From the Cinematheque members email:

It’s summer, it’s hot, and - as requested by many members - we will continue our Oscar program with (mostly) Hollywood entertainment until the end of June.

Here are the best of Oscar nominees and Oscar-winning features and shorts from 2007, and probably your last chance to see these movies as they deserve to be seen ? on a big screen with glorious digital sound!

Hanoi Cinematheque
till 30 June

Oscar program continues

SCHEDULE

JUNE

14 Saturday
19:00 ACADEMY AWARD-WINING SHORTS

15 Sunday
16:00 ACADEMY AWARD-WINING SHORTS
21:00 ACADEMY AWARD-WINING SHORTS

16 Monday
BLOOMSDAY (Details in this post)
19:30 ULYSSES

17 Tuesday
19:00 ACADEMY AWARD-WINING SHORTS
21:00 THE SAVAGES

18 Wednesday
19:00 THE SAVAGES
21:00 MICHAEL CLAYTON

19 Thursday
19:00 MICHAEL CLAYTON
21:00 THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

20 Friday
Reserved for private function

21 Saturday
14:00 JUNO

22 Sunday
15:00 JUNO
17:00 THE KITE RUNNER
19:00 THERE WILL BE BLOOD

23 Monday
19:00 AWAY FROM HER
21:00 ATONEMENT

24 Tuesday
19:00 THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY
21:00 SWEENEY TODD

25 Wednesday
19:00 NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

26 Thursday
19:00 THE KITE RUNNER
21:00 EASTERN PROMISES

27 Friday
19:00 THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES
BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

28 Saturday
TO BE ANNOUNCED

29 Sunday
17:00 THE KITE RUNNER
19:30 LA VIE EN ROSE

30 Monday
19:00 NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

FILM NOTES

ACADEMY AWARD-WINNING SHORTS PROGRAM:

Although the Oscar-nominated shorts are only a tiny and unrepresentative sliver of the short-film universe, their history nonetheless suggests that making short films is not just making features with training wheels on. Even conventionally structured shorts have less room for complicated storytelling and must depend more on visual and sonic elements.

We are pleased to present the 2007 Academy Award winning short films in the following categories: Best Animated Short, Best Live-Action Short and Best Documentary Short. We will also show the amusing WEST BANK STORY, which won the Oscar for Best Live-Action Short, 2006, and TANGHI ARGENTINI, one of the five nominated Live-Action Shorts from 2007.

PETER AND THE WOLF

2007 Directed by Suzie Templeton 28 minutes
No dialog.

2007 Academy Award: Best Animated Short

An exquisitely animated re-telling of the classic set to Prokofiev’s suite. Peter is a slight lad, solitary, locked out of the woods by his protective grandfather, his only friend a duck. In town, he’s bullied. When a wolf menaces the duck - as well as grandfather’s fat cat and an ill-flying bird that Peter has befriended - Peter bravely comes to the rescue.

?this latest version of the classic tale is a triumph of emotional ambiguity and shifting loyalty and a rebirth for the full-bodied animated animal sidekick after years of Disney-declared comic purgatory.?
— Josh Rosenblatt, Austin Chronicle

From review by Geoff Brown, The Times (London):

By contemporary standards, Prokofiev’s tale of a boy, his grandfather, a duck, bird, cat, and a predatory wolf couldn’t be called rip-roaringly dramatic. But in this version, produced by BreakThru Films, the boy starts off sullen and introverted, the eyes glaring coldly, the mouth nailed shut. Beyond the forest and Grandfather’s rustic cottage, the landscape is decayed industrial (just as in Lodz, where the film was made with top Polish artists). There are mean streets and mean behavior - and not just from the wolf.

By hiring Templeton in the first place, the project’s godfathers, the producer Hugh Welchman and the conductor Mark Stephenson, knew they wouldn’t get Disney. This is a tougher, edgier Peter and the Wolf with an environmental twist.

THE MOZART OF PICKPOCKETS

2007 Directed by Philippe Pollet-Villard 31 minutes
French with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation.

2007 Academy Award: Best Live-Action Short

Richard and Philippe live hand to mouth, backing up a gang of Spanish pickpockets on the streets of Paris, posing as policemen who arrest a gang member while the others rifle the pockets and purses of gawkers. When all of the gang except Richard and Philippe are pinched, things look grim. Plus, Richard insists that they take in a wide-eyed immigrant lad, a deaf-mute left behind in the arrests.

Review by Andrew O?Hehir, Salon.com:

?This shambling Parisian street comedy is likable from beginning to end and has a sizable “aww” quotient, thanks to the adorable performance of young Matteo Razzouki-Safardi as the maybe-deaf, maybe-foreign moppet who tumbles into the care of two hapless middle-aged criminals. Philippe (played by director Pollet-Villard) and his pal Richard (Richard Morgi�ve) run a dangerous low-end scam, pretending to be cops as the final act of an elaborate pickpocketing maneuver. The delights of THE MOZART OF PICKPOCKETS largely derive from Pollet-Villard and Morgi�ve’s deadpan Laurel & Hardy act, and from their irresistible star.

TANGHI ARGENTINI

2007 Directed by Guido Thys and Anja Daelemans 14 minutes
Dutch with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation.

2007 Academy Award Nomination: Best Live-Action Short

Review by Andrew O?Hehir, Salon.com:

?This agreeable, sweet-tempered film belongs to the O. Henry short story tradition: You think it’s going in one direction, and in its last seconds it’s revealed to be about something else.

A pudgy, rumpled office worker named Andr� (Dirk van Dijck) has met a woman on the Internet, and set a Christmas-season date to meet her on tango night at a local nightclub. Of course, Andr� has exaggerated his nonexistent tango expertise immensely, which leaves him two weeks to convince his perennially cynical co-worker Frans (played by the long, lean Belgian TV star Koen van Impe) to teach him to dance with suitable Argentine-scale passion. The main delight of TANGHI ARGENTINI unquestionably derives from watching this odd couple practice — they steal moments in the library for especially poetic moves — but the payoff to this shaggy-dog film is pretty good too.

WEST BANK STORY

2006 Directed by Ari Sandel 21 minutes
English only. No Vietnamese translation

2006 Academy Award: Best Live Action Short

A musical comedy spoof on WEST SIDE STORY - set in the fast-paced, fast-food world of competing falafel stands on the West Bank.

David, an Israeli soldier, falls in love with Fatima, a beautiful Palestinian cashier, despite the animosity between their families’ dueling restaurants. Can the couple’s love withstand a 58-year-old conflict and their families’ desire to control the future of the chick pea in the Middle East?

Review by Neva Chonin, San Francisco Chronicle:

?WEST BANK STORY, the most audacious of the Oscar nominees, concerns life’s biggest players: love, war and fast food. As the title suggests, it’s a remake of WEST SIDE STORY — the songs aren’t half bad, either — that replaces the Sharks and the Jets’ gangland rumbles with a war between two competing falafel joints in the occupied territories. One’s Palestinian-owned; the other is run by Israelis. Add a pretty Muslim counter-girl and a cute Jewish soldier, mix in some star-crossed love, flavor with a few dance numbers and Hamas jokes, and you’ve got… well, something that defies critique but is still a hoot to watch.

FREEHELD

2007 Directed by Cynthia Wade 38 minutes
English only. No Vietnamese translation

2007 Academy Award: Best Documentary Short
Special Jury Prize, 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

Detective Lieutenant Laurel Hester spent 25 years investigating tough cases on the police force in Ocean County, New Jersey - protecting the rights of victims and putting her life on the line. She had no reason to expect that in the last year of her life, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, that her final battle for justice would be for the woman she loved.

The documentary film FREEHELD chronicles Laurel’s struggle to transfer her earned pension to her domestic partner, Stacie Andree. With less than six months to live, Laurel refuses to back down when her elected officials - the Ocean County ?Freeholders? - deny her request to leave her pension to Stacie, an automatic option for heterosexual married couples. The film is structured chronologically, following both the escalation of Laurel’s battle with the Freeholders and the decline of her health as cancer spreads to her brain.

As Laurel’s plight intensifies, it spurs a media frenzy and a passionate advocacy campaign. At the same time, FREEHELD captures a quieter, personal story: that of the deep love between Laurel and Stacie as they face the reality of losing each other. Alternating from packed public demonstrations at the county courthouse to quiet, tender moments of Laurel and Stacie at home, FREEHELD combines tension-filled political drama with personal detail, creating a nuanced study of a grassroots fight for justice.

In the end, this documentary shows a loving couple regardless of their sexual orientation who fight to obtain what is really theirs.

Trivia note: Filmmaker Cynthia Wade, who is not gay, made a moving plea for sexual equality and tolerance in her Oscar acceptance speech. Her speech was removed by Singapore censors when the Oscar ceremony was broadcast in Singapore.

FEATURE FILMS

THE SAVAGES

2007 Directed by Tamara Jenkins 113 minutes
English with Vietnamese audio option.

2 Academy Award nominations:
- Best Original Screenplay
- Best Actress (Laura Linney)

In her consummately executed, irreverent drama THE SAVAGES, Tamara Jenkins achieves a rare storytelling feat: making us simultaneously laugh and cry. In what may evolve into a new genre, the coming-of-middle-age story, she has captured all the pain and misgivings that befall a pair of adult siblings, suddenly plucked from their very absorbed lives and forced to care for a parent who never much bothered to care for them.

Jon and Wendy Savage are two siblings who have spent their adult years trying to recover from the abuse of their abusive father, Lenny Savage. Suddenly, a call comes in that his girlfriend has died, he cannot care for himself with his dementia and her family is dumping him on his children. Despite the fact Jon and Wendy have not spoken to Lenny for twenty years and he is even more loathsome than ever, the Savage siblings feel obliged to take care of him. Now together, brother and sister must come to terms with the new and painful responsibilities with their father now affecting their lives even as they struggle with their own personal demons Lenny helped create.

From review by Mark LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle:

Tamara Jenkins has made a movie about something that lots of people are going through but nobody wants to deal with, not even in life, much less in entertainment. And she’s done it fearlessly, with the right mix of humor and horror and with not even a shred of sentimentality.

