Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008, USA/Spain)

I pretty much stopped watching new Woody Allen movies after the one-two punch of Hollywood Ending and Curse of the Jade Scorpion, both of which are terrible. Match Point was the only exception, but he seemed on surer footing with a drama than a comedy, so despite the critical acclaim around Vicky Cristina Barcelona, it took me ages to get around to it. I was prepared for disappointment, but what I found was the lightest, most charming Allen film since Everyone Says I Love You, but with a stronger spine than the oddball musical. It’s deliriously romantic, but more than a little bittersweet, and every time you think Allen is pointing and laughing at one character, one set of mind, it turns out you’re wrong – there are no simple answers here, no expected outcomes. Whatever the reason – his relationship with “muse” Johansson, the freshness of his Spanish setting – I hope Allen is able to retain some of the spryness and delicacy of Barcelona.

District B13 (2004, France)

Since at least Casino Royale, free running and Parkour have become pretty popular in mainstream action cinema, but their recent accessibility doesn’t diminish the awesome stunts in District B13. Luc Besson and his longtime cameraman/cinematographer Pierre Morel basically construct B13 around Parkour, casting originator David Belle and stuntman Cyril Raffaelli as a prisoner and a cop, respectively, unlikely partners working together to stop a bomb from destroying one of the worst neighborhoods in Paris. Yeah, there’s a plot – and a fair amount of talking about democracy, equality, etc. – but who cares? (Though it seems that some of the sermonizing is tied to the conceptual foundations of Parkour.) The action sequences kick ass. Morel is wise enough to keep the camera at a fair distance from the action, and to refrain from the excessive editing that has also become quite popular these days (one of my biggest quibbles with The Bourne Ultimatum). The one element of the action sequences that I wasn’t sure about was the score – pretty terrific, but surprisingly down-tempo for what was actually happening onscreen. A lean 81 minutes, B13 could almost stand to lose another 5-10 minutes of run time and rid itself of the social moralizing that screams Besson, but it’s not like the movie makes that many demands on your time or your brainpower to begin with.

Changeling (2008, USA)

Two things right off the bat – Angelina Jolie looks amazing in a cloche, and her makeup artist should be commended for the stay-put lipstick.

Other than that, Changeling felt pretty rote. I was hoping for a lot more, and though I hate to be one of those critics who nitpicks about what a writer and/or director should have done, I find myself wishing that the film hadn’t felt so broad, that its every intention wasn’t telegraphed wildly through dialog or the camera. I also wish that they’d bitten off a little less in the first place – the true story of Christine Collins and the Chicken Coop Murders, or an investigation into corruption in the police force and the city/county works in Los Angeles in the first half of the decade (no original project, that)? Either way, focus on one or the other would have allowed for more character development, and more investigation of motivations – maybe even some more ambiguity. For a film with few clear answers in the end, ambiguity could have been the line between a generally satisfying period entertainment and Chinatown.

Synechdoche, New York (2008, USA)

It was perhaps both the best and worst timing to watch Synechdoche, New York the same weekend as Nightwatching. Two very opposing views of the creative process, I felt that the former ended up lacking. Why? I couldn’t help but get hung up on the females of Synechdoche (also, I think that Kaufman came up with that title mostly to screw with critics and copyeditors). They’re all so crazy. Sure, the main character (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is no prince, not by a longshot, but he’s surrounded by a variety of treacherous bitches, played (quite well, actually), by Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton (love her), Hope Davis, Dianne Wiest, Robin Weigart (Calamity Jane!), Emily Watson, and the crazy to end all crazies, Jennifer Jason Leigh. (Seriously, does anyone cast her in a film now to do anything but lose her shit?) In comparison to Nightwatching, Synechdoche comes up short in the muse department – its heroines may be different from one another, but they’re not nearly as complex or understandable as the quartet from Greenaway’s film. Was the only way to make Hoffman’s character at all likeable to place him in contrast to these bitch goddesses?

That being said, my other issue with Synechdoche was that it never really let me in. It wasn’t until the final sequence that I really felt able to get emotionally involved with the film. For a piece about the creative process, this is an issue – but the protagonist’s aforementioned unlikability (no criticism of Hoffman’s excellent-as-usual performance intended), combined with Kaufman’s tendency to keep the audience at arm’s reach, made me feel as if the film was more of a cerebral exercise than a fully immersive experience. It would most definitely be expanded by repeat viewings, but I left it not really inclined towards a second watch.

