How Do You Know?

★½/★★★★

Pro-softballer Lisa (Reese Witherspoon) gets cut from the olympic team and her world is rattled. Love's the answer (I guess) but how can she decide between a narcisstic, womanizing, major leaguer (Owen Wilson) and a boyish, lost-puppy, corporate scapegoat (Paul Rudd)? (Hhhmmm, that's a toughy). But how do you know when your in love? That is the titular question that this rambling, murky, and inconsequential film attempts to contemplate.

If you think that sounds corny, it is. Witherspoon - Ms. Adorable with pitch-perfect reactions - gives the mopey and mixed up Lisa her all. But James L. Brooks directs and pens this romcom like a wannabe self-help guru, imparting inane life-lessons of the Jerry-Springer-final-thought variety. Lisa's bathroom mirror is strewn with Postit-notes that read cheesy, go-getter, imperatives: "You see obstacles only after losing sight of your goals." Write that down.

Rudd is the nice-guy to Wilson's jock-jerk. Lisa strings both men along, hopsctoching between them. She's a sulker and stalks off frequently; like when she discovers that Wilson's Matty has sleep-over-clothes for one-night-stands or later when she realizes he's not monogamous (big shock that the guys a pompous ass). Rudd's George is being investigated for shadey deals involving his papa's company. He's innocent, but catches the wrath anyway and is hung out to dry by his associates. A hormonal and pregnant secretary (Kathryn Hahn) stays loyal, but even she can't help him out of his funk. That problem's saved for the magical remedies of love. Can George and Lisa really save each other?

Just like all its predecessors, How Do You Know thrives on awkward exchanges. Unlike spring's When In Rome or Leap Year, were not subject to grating, scewball-physicality, but instead the numskullery is related in pretensious, pointless conversations. These characters open their mouths, but nothing of substance comes out. The film's best scene might be Lisa and George's first date when the discomfort level reaches a pinnacle and both decide to sustain silence then on. It said more than most of Brooks' therapy-talk put together.

To be fair, How Do You Know is basically watchable, and benign. The cast is talented and doing their best, especially Jack Nicholson who steels scenes as George's crooked, shark-suited father. Nicholson makes the most of the character's sleezy cowardice, getting some laughs in-tow. But the script is boring, the pacing arduous, and the situations so inorganic and spurious that these characters seem to float away in some lovesick and lofty artifice: problems history, self-improvement unnecessary. It's ironic because Brooks thinks he'll rescue the lovelorn with his expert insights. But Witherspoon and co. aren't avatars into the nuts-and-bolts aspects of relationships, they're as alien as the inhabitants of district 9. (Sigh). This film really could have been so much better.

How Do You Know serves up the cornball romanticism with artificial sugar. If that's your cup of tea then bottoms up. But this tea's also laced with sedative. Sleep tight.

True Grit

★★★½/★★★★

For their fifteenth feature film, writers/directors/brothers Joel and Ethan Coen decided to go nostalgic. The Hollywood Western - one of the most beloved cinema genres since, well, the beginning of movies (Great Train Robbery, anyone?) to around, I don't know, Watergate - is about as dead as disco in the new millennium. It seems in the age of CGI there's no room for cattle drives, frontier manhunts, and saloon shootouts in the already crowded multiplex. But the brothers Coen - with their splendid "We'll do whatever the hell we want" attitude - chose to get back in the saddle and on the range for True Grit. But don't expect too straight of a western, that just wouldn't be their style.

As is common knowledge, True Grit is based on a highly revered novel by Charles Portis. It was made into a highly revered 1969 film of the same name starring John Wayne. The film isn't so much treasured for its great craft or storytelling, but essentially because The Duke finally got his long overdue Best Actor Oscar. He played Rooster Cogburn -- a one-eyed, whiskey guzzling, over-the-hill U.S. marshall who goes on a manhunt deep into Comanche territory with a fourteen-year-old girl named Mattie Ross. With Mr. Wayne sadly unavailable, the Coens cast none other than His Dudeness (or El Duderino), Jeff Bridges as Cogburn. Bridges fits the bill. He downs whiskey like gatorade at a track meet, rolls and smokes his own ciggs, and grumbles stories of his youth non-stop in an incomprehensible drunken growl, even if no one is listening. He can still shoot, well, sort of, and knows indian territory like the back of his hand.