THE SAVAGES is about young middle-aged adults dealing with an elderly parent who is losing his mind and can no longer take care of himself. The movie is not a farce. Farce would be easy - the audience would be invited to turn off its emotions and view the situation as spectacle. Rather, Jenkins grounds THE SAVAGES in reality, a brutal, absolute reality that’s funny-awful enough to make farce look like an evasion and straight drama look like compromise.

The characters’ situation reflects the fragmented nature of families today. A brother (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a sister (Laura Linney) live far away from each other on the East Coast, and their father (Philip Bosco) lives on the other side of the country, in Arizona. But when there’s a crisis, the kids have to drop what they’re doing (somewhat grudgingly) and fly out there, where they learn the distinctions between assisted-living facilities and nursing homes. Suddenly, they have to figure out where the old man should live.

Movies about adult siblings are rare, and even when we see them, they’re usually about same-sex siblings working out, in adulthood, the competitive stresses of their childhood. THE SAVAGES deals with a brother-and-sister relationship, and it gets the details right - the ease of that interaction, the unspoken bond and the complete willingness of both parties to be rude to the other because they know the sibling can’t be fooled anyway. Hoffman and Linney suggest a complete history in their conversation and even in their body language. They don’t look alike, but they seem like brother and sister.

There’s only one false element, a tiny one. We’re told that Wendy Savage (Linney) is three years younger than Jon Savage (Hoffman). In fact, Linney is three years older than Hoffman, but moreover - and this is the important thing - everything about Linney screams “older sister,” and in THE SAVAGES she treats him like a younger brother, pushing him, cajoling him, abusing him, remembering painful details of his childhood and fretting about everything. And he responds like a younger brother - by ignoring her or mumbling vague replies, and by not being fazed.

Both siblings are involved in theater, but from different angles. Wendy is an unproduced playwright who keeps applying for Guggenheim Fellowships, and Jon has a doctorate in theater studies, teaches in a university and is writing a book on Bertolt Brecht. These are not the arbitrary career designations sometimes found in movies, in which every nice guy is an architect. The protagonists in THE SAVAGES had unwelcome drama in their childhood, thanks to an angry and difficult father, and each has chosen a different way of dealing with it. Wendy has chosen to dive into the drama by writing about it, and Jon has chosen to analyze the phenomenon of drama itself and to study an artist whose whole career was founded on the deconstruction of dramatic techniques.

Hoffman and Linney are superb, but as the film mainly follows Wendy, it’s Linney who has the opportunity to give the standout performance, and she does. She’s full throttle and energetic, knows exactly what she’s doing at every moment, and she’s funny - very funny. As the father, Bosco plays a shell of a man. There’s a flash of life every so often, but there’s little sense of what he might have been like when well. It’s a tribute to writer-director Jenkins’ restraint that she never tries to milk the father’s situation for an emotional tug.

It’s a mildly comic motif in THE SAVAGES that whenever someone has a television on, the scene onscreen is frantic and emphatic, while the scene in the room is quiet and ambiguous. Jenkins is telling us that, in this movie, she’s endeavoring to show life as it’s lived on our side of the TV screen. She does.

MICHAEL CLAYTON

2007 Directed by Tony Gilroy 119 minutes English with Vietnamese audio option

7 Academy Award nominations:
- Best Picture of the Year
- Best Director
- Best Actor (George Clooney)
- Best Supporting Actress (Tilda Swinton)
- Best Supporting Actor (Tom Wilkenson)
- Best Original Screenplay
- Best Original Music
Winning for:
- Best Supporting Actress (Tilda Swinton)

Michael Clayton is Mr. Fix-It for his law firm, Kenner, Back and Odeen. A former District Attorney, Clayton uses his contacts in the police and the criminal justice system to bail out the firm’s wealthy corporate clients. When one of the firm’s senior partners, Arthur Edens, has a nervous breakdown while taking a deposition in a lawsuit against a major agrochemicals company, Clayton is dispatched to bring him home. What Clayton soon learns is Edens not only has doubts about defending the lawsuit but that the company may be acting on its own to ensure a positive outcome.

From review by Philip French, The Observer (London)

?What we have at the heart of this excellent thriller is a story of greed, the misuse of the law, the contempt of the powerful for the weak and the small window of decency through which such things can be corrected. Clooney is the eponymous 45-year-old Michael Clayton, son of an Irish-American cop, product of a minor law school, experienced in handling crime as an assistant district attorney and now a dependable, highly paid troubleshooter for one of New York’s most prestigious law practices.

His friend, the firm’s finest litigator Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), has spent six years working for a multinational chemical company called UNorth, against whom a multibillion-dollar class action is being brought by 450 farmers who believe they’ve been poisoned by a toxic product. But he’s become unhinged and appears to be working for the other side. Clayton, who’s burdened with problems of his own (a broken marriage, big debt incurred by his restaurant, an alcoholic brother), is charged with bringing Arthur home from Milwaukee and getting him back on the medicine that controls his bipolar condition.

Meanwhile, his opposite number, Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), chief legal counsel for UNorth, is on Arthur’s trail. To get where she is, Karen has had to sacrifice her soul, her conscience, her inner life to achieve the necessary ruthlessness and poise; this is superbly conveyed through a series of scenes in which she’s shown alone in a hotel room, anxiously rehearsing for an interview she’s giving for television.

As Karen moves further and further into transgressive territory, talking to her lethal aides in protective euphemisms worthy of David Mamet, so Michael comes to question the ethics of his current profession and to recover the integrity that informed his earlier life. This may sound schematic, even sentimental, but Swinton and Clooney find real depth in their characters. The narrative takes on a moral force without anyone pausing to indulge in fancy rhetoric to explain or justify their conduct.

Interestingly, Clooney has been playing on both sides of the moral fence in recent films. In comic vein in movies like OCEANS ELEVEN and OUT OF SIGHT, he celebrates cool amorality. His more personal pictures, such as GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK and SYRIANA, take a highly principled view of civic responsibility. Likewise, Sydney Pollack has for years been making movies, from THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR through ABSENCE OF MALICE to THE FIRM, that criticise the abuse of power. Yet as an actor, he specialises in playing (very convincingly) cruel, cynical, corrupt lawyers and business tycoons in pictures like EYES WIDE SHUT, and A CIVIL ACTION, in which he famously crushes John Travolta, an idealistic lawyer involved in a class action case.

Review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:

George Clooney brings a slick, ruthless force to the title role of Michael Clayton, playing a fixer for a powerful law firm. He works in the shadows, cleaning up messes, and he is a realist. He tells clients what they don’t want to hear. He shoots down their fantasies of “options.” One client complains bitterly that he was told Clayton was a miracle worker. “I’m not a miracle worker,” Clayton replies. “I’m a janitor.”

Clooney looks as if he stepped into the role from the cover of GQ. It’s the right look. Conservative suit, tasteful tie, clean shaven, every hair in place (except when things are going wrong, which is often). Drives a leased Mercedes. Divorced, drives his son to school, has him on Saturdays. Has a hidden side to his life. Looks prosperous, but lost his shirt on a failed restaurant and needs $75,000 or bad things might happen. Would certainly have $75,000 if he didn’t frequent a high-stakes poker game in a back room in Chinatown. Not much of a personal life.

Clayton works directly with Marty Bach (Sydney Pollack), the head of the law firm; it’s one of those Pollack performances that embodies authority, masculinity, intelligence and knowing the score. But one of Bach’s top partners has just gone berserk, stripping naked in Milwaukee during a deposition hearing and running through a parking lot in the snow. This is Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), who opens the film with a desperate voiceover justifying himself to Michael.

The video of the deposition is not a pretty sight. One of the people watching it in horror is Karen Crowder, the chief legal executive for one of Marty Bach’s most important clients, a corporation being sued for poisonous pollution. Crowder is played by Tilda Swinton, who has been working a lot lately because of her sheer excellence; she has the same sleek grooming as Clayton, the power wardrobe, every hair in place. Thinking of Clooney, Pollack, Wilkinson and Swinton, you realize how much this film benefits from its casting. Switch out those four, and the energy and tension might evaporate.

The central reality of the story is that the corporation is guilty, it is being sued for billions, the law firm knows it is guilty, it is being paid millions to run the defense, and now Arthur Edens holds the smoking gun and it’s not quite all he’s holding when he runs naked through the parking lot.

Enough of the plot. Naming the film after Michael Clayton is an indication that the story centers on his life, his loyalties, his being just about fed up. Arthur Edens is a treasured friend of his, a bipolar victim who has stopped taking his pills and now glows with reckless zeal and conviction. We meet Clayton’s family, we get a sense of the corporate culture he inhabits, we sense how controlling the risks of other people sends him to the poker tables to create and confront his own risks as sort of an antidote.

The legal/business thriller genre has matured in the last 20 years, led by authors like John Grisham and actors like Michael Douglas. It involves high stakes, hidden guilt, desperation to contain information and mighty executives blindsided by gotcha! moments. We’re invited to be seduced by the designer offices, the clubs, the cars, the clothes, the drinks, the perfect corporate worlds in which sometimes only the rest room provides a safe haven.

I don’t know what vast significance MICHAEL CLAYTON has (it involves deadly pollution but isn’t a message movie). But I know it is just about perfect as an exercise in the genre. I’ve seen it twice, and the second time, knowing everything that would happen, I found it just as fascinating because of how well it was all shown happening. It’s not about the destination but the journey, and when the stakes become so high that lives and corporations are on the table, it’s spellbinding to watch the Clooney and Swinton characters eye to eye, raising each other, both convinced that the other is bluffing.

Working with the great cinematographer Robert Elswit (SYRIANA, GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK, MAGNOLIA), director Gilroy uses stable, brooding establishing shots, measured editing that underlines the tension in conversations, and lighting that separates the fluorescent sterility of Clayton’s business world from the warmth of family homes and the eerie quiet of a field at dawn. When he shows us Arthur Edens’ loft, it has the same sort of chain-link enclosure that Gene Hackman’s character had in THE CONVERSATION, and they are the same kinds of characters: paranoid, in possession of damaging evidence, not as well protected as they think.

The thing about Michael Clayton is he’s better at knowing how well protected they are, and what they think.

THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY (Le Scaphandre Et Le Papillon)

2007 Directed by Julian Schnabel 112 minutes
French with English subtitles and Vietnamese audio option

4 Academy Award nominations:
- Best Director
- Best Screenplay
- Best Cinematography
- Best Editing

Best Director Award, Cannes Film Festival 2007

French fashion magazine Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, in 1995 at the age of 43, suffered a stroke that paralyzed his entire body, except his left eye. Using that eye to blink out his memoir, Bauby eloquently described the aspects of his interior world, from the psychological torment of being trapped inside his body to his imagined stories from lands he’d only visited in his mind.

In what follows, we see episodes of Jean-Do’s fantasies, a mixture of memories and dreams, some poignant and some comical or sexy, with some fantastic mise-en-sc�nes. For example, elusive appearances by characters such as Nijinsky (Nicolas Le Riche) or Empress Eugenie (Emma de Caunes); symbolic scenes like Bauby in his wheelchair on an isolated pontoon in the beach at Berk; glaciers crumbling into the sea; a wild dinner at famed Paris’ Le Duc seafood restaurant, with a beautiful woman. There is a marvelously touching recollection of Jean-Do joking and teasing his 92-year-old father, Papinou (Max von Sydow), while shaving him. C�line comes to see him often at the hospital and help out as much as she can, organizing a picnic on the beach with the whole family on Father’s Day, or reading to Jean-Do the voluminous mail that he receives daily.

Review by Mark LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle:

?Jean-Dominique Bauby led a glamorous life as the editor of the French Elle magazine, but his lasting contribution to human consciousness has nothing to do with his carefree years as a man about town. His contribution is THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY, which he wrote after suffering a devastating stroke.

The book, which he dictated by blinking his left eye, makes it forever impossible to forget or ignore the humanity inside people experiencing the most physically distorting and debilitating of illnesses. Speaking from the absolute depths, using the most thin and tenuous line of communication, Bauby assured people of an indestructible human essence inside the destructible human body.

In adapting the book, director Julian Schnabel and screenwriter Ronald Harwood overcame great difficulties. The subject matter is disturbing. The story, about a 43-year-old man paralyzed from head to toe, is infinitely sad. Bauby’s book follows no linear story, but is rather a series of vignettes and ruminations. And, of course, with a paralyzed protagonist, the screen action is limited.

Lesser artists would have taken a programmatic approach to the material: They would have either told most of the story in flashback, with Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) appearing mainly in his able-bodied incarnation; or they would have pitched their tent almost entirely in the land of fantasy, a sentimental approach with occasional hospital pit stops.

Instead, Schnabel begins the film with a subjective camera, so that we see the world through Bauby’s eyes as he wakes up to find himself in a hospital. We soon become familiar with his limited field of vision and aware that he can’t move his head - thus things keep happening outside the frame. We hear Bauby’s thoughts, and knowing what he wants to say helps us to feel just a hint of his frustration at not being able to communicate.

It takes some time for Bauby to realize that his imagination can help ease his misery, and that’s when the fantasy sequences come. But Schnabel uses them sparingly and with care. He never pretends that imagination can offer anything more than temporary consolation, and so beautiful sequences of a magical hospital corridor, with miracle cures or a leaping Nijinsky, land with a thud into reality. The film’s title describes the movie’s delicate balance between taking wing and staying trapped with Bauby inside the physical equivalent of a diving bell.

Schnabel doesn’t routinely give us extended shots of Bauby until about a third of the way through, and it’s only when we’re used to him in his disabled condition that we start getting flashbacks to Bauby in his able-bodied state. The difference is a shock, and it becomes impossible to look at him healthy without thinking of the illness to come.

Schnabel injects some sex appeal in the movie by casting beautiful women in every available role, including those of the nurses. Their beauty is a comfort to Bauby but also a point of rueful contemplation. The actresses - Emmanuelle Seigner as his ex-wife; Marie-Josee Croze as his speech therapist and Anne Consigny as his amanuensis - become the film’s heart, each of them conveying moments of profound emotion. They do it without a tinge of bathos, and while looking straight into the camera. Max von Sydow, who appears in a couple of scenes as Bauby’s father, is painfully effective.

By the end, THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY achieves a victory over difficult material, but celebrating that fact doesn’t preclude recognizing the story is not a natural for movies and remains an uneasy match. Still, it was a story that needed to be told, and Harwood and Schnabel told it better than anyone else could have.

Advisory: Nudity, strong language.

From review by Philip French, The Observer (London):

Julian Schnabel has directed is a triumph, a major advance on his earlier pictures (BASQUIAT, a portrait of the doomed New York painter, and BEFORE NIGHT FALLS, about the struggles of the gay Cuban dissident author, Reinaldo Arenas). It’s made in French from a screenplay by the British playwright Ronald Harwood, and exquisitely photographed by Janusz Kaminski, the Polish cinematographer who has lit all Steven Spielberg’s movies since Schindler’s List, and stars Mathieu Amalric, who has made a corner for himself as the cinema’s favourite quizzical, witty, womanising Gallic intellectual, and who is wholly convincing as the man his friends called Jean-Do.

Ever since the cinema was invented, film-makers have been experimenting with different points of view, ways of getting inside people’s heads, conveying unusual states of mind by visual and aural means. The world of the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the schizophrenic have been explored in pictures as different as Pabst’s SECRET OF A SOUL, Duvivier’s CARNET DU BAL, and Dalton Trumbo’s JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, and numerous films have tried to present a narrative through a single pair of eyes. THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY uses a variety of ways to convey the feeling and texture of the book. It begins with Jean-Do coming out of his coma and being told by a neurologist that he’s suffering from ‘locked-in syndrome’ (the English term is used by the French medical profession), and the audience shares his isolation. Only we, the spectators, have an unmediated access to his mind and we understand his frustration at the world going into and out of focus and his inability to frame for hims!
elf the picture he sees. Later on, after we’ve experienced along with him the process of learning a new way of communicating, the film-makers are freed to follow his memories and his imagination as he starts assembling the materials that will make up his book. There are also occasional views of Jean-Do as he appears to others and the way he envisages his present self after seeing his image in a mirror.

JUNO

2007 Directed by Jason Reitman 96 minutes
English with Vietnamese audio option

4 Academy Award nominations:
- Best Picture of the Year
- Best Director
- Best Actress (Ellen Page)
- Best Screenplay (Diablo Cody)
Winning for:
- Best Screenplay (Diablo Cody)

Review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:

Jason Reitman’s JUNO is just about the best movie of the year. It is very smart, very funny and very touching; it begins with the pacing of a screwball comedy and ends as a portrait of characters we have come to love. Strange, how during Juno’s hip dialogue and cocky bravado, we begin to understand the young woman inside, and we want to hug her.

Has there been a better performance this year than Ellen Page’s creation of Juno? I don’t think so. If most actors agree that comedy is harder than drama, then harder still is comedy depending on a quick mind, utter self-confidence, and an ability to stop just short of going too far. Page’s presence and timing are extraordinary. I have seen her in only two films, she is only 20, and I think she will be one of the great actors of her time.

But don’t let my praise get in the way of sharing how much fun this movie is. It is so very rare to sit with an audience that leans forward with delight and is in step with every turn and surprise of an uncommonly intelligent screenplay. It is so rare to hear laughter that is surprised, unexpected and delighted. So rare to hear it coming during moments of recognition, when characters reflect exactly what we’d be thinking, just a moment before we get around to thinking it. So rare to feel the audience joined into one warm, shared enjoyment. So rare to hear a movie applauded.

Ellen Page plays Juno MacGuff, a 16-year-old girl who decides it is time for her to experience sex and enlists her best friend Paulie (Michael Cera) in an experiment he is not too eager to join. Of course she gets pregnant, and after a trip to an abortion clinic that leaves her cold, she decides to have the child. But what to do with it? She believes she’s too young to raise it herself. Her best girlfriend Leah (Olivia Thirby) suggests looking at the ads for adoptive parents in the Penny Saver: “They have ‘Desperately Seeking Spawn,’ right next to the pet ads.”

Juno informs her parents in a scene that decisively establishes how original this film is going to be. It does that by giving us almost the only lovable parents in the history of teen comedies: Bren (Allison Janney) and Mac (J.K. Simmons). They’re older and wiser than most teen parents are ever allowed to be, and warmer and with better instincts and quicker senses of humor. Informed that the sheepish Paulie is the father, Mac turns to his wife and shares an aside that brings down the house. Later, Bren tells him, “You know, of course, it wasn’t his idea.” How infinitely more human and civilized their response is than all the sad routine “humor” about parents who are enraged at boyfriends.

Mac goes with Juno to meet the would-be adoptive parents, Vanessa and Mark Loring (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman). They live in one of those houses that look like Martha Stewart finished a second before they arrived. Vanessa is consumed with her desire for a child, and Mark is almost a child himself, showing Juno “my room,” where he keeps the residue of his ambition to be a rock star. What he does now, at around 40, is write jingles for commercials.

We follow Juno through all nine months of her pregnancy, which she pretends to treat as mostly an inconvenience. It is uncanny how Page shows us, without seeming to show us, the deeper feelings beneath Juno’s wisecracking exterior. The screenplay by first-timer Diablo Cody is a subtle masterpiece of construction, as buried themes slowly emerge, hidden feelings become clear, and we are led, but not too far, into wondering if Mark and Juno might possibly develop unwise feelings about one another.

There are moments of instinctive, lightning comedy: Bren’s response to a nurse’s attitude during Juno’s sonar scan, and her theory about doctors when Juno wants a pain-killer during childbirth. Moments that blindside us with truth, as when Mac and Juno talk about the possibility of true and lasting love. Moments that reveal Paulie as more than he seems. What he says when Juno says he’s cool and doesn’t even need to try. And the breathtaking scene when Juno and Vanessa run into each other in the mall and the future of everyone is essentially decided. Jennifer Garner glows in that scene.

After three viewings, I feel like I know some scenes by heart, but I don’t want to spoil your experience by quoting one-liners and revealing surprises. The film’s surprises, in any event, involve not merely the plot but insights into the characters, including feelings that coil along just beneath the surface so that they seem inevitable when they’re revealed.

