Three pint-sized reviews after spending a day at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge.

Midnight in Paris, dir. Woody Allen (2011)

I love being pleasantly surprised at 11 in the morning. All in all it had the familiar musk of many Allen films – an ensemble cast of characters oversimplified to the point of absurdity buzz around the shruggish and incredulous New Yorker that Allen unabashedly bases on himself. But Owen Wilson, the actor charged with wearing Mr. Allen’s tweed coat (and his rambling speech patterns), pulls it off relatively well. He stumbles through the magical film with wide eyes and wet lips, never abandoning doubt, and never even entertaining the idea that he may very well be insane. It’s a fun watch, with an all-star cast playing the best-of historical art figures, but there isn’t much hiding underneath the surface.

(The ending, in particular, left me with a strange taste in my mouth. Owen Wilson, who plays a character in his early thirties, ends up meeting a french girl (I’d say no older than 17) at a flea market. At the end of the film, they bump into each other on a bridge, and he “walks her home.” Jeepers creepers, Ms. Previn much?)

The Tree of Life, dir. Terrence Malick (2011)

Giampaolo’s review asks the most important question of this film: Is Bigger Better? I’d even stretch it a little further: How Big is Too Big? This film is. It’s too big. The first 20 minutes are some of the most inspired, emotional and thoughtful filmmaking I have ever seen. Bravo multiplied by a billion, but I don’t give a shit about these dinosaurs. Thank god, now we’re back to the brothers romping around in the unsettling suburbia. But then, the conclusion over inflates itself. First thing that struck home – the ending felt as though it was ripped directly Fellini’s 8 1/2. Not okay with me. And then it takes another 20 minutes for the mother to release her son to the circle of life. I never thought I’d say this about a Malick film, but it’s missing ambiguity. In the theater, I found my own perfect conclusion: Sean Penn walks through the door and the dress rustles in the wind. If that was the ending, I’d have walked out shocked and breathless (but still be like WTF Dinosaurs?)

The Trip, dir. Michael Winterbottom (2011)

What a British film. Two Brit comedians go on a reluctant road trip and snipe away quips at each other to no end. However, among the crackle and pop of dry humor there sprout up the most beautiful moments that are so clearly improvised. For 10-minutes we watch them compare impressions, determine how many octaves they can sing or riff off of war drama cliches. At parts, it is truly hilarious, but I found myself exhausted and offended on their behalves by the end. The constant one-upmanship took a lot to put up with; but it also sheds light on the (depicted) lonely life of Steve Coogan. Mr. Coogan lashes out constantly, beating up on the dopey and wiry Rob Brydon. Mr. Winterbottom strives for some emotional significance towards the end, but I wasn’t feeling much sympathy.

Terrence Malick has made five films in thirty-eight years. All of his films are recognized critically as masterpieces. Keeping with that tradition, his most recent film The Tree of Life won top honors at the Cannes film festival last month. Speaking about the film, head of the Cannes jury Robert DeNiro said, “It had the size, the importance, the intention, whatever you want to call it, that seemed to fit the prize.” DeNiro’s offhand comment is invaluable to deciphering how this film has steadily risen, without much apparent consideration, to a respectable position within the pantheon of contemporary American filmmaking.

The movie is basically the story of Malick’s Texan youth in the 1950s, intercut with glossy meditations on the history of life on Earth. Sean Penn, playing the older version of the young boy we see constantly intimidated by his father (Brad Pitt), wanders awed and aimlessly through a gleaming present-day metropolis. There is a quiet voiceover, often whispered, presumably because only serious things are whispered. As with any of Malick’s films, bizarre moments are captured with a grace that makes them undeniably appealing. In one scene a band of young, directionless boys destructively wander the hinterlands of their hometown; a father intensely urges his son to hit him as the camera floats gently before their faces; children frolic in clouds of hazardous DDT.

What sets these sequences apart from the rest of the film is their total honesty. They don’t defer to clichéd images that stink of Planet Earth—they instead capture the weirdness of being young, the inanities of fatherhood, strange moments that are genuinely past. Even if these aren’t real memories, they’re still something known, something felt, something represented.

However, the elements of the film that haves garnered most praise, confusion, and appreciation are the sequences concerning the origins of life. These moments feature everything from the Big Bang to a heartwarming scene in which a CGI dinosaur spares his prey. O, glory! Yet, far from the objects of sublime, inimitable beauty these shots are intended to be, they seem hollow, generic, and clean. They have all the beauty of screensavers, commercials, stock photos.

