The Academy Award nominations will be announced next week, and it would be a shock of "Lebanon" isn't among the names read for Best Foreign Language Film. In fact, this tremendous Israeli picture about a tank crew during the 1982 war in Lebanon is the odds-on favorite to win.
What's amazing about the movie is that it takes place entirely inside that tank -- grimy, smelly, cramped and oozing oil and gas like bodily fluids, the belly of that machine of war becomes another character in the story.
The crew of four young men includes Shmulik (Yoav Donat), the new gunner who's just arrived in time for a nasty mission. The tank is to accompany a platoon of paratroopers deep into Lebanese territory. As the gunner, Shmulik can peer out his sights into the world beyond -- and is horrified at what he sees.
During their first firefight, he freezes up and fails to fire their main gun, leading to one of the paratroopers being killed. Later, a captured Arab soldier is handcuffed inside the tank with them, leading to much friction.
The story reaches its horrific crescendo when the Israelis invade a Lebanese town, where women and children are right in their line of fire.
Like Shmulik, "Lebanon" bears witness to atrocities from which we cannot look away.
Video extras are rather skimpy in scope, though what there is, is decent.
"Notes on a War Film," a 24-minute feature, is an eclectic mix of interviews and footage. Writer/director Samuel Maoz -- who based the film on his own experiences during the Lebanon War -- claims that after the first day of shooting, all of the remaining shrapnel in his leg from a war wound came out of his flesh.
A funnier bit is where Maoz talks about getting the film past Israeli military censors. Just as an officer in the film does, a major insisted there were no phosphorus weapons aboard the tanks. Maoz asks her how she can say that, since he was there and remembered there were. Your memory is faulty, he is told.
"Paper Moon" is best remembered today for boasting the performance by the youngest actor to ever win an Oscar, Tatum O'Neal at age 10. She beat out Candy Clark from "American Graffiti," Sylvia Sidney from "Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams," Linda Blair of "The Exorcist" (just 14 herself) and O'Neal's own co-star, Madeline Kahn, for the Best Supporting Actress statue for 1973.
(She wasn't the youngest to ever get a nod, though. Jackie Cooper was nine when he was nominated for "Skippy" from 1931, and the youngest nominee ever was Justin Henry, age 8 for 1979's "Kramer vs. "Kramer." Shirley Temple received an honorary Oscar at six.)
It really is an amazing performance, especially when considers she'd never acted in anything before. Director Peter Bogdanovich recruited her to play alongside her real-life father, Ryan O'Neal, as a Depression-era girl who accompanies a con man on a small-time crime spree through the Midwest. People accused Ryan of nepotism, of course, but actually the film was always conceived as a father/daughter pairing: It originally was to have starred Paul Newman and his daughter, Nell Potts, but they left the project when director John Huston quit.
Tatum spends much of the film with a sour-pussed expressed pasted to her adorable little pixie face -- especially when anyone mistakes her character, Addie Loggins, for a boy (which happens frequently because of her short, almost severe haircut).
The screenplay by Alvin Sargent -- who's still alive and kicking in his 80s, thank you very much, having penned the last two "Spider-Man" films -- was adapted from the novel, "Addie Pray," by Joe David Brown. Bogdanovich got the new title from the 1933 song, "It's Only a Paper Moon," and includes a brief scene where Addie has a picture of herself taken in front of a faux moon, which she gives to Ryan O'Neal's character, Moses "Moze" Pray.
What's most interesting about "Paper Moon" is that it has the tone and timbre of a comedy, but the setting and style of the film are somber and more reminiscient of a European art film.
Start with the fact that it was shot in gorgeous black-and-white (by László Kovács) with a deep-focus lens, suggested by Bogdanovich mentor Orson Welles (which is a pretty awesome person to have as your mentor). Coupled with the spare visuals of the Kansas and Missouri plains, a dustbowl of poor farmers straggling along the road and economic blight, it's practically a widescreen opus of dreariness.
And yet, for all that suffering, we never really feel like our two main characters are in danger. Even the big scary moment at the end, when Moze is cornered by a dirty sheriff looking for payback from Moze scamming his bootlegger brother, the worst that happens to him is he gets (lightly) beaten up and has the stolen money stolen back.
