example, you know what I dislike most about my reviews? The second paragraph. That’s where I feel obligated to throw in a couple of vague, coy sentences about the story and/or the actors and/or the cinematic antecedents to whatever I’m writing about. It feels like necessary consumer information, but I always wonder how I could have used those 100 words differently. Let other people sum things up; I want to do something else—expand on the de facto auteurism that you’re rightly suspicious of, maybe, or call attention to those overlooked textures, gestures, lines, images, or moments that are shorthand for the movies at their best. Basically, I want to celebrate what Andrei Tarkovsky called “Time, captured in its factual forms and manifestations.”

You asked me how to become a better film critic. (How sweet of you to think I might know!) Well, it’s imperative to care about every word you write. Persist in the fantasy that you’re being read for posterity. Respect good product by trying to see it as clearly as you can; respect inferior product by being honest and original about its failings. Watch more movies, but read lots of writing that isn’t only about film, too. Keep ideas in your head about other things while dealing with the specifics of the medium. Athough I’m not a huge fan of pop-sociology, “The Hunger Games is a metaphor for class division” criticism because the politics of Hollywood movies are deliberately squishy and stupid, other ideas from other places definitely belong in our work. I didn’t get that Tarkovsky quotation from Rotten Tomatoes; I got it from Lapham’s Quarterly.

The second question you asked is connected to the first one. Timeliness in movie reviewing is also getting more complicated as streaming services and alternate viewing options proliferate. Who has the time? So the question of whether 2014 was a good year starts to get more and more difficult to answer; within that arbitrary 12-month period, are we counting only movies released in Memphis (which includes several high-profile releases from late 2013) or are we counting on everything, from independent stuff like Blue Ruin (which played there briefly) to wacko imported fare like Why Don’t You Play in Hell? (which might not have played there at all)? What does it mean to watch a movie these days anyway?

Thanks to those options, though, the year at the movies I managed to put together was pretty good, maybe even better than last year. But before I share some of my favorites, what were some of yours?
-Addison

Chris Evans and Samuel L. Jackson in Captain America: Winter Soldier

Addison,
I’ll save my list of favorites for the paper, but I think you’ve got a point about the huge amount of movies being made means its easier to piece together a good moviegoing year. I saw a lot more great movies in 2014 than I did in 2013. I think the average quality went up across the board, from big budget Hollywood movies to the microbudget movies we saw at Indie Memphis. The two big Marvel tentpole comic book movies were both good in different ways. Guardians Of The Galaxy was both great space opera and a lot of fun, but in retrospect I preferred Captain America: Winter Soldier for the tighter plotting and some good performances by Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, and Scarlett Johansen. Even stuff like The Lego Movie and Big Hero 6 were better than they had any business being. In doing my year end roundup, I caught up with Edge Of Tomorrow, which was a big budget, high concept Tom Cruise movie that I thought was very well written and executed. That one will be written about for a while because of the horrible way Sony botched the marketing, both at the theatrical and home video level. (Live, Die, Repeat is not a better title than Edge Of Tomorrow).

At indie Memphis, we had much more variety. I think the mumblecore wave has finally broken, or at least people are paying more attention to the script in the indie world. I loved Lawrence Lavine’s Wild Canaries, which was a Brooklynite Rear Window from the guy who did the shapeless but compelling Gaby On The Roof In July a few years ago. Darius Monroe’s autobiographical documentary Evolution Of A Criminal has really stuck with me, too. I think those of us working on the indie level we should take more advantage of the creative freedom we have instead of making movies that look like job applications for Hollywood, and I think I saw more of that this year.

What were some of the movies that didn’t quite make the cut of your year end list?
-Chris

Shawn Ashmore, James McAvoy, and Hugh Jackman in X-Men: Days Of Future Past

Chris,
As far as Hollywood fare goes, a lot of the stuff you mentioned missed the cut for me, with Edge Of Tomorrow and Godzilla being the most agonizing omissions. The latest X-Men movie was probably my favorite installment of that venerable franchise, and though most of the superhero movies fall into a very clear and deeply repetitive story pattern, things like Guardians Of The Galaxy are starting to get weird like the later film noirs of the 1950s or the zombie films of today. So that’s encouraging. Plenty of movies were very good and very enjoyable but just short of great, like Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Vol. I, which was better than Vol. II. A lot of smaller stuff, like John Turturro’s Fading Gigalo and Mathieu Almaric’s The Blue Room, were compact and skillful, too. Again, it was a good year to spend a lot of time at the theaters.