But they’re enormous, and as such probably important (this is where DeNiro comes in). They’re set to an operatic score, yet this also seems like an overbearing way of emphasizing the gravitas of these generic yet supposedly beautiful images. When Stanley Kubrick set a classical score to shots of dancing space technology, he did it with a deft eye for irony and a comic sense that something so modern could be beautiful. Godard once claimed in an interview that Steven Spielberg had only shot Schindler’s List in black-and-white because, for Spielberg, black-and-white meant “serious.” Immediately, this comment came to mind watching Malick’s overproduced iconic imagery set to a classical score.

By the end of the film, though, I doubt many people are genuinely fooled by Malick’s sense of drama and eternity so large it becomes frequently hilarious instead of groundbreaking or awesome. For a film that supposedly grapples with humanities place in the cosmos, I came away learning little about anything, including the intention of Malick’s supposed metaphysical reflection. Rarely, though, is the American multiplex faced with a film like The Tree of Life. Yet despite being a project of unequaled ambition, it is important to note that ambition, importance, and size alone shouldn’t earn any gold stars or Palme D’ors. But in America, where bigger is better, we’ll take what we can get. Whatever you want to call it.

For those of us who paid even marginal attention to this years Cannes film festival, there were two non-surprises that were somehow engineered to be received as stunners. First, and probably less surprising, was the banning of Lars von Trier, the famously badgerlike Dane; second was the victory of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life over the other highfalutin shoo-ins from other directors who have become Cannes mainstays. Both directors came out on top–though for drastically different reasons.

I welcomed the news of von Trier’s expulsion from the festival: what else is there for him to do? When a formerly radical artist–even radical in von Trier’s vein–becomes an accepted member of the cultural institutions he so desperately wants to shit on, the only thing left for them to do is really make a fool of themselves. For von Trier, this seems like a testing of his cultural limits: can I still be banned? Am I still that relevant? It would appear so.

Nothing reveals this more than von Trier’s recent response to the Iranian Minister of Culture, who, apparently, was on von Trier’s side. When he critiqued the festival for its actions, the director responded by reminding everyone that, in his opinion, “Freedom of speech, in all its shapes, is part of the basic human rights,” but continued, “my comments during the festival’s press conference were unintelligent, ambiguous and needlessly hurtful.” What this amounts to, basically, is a redirection of this debate to its appropriate subject, which is not freedom of speech, but simply the continued relevance of von Trier. Even he has no questions about his statements. No, no, he says, I really earned this one. And not even the Iranian Minister of Culture can take it away from him.

For Terrence Malick, the festival ended in a victory, though we’ll never know what he thinks about it or even what he thinks he thinks about it. This is just the kind of lifetime achievement award he never needed. Despite his supposed genius, I’ve never had much patience for Malick’s films: I think he’s the stuff of taste, and taste is frequently tawdry. His selection is a pleasant choice for the American contingent, though, at the hands of Robert DeNiro. It solidifies him as a talent to be reckoned with, a director to be respected, as opposed to a self-serious obsessive who can’t help but make every film he’s already made again, letting enough time lapse between them for it to really feel important when he releases one. Memories are short, and Malick makes sure of it: his movies are so hypnotic as to avoid question, they leave the audience in a stupor where everyone’s shrugging and saying, Well wasn’t that great. This year, I guess, it was great enough.

Between Malick and von Trier, I think I’ll take the latter–his victory angrier, and more divisive, than Malick’s. His position, too, was solidified–far from the mainstream of acceptable society. Just as he wanted.

There are always films that fall through the proverbial cracks in every filmmaker’s viewing library, well-known and applauded films that we have claimed to have seen but actually have on our I’ll-eventually-sit-down-and-watch-it list.  We all have these lists, myself as much as anyone.

Which is why last night, thanks in part to the wonderful advent of Netflix, I decided to start crossing a few films off the list with weekly double features of missed works. It certainly didn’t hurt that my girlfriend was out of town and I could unapologetically choose which films to watch.

I’m approaching these posts as impressions more than appraisals.  I’m not going to write up synopses or review the filmmaking.  The films that I’m going to watch are classics that have just passed me by — I’m choosing the ones I’ve heard are magnificent, and it follows that they are going to deliver on the promise. For this first week’s double feature, I chose to kick things off with a triple feature: Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow and Robert Altman’s Gosford Park.

Badlands (1973)

I liked Badlands, and I think what hit me most was stealing a glimpse of Malick before he became the enigma.  The early work of filmmakers is encouraging because you’re allowed to see how their styles and obsessions developed.

