Juno

Director: Jason Reitman
Cast: Ellen Page, Jason Bateman, Allison Janney, Jennifer Garner, Michael Cera, J. K. Simmons
Writer: Diablo Cody
Runtime: 96 minutes

Plot: Juno (Page) is a sixteen-year-old girl who gets pregnant and decides to keep the baby. Unsure of herself (despite appearances), she snubs her boyfriend, Paulie (Cera), but enjoys the support of her parents, Mac and Bren (Simmons and Janney). She decides to offer the child for adoption to a well-to-do couple, Mark and Vanessa Loring (Bateman and Garner).

Juno is a superior follow-up to Reitman's creative, clever, and memorable Thankyou For Smoking. Further proof, then, that the apple has fallen far from the tree and rolled a good way as well. (His father is Ivan, whose rap sheet includes such vacuous atrocities as Twins, Ghostbusters II, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, Junior, and Six Days Seven Nights.)

You can see why some people have been offended by this film: teenage sex is depicted as perhaps even more commonplace than it is in real life; a slightly cavalier attitude is taken to the Serious Issues of teenage pregnancy and adoption; Juno’s parents and the Lorings are hardly great rôle-models; Juno herself is unspeakably cool, and therefore risks being emulated by real-life teenagers, whose messy problems are unlikely to be magically resolved like they are in movie-land.

But this is a comedy, and (dare I say it?) the pregnancy is in a sense just the MacGuffin. Yes, if I had teenage children, I’d want to have a serious talk to them about this film. But for those of us who know that romcoms work because they bear only fleeting and periodic resemblance to reality, Juno is a very satisfying hour and a half.

Credit must go in the first instance to Cody’s script. As we’re introduced to the main characters in the first few minutes, we’re treated to a feast of cool-as-Clerks dialogue and laugh-out-loud one-liners. Beyond that, the film has an extraordinarily powerful emotional arc, guaranteeing plenty of unseemly guffawing and messy blubbering. What more do you want?

Secondly, the casting is pitch-perfect. If Michael Cera can never break his lovable-geek mould, at least it was put to good use here; Bateman and Garner are so good as the childless couple, childish and neurotic respectively; Simmons and Janney are superb as Juno’s parents. In particular, Janney has enough warmth to make Bren sympathetic, as well as the steel to make some of her acerbic Blackadder-sharp put-downs believable.

And then there is Page in the title rôle. Of course, she first wooed the fanboy in me as X-Men’s Kitty Pryde (a.k.a. Shadowcat). She then wowed me with her disturbingly psychotic turn in Hard Candy. Here, she is spot-on: she is perfectly able to hold together those aspects of Juno’s character which would be impossible in real life. She’s witty and sassy enough to carry the too-knowing dialogue, and cute and vulnerable enough to make us believe in Juno’s insecurity and the whole coming-of-age drama. Definitely Someone Worth Watching.

Finally, the film is hugely enhanced by its off-beat soundtrack. There is a string of kooky and adorably charming songs, led by the eccentric vocals of Kimya Dawson. It’s a magical accompaniment to the film, and the first thing I did when I got home was to buy it on iTunes.

Verdict: Not the best, but certainly one of the most enjoyable films I’ve seen in a long time, with laughter and tears à gogo. Rewatching it with Suzanne has convinced me to bump its rating up a star.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Director: Tim Burton
Cast: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall

Cinema is littered with the proof that it’s very difficult to make a stage musical into a convincing and enjoyable film, but Burton’s Sweeney Todd is a happy exception.

This is due in part to the film’s very satisfying plot, whose dark and macabre elements are the perfect occasion for Burton’s aesthetics. This includes, of course, an unfathomable quantity of claret, as the eponymous barber (Depp) slits his customers’ throats and passes their corpses on to his landlady (Bonham-Carter) for pie-filling.

There are also plenty of mouth-curling moments, arising from both the clever lyrics and the peerless timing of Depp and Bonham-Carter. These two lead a very solid cast, but it seems a bit strange at times when the professional thesps are upstaged by the unknowns who can actually sing. It might have been better to get actors rather than singers for these parts, too.

