Movie reviews | Lisa Schwarzbaum | Owen Gleiberman | The Movie Critics

The Movie Critics Movie reviews | Lisa Schwarzbaum | Owen Gleiberman

Feb 8 2010 04:09 PM ET

The attacks on 'Precious' are starting to say more about the attackers

Categories: Gabourey Sidibe, Ishmael Reed, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire

In response to the six Academy Award nominations received last week by Precious: Based on the novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire, the New York Times editorial page decided to honor the movie by publishing… another blistering attack on it. In theory, that’s okay with me: Precious, in the very spotlight of its success, has been a movie of genuine controversy, and there’s no reason that it can’t continue to bear criticism along with praise. But this particular piece of invective, by Ishmael Reed, the venerable poet, novelist, and essayist (he was born in 1938), was notably revealing in the recklessness of its venom. What it demonstrates is that the taking down of Precious has become a holier-than-thou form of racial-sociological bloodsport.

I haven’t responded to the previous moralistic debunkings of Precious — and there have been a number of them — because I figured that the most passionate argument I could make against them is everything I’d already said in my original review. But just briefly: The best way, the only way, to counter the insidious charge that the movie traffics in clichés and stereotypes of African-American poverty and victimization is to say that the difference between a cliché and a portrayal of genuine life will always come down to the specificity of what you’re seeing. (Read full post)

Feb 5 2010 02:29 PM ET

Oscars: How a big win for 'The Hurt Locker' could change the Academy Awards

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Avatar, Oscars, The Hurt Locker, Up in the Air

Blogging, with apologies to the gods of journalism, is not an exact science, and trying to blog the Academy Awards through the crystal ball of one’s own expectations is really not an exact science. That said, I committed a major blunder in my attempt to size up the Oscar landscape about a month ago. I said that the Best Picture race would come down to a duel between Up in the Air and Avatar – and, what’s more, that the two movies would be competing in a kind of classic Hollywood culture war, with Up in the Air incarnating the entertainment values of the past (the exquisite humanity of great acting and classically clever writing and staging, all employed in a story at once timeless and timely) and Avatar representing the entertainment values of the future (a new kind of sensually intoxicating spectacle, with a technologically driven art so mesmerizing that it may now threaten to make those intimate storytelling virtues irrelevant). The movie I left out of this equation, of course, was The Hurt Locker. But a critic worth his salt always learns from his mistakes, and my prognosticating flub cues me, I believe, to a fascinating lesson. (Read full post)

Feb 4 2010 05:18 PM ET

Is this colorization, part II? Sony now plans to reissue some classic titles...in 3-D

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: 3-D movies, Avatar, Casablanca, Ghostbusters, Men in Black

Would you like to see Men in Black in 3-D? Or maybe Ghostbusters, Spider-Man, or Casino Royale? While we’re at it, how about Taxi Driver or Gandhi? All of the movies above belong to Sony Pictures, which means that you may soon be watching them at home in glorious, eye-popping, headache-inducing, Travis-Bickle-with-his-Mohawk-in- your-face 3-D. According to a report by Bloomberg, Sony is planning to offer Blu-ray discs featuring newly enhanced 3-D versions of some of its vast archive of movies and videos as early as April 1, 2011. Just think of what that will mean! No more tedious, yawn-inducing flat images of goofy ghosts and secret agents and Spidey. If this works, the whole damn catalogue could eventually be brought up to full 21st-century visual speed.

Actually, let’s be honest: This sounds like a not-very-good idea, and potentially a mildly blasphemous one — even if no one is really talking about doing it to Taxi Driver. Personally, I don’t have much of a stake in what happens to Men in Black, which on some kiddiefied Jack-in-the-box level really did want to be a 3-D movie. But Martin Campbell did not direct the classically framed and exciting Casino Royale as some trivial zap-fest for the eyes. I wonder what he, or other directors, will think if their handiwork is suddenly converted into 3-D fodder for the new, imagistically advanced it’s-all-just-popcorn-anyway home-theater experience.

The whole experiment reminds me of an earlier adventure in taking the movie past and awkwardly retrofitting it for the brave technological future. Remember colorization? That was the fad that swept the home-video market for a mercifully brief moment back in the 1980s, when studios decided that the only way they were ever going to get “the kids” to watch boring old black-and-white movies was to turn them into…ugly, fake, Technicolor-throwup versions of boring old black-and-white movies. (Read full post)

Feb 2 2010 02:26 PM ET

Oscars: Ten best picture nominees, nine good choices, and one for congeniality

by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Categories: A Serious Man, Adjective, Awards & Festivals, Awards Season, District 9, Kathryn Bigelow, Oscars, The Hurt Locker, Up!

