Year in review

Movie reviewing is definitely a sideline for me, more a way to write about something I love than a concerted effort to inform the world. Real critics see everything that matters (and bravely sit through a lot that doesn't), but I just watch what I want to see. So I won't pretend to give a Top Ten you can compare with those of other critics.

Instead, here are six movies that stood out for me. Don't take that small number to mean it was a weak year. On the contrary, it's been the best film year in a long time, though my moviegoing experience of this calendar year was profoundly enriched by Children of Men, a 2006 film I didn't get around to until 2007. With There Will Be Blood yet to open in San Francisco, maybe 2008 will have a strong kickoff as well.

Syndromes and a Century
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest masterpiece (a 2006 film, but released in the U.S. this year) is simple, playful and seductive, so you may not realize it's also boldly inventive. It's an art film so smart you don't have to think about it.

In Between Days
Made up almost entirely of extreme closeups of faces, So Yong Kim's film about Korean teen-agers seeking warmth in a Toronto winter evokes the blurry lines between festering and growing and between being uncomfortably close and comfortably intimate.

The Bourne Identity
Great action filmmaking that slams into the era of Abu Ghraib at full speed.

Into the Wild
Never mind the debates about whether the lead character, real-life adventurer Chris McCandless, should have tried to live in the Alaska wilderness. This is a great movie about youth and age, and it bursts with energy and light.

Lust, Caution
Like Into the Wild's polar opposite, Ang Lee's latest and most mature film yet is a black hole. Tang Wei is wonderful as a young actress on a mission, but the seething Tony Leung Chiu-Wai absorbs all hope.

No Country for Old Men
This contemporary Western has mystery, humor, and white-knuckle suspense, and on top of all that, wisdom.

The Godfather on Christmas Eve

We watched The Godfather last night, Christmas Eve. What makes The Godfather a Christmas movie? Well, a long and crucial sequence of it takes place during the holidays. Actually, it's cold all through the film -- in Michael's heart! So it's a dark film, physically as well as thematically, well suited to long winter nights. (Surprisingly, it opened in theaters in March.)

But the choice had as much to do with our movie selection at home. A surprising number of the movies we own are summer films, such as Y Tu Mama Tambien and In The Heat of the Sun. Of course, most of our movies are Chinese, which didn't quite fit the mood. We even own one we've never seen, but somehow Violent Cop seems like an unlikely Christmas Eve movie.

It was the fourth or fifth time I'd seen The Godfather, and I was surprised it was so easy to watch, never slowing down for its nearly three-hour running time. The plot felt more coherent and less sprawling than before. Nothing succeeds like excess, and as in Moby Dick and Into The Wild, it works wonders here. The Godfather never stops telling us it's about the Godfather. Of course, it's about more than that: innocence lost, the American Dream, hypocrisy, the greed and brutality that drives our cheery capitalism. I was stunned again by Al Pacino's performance and noticed that the aforementioned chill in his heart is there from the very beginning. Despite the fact that his family thinks of him as the innocent son, it's like he was born a monster. Which is not a very seasonal observation for Christmas Eve, but hey, it's just a movie, and a miraculously good one, too.

Anybody else just finish Death in Venice?

Last night I couldn't sleep, so I got up and finished Death in Venice -- the Thomas Mann novella (Michael Henry Heim translation), not the Dirk Bogarde movie. Reading Death in Venice on the longest night of the year isn't exactly the most cheery thing you could do, but it was inspiring because the book is so great.

SPOILER ALERT!! (OK, well, the title pretty much tells you what happens. But I will hide a minor spoiler from you, and justify blogging about it, by embedding this lovely travel video of Venice.)



Lo and behold, during some downtime this evening I'm surfing the Web on my iPhone and I see this story in the New York Times: "As Earth Warms Up, Tropical Virus Moves to Italy." Which is, you might note if you've read it, exactly what happens in the book. (I know, I know, maybe it's all his imagination. But you get the idea.) The story concerns an outbreak of a disease associated with the Indian Ocean reaching a town in northern Italy, not far from Venice. In the summer, yet. NYT informs us that this was "the first outbreak in modern Europe of a disease that had previously been seen only in the tropics," which immediately tells me something about the book, namely that it's talking about an event that hadn't happened in real life and would have been extraordinary. Reading about what the government said about this outbreak last summer was quite surreal.

So apocalyptic. But what are the odds of reading both of those the same day?

Review: The Namesake

There's a touching love story in The Namesake, Mira Nair's film of the Jhumpa Lahiri novel, between a self-conscious young Indian engineer living in New York and the wife he brings over from the home country. Their self-sacrificing love amid humble beginnings recalls Satyajit Ray's masterpiece The World of Apu. But everything that makes The Namesake a pleasure, including that plotline, strong lead performances and Nair's eye for telling details, often gets lost in an overall story that comes off as contrived.

That couple name their first child Gogol, after the Russian writer, for reasons that become clear only later. He grows up in an affluent suburb of New York in the 1980s and goes on to Yale and the company of tony Manhattan intellectuals, but all the while he's so ridiculed for this name that he's torn between using it and a more traditional Indian name, Nikil. The idea of such a name causing its holder that much suffering outside of, say, a small town in Arkansas is the sort of thing that might be amusing in a fanciful novel. I've never read Lahiri's book. But in this film, of which humor is not a strong point, the conflict that drives the main story seems so unlikely that it becomes a distraction. And it's not the only piece of Gogol's story that feels forced.