Obviously, this is not a film for the squeamish, but if you know and love the Burton canon, you’re in for a bloody, meaty treat.

Redacted

Director: Brian De Palma

Cast: Patrick Carroll, Rob Devaney, Izzy Diaz, Daniel Stewart Sherman

This is a painfully frank depiction of the events before, during, and after the gang rape of a teenage girl in Iraq by US soldiers. Although plates at the beginning and end of the film insist that this is a fiction, it is clearly based on the Mahmudiyah killings.

The film’s style has been heavily criticized by some, but I thought it worked. It is set up as a documentary pieced together from different sources: US soldier Angel Salazar’s (Diaz) private video that he hopes to use for entry into film school; an Arab news network; an insurgents’ website; a French couple making their own documentary on road-blocks; an embedded journalist; an American anti-war website. These various sources give us a feeling not of objectivity, but of the range of propagandist subjectivities, underlining the tagline that “Truth is the first casualty of war”.

Sunk in the US by a meagre release schedule (only fifteen cinemas nationwide), IMDB lists no Australian release date for this film, but I’m hopeful it will make it there. It’s a brutal piece of film-making that has the audacity to attack not just the administration, but also the sacred cow of the troops themselves.

Yes, it’s clear that the soldiers have been placed in an impossible situation: they don’t know who the enemy is; they are exhausted by too-long tours and the endless promises that they’ll be sent home ‘tomorrow’. They, too, are the victims of the rules of engagement that have seen 2000 Iraqi civilians killed at checkpoints.

And while some of these soldiers are decent men, others are the kind of mindless bigots that you would expect to populate the ranks of an army that feeds on the unfortunate refuse of its society. They believe they’re there to take revenge for 9/11; they can’t see the humanity of the ‘sand-niggers’; they act accordingly, and show no remorse for doing so.

An inferior film, no doubt, to Battle for Haditha, but another important voice in the truth-denying clamour surrounding Iraq.

Cloverfield

Director: Matt Reeves

Cast: Michael Stahl-David, T.J. Miller, Jessica Lucas, Mike Vogel

So far, this is my most surprising film of 2008. I went in knowing nothing about it, and came away full of admiration.

The producers made the clever decision to keep the details of this film under wraps, which of course fuelled viral internet speculation. In the end, there is no big reveal, but perhaps this is a revelation in itself.

It’s a monster movie, told entirely from the perspective of a band of people (the B-grade crew above) who happened to be there and have a handicam. It’s a bit Blair-Gojira, if you will.

Of course, this means that the tension we feel is very raw: there’s no vertigo-inducing close-ups, no strings-heavy score to tell us when to jump. We’re frightened not least because so much is unknown: like the characters, we have no idea what the monster is, where it came from, or how it can be stopped.

We have no choice but to enter into the simple human drama of a man trying to rescue the woman he loves while some thing is outdoing every Mujahid’s wildest dreams. Meanwhile, we’re treated to some awesome, terrifying set-pieces, as our heroes get caught in some army cross-fire, get a little chewed in the subway, and navigate a building whose structural integrity’s so compromised you’d swear the RTA had been tunneling underneath it.

If at all possible, catch it in the cinema for the full effect.

Losing Marion

As I wrote here, I have for some time admired Marion Cotillard's work. I've talked up her films to plenty of people, often wondering why she hadn't 'made it big'.

Well, now she's won a BAFTA, to go with her Golden Globe, and surely Oscar beckons. So I feel like she is about to come to the attention of a bunch of Hollywood studios. And suddenly she won't be this obscure actor whose work I can gush about: she'll belong to everyone, in a superficial, tawdry way.

Of course, it's happened to me before (Paul Giamatti, Daniel Craig, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Radha Mitchell, Clive Owen...), but it hurts every time. At least I've still got Zooey Deschanel. Oh, and Emily Milburn.