Nightwatching (2007, Canada/France/Germany/Poland/Netherlands/UK/whew)

There are certain directors whose work, at least for me, requires a shift in perspective at the outset. John Waters is a good example – unless I’ve been on a streak, it takes me a good five to ten minutes of run time to turn my head around to his worldview, since his style of filmmaking breaks from the common so dramatically. Peter Greenaway is another obvious choice, and I haven’t seen a new film of his since . . . wow, I’m not sure. The Pillow Book was twelve years ago, I still haven’t seen 8 ½ Women, and the Tulse Luper films never got a real release in the States.

In any case, Nightwatching is only the second Greenaway that I’ve seen in the theater, after a revival of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. (Please, DVD gods. Please.) I think his films are best served theatrically – partly because of the, well, theatricality that most of them express, but also because of the color, and the attention to detail. Nightwatching is a perfect example – a greatly elaborated and free-form biopic of Rembrandt’s life before, during and after the painting of The Night Watch, and his relationships with four very different women, the film is crammed with detail. Greenaway not only takes advantage of his subject matter by incorporating extreme chiaroscuro into his visual style, he also litters the screen with the hallmarks of Northern Renaissance still-life and figural painting – a better art historian than I could pick apart almost every sequence, telling you why that wine glass is placed there, this bunch of grapes here.

This latent subject matter turns naturally into some of the larger themes of Nightwatching - the intersections of art and commerce (or, more specifically, art as commerce), social conformity and the creative life, and the dangers a comfortable living might pose a figure such as Rembrandt. As with most of Greenaway’s work, Nightwatching is almost impossibly dense, visually as well as textually. The dialog constantly refers to minutia of Dutch society in the fifteenth century, and can be maddening at times for this very reason. But the actors pull it off with a contemporary straightforwardness – no “thous” here. Martin Freeman (Tim from the British version of The Office) is a surprisingly strong protagonist, and he’s matched well by his female counterparts – Eva Birthistle as his capitalist wife, Saskia, Emily Holmes as the housemaid, Hendrickje (a favorite of mine), Natalie Press as the muse Marieke (if you haven’t seen My Summer of Love, please do so now), and Johdi May as the artist's mistress, Geertje. But, as usual in a Greenaway film, the acting takes second place to the stage itself, and all of the canny things that the filmmaker shows, rather than tells. It may require a shift of senses to really get into Nightwatching, but it’s not without its unique rewards.

Gommorah (2008, Italy)

I don’t really have much to add to the general critical acclaim surrounding Gommorah - I just want to chime in to say that it really is as good as its buzz would indicate. A completely rootless and de-glamorized look at one of the most dangerous Italian mobs, Gommorah rips right out of the gate and doesn’t let up for two hours, following various characters through Mafia life – high and mostly low. There’s no main character to get attached to, no single storyline that pushes through the morass, and only one or perhaps two characters that engender any sympathy at all. Gommorah is brutal and mean – no goodfellas here.

Death Race (2008, USA/Germany/UK)

Seriously, has Jason Stathem ever made a movie in which he does not drive a car? If he did, would anyone care? (Okay - In the Name of the King. I answer my own question. But maybe there's a really bitchin' cart race or something.) Anyway, Death Race is terrible, and contains disappointingly less shirt-fu than Transporter 3, but hey – Stathem drives a car, he occasionally appears topless, Joan Allen slums it for no apparent reason, and . . . Ian McShane! Also, things blow up real good. What’s not to love, or at least vaguely enjoy on a hungover Sunday afternoon?

Babylon A.D. (2008, USA/France/UK)

For the first hour or so, I was surprised that I didn't think that Babylon A.D. was as bad as everyone had said it was. Not very exciting, sure, but the production design is gorgeous, and it’s really not too terrible, at least not until the last five minutes or so. Then it turns into the dumbest, most pointless film I’ve seen in quite some time. I don’t blame Mathieu Kassovitz for disowning it, and if I were him, I’d get out of Hollywood ASAP - Gothika wasn’t much less of a fiasco, though at least for that project he didn’t have to be responsible for bringing Vin Diesel back into the public eye.

Escape from Alcatraz (1979, USA)

Shortly after the death of Patrick McGoohan, I threw a few of his films I hadn’t yet seen on my queue, including Scanners and Escape from Alcatraz. It’s so strange to see McGoohan play figures of authority, as he does in both films (and in his most American-recognized role, Longshanks in Braveheart). I’m so accustomed to McGoohan as No. 6 in The Prisoner that it wigs me out a bit to see him as a king, a doctor, or a prison warden. He’s only got about four scenes in Alcatraz, but they’re doozies of self-control and barely repressed rage. He made an excellent stoic-on-stoic match with Clint Eastwood, which is not something you can say of many actors.