Despite his age and drunkenness, the young Ross hires him to go after an outlaw named Tom Cheney, who murdered her father in cold blood. Why Cogburn? Mainly because he is the most ruthless of all her viable options. Cogburn does admit in a low rasp, "I've grown old." But in a terrific early scene Cogburn stands trial in an oak furnished and smoke filled courtroom. Under heavy berating he admits to killing over twenty men in the name of the law. He claims he had just cause, but the implication is that some didn't necessarily need killing. He's an old timer trained in wild-west-justice -- a man of real (achem) grit.

However, the film's most fascinating character is indeed Cogburn's employer, Mattie Ross. Played with remarkable confidence and gall by Hailee Steinfeld, Mattie's determined as hell and fixed not so much on vengeance, but justice. She drops big law words on a whim, like, "malem in se" and "malem prohibitum" and then says, "That's latin" with smug assurance. She's cunning and capable with the best lawyer in Arkansas (so she claims) and uses the threat of a suit as a negotiating device. With her father dead and her family in grief-stricken pieces, Mattie's that sad case: a young girl forced to grow up too quickly. She puts on a brave facade, but as the adventure gets bloodier and the body count rises, Mattie's idealist/can-do attitude reverts to the child she really is.

The film's most beautiful and dramatic moments come when the camaraderie between Cogburn and adolescent Ross blossoms into a paternal kinship of protector and protected - most notably in a goose bump inducing climactic ride against the gorgeous setting sun on the frontier horizon. Cinematographer Roger Deakins knows how to use a widescreen and paints it with breathtaking landscape scope and grandeur. The shadowy figures of Cogburn and horse move like phantoms in the moonlit dark and the falling snow. It's probably the best photographed film of the year and the Coens take it further by utilizing ravishing dissolves to transition between shots of their sublime horseback marathon.

But the brothers are notorious tonal con-artists. They can rarely keep a straight face. Even in their super-serious masterpiece, No Country For Old Men, a serial killer, job done, nonchalantly puts his feet up to keep his boots clean from blood pooling nearby. (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge). True Grit is no exception. Bridges shoots for laughs straight from the hip with sardonic one-liners and clownish drunken stupors. Matt Damon enters as a butt-of-the-joke, Texas Ranger who comes along on his own accord. Even Josh Brolin as the infamous Tom Cheney arrives as a submissive and pathetic dimwit.

So why remake True Grit? To jumpstart a western resurge? I think not. This is not a western done for westerns' sake. This is a story the Coen Brothers really wanted to tell. And they tell it with their usual technical virtuosity and rich intellectual depth. Despite the quality of True Grit, I feel the western was done to death long before Joel and Ethan came around. There is no renaissance on the horizon. But to watch the Bros wax nostalgic and tackle a classic genre with their trademark edginess was certainly the experience I've been roaming the valley for. I think The Duke (and The Dude) would abide as well.

Another Year

★★★★/★★★★

In Another Year's fascinating opening prologue a pretty and pregnant physician dutifully takes the blood-pressure of a middle aged and deeply depressed insomniac. The patient, played brilliantly in her brief appearence by Imelda Staunton (Vera Drake), sits lifeless and sullen on the examination table. Her head down, face pale and long, eyes puffed and despondent. Her name is Janet and she lethargically pleads for pills, but the doctor prescribes therapy with the hospital's veteran counselor instead. In their first and only session the counselor asks the deeply troubled Janet what she needs. She plainly replies, "A new life."

The incarnated misery imprinted on Staunton's mug is recognizably despairing. Her life-beaten face was like one I might see on a bus or train only for a passing, but indelible moment. But Another Year isn't about Janet. She presumably goes off to live out the rest of her sadly dour existence. The story switches focus to the counselor - a twilight-aged wife and mother named Gerri (Ruth Sheen) - who drives home to an elegant bourgeois cottage in the London suburbs. Waiting for her there is loving and successful husband Tom (Jim Broadbent) and a rapturous and bountiful backyard garden. Essentially, if Janet is the epitome of misery than Tom and Gerri are the very antithesis: perfectly content.

That cannot necessarily be said for the visitors that frequent their Eden-esque home and garden. Over the course of one year they open their doors to an overweight and slothful childhood friend Ken (Peter Wright), Tom's disassociated brother Ronnie (David Bradley), and Gerri's lonely and desperate longtime colleague Mary (Lesley Manville): three aging individuals who've found life a considerably more difficult proposition then their jovial hosts and counterparts.