The tactile, film-school shooting style of the opening looks and feels like a great microfilm:  taking a tiny plot and carefully, almost invisibly inverting it to create a macronarrative.  All three of the films I watched did this (in very different ways).  This is the quality that most student films (which this technically was, since Malick began it while still at the AFI) strive for but miss. In fifteen minutes, a (believable) romance is sealed.  Well done.

The film is the most perfectly crafted vision of a nightmare.  Malick never goes for the easy blows that most horror films relish; there’s more terror in following the inexplicable to its inevitable end.  Martin Sheen’s Kit is a maniac who manages to sound like he’s giving real common sense advice every time he defends himself.  Sissy Spacek’s Holly is bizarrely, horrifyingly, passive.  What’s best about the film, is that it never injects any morality or ethos into the narrative.

I wasn’t crazy about Holly’s voiceover.  (I can hear the objections being screamed now.)  I cannot say that I know anything about the making of the film, but I felt it as tacked on at the last minute.  Whenever a character pontificates or meditates on the past events, beginning a sentence with “Little did I know…”, it reads as two-dimensional and clichéd. The voiceover improves through the film, and works for the ending.   Still, Malick’s wonderful voiceover in Days of Heaven leads me to appreciate his learning curve.

As with every Malick film, the acting is wonderfully understated, especially in the moments that normally permit chewing the scenery.  Warren Oates!  Best actor of the beginning of the 1970s.  This film along with Two-Lane Blacktop seals the deal.  And I’ll be honest: I’ve never really liked Sissy Spacek before, but I thought she was great here.  Martin Sheen, pre-Apocalypse Now, plays the best sociopath written into a film to date, most convincing when he shows the slightest bit of uncertainty and then overcompensates for it.

It’s not Malick’s masterpiece, but, like Polanski’s Knife in the Water, and Scorsese’s Mean Streets (which premiered along with Badlands at the 1973 New York Film Festival), it’s a great first film.

Scarecrow (1972)

I didn’t intentionally set out to watch two films from the same year. Scarecrow is a small gem.  It’s Old Joy thirty years ago, only with arguably deeper and more interesting characters.  Two losers hitch their way across the country: one’s a meek, make-em-laugh personality (Al Pacino’s Lionel), the other a strong douchebag with a permanent chip on his shoulder (Gene Hackman’s Max).

The first ten minutes are mindblowing.  The film opens with a long shot of Max walking through a field, climbing through a barbed wire fence, falling down an embankment, and coming to the side of the road.  He meets Lionel waiting there for a hitch, and as friendly as Lionel is, Max doesn’t want anything to do with him.  No cars come, and they’re waiting there all day.  We see all of this in less than fifteen shots.

Pacino playing comic relief is a rare sight and he does it flawlessly; and his slow progression towards disillusionment and tragedy makes for a great performance.  Hackman plays angry while avoiding all the normal tropes, and the film passes quickly.  It’s never hunkered down with larger-than-life emotional scenes.  It is a good note for directing actors: remove an actor’s conventional reactions to common situations and you have something instantly interesting.

The last thirty minutes are very “and now, the bad stuff happens”.  I’m not going to talk about the last thirty minutes in detail because we live in the society of spoiler alerts and the surprise of events should carry an emotional burden. I will say that everything that happens with Lionel’s family in Detroit, his chance to reconnect with the young son he’s never met, is earned and warranted.  The prison sequence after Max gets them both arrested, on the other hand, feels forced, although it’s both powerful and raw.

Gosford Park (2001)

Can we talk about how unflinchingly pitch perfect this film is?  There is never a moment of dialogue, never a shot, never a prop, never a reference, never a song, never a casting choice, never a sound cue that’s out of place.  This is easily Robert Altman’s best film.

The comparisons to Renoir’s The Rules of the Game are both apt and warranted– although I don’t believe, as some of the critical chatter out there suggests, that Altman, Bob Balaban (so marvelously deadpan in every role), and the inspired Julian Fellowes set out to create a remake.  Yes, both films rest on a shooting party consisting of wealthy aristocrats as plot, the eve of World War II as setting, and the aristocracy’s relationship to their servants as subject–but the films differ in how they employ the shared content. The Rules of the Game is concerned with what’s happening outside of the shooting party, while Gosford Park explores its characters and careful plot within the confines of the shooting party.

Every actor–not to sound hyperbolic–is perfect.  I recognize I’ve said that about each film, but Gosford Park wins the award for best ensemble (which, as it turns out, it did quite a few times during the awards season).  There’s no weak link.  It is a dream team of English actors: Clive Owen, Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren, Emily Watson, Maggie Smith, Kristen Scott Thomas, Charles Dance, Kelly Macdonald, Derek Jacobi, Stephen Fry.