As always, there were at least a couple of instances where I either bought or resisted the hype. Initially I enjoyed Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, but after thinking and reading about it more, I’m not so sure what it was or is supposed to do. And although I like Richard Linklater’s work enormously and was lucky enough to write about Boyhood, I wash’t as enamored of it as everyone else. For one thing, I think they picked the wrong kid to focus on; they should have built the movie around Linklater’s daughter.

Whenever you talk about the good stuff from Indie Memphis, I feel a pang for what I missed out on; I only saw a sliver of the smaller film-festival stuff. As it stands, though, I liked Happy Valley and American Cheerleader. But Citizenfour and HBO Films’ Regarding Susan Sontag are probably my two favorite documentaries.

I’d love to hear what you think about Sony’s current PR/marketing/hacking predicament in re: The Interview, which I picked as my “Movie of the Year” for obvious reasons. But that’s a different conversation for a different time. So let’s wrap things up by looking ahead. On Christmas Day I’m going to the local premiere of Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, and for much of the next couple of weeks I’ll be playing catch-up on things I missed, like Gone Girl (don’t worry, I read the book) and Enemy and The Double and whatever else sneaks into theaters.
-Addison

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Wild

I’m not much of an outdoorsman, but I do like to hike. My primary reaction to seeing Reese Witherspoon’s Oscar bait movie Wild was an urge to tramp senselessly through a wilderness setting for a few days. My secondary reaction is that Witherspoon’s probably got a shot at taking home some hardware come Academy Awards time.

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, who this time last year was getting Oscar buzz for Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto with Dallas Buyer’s Club, Wild is baed on a memoir by Cheryl Strayed that was a runaway bestseller in 2012. After the death of her mother, Strayed spiraled into depression and addiction. Hitting rock bottom, she rejected conventional therapy in favor of embarking on a seemingly Quixotic quest: Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada by herself.
Wild’s secret weapon is the screenplay by Nick Hornby, the novelist whose first novel High Fidelity was released in 1995, the same year Strayed set out on her epic hike. Hornby deftly adapts Strayed’s life story, using flashbacks to add just enough complexity to keep the story interesting without sacrificing clarity. In the flashbacks, we meet Strayed’ mother, Bobbi Grey (Laura Dern) whose upbeat attitude in the face of adversity and ultimately death both enlivened Strayed and seemed to set an impossible standard for her to live up to.
Dern is terrific in this all-important supporting role, but it’s Witherspoon’s party, and she delivers the goods. She traces Strayed’s parallel journeys, the physical one of slow, uneven progress north and the spiritual one of breaking down and building back up. Finding oneself by going back to nature is a core American narrative that goes back before Thoreau went to Walden Pond, and it retains it potency even today. Strayed didn’t exactly blaze new trails through the forest like Deerslayer, but when she’s a lone woman wandering through the desert wondering whether she’s going to be done in by her own city-girl inexperience or the ever-present danger of sexual violence from men who might help her, the stakes feel real. One of the unexpected highlights of Witherspoon’s performance comes in a comic early scene where Strayed, hitchhiking to avoid a snowed-in mountain pass, is interviewed by a reporter for a publication called the Hobo Times. Witherspoon all but stamps her feet insisting that she is not a hobo, even though everything the reporter is saying fits her situation perfectly, until she snatches his offer of a hobo care package out of his hands.
It does help that the admittedly predictable story transpires in unabashedly beautiful natural settings, from snowy mountains to the high desert. Cinematographer Yves Bélanger’s fine, occasionally digitally enhanced, landscape photography could inspire some serious wanderlust, but that could just be a sign that your intrepid reviewer needs to get out of the house more. Regardless, Wild is a cinematic journey worth taking. 

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Addison’s December Film Journal

Black Mirror, Series One (2011; dirs. Otto Bathurst [“The National Anthem”], Euros Lyn [“Fifteen Million Merits”], and Brian Welsh [“The Entire History of You”])—Last Friday afternoon, a colleague and friend of mine who has a “Kill Your Television” sticker on the TV monitor in her classroom told me to check out this show. When I arrived at work on Monday morning, I practically ran to her room to thank her for the tip. Black Mirror first aired on BBC4 in December 2011, so I realize I’m a bit late to the party here. 

