Guru

Reviewer: Jonthan Poritsky
Rating (out of 5): ****

The title suggests decapitation and the poster, an infinitely tousled coif atop a silhouette in profile, suggests the opposite, an overabundance of cranium, if you will. The Headless Woman is nothing that these signifiers suggest, yet they couldn't be more appropriate. That's the trick of Lucrecia Martel's fascinating, if enigmatic film: nothing much seems to happen during it's 86 minute runtime, and yet a great deal happens.

The film's brief first act is simple enough: Children playing on a dirt road. A woman driving a car. The ring of a cellphone. A thud. The rest of the film picks up the pieces and paints a beautiful picture of an ugly life. Verónica (María Onetto), the woman driving the car, sees something lying in the road after her accident. In a daze, or in a panic, she drives off to the hospital to treat whiplash, then has a clandestine meeting with a lover, then finally heads home. For 20 minutes we are fed these hard-boiled blips of an uncertain life. Is Verónica a criminal? Does she have amnesia, or is it a psychotic break?

Reviewer: Dylan de Thomas
Rating (out of 5): ***

A somewhat misguided marriage between Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Monte Hellman's Two Lane Blacktop (but with trucks), James Mottern's Trucker deserves credit for trying. Trying to cast an eye at an underreported and underappreciated vocation; trying to represent the working class with some measure of verisimilitude; and trying to present a very good actress with a starring, er, vehicle at a time when good female leads in dramas are few and far between.

The movie's primary issue is its very concept – that a somewhat troubled, hard living, frankly beautiful young woman would choose and, apparently, thrive as a long-haul, sixteen-wheel-driving trucker. And through the terrific performance of Michelle Monaghan (Gone Baby Gone) I shook my head in disbelief that this young woman was driving a semi.

Best Movies Seen on Screen or Via GreenCine in 2009

by Dylan de Thomas

As I wrote the last time I did one of these, I don't get to see all the hotly anticipated year-end flicks up here in rainy Portland, Oregon. That said, there were less glaring absences this year, with a bunch of excellent movies coming out earlier in 2009. And so here are my own favorites, unnumbered and split into arbitrary categories for nugget-sized consuming pleasure.

Best of the Ones Most People Saw

Inglourious Basterds: Though this list is not numbered, this is my clear number one for the year, providing, as it did, easily the most shocking, exhilarating film experience in a long while. A fantasia on WWII genre flicks, with a gleeful sense of anarchic ahistoricality carrying it through, this is Tarantino's masterpiece. Oscar will likely shun it, but history will be kinder to it than the film is to history. As the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle put it well recently, "Fifty years from now, if someone does a book about the films of this century's first decade, Inglorious Basterds will be on the front cover."

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

Mayhem, martial arts and… Film Movement: together? The distributor known for bringing us classy, tasteful films from around the globe offers up a movie that features Triad bosses, blood and violence? Well, yes and no. While all of these things are present in The Drummer, which arrives on DVD this week, the resulting film is surprisingly gentle, thoughtful and sweet -- when measured against almost any other in this overcrowded Hong Kong genre.

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ****

I can only imagine how Staten Island Paul would react to the 2009 NY Giants' season, which started off so promising and then fell apart in a wash of injuries and inconsistency. There was no off-field incident this year between a player and fan, but otherwise it's easy to picture Big Fan's world as indelibly real.

Big Fan seemed to come and go in theaters about as quickly as a Detroit Lions season goes down the drain, but deserves a cult life on DVD. The film is not just writer Robert Siegel's directorial debut, but a breaking out party for one of my favorite comedians, Patton Oswalt, as an actor.

Like Siegel's Oscar-nominated script for The Wrestler it plumbs the depths of sports hero worship, but rather than look at the athlete's rise and fall from the heights of fame it looks at the other side, those that worship them and are ultimately doomed to be disappointed by them. The film shows admirable lack of sentimentality and stark depiction of what it is to be a bitter and lonely adult who finds a sense of purpose in something that doesn't need you in the same way. The film manages to be richly, darkly funny even while also naturally being a bit of a downer.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ***½

"Coming to America" films in the past have typically been packaged as either broad comedy (such as uh, Coming to America) or relentlessly bleak dramas (In America) and tend to gravitate towards the urban centers of the United States. Amreeka (marking the debut of L-Word writer-director Cherien Dabis) posits a recently divorced, non-religious Palestinian woman and her son embarking on a journey to the far more recognizable landscape of contemporary American life: the suburbs.

