X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009, USA)

You know an action movie is crap when you fall asleep during the climatic fight scene. Seriously, for boasting a mostly kick-ass cast [Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Danny Huston, Taylor Kitsch – the less said about Will.i.am, the better – and Ryan Reynolds (though it was apparently too costly to use him in more than one scene)], Wolverine is totally uninspired, and after excessive jaw-clenching and brow-furrowing on Jackman's part, I was rooting for Schreiber’s gleefully nasty (at least someone’s having fun) Victor Creed to take Logan out, and cause some sort of time-space rupture that would nullify all of the X-Men films, and hopefully keep Marvel from making any more of these half-baked prequels.

CIFF 2009 – Mother (2009, South Korean)

Though less of an outright entertainment than The Host, Mother may be Bong Joon-Ho’s most accomplished film to date, focusing on the question of whether or not the truth is always good for us. A middle-aged shopkeeper’s (the amazing Kim Hye-Ja) mentally disabled son is arrested for a bizarre murder, and though the cops and community are convinced he’s guilty, she goes on a crusade to prove his innocence. Despite the dramatic – and somewhat tragic – storyline, Bong doesn’t dispense with his by-now trademark visual humor, some of which ventures into the range of slapstick. It’s a daring choice, as it could deflate the sense of seriousness necessary to the film, but instead the comic registers jarringly, heightening the tension inherent to the whodunit aspects of the film. It's a compulsive watch, cementing Bong's growing reputation as one of the most interesting new international filmmakers.

Whip It (2009, USA)

Whip It isn’t a great movie. In a lot of ways, it isn’t even a terribly good one. It’s utterly predictable, and features pretty shaky direction along with some dubious roller derby action. But despite some of the sketchy assertions director Drew Barrymore has made to the press about her cast, I think it actually kicks a fair amount of ass that this is the project she chose for her directorial debut, and that due to her Hollywood profile, she was able to put some studio money and marketing savvy behind it. Because as cheesy as Whip It can be, at least it’s emotionally honest, and when was the last time you saw an American studio film that celebrates some of the more unconventional dreams that girls have, even if it plays those dreams out in the most conventional of ways?

Extract (2009, USA)

Extract has all the hallmarks of your typical Mike Judge satire, like Office Space and Idiocracy, with one important exception – it’s not remotely funny. The movie is completely flat, with lazy performances and even lazier writing and directing. Even J.K. Simmons can’t evoke a laugh, which is frankly just criminal. And Judge’s late-game cameo is insultingly overdone. It’s a shame that this wasn’t the Judge movie that got dumped into half a dozen theaters with no promotion. It probably would have been best for all involved.

Retribution (2006, Japan)

There’s a lot I liked about Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Retribution, but unfortunately, I didn’t find it very creepy or scary. There are a couple of shots that are quite eerie, but for an ostensible J-Horror film, it’s not big on fright. As usual with Kurosawa’s films, it’s more about atmosphere. Also as usual, it feels like Kurosawa is only giving us three-fourths of the story, so that a lot of ends are left dangling. (If you’re the kind of moviegoer who likes everything to be tied up with a neat bow, I would recommend staying away from Kurosawa altogether.) But as Retribution glided to a close, I found that I quite liked how Kurosawa had pulled his threads together, even though the big reveal is fairly obvious from the outset. Also, big points for yet another strong Koji Yakusho performance. The man unravels like nobody’s business.

Zombieland (2009, USA)

Of all the films that feature the gratuitous fun of zombie violence, as opposed to the existential horror of humanity turning upon itself, Zombieland is up there. In part, this is because our heroes, with a few small exceptions, didn’t have much use for humanity in the first place. It’s a lot easier to wail on zombies with impunity when you’re pretty sure you wouldn’t have liked them any better when they were alive. Though Zombieland tends towards the conventional, turning a bit soft as it moves into the final act, it still has the good sense to highlight awesome zombie kills and damn good comic timing, mostly centering on Jesse Eisenberg’s reaction to Woody Harrelson’s good-ol’-boy badass. Whoevery cast them opposite one another was a fucking genius. This is my favorite side of Harrelson – though no one would refute that he can act, he’s at his most entertaining when he sits back and lets the Texas out. And attacks zombies with garden shears.