It was worth the wait. Charlie Booker’s latest venture is a real live pop-culture IED, an amalgamation of provocative technophobe fantasies so unsettling that fans and critics describe it as “darkly satirical and funny” almost as a form of self-defense, like stickup victims who tell their assailant “Please, take anything you want, just don’t hurt me.” It is not a funny show, but it might be comic in the sense that it forgoes human greatness to concentrate its scalding rage on human weakness—particularly human vanity. No television show or film has ever made me feel worse about consuming television shows or films. Although its antecedents are difficult to pin down, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley at their most vitriolic certainly come to mind, as does the early work of English filmmaker Peter Watkins. Stanley Kubrick and car commercials are key visual touchstones; each episode is as sleek and aerodynamic as the latest iPhone. Ideally, you shouldn’t know anything about any episode, but the premise of the pilot (“The National Anthem”) is a stroke of disgusting genius as coolly logical as feeding starving Irish people their own children. The second episode, “Fifteen Million Merits,” borrows liberally from both Neveldine/Taylor’s 2009 film Gamer and Bobcat Goldthwait’s 2011 God Bless America, and it is the series high mark; I watched the first half of it while working out on an elliptical machine, which, well, you’ll see why I felt foolish after a while. And how about this: the Black Mirror Christmas special (starring Jon Hamm) airs at 9:30 PM on the Audience Network on December 25. So you can empty the lumps of coal out of your stocking before you stuff your brain with visionary dystopian discomfort. Grade: A

Force Majeure (2014; dir. Ruben Östlund)—A realistic account of a quietly disastrous family vacation at a ski resort in the French Alps photographed so strangely it appears to be a mining colony on an alien planet, Östlund’s shifty and insidious comic drama watches as one man’s moment of weakness spreads and expanding like a poison-gas cloud until everyone recedes into a miasma of self-doubt, nothing looks like it used to and nobody can have any fun anymore. Leisure-as-oppression is not a new storytelling subject, but the small and large ways in which this perky, well-moneyed, physically fit family—mom, dad, two kids (a boy and a girl, of course)—breaks down as they attempt to deal with what they think they’ve seen is as grim and implacable as dwindling daylight in late autumn. It’s very serious, but very funny, too: after all, one resort guest’s emotional breakdown in a hallway is another resort employee’s evening entertainment. Grade: A

Mon Oncle (1958; dir. Jacques Tati)—Criterion’s new The Complete Jacques Tati boxed set is the Blu-Ray reissue of the year; the supplementary materials, including the outstanding visual essays by Tati expert Stéphane Goudet, offer enough material for a lifetime of study. And you’re damn right I’m going to write about every one of Tati’s features, because 1) he only made a handful of them and 2) they’re all brilliant. His cardinal filmmaking virtues are his patience and his curiosity, both of which take some time to appreciate and understand. At first, Mon Oncle’s canny, confusing visual mazes and oppressive arrangements of blinds, modern furniture and privacy fences make you feel like your eyes are playing tricks on you. But consider that initial disorientation a kind of adjustment to your prescription: after a while you start to see more clearly, which makes it easier to pick out all the little sub-movies running behind, parallel to, and even ahead of the central story. Sure, Mon Oncle is about Monsieur Hulot (Tati) and his fruitless attempts to get a job in a plastics factory. That’s a great movie with some pricelessly whimsical passages in it, and it’s worth getting to know intimately. But Mon Oncle is also a sweet fable about a dachshund trapped in the suburbs who befriends a bunch of stray dogs that live in the city. And it’s an affectionate portrait of some shiftless, mischievous school kids who try to trick people into walking into lampposts when they aren’t confusing motorists and causing minor traffic accidents. It’s a parable about a cool and aloof modernist home that deliberately self-destructs in an effort to evict the officious and dull humans who live inside it, too. It’s whatever movie you want it to be, really. Grade: A+

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Music Video Of The Moment: Nots “Decadence”

Natalie Hoffman in Nots new music video ‘Decadence’

Memphis director Geoffrey Brent Shrewsbury‘s new music video for the Nots is as chaotic, raw, and beautiful as the band’s music. Combining performance footage, a studio shoot, and some well-chosen manipulated stock, “Decadence” is reminiscent of the golden age of MTV. 

Music Video Of The Moment: Nots ‘Decadence’

In Shrewsberry’s career, he has done everything from short narratives to PBS documentaries, but he got his start making stylish music videos for some of the best Midtown rock bands of the last 20 years. Here’s his director himself starring in his first video, a narrative of the ultimate New York street hassle he made for The Obivians’ “You Better Behave”. 