The other big confrontation of the film is when Addie arranges for Moze to stumble upon his newfound girlfriend, a stripper named Trixie Delight (Kahn), in flagranta delicto with a hotel clerk -- but the expected bloodletting never arrives. Addie's partner in crime, Trixie's long-suffering black assistant Imogene (P.J. Johnson), predicts that Moze will kill them both. But he is simply disappointed -- heartbroken is not really in his wheelhouse, since he avoids attachment -- and Moze and Addie depart.
Addie and Moze's relationship is understated, which I think only underscores how much these two scammers care for each other, since showing their cards is something they both eschew. Moze picked her up after the funeral of Addie's mother, who many people suspect (including Addie) dallied with Moze and produced her only offspring.
So it's an interesting fact-and-fiction parentage puzzle: A real father and daughter playing a pair we suspect might be an actual parent and child, though they deny it, posing as such.
Moze was charged with delivering Addie to her aunt in Missouri, but instead he found an accomplice for his habit of scamming recent widows into buying overpriced Bibles. Turns out no one thinks a man with a cute little daughter could be dishonest. She soon upstages both his skill and daring.
Addie acts as their accountant and moral conscience, carefully tabulating their earnings -- which she keeps stored in her totem-like Cremo box, which also contains her few possessions -- while suggesting they give some of it away to the downtrodden folks they encounter in their journeys. (Imogene gets $30 to help her return to the home she ran away from.) Moze, who poses as a blackheart but has a bigger soft spot than he admits even to himself, wants to avoid all risk, especially lawmen.
John Hillerman -- best known as Higgins from TV's "Magnum P.I." -- has a sly dual role as the bootlegger and his brother the sheriff. Moze comes up with a scheme to steal whiskey from the bootlegger's stash and then sell it back to him. Turns out the lawman is the biggest con artist of them all.
With its sweet disposition but striking backdrop, "Paper Moon" is a lovely, wonderful film that always keeps us guessing.
"The Green Hornet" is what happens when smart people set out to make a dumb movie.
Screenwriter William Goldman famously wrote that there are only three kinds of films: Those that are meant to be good and are, those that are meant to be good and aren't, and those that were never meant to be any good. Depressingly, this last category is the largest, and where "Hornet" belongs.
It's less of a super-hero movie than a spoof of one. I'm all for making fun of a genre ripe for ridicule, but "Hornet" is loaded with action scenes and nervous energy and cool gadgets ... and not much you would really call funny.
I laughed out loud exactly once, and it was the very last scene in the movie where young newspaper tycoon Britt Reid (Seth Rogen) and partner Kato (Jay Chou) take extraordinary steps to preserve the fiction that the Green Hornet is a villain, instead of a hero. It's a genuinely clever bit, and I don't mind saying I got the joke a few seconds before everyone else did, and enjoyed a moment of solitary guffawing before everyone else joined in.
Interestingly, Green Hornet is one of the few super-heroes who didn't debut in a comic book. He started as a popular radio show in the 1930s, followed by some cheapie film serials starting in the early 1940s, and only then did he arrive in comic form. He's probably best known to recent generations for a '60s TV show.
Britt is a lazy, rich party boy living off the fruits of his father's newspaper empire, The Daily Sentinel in Los Angeles. But when dad dies suddenly and mysteriously, he discovers that his father had been ordering up all sorts of advanced weapons from Kato, his mechanic-slash-confidant. Britt, wallowing in booze and anonymous hook-ups, knows Kato only as the guy who makes him a really awesome cup of coffee every morning.
Rogen, who's made a career out of playing schlubby, chubby (though noticeably less so here) man-boys, is less charming when he's not playing a loser. Britt is supremely arrogant, not in a nasty way but with a presumption of superiority that drowns any affection the audience might develop for him.
After a late night hijinx to behead his father's statue monument turns into a dust-up with some thugs, Britt realizes he's found his calling: To become the city's masked protector. Soon he and Kato are cruising around in a highly modified 1965 Chrysler Imperial decked out with machine guns and missiles they dub Black Beauty.