In any case . . . the escape. Don Siegel made a tight, smart prison movie, one that has obvious influence on many con movies and television shows of the last thirty years. Eastwood plays Frank Morris, an escape artist and heist man shipped off to Alcatraz, the supposedly unbreakable prison in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. From there, it’s pretty self-explanatory – it is called Escape from Alcatraz - but Siegel sets the stage perfectly, and Eastwood is well-matched by his co-stars, including Fred Ward, Paul Benjamin, and Larry Hankin. (Carl from Billy Madison. I KNOW.) In short, it’s a terrific genre movie, and McGoohan will be sorely missed.

Scanners (1981, Canada)

I have to admit my shame – I had never seen Scanners from start to finish until last night. David Croenenberg’s horror yarn about telepaths who can make your head blow up if they try real hard is both a literal and a stylistic middle point between the director’s more developed films of the 1980’s and 90’s, such as Videodrome, and his earlier work, like The Brood and Shivers. (All of which are awesome in their own way, but Videodrome is when Croenenberg really comes into his own.) Partly this is due to his developing visual, audio, and thematic style – though, as usual, the danger lurks within – but it’s also aided by a ambivalent performance from the late, great Patrick McGoohan as Dr. Ruth, a military-industrial psychologist who may or may not be on the side of good. Most of the performances in Scanners are fairly straightforward, even bad, but McGoohan rises above, partly perhaps because he doesn’t have to stare at anyone while subtly vibrating his head and rolling his eyes back into his head. Also notable is the awesome Michael Ironside as the evil scanner with a nefarious plan for Canadian domination. Scanners is early Croenenberg at its most Croenenbergarian.

Into the Night (1985, USA)

Into the Night is one of those odd movies that I half-remember from when I was in my teens – kind of like Pennies from Heaven or A Boy and His Dog. In one of John Landis’ last decent films before the 90s struck, Jeff Goldblum plays Ed, an office drone with a cheating wife and a brutal case of insomnia. Fed up, he drives to the airport one night looking for an escape. What he finds is an incredibly frantic Michelle Pfeiffer as Diane, on the run after a jewel heist gone wrong. The two spend the next few days criss-crossing Los Angeles, at every point encountering more and more people who want to kill them.

Since I last saw Night a good fifteen or so years ago, I didn’t realize what a quintessential L.A. film it is. Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself) must love this movie – to begin with, it’s all about cars and movement. Ed lives under a freeway overpass, he carpools to work in endless traffic jams (alongside a jovial Dan Ackroyd), and he and Diane trade cars at least five times, starting with a ratty old Toyota and ending up in a Ferrari Testarossa. You know – the typical L.A. stuff. The film is also about the landscape of Los Angeles, all of which is only possible because of the automobile (Ed’s endless quest for a cab is only one of many Angeleno in-jokes). From Ed’s anonymous commuter neighborhood, to LAX, the marina, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and back through West L.A. to the airport again, I’ve rarely seen an L.A. movie cover more ground than Night. It also covers a good deal of the Los Angeles population, including weirdo Elvis impersonators, Hollywood bimbos and studio moguls, West Side Persians, and the wealthy underground that only a few ever see.

As much as Night is about L.A., it’s about the movies, too, and film geeks like me will likely delight at the endless cameos, including Rick Baker, Roger Vadim, Jim Henson, David Cronenberg, Amy Heckerling, and Jonathan Demme. Not to mention David Bowie’s hilarious bit as a confused killer-for-hire, and Landis himself as one of the Iranian thugs chasing after Diana and Ed. The good thing is that so many of these people are strictly behind-the-camera and below-the-line players, so it doesn’t disrupt the flow for anyone not interested in nerding out. Indeed, Night is smart and tongue-in-cheek, moving along at a rapid clip and displaying a ruthless sense of humor. Goldblum’s weird intensity and spacey demeanor makes him an oddly fitting choice for a burnt-out urbanite, and he shares surprising chemistry with a luminous twenty-six-year-old Pfeiffer. It’s amazing to remember how gorgeous these two were in their prime, and Night is a slick and quirky offbeat Hollywood time capsule, perfectly deserving of a cult audience.