The film has no wrong scenes and no extra scenes, and flows like running water. There are two repeating motifs: the enchanting songs, so simple and true, by Kimya Dawson. And the seasonal appearances of Paulie’s high school cross-country team, running past us with dogged consistency, Paulie often bringing up the rear, until his last run ends with Paulie, sweaty in running shorts, racing to Juno’s room after her delivery.

Review by Stella Papamichael, BBC (London)

A teenager coping with pregnancy needs a strong backbone so it’s no wonder that director Jason Reitman cast Ellen Page as Juno. After her steely turn in HARD CANDY (2006), the young actress carries the weight of this film with consummate ease and no small degree of charm. She cuts straight to the bone with scathingly sharp dialogue (scripted by professional blogger and ex-stripper Diablo Cody), but she also brings warmth and vulnerability to soften the edges.

Holding his own with Page is SUPERBAD’s Michael Cera doing his ‘deer in the headlights’ bit as the father of the baby. It’s Juno who wears the trousers in this relationship (elasticised of course) and keeps him dangling whilst she tries to get a handle on her feelings. Aside from the hormonal rush, that process is further complicated by Juno’s budding friendship with older man Mark (Jason Bateman) who plans to adopt the child with his sullen wife Vanessa (Jennifer Garner). He offers Juno refuge from sniggering schoolmates and anxious parents.

It’s daring and devastatingly funny, but Reitman doesn’t rely purely on shock value for laughs. The unusual balance of power in Juno’s relationship with the adoptive couple tickles the ribs more than her witty oneliners and also heightens the intrigue. When she struts into their tidy, squeaky-clean home and brashly states her terms - to “kick this old school” like “Moses and the reeds” - it only pops the tension for a moment before highlighting the couples’ growing discomfort. Juno’s loss of innocence doesn’t hinge on having sex as much as it does on uncovering the truth behind these awkward silences.

THE KITE RUNNER

2007 Directed by Marc Forster 127 minutes
English and Pashtu and Dari with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation.

Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score

Review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:

How long has it been since you saw a movie that succeeds as pure story? That doesn’t depend on stars, effects or genres, but simply fascinates you with how it will turn out? Marc Forster’s THE KITE RUNNER, based on a much-loved novel, is a movie like that. It superimposes human faces and a historical context on the tragic images of war from Afghanistan.

The story begins with boys flying kites. It is the city of Kabul in 1978, before the Russians, the Taliban, the Americans and the anarchy. Amir (Zekiria Ebrahimi) joins with countless other boys in filling the sky with kites; sometimes they dance on the rooftops while dueling, trying to cut other kite strings with their own. Amir’s friend is Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada), the son of the family’s longtime servant Ali, who has been with them for years and has become like family himself. Hassan is the best kite runner in the neighborhood, correctly predicting when a kite will return to earth and waiting there to retrieve it.

The boys live in a healthy, vibrant city, not yet touched by war. Amir’s father, Baba (Homayoun Ershadi), is an intellectual and secularist who has no use for the mullahs. Baba, whose kindly eyes are benevolent, loves both boys.

There is a neighborhood bully named Assef, jealous of Amir’s kite, his skills and his kite runner. On a day that will shape the course of many lives, he and his gang track down Hassan, attack him and rape him. Amir arrives to see the assault taking place, and to his shame, sneaks away.

Then a curious chemistry takes place. Amir feels so guilty about Hassan that his feelings transform into anger, and he tries insulting his friend, even throwing ripe fruit at him, but Hassan is impassive. Then Amir tries to plant evidence to make Hassan seem like a thief, but even after Hassan (untruthfully and masochistically) confesses, Baba forgives him. It is Hassan’s father, Ali, who insists he and his son must leave the home, over Baba’s protests.

The film has opened with the modern-day Amir, now living in San Francisco, receiving a telephone call from Rahim Khan: “You should come home. There is a way to be good again.” Then commences a remarkable series of old memories and new realities, of the present trying to heal the wounds of the past, of an adult trying to repair the damage he set in motion as a boy. For if he had not lied about Hassan, they would all be together in San Francisco and the telephone call would not have been necessary.

Working from Khaled Hosseini’s best seller, Forster and his screenwriter David Benioff have made a film that sidesteps the emotional disconnects we often feel when a story moves between past and present. This is all the same story, interlaced with the fabric of these lives. There is also a touching sequence as Amir and his father, now older and ill, meet a once-powerful Afghan general and his daughter Soraya (Atossa Leoni). For Amir and Soraya, it is instant love, but protocol must be observed, and one of the movie’s warmest scenes involves the two old men discussing the future of their children. I want to mention once again the eyes, indeed the whole face, of the actor Homayoun Ershadi, as Amir’s father; here is a face so deeply good, it is difficult to imagine it reflecting unworthy feelings.

What happens back in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) in the year 2000 need not be revealed here, but the scenes combine great suspense with deep emotion. One emblematic moment: A soccer game where the audience, all men and all oddly silent, is watched by guards with rifles. The film works so deeply on us because we have been so absorbed by its story, by its destinies, by the way these individuals become so important that we are forced to stop thinking of “Afghans” as simply a category of body counts on the news.

The movie is acted largely in English, although many (subtitled) scenes are in Dari, which I learn is an Afghan dialect of Farsi, or Persian. The performances by the actors playing Amir and Hassan as children are natural, convincing and powerful; recently I have seen several such child performances that adults would envy for their conviction and strength. Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, as young Hassan, is particularly striking, with his serious, sometimes almost mournful face. (The boy now fears Afghan reprisals for appearing in the rape scene, and the producers have helped to relocate him.)

One of the areas in which the movie succeeds is in its depiction of kite flying. Yes, it uses special effects, but they function to represent what freedom and exhilaration the kites represent to their owners. I remember my own fierce identification with my own kites as a child. I was up there; I was represented. Yet there is a fundamental difference between the kite flyer (Amir) and the kite runner (Hassan). Perhaps that sad wisdom in Hassan’s eyes comes from his certainty that all must fall to earth, sooner or later.

This is a magnificent film by Marc Forster, now 38, who since MONSTERS BALL (2001) has made FINDING NEVERLAND (2004), STAY (2005) and STRANGER THAN FICTION (2006). All fine work, but THE KITE RUNNER equals MONSTERS BALL in its emotional impact. Like HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG and MAN PUSH CART, it helps us to understand that the newcomers among us come from somewhere and are somebody.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD

2007 Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson 158 minutes
English only. No Vietnamese translation.

8 Academy Award nominations:
- Best Picture of the Year
- Best Director
- Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis)
- Best Cinematography
- Best Editing
- Best Art Direction
- Best Sound Editing
- Best Screenplay
Winning for:
- Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis)
- Best Cinematography

Based loosely on the Upton Sinclair novel, Oil!, the film follows the rise to power of Daniel Plainview — a charismatic and ruthless oil prospector in he early 20th century, driven to succeed by his intense hatred of others and psychological need to see any and all competitors fail. When he learns of oil-rich land in California that can be bought cheaply, he moves his operation there and begins manipulating and exploiting the local landowners into selling him their property. Using his young adopted son H.W. to project the image of a caring family man, Plainview gains the cooperation of almost all the locals with lofty promises to build schools and cultivate the land to make their community flourish. Over time, Plainview’s gradual accumulation of wealth and power causes his true self to surface, and he begins to slowly alienate himself from everyone in his life.

Review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:

The voice of the oil man sounds made of oil, gristle and syrup. It is deep and reassuring, absolutely sure of itself, and curiously fraudulent. No man who sounds this forthright can be other than a liar. His name is Daniel Plainview, and he must have given the name to himself as a private joke, for little that he does is as it seems. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s brutal, driving epic THERE WILL BE BLOOD, he begins by trying to wrest silver from the earth with a pick and shovel, and ends by extracting countless barrels of oil whose wealth he keeps all for himself. Daniel Day-Lewis makes him a great oversize monster who hates all men, including therefore himself.

Watching the movie is like viewing a natural disaster that you cannot turn away from. By that I do not mean that the movie is bad, any more than it is good. It is a force beyond categories. It has scenes of terror and poignancy, scenes of ruthless chicanery, scenes awesome for their scope, moments echoing with whispers and an ending that in some peculiar way this material demands, because it could not conclude on an appropriate note — there has been nothing appropriate about it. Those who hate the ending, and there may be many, might be asked to dictate a different one. Something bittersweet, perhaps? Grandly tragic? Only madness can supply a termination for this story.

The movie is very loosely based on Oil!, Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel about a corrupt oil family based so loosely, you can see the film, read the book and experience two different stories. Anderson’s character is a man who has no friends, no lovers, no real partners and an adopted son that he exploits mostly as a prop. Plainview comes from nowhere, stays in contact with no one, and when a man appears claiming to be his half-brother, it is not surprising that they have never met before. Plainview’s only goal in life is to become enormously wealthy, and he does so, reminding me of CITIZEN KANE and Mr. Bernstein’s observation, “It’s easy to make a lot of money, if that’s all you want to do is make a lot of money.”

THERE WILL BE BLOOD is no KANE however. Plainview lacks a “Rosebud.” He regrets nothing, misses nothing, pities nothing, and when he falls down a mine shaft and cruelly breaks his leg, he hauls himself back up to the top and starts again. He gets his break in life when a pudding-faced young man named Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) visits him and says he knows where oil is to be found, and will share this information for a price. The oil is to be found on the Sunday family ranch, where Standard Oil has already been sniffing around, and Plainview obtains the drilling rights cheaply from old man Sunday. There is another son, named Eli, who is also played by Paul Dano, and either Eli and Paul are identical twins or the story is up to something shifty, since we never see them both at once.

Eli is an evangelical preacher whose only goal is to extract money from Plainview to build his church, the Church of the Third Revelation. Plainview goes along with him until the time comes to dedicate his first well. He has promised to allow Eli to bless it, but when the moment comes he pointedly ignores the youth, and a lifelong hatred is founded. In images starkly and magnificently created by cinematographer Robert Elswit and set designer Jack Fisk, we see the first shaky wells replaced by vast fields, all overseen by Plainview from the porch of a rude shack, where he sips whiskey more or less ceaselessly. There are accidents. Men are killed. His son is deafened when a well blows violently, and Plainview grows cold toward the boy; he needs him as a prop, but not as a magnet for sympathy.