[A brief side note/tangent that I have to get off my chest: has anyone else in the world seen the 1996 sci-fi epic Space Truckers? Charles Dance plays a weird half-human/half-robot guy in a really bizarre sex scene that involves electronic appendages.  It all came rushing back to me in an unfortunate Proustian moment when I recognized the actor.]

Anamorphic cinematography can be so beautiful and seamlessly integrated into a film.  The anamorphic in Gosford Park is anti-Wes Anderson.  Anderson’s gorgeous films are shot so that every image bends to cram painstakingly arranged subjects.  It’s intentional and arranged. Here, you almost forget about the cinematography; every scene was filmed with two cameras, simultaneously, so that actors never played for a camera.  Everyone was simultaneously recorded with wireless microphones.  Nothing seems arranged, but the anamorphic lenses allow enough information into every frame and set-up (not to mention light to allow for deep focus) that the dialogue and plot fits into it.  It would have been very easy to let this film slip into a theatrical talk-fest.  That’s a mumblecore choice, where the formal filmmaking takes a backseat to the talking.  Not so here.  It’s quintessentially cinematic thanks to great editing, superb direction, and wonderful cinematography.

The only thing I can hold against it is the extent to which Stephen Fry’s Inspector gets pushed to the side.  I streamed it on Netflix, so perhaps there were more Fry-heavy scenes on the DVD that were cut from the finished film, but I felt that once the Inspector arrived he disappeared just as quickly.

*     *     *

That wraps up this first installment.  I have no idea what I’ll be watching next, so leave some suggestions in the comments and if I haven’t seen them I’ll check it out.

After a record-setting year at the box office, what can we expect in 2010? More of the same. Don’t expect Hollywood to surprise us when things are going so well. Expect more 3D, more talking CGI animals, more lame comedies/soft dramas starring Sandra Bullock.

Not that I’m cynical.

Seriously, there are some really interesting projects set to premiere in 2010. Here is what I’m most excited to see:

Green Zone (March) The Bourne Occupation. Based on the nonfiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Matt Damon searches for WMDs right before the surge of troops in Iraq. Judging from Paul Greengrass’ non-Bourne outings (United 93, Bloody Sunday), expect a meticulously-researched, taut thriller.  Not to be confused with Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg, out the same week.

Iron Man 2 (May) The exception to the unfortunate-sequel rule: sequels to superhero movies are generally bigger, badder, and bolder than their originals. The principal cast and crew is back and they’ve nabbed Mickey Rourke. The biggest movie of the year, and for good reason.

Inception (July) How do you follow up after making one of the most successful blockbusters–financially and critically–in history (The Dark Knight)? Use the new, expanded resources the studios are now willing to give you to return to your roots. This sci-fi, potentially time-travelling story (the press and trailers are vague) suggest Memento for Imax. Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page (!) star.

The Green Hornet (December) Michel Gondry, Seth Rogen superhero adaptation, just in time for Christmas, written by the scribes of Superbad and Pineapple Express. Could be all wrong, or just right. I’ll bank on the latter.

The Tree of Life (TBA) Terrence Malick makes films every half decade, if that. This generational epic, originally titled Q, has been in the works for 30 years. Brad Pitt and Sean Penn star. Expect something interesting, if not magnificent, with a pervertedly long running time.

The Beaver (TBA) A year ago, the script of “The Beaver” was number one on an “official” list of best unproduced screenplays. This quirky portrait of a CEO who suffers a mental breakdown and, following, can only communicate through use of a beaver puppet, originally had Steve Carrell attached but now has (gulp) Mel Gibson. I couldn’t think of a more fitting comeback.

The First Gun (TBA) The director of Hero and House of Flying Daggers remakes the Coen Bros’ Blood Simple for the Mandarin-speaking crowd. Hey, we do it all the time to them. Here is some sweet vengeance.

Black Swan (TBA) Darren Aronofsky’s psychological ballet thriller. Yeah, I know. I can’t wait either.

Life During Wartime (TBA) Todd Solondz’s sequel to 1998′s great dark comedy Happiness has already made the festival circuit to generally positive reviews. Apparently, it’s more talk-heavy and politically overt than his previous films. Suitably, it’s named after a Talking Heads song.

Rabbit Hole (TBA) John Cameron Mitchell has proven he’s capable of stage-to-screen adaptations. In this one, Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart star as a couple dealing with the death of their 4-year-old. Decidedly less wacky than Hedwig and the Angry Inch.