But writer/director Mike Leigh's captivating narrative is far too everyday to idealize the perfect man and wife. There not so much an aged Adam-and-Eve-in-the-garden as a sweetly satisfied ordinary couple. That's the best anyone can hope for in the real world, right? And if their garden - a perfectly realized milieu that morphs beautifully with the seasons - is particularly lush and the food they cook from it particularly delectable then maybe it's the distorted perceptions of those visitors who attatch themselves to Tom and Gerri's complacent warmth.

This is true of none more than Manville's Mary who for all intensive purposes takes over the movie, both as protagonist and emotionally wrenching performer. Manic and loquacious, Manville slingshots Leigh's rapid fire dialogue with an uncomfortable and neurotic twinge. She's imposing and a drunk, but ultimately sad and in-need. The director cleverly makes her the film's beating heart and as the story's most dependent houseguest, rejection could be shattering to her already fragile persona.

Leigh's Another Year is just the latest in his subgenre of grounded contemporary-realism. The conflicts are light and glazed over. The characters are fervent and fleshed out. The dialogue comes fast in extended sequences - some of it trivial, but all of it brimming with honesty and quiet truths. Leigh is notoriously Altman-esque is his approach to actors and improvisation, but working mostly in the vein of Ozu here: elaborately composed interiors, melancholic musical transitions, and commonplace middle-class familial strife that's shielded by an unrelenting cultural courtesy. (The Brits and the Japanese have that in common).

As consequence, Mike Leigh's dramedy-of-manners is one of the best films of the year and essentially a story of haves-and-have-nots. In its gentler moments it's a catharsis on love and friendship, but the tone slips gradually as summer turns to winter and life grows darker/colder - and the film transforms into a meditation on the coexistence of the happy and the miserable as eternally sequestered in not ephemeral. Like how a life-broken face (possibly Mary's or Janet's) could pass by in the window of a bus or train, and for a fleeting moment their misery can become ours.

Black Swan

★★★½/★★★★

It's difficult to describe the intensity with which director Darren Aronofsky relates his nightmarish, erotic thriller about life imitating art in the high pressure world of ballet. Natalie Portman plays Nina Sayers, a beautiful and delicate young ballerina who becomes obsessed with achieving balletic perfection, after receiving the starring role in her company's rendition of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. As Swan Queen, Nina must master the parts of both the good white and the evil black swan. The pressure to perfect both, to be good and evil, drives her to the brink of madness.

Black Swan exemplifies the palpable synergy of director and star. Aronofsky wields the power of perspective like a deadly weapon: we step, jump, and pirouette in Nina's worn and bloody ballet shoes. His impressionistic brio - and sheer directorial force - fully aestheticizes Nina's mounting delirium with, often gruesome, hallucinatory imagery. As she descends deeper into a schizo-type realm of delusion, the viewer gets to partake (more than a little uncomfortably) in her whirlwind and maniacal dance.

With a style that favors close-ups and hand held camera work, the director emphasizes just how small Nina's world really is. The only people in her life are: a perversely controlling stage mother played by Barbara Hershey, a borderline abusive director (Vincent Cassel) - who uses sexuality as means of manipulating the perfect performance; and a seductive understudy, Lily, played by Mila Kunis. Lily, is essential to Nina's growing paranoia as she is never able to discern whether Lily is a friend or a jealous saboteur. But none are as critical of Nina as she is of herself: practicing until her toenails split, picking at her fingernails until they gush blood, neurotically scratching ribbons in her upper back. It's grotesque stuff.

Aronofsky seems to revel in Nina's misery putting his protagonist on the proverbial rack. But Natalie Portman is up fo every bit of physical or psychological torment her director can dish. She validates Aronofsky's twisted vision. Her soft voice and delicate allure realizes Nina with sympathetic human characteristics and potent human emotions: passion, repression, loneliness, and fear. Her turn to the dark side and her slipping hold on reality becomes all the more horrific because we know and care about her. In her portrayal of a girl's self-destructive pursuit of transcendence, Portman may just have achieved it herself. It's an oscar-calibre performance.

It would seem that a film about ballet - the most graceful of human movement - would employ a style that reflected the art it portrayed, but other than clever use of mirrors and reflections to symbolize Nina's growing duality, Aronofsky goes the complete opposite direction: employing about as much subtlety as a freight train. But in the end it seems that was the point. This highly sexualized, and seriously disturbing, ballet horror show - that's something like Center Stage by way of Repulsion - is unforgettable and about as intense as movies get. The film's contrasting style and subject matter is meant to remind us that a person's outward beauty is sometimes suppressing a dark, wicked other half trying to get out.