You know us critics, we’re used to shrugging our shoulders about the whole Oscar rigamarole, aware that if we stamped our little feet and huffed, “The great Romanian film Police, Adjective was snubbed, snubbed I tell you!” we’d be kicked out of Starbucks for obnoxious cronyism. (For the record, it was: Police, Adjective is great, and I commend it to your Netflix queue.) But as an on-duty critic, and as an off-duty ticket-buyer, too, nothing that did or didn’t receive an Oscar nomination today surprises me, bothers me, or, for that matter, shakes my confidence in my own taste. You feel the same way, right? You either liked or didn’t like A Serious Man (I loved it); you either think The Blind Side is an uplifting, feel-good drama of hope or a gooey fable (I’m with Team Goo, much as I cheer Bullock). But what the heck, good for them for nabbing Best Picture nominations.

And good for the Wizards of Oscar for doubling the number of Best Picture nominees. Why not? The ten in contention are as reasonable as any to represent a consensus of discriminating-but-not-elitist American movie-going taste in 2009. Without ten slots, Up! wouldn’t have been recognized for the brilliant creation it is, as emotionally rich as any live-action title on the list. (Of course, Up! also received a reality-check nomination in the Animated Feature Film category, so if — er, when a live-action title wins Best Picture after all, Up! still stands to win in Pixar’s more traditional category.) Without ten slots, the utterly original politico-sci-fi serio-comedy District 9 (above) might have been left hovering in the air, awardless, like an alien spaceship stalled over Johannesburg.

And so long as I can sustain this magnitude of something-for-everyone amiability, I can proclaim here with Zen calm that this year’s roster of Oscar nominees for Best Picture is very good. Between now and the Academy Awards on March 7, I might give a passing thought to what the Best Picture list might have looked like if the ballot had been kept to five. (Got any suggestions for me?) But mostly, I’m happy to go about my business, which, between now and Oscar night, involves telling anyone who will listen that it will be the crime of the century if Kathryn Bigelow doesn’t win the Oscar for Best Director for The Hurt Locker.

Really. Don’t mess it up with Bigelow, Oscar voters, or I’ll have to care.

Jan 31 2010 03:49 PM ET

Sundance: Kudos to John Cooper for a year in which 'rebel spirit' really meant 'terrific films'

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Blue Valentine, John Cooper, Sundance Film Festival 2010, The Company Men, The Kids Are All Right

In my introductory post this year from the Sundance Film Festival — the first Sundance to be presided over by newly appointed festival director John Cooper, pictured at left — I said that the real test, the only test, for the Cooper era wouldn’t be the festival’s novel display of bells and whistles: the NEXT section (which bracketed and highlighted eight films made on very low budgets — just like dozens and dozens of past films shown at previous Sundance festivals), or the freshly trumpeted, take-back-the-megaplex, this is the new rebel spirit of indie film signifiers. (Rebellion, as a word, was long ago co-opted by those who aren’t for it.) I said that what mattered would be whether there was fresh creative DNA in the programming itself.

On that score, Cooper and his team came through, triumphantly. The programming this year was bold, sharp, tasteful, and demanding. It did a first-rate job of separating the wheat from the chaff — and leaving the chaff out of the festival. I can’t tell you how many times, over the years, I have sat through a movie at Sundance that was inept and awful in every way (it might be an unwatchable kitsch comedy like D.E.B.S., or the aptly named Sleepwalking, a road movie that managed the singular feat of standing still), only to spend half the film wondering how this particular waste of time ended up in the middle of the world’s premiere independent film festival, at the expense of a submission that must surely have been more worthy.

This year, I never had that experience, or anything close to it. Every movie I saw, even a half-baked novelty that didn’t really work, like Holy Rollers, with Jesse Eisenberg as a Hasid who becomes a drug runner, justified its presence. I also think it’s encouraging that no single film dominated the buzz-sphere. There was a roundedness and vivacity to the spectrum of movies on display, which is one reason just about everyone I talked to believed that the festival had such a vital year. Here are a few of my random thoughts and observations on Sundance 2010:

For Young Filmmakers, Marriage is the New Dating. By its nature (brash, cheap, hungry for adventure), independent filmmaking is mostly a province of the young, which is why indie movies about romantic relationships have often been mumbly twentysomething comedies about hooking up and dating. This year, however, there was an abundance of films that focused on the promises and perils of marriage: Blue Valentine and The Kids Are All Right, and even text-generation comedies like Douchebag and The Freebie. Which makes me think that a whole generation — of indie filmmakers, or maybe just of Americans, period — are growing up faster than they used to. (Read full post)

Jan 30 2010 10:53 AM ET

Sundance: 'The Kids Are All Right,' 'Winter's Bone,' and films from around the world

by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Categories: Annette Bening, Debra Granik, Down To the Bone, Jennifer Lawrence, Julianne Moore, Lisa Cholodenko, Mark Ruffalo, Mia Wasikowska, Sundance Film Festival 2010, The Kids Are All Right, Winter's Bone

The marketing campaign for this year’s Sundance Film Festival urges rebellion, renewal, and a return to the aesthetic roots of independent filmmaking, while festival volunteers wear jackets emblazoned with the establishment logo of corporate sponsor Kenneth Cole. In other words, it’s Sundance, Jake. And this year I’ve been wearing the (non-logo) badge that identifies me as a member of the three-person jury judging 14 entries in the World Dramatic category of the competition. The awards ceremony is tonight; I’ll report on some of the outstanding selections I’ve seen next week, after I’ve removed my ID badge.

So much for my silence on this site, while Owen has been commenting eloquently on what he and I agree has been a particularly rewarding Sundance. But nothing stops me from sharing my enthusiasm for two of the films I’ve liked best outside of my jurisdiction.

I’ll start with my favorite U.S. drama with movie stars: The Kids Are All Right, directed by Lisa Cholodenko from a screenplay she cowrote with Stuart Blumberg, stars Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a long-time married lesbian couple in California, mothers, via sperm donor, of an academically gifted 18-year-old daughter (Mia Wasikowska) and an athletic 15-year-old son (Josh Hutcherson) on a quest to find their biological father. The kids don’t have to look far: Open records lead sister and brother to Mark Ruffalo as a free-wheeling, peace-and-love-style bachelor restaurant entrepreneur whose charm enchants his chromosomal offspring — and challenges their mothers.

Rebellious filmmaking? Yes, insofar as Cholodenko’s warm, smart, audience-friendly, often very funny movie features two marvelous, famous actresses in full flower as lesbians — not to mention gay sex, straight sex, and (Read full post)

Jan 29 2010 04:57 PM ET

Miramax: What a moviegoer felt like, back in the summer of '89

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Batman, Harvey Weinstein, Miramax, sex lies and videotape

Now that Miramax has finally, sadly, been effectively shut down, its offices shuttered, I promise I won’t subject you to any hand-wringing about the end of an era — mostly because I got the hand-wringing out of the way in two previous posts. Last fall, when Disney first downsized Miramax, and it was already clear that the company’s days were numbered, I took a look at what that decision portended for the future of studio specialty divisions, and for the larger world of independent film. A month later, when the company’s New York offices were closed, I talked about the central place that Miramax occupied in the history of New York movie culture. Now, at last, the company really has passed into history. That should be an upsetting and more than slightly ominous thing for anyone who loves movies.

Right now, however, I want to remember Miramax by going back to a moment – the moment, in fact, when Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s company first shook up the movie world (though no one at the time, not even Harvey and Bob, could fully have guessed what was coming). It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in August of 1989, and sex, lies, and videotape had just opened the day before. I lived in Boston at the time, and I was standing in a very long line to see it at the city’s premiere five-screen indie-art multiplex, the Nickelodeon. Like most of the people on line, I knew virtually nothing about the film but its title (I had seen James Spader play more than a few WASP slimeballs in ’80s teen movies). Yet the title was enough. It wasn’t just the lower-case sensational bluntness that hooked you; it was the teasing yet unmistakable implication of home-video porn in the mixing of those two seemingly polar-opposite concepts — sex (who wouldn’t want to see a movie that starts with…sex?) and videotape (a word that seemed, at the time, so technological, even though it now sounds about as advanced as “ham radio”). (Read full post)

Jan 28 2010 06:37 PM ET

Sundance: Is video-on-demand the future of indie film? For titles like 'The Freebie' and 'Bass Ackwards,' yes

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Bass Ackwards, Dax Shepard, Sundance Film Festival 2010, The Freebie, Video On Demand

Everywhere I’ve gone at this festival, the conversation — the obsession, really — has been about “new distribution models.” If you listen up, there’s some awfully excited chatter. Independent filmmakers are going to take control of their destiny! They’re going to forge new strategies! They’re going to make the technology work for them! They’re going to self-distribute! They’re going to plan out how to market their movie before the movie has even been made! (Think I’m kidding? I’ve heard that one several times.) They’re going to take a good hard look at the increasingly marginalized and battered — not to mention cash-poor — landscape of independent film and figure out how to impose themselves on that landscape, to make if work for them, by hook or by crook.