The big pun of the movie is that Kato is the real muscle and brains of the outfit, but the Green Hornet gets all the attention. Kato is a genius with cars and weapons, and even invents a gas gun for the Hornet that knocks out his opponents. Kato can even take on six bad guys at once with his martial arts prowess, which allows him to see things in slow time.
Britt, of course, still thinks he's the top gun, and takes to dismissing Kato as his henchman or sidekick, leading to inevitable fisticuffs between them.
Neither has much of a notion how to act like a villain, though, so they recruit help from Britt's hot new secretary Lenore (Cameron Diaz), who works at a temp agency but somehow knows more about journalism than the people working there. Britt and Kato take turns hitting on her, even though she's, like, really old and stuff. (She's 36.)
The heavy is played by Christoph Waltz, fresh of his Oscar win for "Inglourious Basterds." He plays Chudnofsky, head of L.A.'s gangland. Rogen, who co-wrote the screenplay with Evan Goldberg, tries to make a joke out of the fact that Chudnofsky is so dull and un-flashy a villain. (James Franco, in a cameo as another gangster, dubs his fashion sense "disco Santa Claus.").
Later he renames himself Bloodnofsky and takes to wearing red in a lame attempt to dovetail on Green Hornet's sizzle. But it turns out the gag of a bad guy fretting about his lack of charisma quickly turns into a whiny bore.
Also hanging around is Scanlon (David Harbour), the smarmy district attorney who seems overly interested in how the Sentinel is portraying all the violence left in the Hornet's wake. We don't quite know what to make of him, but with his beady eyes and a name like Scanlon, we know it's just a matter of time before something nefarious turns up.
"The Green Hornet" is directed by French filmmaker Michel Gondry, whose work has not impressed me. (He's universally beloved by critics for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," but not by me.) Perhaps he, Rogen and Goldberg think they've made a really smart, hip film that mocks the conventions of the super-hero movie while indulging in them.
But somewhere along the way of trying so hard to be cool, they made the movie they wanted to watch, rather than the one anyone else might want to.
This line, delivered in the opening moments of "The Dilemma," is used to describe Vince Vaughn's character -- which is pretty much the same as every other Vince Vaughn character.
Vaughn's become a bankable star employing the same charming motormouth routine over and over. His signature move is to get rolling on a verbal treadmill from which he cannot easily climb off. We've seen it so many times ("Couples Retreat," "Wedding Crashers") that we've come to understand that what he says isn't important -- it's the feat itself, keeping the words coming faster and faster as he bounces around from one thought to the next.
The standout example of this in "The Dilemma" is when his character, Ronny, is giving a toast at his girlfriend Beth's (Jennifer Connelly) parents' 40th wedding anniversary. Ronny has recently learned that his best friend Nick's (Kevin James) wife Geneva (Winona Ryder) has been playing around on him.
He tries to use the toast to talk about the importance of honesty in marriage, as a way of shaming Geneva into confessing her affair to Nick so Ronny won't have to spill the beans himself. But he gets off on a tangent about temptation, imagining scenarios of Beth's mother dallying with the pool boy, and it's all downhill from there -- zigging and zagging all the way.
"The Dilemma" bounces around a lot, too. The movie can't quite decide what it wants to be when it grows up.
Ostensibly it's a comedy about Ronny's predicament -- whether to tell the man he loves like a brother about his wife's infidelity. The movie simply forgets to be funny for long stretches, as in one sequence where Ronny prays to God for guidance. "I know I'm supposed to give you things, but I'm scared to give you this," he tells the Almighty.
The biggest thing that's missing from the story (screenplay by Allan Loeb) is a sense of how important these relationships really are. Ronny's supposed to cherish his friendship with Nick so much that the prospect of telling him about Geneva tears him up inside. But we never see them doing much more than normal buddy-buddy stuff.
Ronny's relationship with Beth is off-kilter, too. He's a 40-year-old commitment-phobe, and can't bring himself to ask her to marry him. But what she gets out of this pairing is rather murky.
Geneva doesn't make a lick of sense, either. For awhile it's suggested she might actually be nutso, as demonstrated in a scene where Ronny confronts her and she cows him by threatening to claim he's made advances toward her.