Music Video Of The Moment: Nots ‘Decadence’ (2)

A few years later he immortalized Jay Reatard and Alicja Trout’s seminal band Lost Sounds at their peak with the Gothy “Memphis Is Dead”, which saw the filmmaker come into his own as a visual stylist. It’s particularly cool when the video, which has been frantically phantom riding through Downtown, slows to a theatrically languid pace as the music downshifts from punk drive into synth dirge. Shrewsbury is also a musician, and its his deep understanding of and love for Memphis punk that allows him to create such compelling work in a time when music videos are as important as ever.

Music Video Of The Moment: Nots ‘Decadence’ (3)

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Addison’s November Film Journal

Tess (1979; dir. Roman Polanski)—Pretty soon, I’ll have to figure out—excuse me, “reveal”—my Top 10 movies of 2014. But this task always reminds me that, regardless of quality, there are just too many movies released in theaters every year for an amateur like me to see. (And let’s not talk about the Wild West of VOD, although its importance as both exhibition platform and moneymaker is growing.) Unless you’re really on top of your game, even the most promising movies can sneak out of town under your nose. This happened to me with Roman Polanski’s Venus In Fur a while back. Flyer Film/TV editor Chris McCoy reviewed it and really liked it. But when Venus In Fur showed up at my local theater I missed my chance to see it, so I got my Polanski fix by watching his gorgeous adaptation of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel about ruined families, lost legacies, creeping industrialism and crushing female degradation. Polanski meets Hardy’s “oblivion almost inconceivable in its profundity” head-on, in part because his widescreen framing and production design are as well-designed as Hardy’s prose and in part because he gets a strange, unnerving performance from a lead actress (Natassia Kinski) for whom English is a second language. It’s almost as though Polanski took a line from the book and made it his credo: “And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.” Grade: A+

Art and Craft (2014; dirs. Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker)—According to Mark Landis, it’s easy to make new paintings look like old ones: just pour a little instant coffee on them. He should know: the soft-spoken, stoop-shouldered Landis spends his days copying paintings and sketches he loves. That’s just the beginning of his hobby, though. His affectionate forgeries lead to “philanthropic binges” which involve him dressing up like a grieving relative (or, in some cases, a priest) and donating his imitation artworks to local museums. Landis is an ingratiating and talented prankster with significant mental health issues but without a trace of malice; he could be one of Robert Crumb’s long-lost siblings. He means no apparent harm, but that isn’t to say the local art museums he fools are happy about what he does. Art and Craft is first and foremost a slow and steady portrait of Landis, but it is also a portrait of former museum employee Matt Leiniger, who has made it his life’s mission to track this bony old fraud down and bring him to justice. There’s a catch, though: there isn’t any justice to bring him to. Landis hasn’t committed a crime, and he doesn’t make any money for his efforts. As the film meanders towards Leiniger’s confrontation with Landis at an exhibit of Landis’ work, the looming sense of anticlimax is as satisfying as a more explosive and conventional confrontation. Grade: B+

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970; dir. Jaromir Jiles)— Flyer commenter “Coffell Scruggs” (did we go to high school together, C.S.?) suggested this movie last month, and although I couldn’t stay up late enough to catch it when it originally aired on Turner Classic Movies in the wee wee hours, I took advantage of TCM.com’s Movies On Demand feature and saw it a couple days later. (N.B.: TCM.com is the one of the better free movie sites out there. Seriously, I wouldn’t be offended if you clicked over there right now and watched Buster Keaton’s The Navigator. In fact, I’d be flattered.) I’m not sure what Jiles’ film is about, exactly—it’s full of sexual awakenings, occult rituals and mystical showdowns captured from cameras that appear to be perched in treetops and church belfries—but it’s got the morbid kink of an Angela Carter fairy tale, and the deep, barrel-aged color effects please the eye and the soul. Grade: A-