No Country for Old Men

Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen
Cast: Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones

Like the Coen brothers’ classics of yore, it’s difficult to classify noir-80s-period-Western No Country, but the good news is that it sees a real return to form for the directors.

It’s a fairly standard set-up: Llewellyn Moss (Brolin) is a Texan yokel who comes across a case containing $2 million cash, which he decides to keep. Anton Chigurh (Bardem) is the eccentric hitman sent to recover it. Ed Tom Bell (Jones) is a near-retirement Sheriff who is half-heartedly looking for both men.

But the conventions are left behind as the focus shifts between these principal players. Driving it all is Llewellyn’s attempt to make good his escape. Eerily accompanied by a near-silent soundtrack, he burrows through a network of seedy hotels whose misery is cast into relief by the starkly beautiful Texan landscape. (Hats off again to Roger Deakins!) The film manages to be both unspeakably tense and grimly hilarious as Chigurh closes in on his quarry.

Good as Brolin and Jones are, it’s Bardem’s psychopath who lingers in the mind. He’s obsessed with chance, and endowed with the sense of purpose and the vulnerability of a T800. His exotic dialogue is delivered in deadpan, otherworldly tones; his weapons of choice are an air-powered bolt (the kind used to kill cattle in abattoirs) and a shotgun with a silencer; his hairdo lends him the air of a terrifyingly demented lego-man.

This is by no means a film for the squeamish, or for those slavishly committed to conventional resolutions. It may be less accessible than Fargo or The Big Lebowski, but for mine it’s lyrical, gripping, funny, and haunting — in short, vintage Coen.

It’s a Free World…

Director: Ken Loach
Cast: Kierston Wareing, Juliet Ellis, Leslaw Zurek

Loach’s latest tackles the question of immigration from an unexpected angle. This is the story of Angie (Wareing), a single mother who is unjustly sacked and decides to set up her own business with her flatmate, Rose (Ellis). Their plan is to supply cheap Eastern European labour to a greedy UK market.

It’s a fairly standard first and second act, as Angie and Rose face the difficulties of starting something fresh in a cutthroat, masculine world. Added to this is the pressure on Angie to look after her son properly, and her attraction to Karol (Zurek), a Polish man trying to make his way in the UK.

Mistreated by her boss, put down by her mother, and abandoned by the father of her child, Angie is naturally the object of our sympathy. Newcomer Wareing is brilliant in her simple and endearing portrayal. As the business starts to succeed, we’re completely in her corner. Everything is in place for Loach to establish an uncharacteristically heart-warming portrait of someone doing the right thing by immigrants who are widely treated as scum.

In the third act, however, Loach shows himself true to form, allowing free reign to human depravity. Therefore we end up with something far more realistic and ultimately more satisfying than the likes of Brassed Off or The Full Monty.

A scathing indictment of contemporary Britain (and Europe more broadly), this is the perfect realist tonic against the feel-good froth that chokes so much our cinema.

Asterix at the Olympic Games

Directors: Frédéric Forestier, Thomas Langmann
Cast: Clovis Cornillac, Gérard Depardieu, Alain Delon, Benoît Poelvoorde

There’s no better comic than Asterix, but it seems it’s almost impossible to translate to the big screen. Despite an impressive cast (and list of cameos!), this is weaker than the last couple of outings.

Asterix has always been what the French call ‘second-degree humour’, that is, amusing social criticism and self-assessment masquerading as buffoonery or pitch-black pathos. Regrettably, the criticism here is less than mordant, and the comedy often less than funny.

There are some classic moments (not least Delon doing some lovely self-parody), but such isolated moments make for a rather long two hours. Moreover, despite the fact that it’s the most expensive French film ever made, it’s often hard to see where the money went: the effects are frequently flat or outright dodgy.

One for completists only!

Battle for Haditha

Director: Nick Broomfield

Cast: a number of real US soldiers and Iraqis

Battle for Haditha is a documentary-style film that follows three groups of people: a squad of US soldiers, an Iraqi family, and a couple of Iraqi ex-soldiers who plant a roadside bomb.