The movie settles down, if that is the word, into a portrait of the two personalities, Plainview’s and Eli Sunday’s, striving for domination over their realms. The addition of Plainview’s alleged half-brother (Kevin J. O’Connor) into this equation gives Plainview, at last, someone to confide in, although he confides mostly his universal hatred. That Plainview, by now a famous multimillionaire, would so quickly take this stranger at his word is incredible; certainly we do not. But by now Plainview is drifting from obsession through possession into madness, and at the end, like Kane, he drifts through a vast mansion like a ghost.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD is the kind of film that is easily called great. I am not sure of its greatness. It was filmed in the same area of Texas used by NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, and that is a great film, and a perfect one. But THERE WILL BE BLOOD is not perfect, and in its imperfections (its unbending characters, its lack of women or any reflection of ordinary society, its ending, its relentlessness) we may see its reach exceeding its grasp. Which is not a dishonorable thing.

Review by Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times:

THERE WILL BE BLOOD, the joint venture between actor Daniel Day-Lewis and director Paul Thomas Anderson, might be the most incendiary combination since the Molotov cocktail. Though it can be over the top and excessive, this morality play set in the early days of California’s oil boom also creates considerable heat and light and does some serious aesthetic damage.

Aside from exceptional talent and triple-decker names, Day-Lewis and Anderson share a ferocity of approach to their work, investing so much intensity in the projects they choose that they don’t choose very many: BLOOD is the actor’s fourth film in the last decade and the director’s second in the last eight years.

Anderson, a modern cinematic visionary, is always happiest when he is out on the aesthetic edge, determined to involve audiences in disturbing, difficult narratives, from the suburban pornographers of BOOGIE NIGHTS to MAGNOLIA’s raining frogs.

As for Day-Lewis, he has become justifiably celebrated for disappearing into his characters with a completeness that is both terrifying and an ideal match for Anderson’s filmmaking approach. “People don’t know how Daniel can do this job the way that he does it,” the director has tellingly said, “and my feeling is, I just can’t understand how anyone could do it any other way.”

The story that has intrigued these two men started with a venerable source, Upton Sinclair’s muckraking 1927 novel “Oil!” The book, however, has a really minimal, almost “suggested by” relationship to what’s on the screen, which turns out to be a distinctly timely and modern tale, albeit one with problematic aspects, that involves the unholy trinity of oil, money and religion.

For Anderson, who has reveled in multi-strand stories, this has been a chance to venture into, in his own words, “100% straightforward old-fashioned storytelling.” With this filmmaker, however, nothing is ever really old-fashioned or straightforward, and there is enough savagery, extremism and grotesque violence in the way THERE WILL BE BLOOD unfolds to unsettle most folk.

Making BLOOD’s story even more disturbing is the troubling score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, powerful, brooding new music that is critical to the film’s impact, creating pervasive uneasiness and letting us know that, appearances to the contrary, we’re not watching a conventional story.

It helps, of course, to have someone of Day-Lewis’ trademark fierceness and implacability as protagonist Daniel Plainview, whom we follow from his turn-of-the-20th-century beginnings as a silver miner to a finale nearly 30 years later.

Day-Lewis works at such a high-wire level that many of the film’s supporting cast members simply fade away. Only the self-possessed newcomer Dillon Freasier as his young son H.W. and the gifted Paul Dano of LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE as his nemesis have the ability to hold the screen against him.

Marvelously photographed by Anderson veteran Robert Elswit largely around Marfa, Texas (where GIANT was shot), THERE WILL BE BLOOD is western to its core, presenting a vast, uncaring environment that dwarfs the grasping men who are determined to wrest hidden wealth from the earth. Anderson has said that THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE, John Huston’s treatise on madness and greed, was a touchstone movie for him in shooting, and it’s easy to see why.

After preliminary, almost wordless sequences convincingly establishing the world of turn-of-the-last-century oil prospecting, BLOOD begins in earnest with Day-Lewis’ Plainview persuasively addressing a group of citizens whose oil he wants to drill for.

He’s an oilman, he says in an almost melodic voice, not a speculator, and, grandly introducing the 10-year-old H.W. as “my son and my partner,” he also claims to offer “the bond of family.” Convincing and compelling as all this is, there are hints of other traits in Plainview, intimations of a frighteningly indomitable man you trifle with at your own peril.

With the original Upton Sinclair “Oil!” said to be based on the Signal Hill oil strike outside of Long Beach, the largest part of THERE WILL BE BLOOD takes place around a similar huge strike near the fictional California town of Little Boston. Plainview goes there on a tip, and the film shows what transpires as he attempts to consolidate control over the vast oil fields he discovers. It is not a pretty picture.

For as he works to gain power, Plainview turns into God’s wrath, or the devil’s. He engages in ferocious battles with all comers, even his son, but his most bitter fight is with young Eli Sunday (the smoothly effective Dano), a charismatic preacher and faith healer and founder of Little Boston’s Church of the Third Revelation. On a personal level, Sunday is no more godly than Plainview, and their psychological and even physical combat is savagery itself.

Though he starts out almost likable, as Plainview stores up hatreds and animosities over the years, his coldness and arrogance become more visible and his indifference to and contempt for humanity grows exponentially. This, THERE WILL BE BLOOD is in part saying, is what we do to ourselves when, as either business or religious leaders, we deny the humanity in us and overvalue wealth and power.

This study of rapacious, uncaring capitalism points up the uncertain philosophical legacy of the original novel, for where THERE WILL BE BLOOD shows its limitations is in the realm of subtleties of character development.

It’s important to remember that Sinclair was as much a committed socialist as a novelist, someone who probably wrote for political purpose more than for dramatic effect. So while Day-Lewis’ gorgeous acting largely disguises it, the people in BLOOD tend to be schematic and the film as a whole has a weakness for the didactic. In its willingness to push everything, even personality, to extremes, this is a film with the defects of its virtues, so it’s fortunate that those virtues are very great indeed.

AWAY FROM HER

Canada. Directed by Sarah Polley 110 minutes
English only. No Vietnamese translation

2 Academy Award nominations:
Best Actress (Julie Christie)
Best Adapted Screenplay

Fiona and Grant are an Ontario couple who have been married for over 40 years. Now, in the oncoming twilight of their years, they are forced to face the fact that Fiona’s “forgetfulness” actually is Alzheimer’s Disease. After Fiona wanders away and is found after being lost, they agree she must go into a nursing home. For the first time in the five decades their relationship has spanned, they are forced to undergo a long-time separation since the nursing home has a “no-visitors” policy for the first 30 days of a patient’s stay, so they can adjust to their new surroundings.

From review by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (London):

The Nietzchean maxim about the strong man forgetting what he cannot master is what this film brings to mind. It is a deeply impressive and intelligent film about Alzheimer’s disease starring Julie Christie and directed by the Canadian actor-turned-director Sarah Polley, who at just 28 years old, has shown remarkable maturity and flair with her adaptation of an Alice Munro short story, The Bear Came Over the Mountain.

Julie Christie gives a lovely performance - perhaps the best of her career - as a woman succumbing to early-onset dementia. She equals and perhaps surpasses Judi Dench’s portrayal of the similarly afflicted Iris Murdoch. Christie plays Fiona, married to a retired academic called Grant (Gordon Pinsent), and they live in a house in the remote wilderness. Here she is beginning to forget the names for simple things and put pots and pans away in the fridge: but a residual self-awareness means that the thick layers of snow settling on the landscape have become unbearable metaphors for the gradual obliteration of her memory. Sick at heart, Grant prepares to put Fiona away in a retirement home.

But their story is more complicated than this. Fiona has painful memories of their marriage, particularly a period when Grant made free with beautiful young students. Forgetting these lapses is another masculine prerogative of which the now greybearded Grant has availed himself, but for Fiona it has not been so easy. So when Fiona appears to accept her condition, and even tells him, enigmatically, that there is “something delicious in oblivion”, Grant feels an obscure anger at her and at himself.

Gordon Pinsent shows Grant retreating into a kind of gruff blankness; his face has the impassive, leonine quality associated with Alzheimer’s sufferers, and he is in fact at one stage mistaken for a patient. Grant wonders if has ever really known his wife, in all their decades together, and Alzheimer’s has made explicit to him the fear that his wife has always had a secret, secluded identity which will be forever unknown. For Fiona, the awful truth is that perhaps Alzheimer’s has been a kind of liberation, not merely from memory but from the self: all those decades of habit and precedent which coerce us into accepted ways of behaving and feeling.

An outstanding film. A film for grownups, and a promise of brilliant future work from Sarah Polley.

From review by Philip French, The Observer (London):

This is a most adroit, confident film, calmly understated and never sentimental. It supports the argument that short stories and novellas are the best source material for feature movies.

ATONEMENT

U.K. Directed by Joe Wright 130 minutes
English only. No Vietnamese translation.

7 Academy Award nominations:
- Best Picture of the Year
- Best Original Screenplay
- Best Cinematography
- Best Supporting Actress (Saoirse Ronan)
- Best Art Direction
- Best Costume Design
- Best Original Music
Winning for:
- Best Original Music

Fledgling writer Briony Tallis, as a 13-year-old, irrevocably changes the course of several lives when she accuses her older sister’s (Keira Knightley) lover (James McAvoy) of a crime he did not commit. Based on the British romance novel by Ian McEwan.

With a masterly adaptation by Christopher Hampton, strong central performances and fine cinematography, Ian McEwan’s novel has been brought thrillingly to the screen

Review by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (London)

There are moments - delirious, languorous, romantic moments - when this film appears to have the lineaments of a classic. Yet could it be that its epic, haunting story of tragic love in the second world war is too oblique and opaque, with too complex an enigma at its heart, to press the right commercial buttons?

I hope not. This is Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of the 2001 novel by Ian McEwan that was his breakthrough into serious bestsellerdom, and, it is widely believed, raised him above the Amis-McEwan-Barnes triumvirate into a premier league of his own: the greatest living English novelist.

Well, Hampton and director Joe Wright have certainly done McEwan proud with this lavish and spectacular screen version: they are really thinking big, in every sense, and the result is exhilarating. The gobsmacking sequence at Dunkirk in 1940 justifies the price of admission on its own, featuring an extraordinary travelling shot through the violence and chaos of angry soldiers stranded on the beach. Digitally assisted this may have been, but what a spectacle none the less. They say directing a film is like commanding an army. With his second feature film, 35-year-old Joe Wright has done more than enough to earn his general’s uniform.