I honor their efforts, and I believe in them, too; if I were a filmmaker, I’d be saying, and doing, the exact same thing. But since I’m not a filmmaker, I can afford to stand back and say that my own excitement about the newly spartan and precarious, technologically fixated, catch-as-catch-can world of indie-film distribution is tempered by a profound ambivalence. It comes down to this: When people talk about “new distribution models,” most of what they’re referring to is innovative new ways to watch movies on television, over the Internet, on your iPad, etc. And before we even get into the possibilities and promises of all that, which are undeniably immense, there’s a voice in my head, a loud and passionate one that shouts, beyond reason: No! What you’re really talking about is giving up the theatrical experience! The shared experience! You’re giving up the dream of what movies are! And you’re daring to call that a revolution!

Okay, I just had to get that out of my system. Now let’s talk about the real world. (Read full post)

Jan 27 2010 12:27 PM ET

Sundance: Joan Rivers comes off as a stand-up heroine in the sharp and irresistible documentary 'Joan Rivers -- A Piece of Work'

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Joan Rivers -- A Piece of Work, Sundance Film Festival 2010

Here are a few of the fascinating things you learn about Joan Rivers in the rip-roaring documentary Joan Rivers — A Piece of Work. At 75, she works constantly, day after night after day, taking more or less any gig that’s offered — it doesn’t matter if it’s in a laundromat in Queens, if they’re paying, she’ll go. When you get inside her apartment, it’s shockingly ornate, with the towering ceilings, gilded walls, and stately royal-court furniture of an Upper East Side Versailles. Back in 1986, after years of acting as Johnny Carson’s regular guest host on The Tonight Show, she was offered her own late-night talk show by Fox — and, out of loyalty (because Joan, among other things, is very loyal), the first person she called to tell about it was Carson, who’d been her mentor and had been instrumental in fostering her career. Carson’s response? He slammed the phone down and never spoke another word to her for the rest of his life.

When Rivers, with her tirelessly blaring, paint-scrape voice, tells an anecdote like that one, she does it with a merciless appreciation for the comedy of her own misfortune. Yet there’s never a hint of self-pity; her ruthless mockingbird personality wouldn’t allow it. A Piece of Work follows Rivers around the country as she riffs, performs, worries, complains, and prepares her act with an index-card scrupulousness that belies its outrageously tossed-off, Jewish-firecracker spontaneity. What makes her a great stand-up artist is that she doesn’t labor to twist her observations into jokes. Her funniest, most caustic lines really are just what she thinks. She’s no relic. She’s the comedian as teller of uproariously toxic, gutbucket truths as surely as Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor ever were. (Read full post)

Jan 26 2010 06:57 PM ET

Sundance: Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams show you what acting is all about in the wrenching 'Blue Valentine'

by Owen Gleiberman

Categories: Blue Valentine, Michelle Williams, Ryan Gosling, Sundance Film Festival 2010

No movie I’ve seen at Sundance this year conjures the possibilities — or the current, gloom-and-doom marketplace environment — of independent film more powerfully than Blue Valentine. A lushly touching, wrenching, and beautifully told story, directed by Derek Cianfrance with a mood of entwined romantic dreams and romantic loss, it stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as Dean and Cindy, a young, semi-working-class couple who meet, fall in love, get married, raise a little daughter, and lose their spark, though not necessarily in that order. Among other things, the movie fractures time with elegant originality.

There are moments in Blue Valentine that make you melt, like the one where Gosling, on what is basically the couple’s first date, stops at a storefront and does some weird sort of awful/charming Elvis impersonation, singing “You Always Hurt the One You Love” as he accompanies himself on the ukulele, while Williams dances a happy little jig; you can see them locking souls, literally falling in love at that instant. And there are moments that tear you apart, like one set several years later in the doctor’s office where Williams’ Cindy works, with Dean, now a morning drinker with a receding hairline, busting into the place to argue with her, and everyone looking at him like he’s crazy, and us realizing that he’s not crazy but that he may now be a loser, too desperate to stop hurting the one he loves. (Read full post)

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