It’s a fictionalized account of real events: on 19/11/05, a roadside bomb killed one marine and injured two more. In the ensuing hours, marines killed twenty-four Iraqis — men, women, and children — many (if not all) of whom were subsequently revealed to be civilians. There has been debate as to whether the massacre (sometimes tendentiously called ‘the Iraqi Mỹ Lai’) was conducted in accordance with USMC protocol or not. Trials are not yet complete.

The handheld camera and real personnel (recently returned US soldiers and Iraqi refugees) lend a painful realism to the picture. Of course, plenty of the details are guesswork. We know it can’t be documentary, but it feels awfully close.

The great strength of the film is its empathy for the three groups: it doesn’t merely demonize either the Americans or the insurgents, and won’t allow the kind of lazy, knee-jerk ethics that jingoism (“It’s tough for our boys over there!”) or the nightly news (“The US is an evil imperialist!”) encourage.

This is Broomfield in a new and very welcome mode. Some of the performances are truly breathtaking, but one can’t help imagining that in certain heartbreaking scenes, we have moved past ‘just acting’ into borderline exploitation. Elliot Ruiz (as Corporal Ramirez) is a standout, and it’s easy to imagine him finding more mainstream acting work.

The film is a little maudlin in parts, which breaks the vérité mood, but there is so much right here, and it’s such an important story to tell, that you have to overlook its minor flaws.

Into the Wild

Director: Sean Penn
Cast: Emile Hirsch, William Hurt, Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughan

This traces the couple of years that Christopher McCandless (Hirsch — reminiscent of a young Leonardo diCaprio, only with talent and charisma) spent on the road in the US before his death from starvation in an abandoned bus in Alaska.

Despite being based on true events, the film is really magical realism: McCandless is an improbably insightful and winsome character, his encounters with people magnified and beatified by his early death.

This will annoy some people no end: why is he shown in such a positive light? He’s so self-absorbed, so selfish, so idiotic! (The film omits some facts that reveal how easy it would have been for him to survive.)

But the Romantic in me soared as I watched this film. This is due in no small part to the magnificent framing of the varied American landscape, and to the skilfully played, intimate characterizations that Penn has crafted. This sounds dull, but the true events and characters have been moulded to create an engaging pacing to match the emotional arc.

McCandless is someone who has faced the emptiness of much of his culture, and spurned it for the subversive naturalism and spiritualism of Romanticism’s heirs: Tolstoy, Thoreau, London, the beat poets.

However flawed an icon McCandless is, there is something in his story that should call out the wild in all of us, just a little.

Atonement

Director: Joe Wright
Cast: James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Romola Garai, Brenda Blethyn

Let me say it up front: I haven’t read the book, and I just don’t get the hype. Don’t get me wrong: there’s no question this is an above-average film. There’s some really superb camera work, most memorably an extraordinary one-shot that situates us in the chaos of the Dunkerque evacuation.

I also loved some of the narrative devices at the beginning — scenes are retold from different characters’ perspectives, establishing an irony that pays off later on.

Moreover, there are the solid performances you’d expect from this cast, and even some pleasant surprises (especially from the various incarnations of Briony). There's some exquisite costuming, a value-adding score and extremely clever soundtrack, and some very tense set-pieces.

But the whole didn't hang together for me. I think this is primarily because I just didn't believe enough in the lovers , Robbie and Cecilia (McAvoy and Knightley). Attractive and charismatic as both these actors can be, I just didn't know enough about their characters’ history to feel acutely the pain of their separation.

Once again I’ll fly in the face of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association®, and declare it to be a film worth watching, but not this year’s best drama!

Rendition

Director: Gavin Hood

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Omar Metwally, Reese Witherspoon

The US’s practice of kidnapping and torturing terrorism suspects is important enough to be brought to the American mainstream, but this is not really the film to do it. Despite some engaging performances (particularly from two young ‘North African’ lovers), it’s impossible to overlook the fact that the dialogue is sometimes painfully preachy, and the whole set-up is far too hokey.