ATONEMENT is the story of a single, tragic error: an error on the part of someone who is almost, but not quite, too young to know what she is doing. It is an error that radically alters the destinies of three adults: it is not precisely accidental, not exactly comprehensible and, like the flaw in Henry James’s Golden Bowl, remains an enigma, resisting complete explanation until the very last.

The three principals in this mysterious tragedy are firstly Cecilia Turner, played with angular, flapperish poise by Keira Knightley. She is a beautiful young woman who is whiling away a baking hot summer in the grounds of her family’s spectacular Brideshead-type mansion, at one point sporting an impossibly white bathing costume and pristine matching hat fastened under the chin, sprawled on the diving board like an Anglo-Saxon Esther Williams.

James McAvoy is Robbie, the son of the local groundsman, a bright boy to whom Cecilia’s father took a shine after Robbie’s father ran out on them, and who has been allowed great familiarity with Cecilia.

And then there is Cecilia’s super-bright younger sister Briony, with a secret crush on Robbie. Her overactive imagination is to be the ruin, and then the disputed salvation, of them all. At 13, she is played by Saoirse Ronan; at 18, by Romola Garai; and then, as an old woman, by Vanessa Redgrave.

What a clever, ambitious, compassionate picture it is; what a success for Joe Wright and for Knightley and McAvoy - though it is probably in the long, languid wordless summery scenes at the beginning that the film works best. It’s a film which aims at big ideas, and it treats us like grownups.

SWEENEY TODD: THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET

2007 Directed by Tim Burton 116 minutes
English with French subtitles. No Vietnamese translation
(Please be advised that this film contains stylized but graphic shots of throat-cutting!)

8 Academy Award nominations:
- Best Actor (Johnny Depp)
- Best Art Direction
- Best Costume Design
Winning for
- Best Art Direction

Review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:

For many a poor orphan lad
The first square meal he ever had
Was a hot meat pie
Made out of his dad
From Sweeney Todd the Barber.

Tim Burton’s film adaptation of “Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” smacks its lips at the prospect of such a meal, and so it should. In telling this story, half-measures will avail him nothing. The bloodiest musical in stage history, it now becomes the bloodiest in film history, and it isn’t a jolly romp, either, but a dark revenge tragedy with heartbreak, mayhem and bloody good meat pies.

But we know that going in and are relieved that Burton has played true to the material. Here is one scenario that is proof against a happy ending.

It has what is much better, a satisfactory mixed ending, in which what must happen, does. Along the way, with merciless performances by Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Alan Rickman, with a brooding production design by Dante Ferretti, with the dark shadows of Dariusz Wolski’s cinematography, it allows Burton to evoke the 19th century London of Henry Mayhew’s Labour and the London Poor, which reported on the dregs of London and greatly influenced Charles Dickens. The worst you’ve heard about Calcutta would have been an improvement on London poverty in those days.

And yet there is an exhilaration in the very fiber of the film, because its life force is so strong. Its heroes, or anti-heroes, have been wounded to the quick, its villains are vile and heartless, and they all play on a stage that rules out decency and mercy. The acting is so good that it enlists us in the sordid story, which even contains a great deal of humor — macabre, to be sure. As a feast for the eyes and the imagination, SWEENEY TODD is … well, I was going to say, even more satisfying than a hot meat pie made out of your dad.

The story: In London years earlier lived a barber named Benjamin Barker (Johnny Depp) and his sweet young wife and child, and he loved them. But the vile Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) sentenced Barker on trumped-up charges and had him transported to Australia, meanwhile capturing his wife and child. After Turpin ravishes the wife, destroying her life, the girl Johanna (Jayne Wisner) grows up to become the judge’s ward and prisoner.

As the film proper opens, Benjamin has escaped from prison Down Under and sails into London with young Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower). He races through the streets to his former barbershop, where the landlady is still the dark-eyed beauty Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who sells the worst meat pies in London. She tells him about the fate of his family. He moves upstairs to his former shop, now a ruin, changes his name to Sweeney Todd and sets up in business again.

But so deep is his rage that he makes an architectural improvement: a sliding chute that will drop his customers straight into the basement after he slits their throats, so Mrs. Lovett can cut them up and bake them into her pies. Now she offers the meatiest and most succulent meat pies in London; business booms, and sometimes satisfied customers go upstairs for a haircut and a quick recycling.

Burton fashions his musical in what can almost be described as an intimate style. No platoons of dancers in London squares, as in OLIVER!. This is a London of narrow alleys, streets shadowed by overhangs, close secrets. The Stephen Sondheim songs don’t really lend themselves to full-throated performance, although that has been the practice on the stage. They are more plot-driven, confessional, anguished. Depp and Bonham Carter do their own singing, and very well, too, and as actors, they use the words to convey meaning as well as melody.

There are also star turns by Sacha Baron Cohen, as the rival Italian barber Pirelli, whose singing career ends dramatically rather early in the film. And by Rickman as the judge and the invaluable Timothy Spall as Beadle Bamford, his flunky. And by Jayne Wisener as Johanna and Jamie Campbell Bower as Anthony, who become lovers and provide some consolation after the last throat has been slit.

To an unusual degree, SWEENEY TODD works on a quasi-realistic level and not as a musical fantasy. That’s not to say we’re to take it as fact, but that we can at least accept it on its own terms without the movie winking at us. It combines some of Tim Burton’s favorite elements: The fantastic, the ghoulish, the bizarre, the unspeakable, the romantic and in Johnny Depp, he has an actor he has worked with since “Edward Scissorhands” and finds a perfect instrument.

Helena Bonham Carter may be Burton’s inamorata, but apart from that, she is perfectly cast, not as a vulgar fishwife type but as a petite beauty with dark, sad eyes and a pouting mouth and a persistent fantasy that she and the barber will someday settle by the seaside. Not bloody likely.

Review by Philip French, The Sunday Observer (London):

The story of Sweeney Todd, the London barber who cuts his customers’ throats and has their bodies baked into pies by his Fleet Street neighbour, Mrs Lovett, is one of those gruesome stories we first hear as children. I have no recollection where I first came across this urban legend, though I do remember passing fleapit cinemas in the 1940s that were showing a British B-movie on the subject starring a great barnstorming exponent of Grand Guignol with the splendid name Tod Slaughter. The tale touches on all sorts of fears, including the vulnerability you feel in a barber’s chair and, especially, cannibalism.

For his musical ?Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,? Stephen Sondheim drew on a little-known British play of 1973 by Christopher Bond that refined and embellished its Victorian sources. He worked once more with the British writer Hugh Wheeler, who before turning to the theatre had been a prolific author of detective novels under the pseudonym Patrick Quentin. Sondheim is also fascinated with crime and wrote an ingenious movie thriller THE LAST OF SHEILA with Anthony Perkins.

The musical was not a great success initially, and in the short-lived 1990 London production that marvellous actor Denis Quilley was too jovial as Sweeney. But it’s now rightly regarded as a classic. More or less sung through with the minimum of dialogue, its lyrics are harsh, witty, ironic, its music influenced in part by Kurt Weill and Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Hitchcock.

Tim Burton, who dropped the upbeat songs from the 1971 film of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when he came to make a more sinister version three years ago, has found a perfect subject in SWEENEY TODD, and he’s working for the fifth time with Johnny Depp, an actor put on earth to play the part. His presence is powerful, his singing clear, dramatic, unembarrassed. The animated opening titles drip with blood, and when the gore starts to flow in Victorian London about half an hour later, it spurts and cascades until the final scene.

The film begins as Sweeney comes up the Thames in a sailing ship, he and his young companion Frank singing ‘No place like London’, a celebratory song for Frank but for Sweeney a hymn of hatred for the city’s squalor and vice. Once ashore, Sweeney tells him the story of Benjamin Barker, a kindly man whose beautiful wife and small daughter are coveted by the evil Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), and how the wife is destroyed when Barker is framed and transported to Australia.

Now Barker is back, disguised as Sweeney, with vengeance on his mind in a wonderful looking studio-created London, the work of production designer Dante Ferretti and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski. The sets are as splendid as those created by Martin Childs and photographed by Peter Deming in From Hell, the Hughes Brothers’ film starring Johnny Depp as a Scotland Yard inspector investigating the Jack the Ripper murders, and they too appear to be influenced by Victorian paintings, especially the school of William Frith and the nocturnes of Atkinson Grimshaw and Whistler.

Depp has a ghoulish appearance, his unnatural pallor recalling his first appearance in a Burton film as the eponymous Edward Scissorhands, who has knives and scissors instead of fingers, which under stress turn from delicate instruments of refinement to weapons of bloody destruction. When Sweeney returns to his old shop, kept for him by the devoted Mrs Lovett (Helen Bonham Carter), he hymns his box of razors with a song that begins, ‘These are my friends/ See how they glisten’. Mrs Lovett, a distraught pale-faced beauty with black rings around her bright eyes, wishes to restore him to normal life. But when he kills a blackmailer and she disposes of the body by putting it into the pie, the moral and political dice are cast. His obsessions with avenging the destruction of his family is all-consuming and becomes directed at a whole society. He constructs a special barber’s chair to despatch his victims down a chute to the cellar, and it soon becomes an industrial process.

A major consequence is that Mrs Lovett’s pies, once unpleasantly tasteless, become the toast of London, selling like hot cakes. The killing and the cannibalism become a metaphor for cut-throat capitalism and the transformation of our fellow human beings into a disposable consumer commodity.

In an extended dream sequence Mrs Lovett creates a light, bright idyllic world where she and Sweeney picnic in the countryside, bathe by the sea, get married and adopt the street orphan Toby as a son. This dream is shattered by the barber’s obsession and by the depths to which they have sunk. Bloody retribution, melodramatic but tinged with tragedy, inevitably ensues. Before then there has been a deal of incidental humour and two considerable comic performances of a positively Dickensian kind by Timothy Spall as the creepy Beadle Bamford, sly toady to Judge Turpin (also Dickensian in style), and Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli, the phoney Italian barber and peddler of elixirs.