After Muna and her teenage son Fadi are granted visas through a lottery program, they spend precious little decision-making time to determine that their once comfortable life under occupation is becoming so exceedingly dangerous and lacking in opportunity that taking a chance on a new beginning is their only viable option. They move in with her sister in the outer boroughs of Chicago where Muna looks for work as an accountant and Fadi starts at a new high school. Unfortunately, her accent and his timid nature are immediately deemed unacceptable in each of those worlds, leaving her working at a White Castle restaurant and him getting beat up on a regular basis.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): **

In 2006, many film writers became excited about a certain movement, a kind of Mexican New Wave, spearheaded by three major movies released toward the end of the year by directors from Mexico at the top of their game, Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men and Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel. There were several other, smaller films in the movement as well, including Carlos Reygadas' Battle in Heaven and Fernando Eimbcke's Duck Season, which were more under the radar. A slightly bigger story was the feud that cropped up between director Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga over the three films they made together (Amores perros, 21 Grams and Babel).

It seems that each man wanted to take most of the credit for the success of all three films, to the detriment of the other. Outsiders could not tell which one was right, though given Iñárritu's overall lack of directorial personality, and the fact that Arriaga also wrote Tommy Lee Jones' superb The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, it looked as if the more fruitful artist might indeed be Arriaga. Unfortunately, Arriaga's own directorial debut, The Burning Plain, might just as easily prove everyone wrong. It's a dreary slog of a movie that's so tightly wound and so full of its own convictions that if it seems to loosen up or breathe for just a moment, we know that it's really just foreshadowing the next disaster. Hence, it's all too easy to read in advance. (If someone stops to make tortillas for lunch, get ready for a plane crash.)

Reviewer: Jonathan Poritsky
Rating (out of 5): Che Part One (The Argentine): ****
Che Part Two (Guerilla): ****½

When it comes to Steven Soderbergh, there seem to be two camps of people who follow his work. One believes he is one of the most prolific, diverse and surprising American filmmakers working today. The other thinks he is a gutless Hollywood shill whose art-house fare hardly makes up for his blockbuster shlock. (I've seen both these camps posting and commenting on various film blogs.) Divided into two parts, the two films comprising Che seem to prove why both sides are right and wrong. Part One smacks of a glossy studio biopic while Part Two delves deep into the psyche of a revolutionary being. In other words, Soderbergh gets to have his cake and eat it too.

Che Part One follows Ernesto “Che” Guevara, played brilliantly by Benicio del Toro, through his successful and famous campaign through Cuba. Cinematically, this film picks up almost exactly where Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries leaves off. In that film, Gael Garcia Bernal plays a lithe, silky, almost prepubescent version of Guevara curiously bouncing around South America, incubating his mission. Del Toro fills out a much more grown up version of the character. His whole physicality, from the bags under his eyes to his lumbering gait, exudes that of a man who has seen some serious shit. Featuring sporadic use of voice over and flash forwards to New York City in 1964, this is the Guevara biopic that Hollywood would make if they could put some weight behind a real live Marxist. This Che is the sillhouette who adorns smoky dorm rooms the world over: a rock star. But only just so.

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

To each generation of gay rights activists there is a galvanizing moment where the status quo becomes intolerable. In the 80s it was the Reagan administration's denial of AIDS while half a million Americans died; in the 90s it was the passage of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," banning gays from serving in the military. In the Aughts it was the totality of the 2004 Republican strategy to win the presidency and house seats by funding anti-gay measures across the states' to encourage religious fundamentalists to vote.

The documentar Outrage presents BlogActive creator Michael Rogers as the leader of a new opposition movement. Rogers employs the values of old-fashioned yellow journalism with the tenacity and immediacy of blogging to collect data and out political figures who by night have same sex partners but spend their daylight hours chipping away at the civil liberties and safety of out homosexuals. Outrage also demonstrates the baffling inability of mainstream media to cover these issues at all -- even when it involves inappropriate expenditures of funds to take a same sex staffers on exotic locations or when it is a clear-cut case of hypocrisy. (Though the film leaves aside any issue of how one defines lesser hypocrisies when the nature of federal legislation is so convoluted, a single vote impacts a myriad of different issues.)

Director Kirby Dick (This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Sick) wades into the complications that arises around privacy rights when discussing people who are not only public personas but law-makers and how expectations of honesty can conflict with the realities of political campaigning. The cognitive dissonance experienced by men like Idaho Senator Larry Craig and Florida Governor (and 2012 presidential hopeful) Charlie Crist is played as equally tragic, to see people so at odds with their own reality and as a series craven political choices that have destroyed the lives of millions of people.

It feels a bit "Let them eat cake"-ish to gush too much about the glorious political theater on display in the film. But it's worth mentioning Outrage could serve as a primer course on legislative fundamentals as Dick gains access to virtually every out gay politician on the national level, and also some of the top level staffers, think tankers, political pundits, fundraisers, lobbyists and legal advisors.

Former Arizona Congressman Jim Kolbe and former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey provide particularly heartwrenching insight into being outed while in office, one having had enough time to feel liberated the other still dealing with the immediate fallout if tearing a family apart and seeing one's career end publicly.