The victim of the rendition, El-Ibrahimi (Metwally), is clearly not a terrorist: he’s lived in the US for a long time; he’s attended a top-school; he’s married to muppet-faced soccer-mom Isabella (Witherspoon); he doesn’t even have a beard or a funny hat. Meanwhile, fresh-faced pencil-pusher Freeman (Gyllenhaal) is simply not the kind of man we could ever imagine being chosen to observe an interrogation — he’s precisely too fair-minded and liable to spill the story to the press.

All of this simplifies the moral categories: it’s the story of a good, innocent man facing an egregious injustice. We really need to ask ourselves: even if someone is collaborating with terrorists, do we have the right to imprison him without trial and torture him?

Is that really how best to defend our democracy?

Garage

Director: Leonard Abrahamson
Cast: Pat Shortt, Conor Ryan

An unassuming film that came out at Cannes and has no release date in Australia as yet, the shorts promised me that Garage would be the IrishKenny, with a petrol station substituting for a portaloo convention.

And there are certainly elements of this: Josie (Shortt) is a steady, craic-loving, heart-of-gold, small-town bowser attendant who prides himself on giving the punters ‘valet service’ when he fills their tanks, and whose idea of growing the business extends to putting a stand of Castrol oils out the front of the shop.

The laughs come pretty regularly for the first hour or so, with quietly hilarious dialogue and a masterful physical performance from Shortt. He’s ably supported by Ryan, playing David, Josie’s slightly awkward young off-sider.

As we watch Josie and David’s relationship blossom, we delight to see Josie’s crescent confidence bleed out into other areas of his life, and we’re all set for a feel-good ending.

What we get, however, is a disturbing and haunting wrong-footing — the kind of thing that is ultimately more satisfying than the sentimentalism of films like The Full Monty or Billy Elliot, even if it ends up being far less bankable.

Gone Baby Gone

Director: Ben Affleck
Writers: Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard, from the novel by Dennis Lehane
Starring: Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Ed Harris, Morgan Freeman, Amy Ryan
Running time: 114 minutes

Plot: Private detectives Patrick Kenzie (Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Monaghan) are called to investigate the disappearance of a four-year-old girl. As they delve the background of her drug-addicted mother (Ryan), they are drawn into a world of dealers, pedophiles, and corrupt cops which puts at risk the detectives’ relationship and their very lives.

Lehane penned the novel behind 2003’s Mystic River, and Gone Baby Gone initially seems to be retreading familiar territory: again, the setting is down-and-out Boston; again, the key plot moments revolve around investigating the abuse of children, which lends the whole an extremely grim tone that will sicken most sensible viewers.

But the plot is in a sense secondary to Gone Baby Gone, because at its heart is a character study and some probing queries about the relationship between law and morality. The film rises or falls on how much the viewer believes in Kenzie’s character arc, and how much we engage in the choices he faces.

For mine, the film establishes these concerns well, and gives us enough time to see the horror of Kenzie’s moral questions and therefore connect with (or revile) his decisions. Praise must go here to Ben Affleck, who seems to have handled his first (serious) directorial effort very well. On reflection, the plot seems to develop a little too easily at points (some characters cough up more simply than we might expect; we wonder if other solutions might not have been found; some actions seem to lack the expected consequences). But the key scenes are tight and tense, the ending is superbly ambiguous, and throughout best use is made of the excellent cast.

In particular, Casey Affleck effects a mixture of fresh-faced vulnerability and sharp-witted hardman that allows us to believe he could do the job of wringing information out of the Boston lowlifes who would never talk to the police. This performance can only bolster any Oscar hopes for his Robert Ford. Meanwhile, Monaghan injects Gennaro with enough girl-next-door sense and empathy that she becomes the touchstone of ‘normalcy’ for us in the maelstrom that consumes the detectives’ lives.

Verdict: Tense and thought-provoking, this is one of my favourite films for this year. It is, however, very dark — much darker than the French 12+ rating would suggest! I look forward to more of the Afflecks in this mode: the senior behind and the junior in front of the camera.