The film is jaunty, beautifully rhythmic in its camera movements and editing, extraordinarily rapid without being obtrusively hasty. Two hours were suddenly over and there I was in the foyer eating a warm meat pie, smiling at what I’d been lured into doing. This is a shocking film, the first musical, I believe, to get an 18 certificate. But it’s ultimately an exhilarating one.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

2007 Directed by Ethan and Joel Coen 122 minutes

8 Academy Award nominations:
- Best Picture of the Year
- Best Director (Ethan and Joel Coen)
- Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem)
- Best Screenplay (Ethan and Joel Coen)
Winning for
- Best Picture of the Year
- Best Director (Ethan and Joel Coen)
- Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem)
- Best Screenplay (Ethan and Joel Coen)

In rural Texas, welder and hunter Llewelyn Moss discovers the remains of several drug runners who have all killed each other in an exchange gone violently wrong. Rather than report the discovery to the police, Moss decides to simply take the two million dollars present for himself. This puts the psychopathic killer, Anton Chigurh, on his trail as he dispassionately murders nearly every rival, bystander and even employer in his pursuit of the money. As Moss desperately attempts to keep one step ahead, the blood from this hunt begins to flow behind him with relentlessly growing intensity as Chigurh closes in. Meanwhile, the laconic Sherrif Ed Tom Bell blithely oversees the investigation even as he struggles to face the sheer enormity of the crimes he is attempting to thwart.

Warning: This movie includes a good deal of graphic violence and killing.

Review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:

The movie opens with the flat, confiding voice of Tommy Lee Jones. He describes a teenage killer he once sent to the chair. The boy had killed his 14-year-old girlfriend. The papers described it as a crime of passion, “but he told me there weren’t nothin’ passionate about it. Said he’d been fixin’ to kill someone for as long as he could remember. Said if I let him out of there, he’d kill somebody again. Said he was goin’ to hell. Reckoned he’d be there in about 15 minutes.”

Jones delivers it with a vocal precision and contained emotion that is extraordinary, and it sets up the entire film, which regards a completely evil man with wonderment, as if astonished that that such a merciless creature could exist.

The man is named Anton Chigurh. No, I don’t know how his last name is pronounced. Like many of the words McCarthy uses, particularly in his masterpiece Suttree, I think it is employed like an architectural detail: The point is not how it sounds or what it means, but the brushstroke it adds to the sentence. Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is a tall, slouching man with lank, black hair and a terrifying smile, who travels through Texas carrying a tank of compressed air and killing people with a cattle stungun. It propels a cylinder into their heads and whips it back again.

Chigurh is one strand in the twisted plot. Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff played by Jones, is another. The third major player is Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a poor man who lives with his wife in a house trailer, and one day, while hunting, comes across a drug deal gone wrong in the desert. Vehicles range in a circle like an old wagon train. Almost everyone on the scene is dead. They even shot the dog. In the back of one pickup are neatly stacked bags of drugs. Llewelyn realizes one thing is missing: the money. He finds it in a briefcase next to a man who made it as far as a shade tree before dying.

The plot will involve Moss attempting to make this $2 million his own, Chigurh trying to take it away from him and Sheriff Bell trying to interrupt Chigurh’s ruthless murder trail. We will also meet Moss’ childlike wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald); a cocky bounty hunter named Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson); the businessman (Stephen Root) who hires Carson to track the money after investing in the drug deal, and a series of hotel and store clerks who are unlucky enough to meet Chigurh.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is as good a film as the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, have ever made, and they made FARGO. It involves elements of the thriller and the chase but is essentially a character study, an examination of how its people meet and deal with a man so bad, cruel and unfeeling that there is simply no comprehending him. Chigurh is so evil, he is almost funny sometimes. “He has his principles,” says the bounty hunter, who has knowledge of him.

Consider another scene in which the dialogue is as good as any you will hear this year. Chigurh enters a rundown gas station in the middle of wilderness and begins to play a word game with the old man (Gene Jones) behind the cash register, who becomes very nervous. It is clear they are talking about whether Chigurh will kill him. Chigurh has by no means made up his mind. Without explaining why, he asks the man to call the flip of a coin. Listen to what they say, how they say it, how they imply the stakes. Listen to their timing. You want to applaud the writing, which comes from the Coen brothers, out of McCarthy.

The $2 million turns out to be easier to obtain than to keep. Moss tries hiding in obscure hotels. Scenes are meticulously constructed in which each man knows the other is nearby. Moss can run but he can’t hide. Chigurh always tracks him down. He shadows him like his doom, never hurrying, always moving at the same measured pace, like a pursuer in a nightmare.

This movie is a masterful evocation of time, place, character, moral choices, immoral certainties, human nature and fate. It is also, in the photography by Roger Deakins, the editing by the Coens and the music by Carter Burwell, startlingly beautiful, stark and lonely. The movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice. The movie also loves some of its characters, and pities them, and has an ear for dialog not as it is spoken but as it is dreamed.

Many of the scenes in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN are so flawlessly constructed that you want them to simply continue, and yet they create an emotional suction drawing you to the next scene. Another movie that made me feel that way was FARGO. To make one such film is a miracle. Here is another.

From review by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (London):

The tone of the film, like that of McCarthy’s original novel, is apocalyptic: it gestures ahead, darkly, to an utter annihilation of norms and restraints. The Coens are true to the pessimistic severity of the book’s ending - darker, arguably, than the ending of McCarthy’s great novel The Road, to whose horror this story can, in retrospect, be seen to be heading.

The savoury, serio-comic tang of the Coens’ film-making style is recognisably present, as is their predilection for the weirdness of hotels and motels. But in McCarthy’s novel they have found something that has heightened and deepened their identity as film-makers: a real sense of seriousness, a sense that their offbeat Americana and gruesome and surreal comic contortions can really be more than the sum of their parts.

Tommy Lee Jones and the actor Barry Corbin have a wonderfully modulated scene, in which Ed Tom calls on his old Uncle Ellis, another retired police officer, who has seen enough of the unequal struggle against evil to have even fewer illusions than his nephew. But he tells him that America has always been like this, that it is a tough country, cruel and harsh, eating its sons like Saturn. Watching this film has something of the elemental thrill of watching a cloud-shadow spread with miraculous speed over a vast, empty landscape: it has a chilly, portentous intuition of what America is.

From review by Philip French, The Guardian (London):

From brutal start to ironic finish the movie’s tension is constant. The action sequences - chases, shootouts, killings - are handled with great verve and directness. The violence here, though exciting, isn’t fun. The Coens show us the pain of gunshot wounds and reality of death.

The suspense lets up only for eloquent dialogue between Sheriff Bell and other law enforcers about the changing nature of crime and civic morality from the frontier days to the new world of drug dealing and the permissive society. The sequence in which he visits a crippled old ex-sheriff inevitably recalls Gary Cooper’s Marshal Kane dropping in on his predecessor in HIGH NOON. But Sheriff Bell is planning retirement, not a final showdown.

Magnificently photographed by a frequent Coen collaborator, the British cinematographer Roger Deakins, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN is perhaps the Coens’ finest achievement to date. Like the not dissimilar FARGO, it’s one of their least eccentric and laidback, but it does contain characteristically unforgettable moments and images. A crunched empty nut packet unfurls in close-up on the counter of a filling station with a crackling menace like a miniature snake about to strike; a man talks on the phone, casually lifting his polished boots to avoid the pool of blood spreading beneath him. These shots are now etched on my mind like the ceramic fish used as a murder weapon and several others I can recall from BLOOD SIMPLE.

EASTERN PROMISES

U.K. Directed by David Cronenberg 100 minutes
English and Russian with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation.

Academy Award nominations:
BEST LEADING ACTOR (Viggo Mortensen)

This is a skillfully-made electrifying thriller. Engineering the cliches of the gangster genre for their own purposes, Cronenberg and screenwriter Steve Knight masterfully orchestrate an atmosphere of danger and dread for a look into an underworld inhabited by the Russian mafia in London.

The shadowy and ruthless Nikolai (Viggo Mortensen) is tied to one of London’s most notorious Russian crime families. His carefully maintained existence is upset when he encounters Anna (Naomi Watts), an innocent midwife who accidentally uncovers potential evidence against the family.

We believe this is an exceptionally well-made film, which deserves to be seen on a big screen. BUT PLEASE BE WARNED THAT THE MOVIE CONTAINS FOUR BRIEF MOMENTS OF EXTREME VIOLENCE AND GUSHING BLOOD (although it is usually possible to see it coming and look away). There is also some nudity and graphic sexuality.

From review by Philip French, The Guardian, London:

EASTERN PROMISES is an exciting story about hypocrisy, decency and different kinds of honour, and about the dark underside of globalisation and multiculturalism. There are some flaws in the script (of a kind that can only be discussed between those who have seen the picture), but most of them are concealed, at least while we sit watching, by the excellence of the acting and Cronenberg’s attention to detail.

From review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:

David Cronenberg’s EASTERN PROMISES opens with a throat-slashing and a young woman collapsing in blood in a drugstore, and connects these events with a descent into an underground of Russians who have immigrated to London and brought their crime family with them. Like the Corleone family, but with a less wise and more fearsome patriarch, the Vory V Zakone family of the Russian mafia operates in the shadows of legitimate business — in this case, a popular restaurant.

EASTERN PROMISES is no ordinary crime thriller, just as Cronenberg is no ordinary director. Beginning with low-rent horror films in the 1970s, because he could get them financed, Cronenberg has moved film by film into the top rank of directors, and here he wisely reunites with Mortensen, star of their A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005). No, Mortensen is not Russian, but don’t even think about the problem of an accent; he digs so deeply into the role you may not recognize him at first.

The script is by Steven Knight, author of the powerful DIRTY PRETTY THINGS (2002), about a black market in body parts. Set in London, it had scarcely a native-born Londoner in it. He’s fascinated by the worlds within the London world. Here, too. His lines of morality are more murkily drawn here, as allegiances and loyalties shift, and old emotions turn out to be forgotten but not dead.

Cronenberg has said he’s not interested in crime stories as themselves. ‘I was watching ‘Miami Vice’ the other night,’ he told Adam Nayman of Toronto’s Eye Weekly, ‘and I realized I’m not interested in the mechanics of the mob, but criminality and people who live in a state of perpetual transgression — that is interesting to me.’