Julia (2008, France/USA/Mexico/Belgium)

I’ve seen Tilda Swinton in a good number of movies, but I’ve never seen her like she is in Julia. It’s a fantastic performance, even for Swinton, playing against type as a brash loose cannon of an alcoholic, a party girl who’s starting to unravel as she heads towards middle age. When an opportunity to do the wrong thing presents itself, Julia barely thinks twice before making a bad decision that, not unexpectedly, spirals out of control. Unfortunately, there are a few too many twists and turns, and Julia is at least a half an hour longer than it should be. It’s that much more time to spend with Swinton’s terrifying, fascinating character, but the film as a whole would have served her performance better were it just a little bit tighter.

(I’m not kidding about the terrifying, by the way. Julia is not for the squeamish. It’s a pretty relentlessly ugly film.)

Shall We Dance? (1995, Japan)

I have a hard time thinking of another film that’s as guileless and charming as Shall We Dance? Taking time off from some of his more intense work in the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Shohei Imamura, Koji Yakusho plays a serious-minded salaryman who becomes entranced by ballroom dancing, a pastime he must hide from his family and co-workers, as dancing is seen as inappropriately intimate in Japanese society. Yakusho’s excellent performance is supported by a strong cast, in particular the bizarre Naoto Takenake as a Rumba-obsessed co-worker and Reiko Kusamura as their sweet middle-aged dance instructor. This was my second viewing of Dance, and it didn’t lose any of its appeal on repeat. Its pleasures are largely conventional, but they are so sincerely executed and professionally rendered that Dance reminded me why I go to the movies.

Watchmen (2009, USA)

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen looks gorgeous – you can see every penny of its enormous budget on the screen – but it has no soul. Snyder has taken a wonderfully dense narrative and found a way to make it both an anvil festival and a pointlessly opaque translation. It screams out some of its themes while discarding others with little more than a shrug. There’s a lot of speechifying with very little actual content – in fact, it’s kind of stunning that a film with this much going on is so stupefyingly boring. There’s no sense of impending doom, nuclear or otherwise.

Two more quick points: one – I hope the music supervisor never gets another job, ever. Two – I love how Snyder insisted on pummeling the audience with images of the Twin Towers, despite the fact that even in an alternate reality, they would most likely have been standing in 1985. Just another example of how Snyder always goes for the most obvious idea first, seeking to hide the fact that his movies are little but sound and fury.

Tokyo! (2008, France, Japan, Germany, South Korea)

For a movie with an exclamation mark in its title, Tokyo! is pretty dour. The anthology, featuring short works by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-Ho, focuses on lost souls in the Japanese megopolis. Is it because they’re foreigners that these takes on Tokyo are so dark? Or does the city just bring out the worst in too many?

The series kicks off with Gondry’s Interior Design, in which two young lovers try to make it in the big city, despite parking regulations, an ugly real estate market, and more than a little self-doubt. It’s somewhat whimsical, which is to be expected from Gondry, and touches on his usual themes of artistic viability and male-female disconnection. It’s a tight and somewhat affecting little tale, however, without Gondry’s more typical excesses. Unfortunately, the following piece by Carax doesn’t avoid the same. Too broad by half – an obvious allegory about the xenophobia and general unrest lurking just below Japan’s surface – it’s stylish, but ultimately frustrating and flat.

My favorite section is Bong Joon-Ho’s story of an agoraphobic Tokyoite who inadvertently finds the connection he needs. Still fairly obvious, thematically, it’s anchored by the awesome Teruyuki Kagawa (Tokyo Sonata, Sukiyaki Western Django), and has a humanity that the other films lack. Its take on Tokyo life may not be much sunnier than the preceding two, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to finally find a hero.