Even Ronny and Nick's business partnership is goofy. Nick is supposed to be a brilliant engineer, but their dream is rather mundane: To make electric vehicles that look and sound like muscle cars. So basically they're just installing speakers under the hood to simulate the rumble of a gasoline engine.
(The movie has caused some controversy for a scene where they're pitching some General Motors executives, and Ronny calls electric cars "gay." I'll decline to enter the fray other than saying I think "South Park" already covered this topic sufficiently.)
Queen Latifah pops up as Susan, the liaison between the car company and our boys, who has a tendency to talk in inappropriate, hyper-sexualized terms. The joke is supposed to be that usually it's the guys in movies like this who speak that way. But she just comes across as another unexplained weird quirk of the movie.
The strangest thing about "The Dilemma" is that it was directed by Ron Howard, and has to be the most un-Ron-Howard-like film he's ever made.
The depressing part is not that it's not very good, or that a guy who's mostly done serious Oscar-bait movies has returned to his comedy roots. It's that this movie could have been directed by anyone.
"Rabbit Hole" is a film that's steeped in sorrow, but watching it is a joyful experience -- at least for those who appreciate finely-drawn characters from fabulous actors who invest them with heft and heart.
Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart play Becca and Howie Corbett, a couple in their late 30s who lost their 4-year-old son, Danny, after being hit by a car eight months earlier. Though the film is adapted from a play by David Lindsay-Abaire (who also wrote the screenplay), there's no theatricality to their performances -- Howie and Becca feel like real, flawed people who could be living next door.
On the surface, Becca is the "problem" half of the couple. A homemaker who gave up her job at Sotheby's, she keeps the house and gardens ordered and neat like a good upstate New Yorker in the Martha Stewart mold. She's brittle and defensive, and at a group therapy meeting she mouths off at another grieving mother.
"It's just too much God-talk for me," she complains, resolving to skip any future sessions.
A highly organized person, Becca has organized her grief in a way that's least painful for her.
Though Howie remains superficially gregarious and productive, there's a dark rage boiling inside him. On some level he blames Becca for not watching Danny better, or blames himself for leaving the gate open that allowed him to run into the street, or blames the family dog for leading him out that gate.
While better hidden, Howie's sorrow is highly volatile, ready to erupt.
Becca is the sort who, when in pain, tends to lash out at those closest to her. Much of the brunt is borne by her mother, Nat (a superb Diane Wiest), a blue-collar church-going person who's somewhat mystified by the elegant, affluent woman her daughter has turned into.
Nat, who lost her own adult son to drug addiction, gives a moving speech about grief: At some point the weight of it becomes tolerable, she says, like a brick that you carry around in your purse. You occasionally forget about it, but it's always there, because that's what you have left instead of your child.
Exacerbating Becca's anguish is the fact that her never-do-well sister Izzy (Tammy Blanchard) has just become pregnant by her musician boyfriend (Giancarlo Esposito). Izzy's carefree, we'll-worry-tomorrow attitude flies in the face of Becca's carefully planned existence.
Ostensibly, she's worried that Izzy may not be ready to be a parent, but we suspect her real fear is that she'll prove a better mother than Becca herself.
A few other characters slide into the frame. There's Gaby (Sandra Oh), the organizer of the group therapy meetings, who forms a bond with Howie -- they take to smoking pot in her car to loosen up before sessions (he has continued to go even after Becca quit). Unlike Becca, Gaby is upfront about the loss of her child, which appeals to Howie's craving for empathy.
The most curious addition is Jason (Miles Teller), a 17-year-old who happened to be driving the car that killed Danny. It wasn't really his fault, but like the others Jason has come to internalize the tragedy. It's illustrated in a comic book he's writing about parallel universes that he shares with Becca, which gives the movie its name.
"Rabbit Hole" is directed by John Cameron Mitchell, whose two previous features -- about a transvestite rock 'n' roller ("Hedwig and the Angry Inch") and an ensemble drama featuring graphic, unsimulated sexuality ("Shortbus") -- might not seem an obvious choice for this unassuming character study.