Adieu Au Langage (Goodbye to Language) (2014; dir. Jean-Luc Godard)— I really hope you get a chance to see Godard’s new movie in 3D. No joke: it’s the best movie of the year, and it’s so refreshing that you should plan a vacation around seeing it wherever it plays next. Like Jacques Tati’s PlayTime, if you accept its challenges and embrace its difficulties, it will change the way you see the world. (And if you walk out scratching your head, don’t lose faith: there’s already a ton of great scholarship and analysis online. Start with David Bordwell’s lengthy appreciation and follow the links.) Like many later Godard films, Adieu Au Langage is both a fairly coherent statement and a protean sketchbook of short films and scenes covering a wide range of subjects: dogs, old VHS images, color, language, philosophy, nature, canted framing, optical illusions, books, female nudity, and, uh, poop jokes. (You heard me. Poop jokes.) I wanted to see this all three times it played at the Walker Art Center, but I only made it there once. Still, what I wouldn’t give to re-experience the remarkable shot involving two 3D cameras that split and merge so that you see superimposition, split-screen and 3D simultaneously. Apparently when people saw this shot at Cannes they lost their marbles. Distribution and difficulty be damned; why deprive others of such spontaneous joy and wonder? Grade: A+

Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown (2014; dir. Alex Gibney)—This HBO documentary, which covers Brown’s life and career from 1962-1974, is the perfect complement to Tate Taylor’s excellent biopic Get On Up. It contains more (and better) music than Taylor’s film, too. And it does much more than verify Get On Up’s surreal scenes at the famous Boston show Brown played the night after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. It partially explains why Brown gave a shout-out to Hubert Humphrey when I saw him perform in Duluth in 1996, and it also explains Brown’s affection for Richard Nixon. But mainly it gives the band a chance to talk back. Their affectionate reminiscences overshadow the film’s many knowledgeable commentators and musicians, and it turns Mr. Dynamite into a gossipy mosaic. I mean, wouldn’t you like to hear Bootsy Collins tell stories about James Brown’s tacky shoes and his inability to tell a joke? Wouldn’t you like to hear drummer Clyde Stubblefield explain why he hates “Funky Drummer”? Wouldn’t you like to know why Maceo Parker’s brother once put the barrel of a revolver up Brown’s nose? And wouldn’t you like to hear some more of that music again? Grade: A- 

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The Adult Swim Short That Ate The Internet

Every once in a while, something comes along that captures the imagination of the denizens of the internet for no good reason. Yeah, that’s right: I’m posting about “Too Many Cooks”, the short film produced by Atlanta’s William Street Studios for the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim bloc. It started playing on the network at 4 AM last week, and by Friday it had blown up into a full-fledged phenomenon, Its creator, comedy writer Chris “Casper” Kelly, took a victory lap on Reddit while even the august New Yorker asked, “What does it mean?” 

The Adult Swim Short That Ate The Internet

Unlike some inexplicable memes (I’m looking at you, unboxing videos), the secret of “Too Many Cooks” is just good filmmaking. It’s a series of nestled rake gags that slowly evolves over the course of 11 minutes into something resembling a narrative—or perhaps a meta-narrative, since it plays on, and ultimately subverts, expectations you have built up from a lifetime of watching inoffensive sitcom openings. Like the Dadaists and Abstract Expressionists, this is the kind of thing that is easy to dismiss as “a bunch of random crap”, but is in fact really hard to do, especially at this level. When you watch it for the third or fourth time, notice how deliberate the pacing is. Kelly has done dozens of iterations on this piece to find exactly the right moments to release and reset the tension, and unreleased tension is where the laughter comes from. Dying by machete wielding maniac is easy, comedy is hard. 

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Pharaohs Rule Indie Memphis Audience Awards

Dance documentary Pharaohs Of Memphis completed a sweep of the 2014 Indie Memphis Hometowner Awards by taking home the Audience Award for Best Feature, a remarkable achievement for first-time director Phoebe Driscoll, a 22-year-old senior at Rhodes College. The just-announced awards were determined by audience members who gave the films they saw over the four-day festival grades from A to F.

Taking home the Best Narrative Feature award was The Imitation Game. Directed by Morton Tyldum, the film stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, who helped develop the modern computer while breaking German codes during World War II. 

The Documentary Feature Audience Award went to Art & Craft, the story of art forger Mark Landis, which was directed by the team of Sam Cullman, Jennifer Graussman, and Mark Becker. 

The Bravest, the Boldest – Teaser Trailer from Moon Molson on Vimeo.

Pharaohs Rule Indie Memphis Audience Awards

Among the short films, the audience chose Moon Molson’s “The Bravest, The Boldest” as Best Narrative; “Leadway” by Robbie Fisher and Dudley Percy Olsson as Best Documentary, while “Space Licorice” by Nathan Ross Murphy took home the Hometowner Short award.