The Fighter

★★½/★★★★

Mark Wahlberg's dukes it out in the ring and at home in, The Fighter, David O. Russell's new boxing melodrama. Wahlberg plays real-life fighter Micky Ward, aka "Irish," from the blue-collar town of Lowell, Mass. Trained by his crackhead brother Dicky - a once near-great boxer and now serious troublemaker - and under the thumb of his loud mouth/control freak Ma, Micky's got what it takes to "be a contender" if only he can get his wacked-out family under control and into his corner.

Among this defective tribe of Beantown squabblers, the wannabe scene-steeler is an emaciated and highly energized Cristian Bale as big bro Dicky. Dicky's a semi-pathetic, has-been with a delusion for his glory days and his famous bout with Sugar Ray Leonard. Bale fully commits to this part in appearence and demeanor, and though Dicky knows his stuff in the ring - "Head-body-head-body!" "Tire him out!" he shouts ringside - in the streets he's a mess and an addict. He's too big of a liability to coach his lil bro Micky to a title.

Mellisa Leo, as Mick's manager and mother Alice, is a force to be reckoned with. Like a verbal knife-fighter fresh off an appearence on Springer, Alice also has a constant litter of trashy clones - that reminded me of the Tribiani sisters -covering her back. If Dicky is fightin through his brother than Mama Dearest is a fighter as well, first through Dicky now through Micky and she doesn't go down easy.

This family-on-the-verge officially melts down after Micky gets pummelled in an ill-advised Atlantic City showdown and Dicky ends up in the pen. Mick starts thinkin about new management. Besides his new girlfriend, barmaid Charlene - an off-kilter, brawlin and swearin Amy Adams - pressures him to give his fams the proverbial boot.

Wahlberg is the most reserved of all - typically strong and silent - but Bale and Leo are the standouts, chewin it up in support. I was most impressed with the non-flashy, naturalist directorial stylings of David O. Russell (Three Kings) who shoots the tremendous boxing scenes in a grainy, 90's HBO-Special manner that gives each one a palpable realism as if they're playing on my old 15 inch tube from 1992 with antennas sticking out the back. These scenes are the best Russell has to offer.

With all the obnoxious hamming and bickering on display from the cast, the film revels in its trailer-trash, familial conflicts that seem stripped from an exceptionally well produced episode of Celebrity Intervention - much to my dismay. On the other hand, the boxing... it's such an enduring dramatic device because it reaches us on such an, all or nothing, by-the-boot-straps, primal level - that feels both societal and animalistic at the same time. The film is its most stimulating in these perfectly pitched and rutheless man-to-man moments where everything is at stake. But (sigh) it's the disruptive and ugly family dysfunction that dominates the ring, and I wasn't cheering.

The King's Speech

★★★/★★★★

It's hard to imagine Colin Firth not taking home the academy award for Best Actor in February. His latest has all the credentials: famous protagonist with affliction that's not, achem, full-retard; a historical setting, and an inspirational message. But you know - it's one thing to theorize an oscar winner it's another to produce one. But rest assured, Tom Hooper's The King's Speech is quite an elegant product indeed, thanks in very large part to the trifecta of outstanding performances on display.

Firth plays King George VI, or Bertie to his family, a stumbling stammering monarch in 1930's England. Bertie-boy enlists help from Lionel Logue - a speech therapist - to improve his neurotic word choking, so he can speak with strength and dignity for his country on the eve of WWII.

Though he has no credentials or degree, Logue (wonderfully played by Geoffrey Rush) has loads of experience, including helping shell shocked vets regain their speech. He's a man of austerity and cognizance, but also faith. He likes to say that he can cure anyone that wants to be cured. As a theater hobbyist and Shakespeare admirer, Logue understands the beauty of speech and tries to relate to Bertie that he has a voice and he must not be afraid to use it.

The King's Speech is predictable, but incredibly engaging because it's not a movie that asks what - that's obvious, read a history book - but why? Why does the King struggle to speak? Firth is extraordinary as said king. He inhabits the man and makes it look effortless: the panicked face and nervous ticks, the quiet self-doubt and sudden bursts of aggravation. He's a sensitive, ambivalent, and anxious fella who trips and stumbles over his words because he's all bottled up. Bertie contemplates the commoners he knows nothing of and vice-versa, as well as his callous father and brother of which he could say the same. He is disconnected.