But Mitchell has a sensitive touch with his actors that helps them deeply etch their characters into an audience's mind and soul. The performances are spectacular, but you won't catch anyone acting.
A man and a woman stand in a closed storefront. He strums a ukulele and sings in a funny warble, while she dances a high-stepping jig in incongruous accompaniment. They are young, and they are falling in love.
This moment of pure cinematic magic would mark the high point of your average romantic comedy. But in writer/director Derek Cianfrance's "Blue Valentine" it is the crystallization of a heartrending certainty: This is the happiest they will ever be.
Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling star in the most authentic portrayal of romance we've seen in a long time: Its hopeful, giddy beginning and its stagnant, fracturing end.
The story jumps back and forth from the first meeting of Cindy and Dean to the dissolution of their marriage a few years later. The most amazing thing is that if we look closely enough, we can already see the seeds of destruction planted and beginning to take root.
Dean is a fatalist who commits to an idea totally, if not permanently. A high-school dropout who totes boxes for a moving company, he takes one look at college student Cindy and is hooked. He tells his buddies about love at first sight, and when he spies her on a bus Dean moves in with relentless if affectionate determination.
Cindy is ambitious, maybe even wants to be a doctor, and is put off by Dean's contentment at working a menial job. In a frank conversation between their older selves, he's frustrated by her questions about his lack of drive. Work is something I only do so I can get back to you and our daughter Frankie (Faith Wladyka), he replies.
Having seen firsthand how love can drain out of a relationship -- her father barely speaks to her mother, other than to complain about her cooking -- Cindy worries it'll happen to her, too.
"How can you trust your feelings if it can just disappear like that?" she asks her grandmother.
The modern part of the story is rife with recrimination and regret. Cindy carelessly leaves the gate open so the family dog gets out and is run over. Dean, who adores and is adored by Frankie, tells her the dog has gone to Hollywood to star in movies.
Dean comes up with the lame idea of going to a low-rent sex hotel with themed rooms: We'll get drunk and make love, he says, as if that will fill the canyon between them. Given the choice between the Future Room or Cupid's Cove, Dean chooses the science fiction-themed one.
That sums up their relationship right there: Dean wants a future together, and Cindy clearly does not. She hasn't told him only because she hasn't really told herself, either.
The performances by Gosling and Williams are tender, real and nuanced. Their conversations, so easy and engaging when they're younger, turn into low-grade fencing matches.
Cianfrance, who wrote the screenplay with Joey Curtis and Cami Delavigne, makes the bold choice of not picking either Dean or Cindy as the bad guy. Both have faults that contributed to their failed relationship, and have acted in ways that are selfish or childish.
Dean's anger is the easiest to understand: He treats his wife and daughter well, and doesn't comprehend why his affection is not returned. Cindy is the realist who realizes you can't create passion, or recapture it once it's fled.
"Blue Valentine" is an exquisitely well-acted drama that gets both the joy and the ache of love just right.
Who would've thought a few short months ago that a verbose drama about computer nerds would end up as the front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar?
But it's true: "The Social Network," which contains zero sex or violence, and consists mostly of legal depositions and flashbacks of college kids hunched over computers, was the best movie of 2010.
It's the story of the founding of Facebook, an experiment to link college students on the Web, and became a phenomenon -- and a company worth billions. It might not surprise you that Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder who was recently named Time Magazine's Person of the Year, was not universally liked by those who knew him.
Especially those who ended up suing him.
The movie, which is a self-conscious evocation of "Citizen Kane," may not bear much resemblance to the actual Zuckerberg, in the same way that Orson Welles' opus was a fictionalized account of another media mogul, William Randolph Hearst.
But in a performance of contrasting attraction and repulsion, Jesse Eisenberg paints a portrait of a young man who would change the world by bringing friends together, even as he pushed his own away.
Extras, which are identical for the Blu-ray and two-disc DVD editions, are rife with goodies.
There are two separate feature-length commentary tracks: One by director David Fincher, and another with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and cast members Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Armie Hammer and Josh Pence.
There is also a feature-length documentary, "How Did They Ever Make a Movie of Facebook?". Plus several featurettes on various aspects of production, including editing, musical score and soundtrack, visual effects and more.