(For what it’s worth, expect to see a good deal of Japanese fare here in the next couple of months. (If I can get my act together and start posting regular reviews, that is.) I’m headed to Japan in November, and in anticipation, I plan to be queuing up a number of old favorites as well as some films I’ve been meaning to get around to for ages.)

Rachel Getting Married (2008, USA)

I haven’t been a fan of Jonathan Demme’s work over the last decade or so, but I was sucked in by the baldly emotional Rachel Getting Married. The cast is superb – I was particularly impressed by Bill Irwin, Rosemarie DeWitt and Tunde Adebimpe – and the story bounces back and forth between the happy moments leading up to a large family wedding, and the raw, more painful ones that well up from family history. It’s a tension between the immediate and the historical, an examination about how nothing is ever truly buried or forgotten, and how the best parts of life are often necessarily intertwined with the worst.

Inglorious Basterds (2009, USA/Germany)

Quentin Tarantino directs like a kid in a candy store. He’s the ultimate film nerd, and fifteen years after Pulp Fiction, it’s like he still can’t believe his luck. This exuberance has its benefits and its pitfalls. On one hand, few directors can match him for sheer energy and entertainment value. On the other, his films are often little more than individual scenes strung together, with little glue in between.

But wow – what scenes. Starting with the obvious – the opening marathon between Christoph Waltz’s SS Colonel Landa and a French dairy farmer played by Denis Menochet – and continuing through such meticulous gems as Landa’s initial meeting with the grown Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), and the excruciatingly tense sequence in La Louisiana, Tarantino crams in so much detail and so many homages to his film heroes that it would likely take a dozen viewings to unpack them all.

And this is probably my favorite thing about Basterds - Tarantino is finally making some natural, if occasionally totally insane, statements about the power of film, something that he’s only played with stylistically with earlier works like Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. From the tongue-in-cheek references to Leni Riefenstahl and other German propaganda films, to the fact that (SPOILER!) film, physical film, is used to rewrite history and literally kill Hitler and his cronies, Tarantino has made a propaganda film of his own that is all about the power of the movies to color our perception of the world. The characters reference films constantly (one of my favorites is in the La Louisiana scene – “Am I the story of the Negro in America?” “No.” “Then I must be King Kong!”), and the movie itself employs the hallmarks of various genres, jumping back and forth between. This works sometimes – the Spaghetti Western and the war film are natural allies – but occasionally oversteps, as with the Blacksploitation introduction of Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger). It’s funny, but also more than a little distracting. But would it be a Tarantino film without the excess? Now at least he has a little sub- to go with his text.

G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra (2009, USA)

Aaaaand, now I’ve seen it all. Fucking Celtic-speaking fighter jet. Avoid at all costs.

The Hurt Locker (2009, USA)

Almost more than war, The Hurt Locker is about three men and their very different ways of coping with insane amounts of stress, day after day. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) is a professional, treating war more or less like any other job. Eldridge (Brian Garaghty) shouldn’t be there at all – he’s not equipped to make the decisions he’s forced to make. For both of them, though, war is – hopefully – only temporary. For James (a truly amazing Jeremy Renner), however, the war has become his obsession, the only way of life that he can handle anymore.

The movie itself is incredibly intense. Structurally, it’s more of a series of sequences than anything really plot-driven as it counts down the days that the members of Bravo Company have left on their rotation ridding Iraq of I.E.D.s. It also examines the impact of James’ force of personality has on an already very unstable situation, how his actions create a ripple effect, destabilizing an already tenuous set of circumstances. One of the best films I’ve seen so far this year.

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008, UK)

Sally Hawkins really is as wonderful as everyone says in Mike Leigh’s bittersweet comedy that examines life through the eyes of a bubbly eternal optimist, and in particular what happens when Poppy (Hawkins) meets her match in a cantankerous driving instructor named Scott (a very dark Eddie Marsan). There’s been a lot written about Poppy’s nature walking a fine line between happiness and insanity, but despite one particularly leading scene, I don’t agree – I think that it more accurately looks at how we deal with happiness as a contemporary society, especially in a culture where pessimism, sarcasm and rejection rule the day.