Rush's Lionel Logue is able to connect because he doesn't treat him like a king, but an equal, insisting on calling him Bertie and not Your-Majesty. The psycho-analytical swordplay the two men engage in is both riveting and revealing, of both men.

Helena Bonham Carter as Bertie's wife, the Queen, also deserves props for her charm and gentle understanding. She demands attention even up against her screen-hogging costars.

Polished and artistically directed by Tom Hooper, The King's Speech is oscar bait of the most scrumptous variety. It deserves the acting accolades it will surely recieve. If history is people, places, and events then Speech is cinematic delight because it focuses in on the people: who they really were and what they were able to say - I mean, after finding their voices of course.

I Love You, Phillip Morris

★★★/★★★★

Jim Carrey has played a cop, he's played a lawyer, and hell, he even played a bumbling con artist. It's just that—he's never played all three in the same movie, and never quite like this. In I Love You Phillip Morris, a fascinatingly odd little flick about a real-life, gay grifting jailbird who ultimately became the world's most audacious escape artist, Carrey gets a chance to anthologize his two decades as the sensei of cinema clownishness, as well as do his very best Frank Abagnale/Perez Hilton amalgamation. What we get for his trouble is an incredibly funny, kind of romantic, and seriously wacked-out piece of screwball dramedy.

The film begins with the tagline "This actually happened." Then a few moments later, "No really. This actually happened." We get clarification upfront about the outlandishness of the proceeding narrative, and it is outlandish. But the truth can, indeed, be stranger than fiction.

Carrey's Steven Russell is a closeted homosexual who lives a life of repressed, god fearing, do-gooderism. After a near fatal car crash, Steven decides to come clean about his sexuality, quit his job as a cop, and move to Florida to start a new fabulous life with a fella named Jimmy. Carrey, in all his big-tooth-grinning and limb-flapping glory, gets to do what he does best and flamboyantly slapstick his way through every scene. Accessorizing this and glamorizing that, the actor's trademark exuberance was perhaps never better suited for a role. The expressivity of the comedian and his character, as well as the tropes that have come to define such a lifestyle, fits like hand in glove. I'm surprised it took so long.

But Russell soon discovers that living the fab life gets expensive. Grifting, stealing, and cheating soon follows—so does a trip to the slammer. But there he meets a soft-spoken and kindhearted inmate oddly named Phillip Morris. Ewen McGregor as the titular Morris appears fully adore-ified for the role with sandy blonde highlights and sky blue eyes. Even more, McGregor plays him with syrupy sweet, lost puppy vulnerability, arriving like Russell's angelic counterpart with whom he is instantly smitten.

Of course opposites do attract: Morris is the king-of-the-comfortable-zone and doesn't even go into the exercise yard for fear of what they do to "blonde haired, blue-eyed queers"; Carrey's Russell is a remarkable testament to the sheer power of chutzpa. The guy is brash. After parole he pretends to be a lawyer with relative ease and then a faux-executive at a medical finance company, gaining wealth and respectability. And like before, he can't keep his hands out of the company pot (he's got to pay for the mansion and twin Mercedes convertibles after all). And the film's most essential question becomes: what drives Russell to delinquincy? It seems to be a compulsion, but perhaps it's a lost sense of identity, or possibly his delusions about it takes to be loved by someone else. In any case, troubles afoot and everything is at stake, including the man of his dreams, Phillip Morris.

Fashionably directed by Glen Ficarra and John Requa, I Love You Phillip Morris is a peculiar, shape-shifter of a movie. Sometimes it’s hilarious, like when Russell's blatant homoeroticism begins to invade the frame with phallic symbols in clouds or a loaf of bread conveniently placed between two bagels. Other times it’s glowingly romantic, thanks to the work of the two leads. We get a sudden shift to mawkish tragedy and are then smacked back to Carrey's physical antics just as quickly. The film's tonal hopscotch manages to be part of its charm, as if we were the targets of Russell's bamboozlement all along. In the same vein, the film works best as it moves through its diverse pieces: part caper, part iron-bar-romance, and part Jim Carrey sample platter, all adding up to an entertainingly wacky whole made all the wackier because it actually happened. No really. It did.