And to me as well. What the director and writer do here is not unfold a plot, but flay the skin from a hidden world. Their story puts their characters to a test: They can be true to their job descriptions within a hermetically sealed world where everyone shares the same values and expectations, and where outsiders are by definition the prey. But what happens when their cocoon is broached? Do they still possess fugitive feelings instilled by a long-forgotten babushka? And what if they do?

?Just don’t give the plot away,? Cronenberg begged in that interview. He is correct that it would be fatal, because this is not a movie of what or how, but of why. And for a long time you don’t see the why coming. It’s that way with stories about plausible human beings, which is why I prefer them to stories about characters who are simply elements in fiction. The actors and the characters of EASTERN PROMISES merge and form a reality above and apart from the story, and the result is a film that takes us beyond crime and London and the Russian mafia and into the mystifying realms of human nature.

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD

2007 Directed by Andrew Dominik 160 minutes
English only. No Vietnamese translation

2 Academy Award nominations:
- Best Supporting Actor (Casey Affleck)
- Best Cinematography

Also Best Actor Award (Brad Pitt) at 2007 Venice Film Festival

The story is a narrative of the twilight months of the infamous James Gang portayed through the deteriorating relations of the few remaining gang members struggling to maintain a semblance of normal life set against a stark Missouri winter landscape. Years of crime, violence, and life in seclusion have taken their toll on the physical and mental health of the characters, especially Jesse James (Brad Pitt) who exhibits increasing paranoia and unpredictability.

Young Bob Ford (Casey Affleck) has grown up worshiping the legend of Jesse James and through his older brother Charley’s (Sam Rockwell) affiliation, is introduced to the 34 year old James. The young man longs to prove his mettle to his larger-than-life idol. As he becomes increasingly exposed to the real personna, an inevitable disillusionment takes root.

The last months of Jesse James’s life, from meeting Robert Ford, to the day Ford shoots him. Jesse’s a wanted man, living under a pseudonym, carrying out a train robbery, disappearing to Kentucky, and reappearing to plan a bank holdup with Robert and Robert’s brother as his team. The rest of the gang is dead, arrested, or gone from Missouri. Whenever Jesse’s around, there’s tension: he’s murderous, quixotic, depressed, and cautious. Ford wants to be somebody and wants the reward. On April 3, 1882, things come to a head: Jesse is 34, Robert 20. Ford becomes famous, reenacting the shooting on stage, facing down the label “coward,” shot dead in 1892.

Review by Peter Travers, Rolling Stone:

This quiet wow of a Western sneaks up as one hell of a satisfying surprise. Artfully exciting and compulsively watchable even at 152 minutes, the film makes good on the promise New Zealand writer-director Andrew Dominik showed with CHOPPER in 2000.

Brad Pitt totally nails it as Jesse James. He just picked up the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival, and damn if he doesn’t deserve it. Pitt is built to reveal Jesse as the tabloid celeb of his day (1881). Living at home with the wife (Mary-Louise Parker) and kids under the alias Thomas Howard, when he’s not out robbing trains with brother Frank (Sam Shepard) and the gang, Jesse is one sick puppy, an insomniac given to psychotic flare-ups and shooting enemies in the back. It’s an irony that his biggest fan, the whiny nineteen-year-old hanger-on Robert Ford (the terrific Casey Affleck matches Pitt step for step), is the instrument of his doom.

Adapting Ron Hansen’s 1983 novel, Dominik paints a richly detailed mosaic on locations in Calgary and Winnipeg, and you can only marvel at the visual miracles achieved by cinematographer Roger Deakins. But it’s in the scenes after Jesse’s death, when Dominik pits truth against legend, that this intimate epic shows its teeth.

From review by Philip French, The Guardian (London):

The movie is about the complex relationship between assassin and victim and we think of the killers of Lincoln, Trotsky, Gandhi and even John Lennon. Casey Affleck subtly traces the way Bob Ford both identifies himself with Jesse and develops a bizarre hatred for him, until eventually they’re unconsciously involved in a form of suicide pact. We sense Jesse’s death wish in the way he tracks down his suspected betrayers, in bizarre gestures like firing his revolver at the frozen river on which he stands and in the pristine pistol he gives Ford shortly before his death.

THE ASSINATION OF JESSIE JAMES does not end with Jesse’s assassination, but with the following decade in which Ford himself becomes a puzzled, guilt-ridden celebrity and, like Lee Harvey Oswald, the target for another self-justifying, publicity-seeking assassin.

This is a subtle, perceptive, ruminative film, with little violent action and a deal of eloquent talk. The acting is understated, undemonstrative and the striking images, the work of the fine British cinematographer Roger Deakins, are cold, dark and bleak. Among the many incidental delights is the brief appearance of James Carville, the ‘Ragin’ Cajun’ who managed Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, as the vindictive governor of Missouri. I wish the film-makers had mentioned that a couple of weeks after Jesse’s death in St Joseph, Missouri, the celebrities’ celebrity Oscar Wilde appeared on 18 April 1882 at the town’s Tootle’s Opera House during his exhausting coast-to-coast lecture tour. He wrote from there about the looting of Jesse’s effects by souvenir hunters, remarking that Americans ‘always take their heroes from the criminal element’.

LA VIE EN ROSE

France. Directed by Olivier Dahan 141 minutes French with English subtitles. No Vietnamese translation

3 Academy Award nominations:
- Best Leading Actress (Marion Cotillard)
- Best Costume Design
- Best Make-up
Winning for
- Best Actress (Marion Cotillard)

An un-chronological look at the life of the Little Sparrow, Edith Piaf (1915-1963). Her mother is an alcoholic street singer, her father a circus performer, her paternal grandmother a madam. During childhood she lives with each of them. At 20, she’s a street singer discovered by a club owner who’s soon murdered, coached by a musician who brings her to concert halls, then quickly famous. Constant companions are alcohol and heartache. The tragedies of her love affair with Marcel Cerdan and the death of her only child belie the words of one of her signature songs, “Non, je ne regrette rien.” The back and forth nature of the narrative suggest the patterns of memory and association.

The most astonishing immersion of one performer int the body and soul of another ever encountered on film.
Stephen Holden, The New York Times

Review by Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:

She was the daughter of a street singer and a circus acrobat. She was dumped by her mother with her father, who dumped her with his mother, who ran a brothel. In childhood, diseases rendered her temporarily blind and deaf. She claimed she was cured by St. Therese, whose shrine the prostitutes took her to. One of the prostitutes adopted her, until her father returned, snatched her away, and put her to work in his act. From her mother and the prostitute she heard many songs, and one day when his sidewalk act was doing badly, her father commanded her, “Do something.” She sang “La Marseilles.” And Edith Piaf was born.

Piaf. The French word for “sparrow.” She was named by her first impresario, Louis Leplee. He was found shot dead not long after — possibly by a pimp who considered her his property. She stood 4 feet, 8 inches tall, and so became “the Little Sparrow.” She was the most famous and beloved French singer of her time — of the century, in fact — and her lovers included Yves Montand (who she discovered) and the middleweight champion Marcel Cerdan. She drank too much, all the time. She became addicted to morphine, and required ten injections a day. She grew old and prematurely stooped, and died at 47.

Olivier Dahan’s LA VIE EN ROSE, one of the best biopics I’ve seen, tells Piaf’s life story through the extraordinary performance of Marion Cotillard, who looks like the singer. The title, which translates loosely as “life through rose-colored glasses,” is from one of Piaf’s most famous songs, which she wrote herself. She is known for countless other songs perhaps most poignantly for “Non je ne regrette rien” (”No, I regret nothing”), which is seen in the film as her final song; if it wasn’t, it should have been.

How do you tell a life story to chaotic, jumbled and open to chance as Piaf’s? Her life did not have an arc but a trajectory. Joy and tragedy seemed simultaneous. Her loves were heartfelt but doomed; after she begged the boxer Cerdan to fly to her in New York, he was killed in the crash of his flight from Paris. Her stage triumphs alternated with her stage collapses. If her life resembled in some ways Judy Garland’s, there is this difference: Garland lived for the adulation of the audience, and Piaf lived to do her duty as a singer. From her earliest days, from the prostitutes, her father and her managers, she learned that when you’re paid, you perform.

Oh, but what a performer she was. Her voice was loud and clear, reflecting her early years as a street singer. Such a big voice for such a little woman. At first she sang mechanically, but was tutored to improve her diction and express the meaning of her words. She did that so well that if you know what the words “Non je ne regrette rien” mean, you can essentially feel the meaning of every other word in the song.

Dahan and his co-writer, Isabelle Sobelman, move freely through the pages of Piaf’s life. A chronology would have missed the point. She didn’t start here and go there; she was always, at every age, even before she had the name, the little sparrow. The action moves back and forth from childhood to final illness, from applause to desperation, from joy to heartbreak (particularly in the handling of Cerdan’s last visit to her).

This mosaic storytelling style has been criticized in some quarters as obscuring facts (quick: how many times was she married?). But think of it this way: Since there are, in fact, no wedding scenes in the movie, isn’t it more accurate to see husbands, lovers, friends, admirers, employees and everyone else as whirling around her small, still center? Nothing in her early life taught her to count on permanence or loyalty. What she counted on was singing, champagne, infatuation and morphine.

Many biopics break down in depicting their subjects in old age, and Piaf, at 47, looked old. Gene Siskel once referred to an actor’s old-age makeup as making him look like a turtle. In LA VIE EN ROSE there is never a moment’s doubt. Even the hair is right; her frizzled, dyed, thinning hair in the final scenes matches the real Piaf in the videos I cite below. The only detail I can question is her resiliency after all-night drinking sessions. I once knew an alcoholic who said, “If I wasn’t a drinker and I woke up with one of these hangovers, I’d check myself into the emergency room.”

Then there are the songs, a lot of them. I gather from the credits that some are dubbed by other singers, some are sung by Piaf herself, and some, in parts at least, by Cotillard. In the video clips you can see how Piaf choreographed her hands and fingers, and Cotillard has that right, too. If a singer has been dead 50 years and sang in another language, she must have been pretty great to make it onto so many saloon jukeboxes, which is how I first heard her. Now, of course, she’s on my iPod, and I’m listening to her right now.

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