DVD extras include Commentary with Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering, deleted scenes, Director Q&A, and panel discussion from the Tribecca Film Festival.

Trailer:

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Rating (out of 5): ***½

If you’re familiar with the early to middle period of Spanish director Luis Buñuel, you may not be surprised at what he does with the dark adventure/melodrama from 1956, Death In The Garden. I would guess that this was work-for-hire for the director who began his career with the classics Un chien andalou and L'âge d'or, and then went on the do everything from anti-Franco propaganda films during the Spanish Civil War to late, semi-great works like Tristana and That Obscure object of Desire.

I am also guessing that what attracted Buñuel to this material was its dark elements: how religion, responsibility, money and sexual attraction are used for survival, and can lead to betrayal. With three other writers, Buñuel co-adapted the novel by José-André Lacour and managed to create an unflaggingly interesting tale of what happens when a South American military dictatorship decides to take over, without warning (and of course without just cause), the diamond prospecting of a number of locals and foreigners located near a military outpost surrounded by jungle (the “garden” of the title). The first major surprise of the film, given all but one of the director’s movies (Robinson Crusoe) that had come before, is that this one’s in color.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): *****

Swedish-born filmmaker Roy Andersson began making films in the late 1960s, but to date has completed only nine films: five shorts and four features. That makes him one of the deliberate filmmakers in history, up there with Bresson and Kubrick. On top of that, it took a while for his latest film, You, the Living, to reach theaters. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007, had a single screening a year later at the San Francisco International Film Festival and then -- thanks to newly refurbished distributor Palisades Tartan -- finally opened in a couple of U.S. theaters in the summer of 2009. As far as I can tell, it's only the second Andersson film to play here, after 2001's superb Songs from the Second Floor.

All this slowness probably prevents Andersson from being the major director he deserves to be; he's like a cold soup mix of Buster Keaton, David Lynch, Jerry Lewis and Terry Gilliam, and yet he's a total original, hawking deadpan jokes as well as chilly, disheartening mean streaks in his blocky, deep-space single takes. Every frame is awash in blue-gray -- gray clothes, buildings and clouds (a thunder and lightning storm breaks up the grayness by turning it a bit darker). There's rarely a continuous cut within a scene, and camera moves are even scarcer. His disparate characters talk about dreams and nightmares, practice musical instruments (Living has a hilariously ill-fitting ragtime score) or simply wait in endless lines.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): ***

The science fiction genre is basically defined as imaginary stories that employ science elements, such as traveling in time machines or discovering life on other planets. Yet the genre has often been used as a way to deliver weighty messages aboutthe wrong direction mankind is generally headed in. A great many successful and acclaimed science fiction movies such as these surfaced in 2009. Beloved examples like Star Trek, District 9 and Avatar, were merely war movies disguised as science fiction, with humans battling aliens rather than people of another culture. Yet, occasionally sci-fi films do come along that try to deal with things more mysterious than war; they're more interested in characters than in mankind.

German-born Christian Alvart makes his American directorial debut (his first film was the creepy serial killer film Antibodies) with Pandorum, and though it may not be the most brilliant example, it's still an intensely effective sci-fi chiller, mainly thanks to its canny set and sound design, and its constant, relentless sense of dread and tension. Oddly, it is yet another film with a message, but the message is so nicely hidden within the surprise turns of plot that there's never any preachy feeling.

Reviewer: Jeffrey M. Anderson
Rating (out of 5): *****

The three major figures of the German New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s took three completely divergent paths. Rainer Werner Fassbinder remained determinedly local and burned out quickly, dying at the age of 37 after pumping out more than 40 films in 15 years. Werner Herzog became interested in issues of man versus nature, and often ventured out into uncomfortable sections of the world, in both features and documentaries. Meanwhile, Wim Wenders became fascinated by America, and especially the open road that connected all the various people and places within. A good number of his movies deal with characters that travel from one place to another, especially the three-hour Kings of the Road (1976), which is sadly absent from DVD. Happily, his best-known and best-loved road movie Paris, Texas (1984) has just been re-issued in a beautiful Criterion Collection edition.

Reviewer: Jeremy Hatch
Rating (out of 5): ***

For a movie that's so entertaining and even, at times, philosophically rich, it's too bad that Enlighten Up! has a gimmicky premise. Director Kate Churchill, in voiceover, describes her seven years of yoga practice, and wonders whether yoga can transform a person's life in only six months, whether it's possible for a total beginner to achieve a spiritual awakening in that time? (Why six months? Why not a year or more?) Kate herself is conveniently exempt from being a subject, so she sets about finding somebody who has never practiced yoga, so he can explore the subject. She'll just tag along and see what happens.