These unlikely (or underdeveloped) plot developments and a sometimes clunky script contrast with the film's sophisticated perspective on migration. Though the trailer strongly suggests it, The Namesake never sends its young protagonist to India in a successful search for his roots. His family's identity is unique, rooted in both America and India as well as in their own shared experiences. And there are subtle touches -- shots of a scarf tangled in a phone cord, of the father smoking alone outdoors, seen through a window -- that make that portrayal richer. The acting is fine as well, especially by Gogol (Kal Penn) and his father and mother (Irfan Khan and Tabu). The Namesake often feels as if it would have been better if its makers had had the courage of their convictions.

We must be in heaven, man!

How does this video make Obama look like a rock star?



First of all, the rally itself looks like a concert. It's outdoors, there's a big stage and a huge crowd, and people are screaming, not just clapping. But if the whole video were shot from the audience's perspective, it would just look like a political rally. We would be passively waiting with the audience for the headliner to appear, and then we'd see the Obama we know from TV.

Instead, the video begins backstage (sidestage, really), and you can instantly tell. It's like the inside of a giant black tent, with lots of scaffolding, and I think you can see the sound guy at his mixing board on the right. It looks like backstage at a rock concert, which we've all seen in concert movies. And here's the thing: What does backstage at a campaign rally look like? We don't know, because nobody's shown us. It suggests backroom deals. But here, it's just Obama, a young woman, a young black man, and one white guy in a suit (who quickly ducks out of the frame). And then Obama talks to us.

First we hear the announcer introducing Obama, with exactly the tone of a concert promoter. And what's more exciting than going to a rock concert and hearing the promoter announce the headliner? Being backstage with the headliner as he is introduced, because he has to immediately go out on stage and meet his fans. There's urgency, not just anticipation.

But suddenly, Obama turns to the camera and gives his pitch for caucusing. It lasts just six seconds, but with the audience roaring in the background, it feels much longer. It's an incredibly taut moment, with Obama stretched between his live audience and us, the YouTube viewers. It feels all the more personal because he is supposed to be out on that stage.

So far, candidate YouTube videos have been mostly TV clips, conventional footage of rallies, or fawning supporter videos. Here, Obama is truly YouTubing. Centered in the frame, his face slightly distorted by the wide-angle lens, is it any wonder he looks incredibly young?

Then, without a cut, the camera turns toward the stage as he walks out, and the light changes from the cool of backstage to the warm glow of the spotlights. But again, we're backstage, so we can see the spotlights. As no other candidate can, he walks out on stage calmly, casually, and yells, "Hey!" Finally, the video switches to the audience's view as he greets the on-stage group in that warm stage light.

It looks thrown together, but this is a well-crafted video. Obama's voice is coming from the wireless microphone clipped to his shirt, while the introduction and the crowd noise are from another microphone. There's very little distortion. They've been perfectly mixed, probably while the video was being edited. (If the camera were plugged into the sound board, the cheering wouldn't be so loud.)

It's also a very smart political video. By taking us backstage and showing us the rock-star trappings of Obama's rally -- and in a sense, of his life -- the video makes him a rock star.

FNL: DIY

YouTube user TugaA is doing something interesting: Re-editing Friday Night Lights clips and setting them to music.

On the surface, this isn't that big a deal. TugaA use good songs that could have been on the show (maybe they were) and does a pretty good job of editing. I'm not sure you could say the clips are exceptionally well chosen, because one of the things this exercise shows is that nothing on FNL has ever looked bad. Some of the stories have been preposterous, occasionally the dialog is forced, and a two or three of the actors are less than spectacular, but every single frame looks compelling.

But there's a little more depth to this than it seems. Take this video, for example:



The characters Tim and Tyra are an on-again, off-again couple. The show actually isn't very coherent on the deep meaning of their relationship. The writers are too interested in starting and resolving various outlandish stories among the sprawling ensemble cast. But TugaA seems to be trying to do that for them. It's the magic of editing: There's a story there that you didn't recognize until TugaA found it for you in the footage.

TugaA isn't alone, by the way.

Unfortunately, this effect runs out of steam before the song does, or maybe I just don't remember enough about what each of those scenes means to keep getting something out of it. Ultimately, this video just makes me want to re-watch a couple of the more spectacular scenes between these characters (the carnival and the roadside argument). But the idea has potential. And it raises questions: Could you re-edit FNL footage to achieve a fundamentally different tone from the show? What if you used a kind of music that's never been used on FNL? Some Bach might be interesting, for example.

FNL: Our long viewer nightmare is over

Talk about a relief. Now, let's hope Plemons and Morshower don't get sidelined for the rest of the season. Palicki will find her way into something, don't worry.

Nice that Tami and Julie made up, too.
....... aw, who am I kidding? The screaming match made my day!

Clever and subtle (OK, pretty subtle) touch of the night: Coach with Riggins right after Tami talked about celebrating her two little girls.

Pop-up politics

Though its amateurish "authentic" quality probably really is authentic, this Joe Biden video is an impressive piece of editing. The reason the word "live" keeps half-appearing is that the footage has been reframed and moved around on top of a black background.

It's fun to see Biden's sober assessments of the Iraq war and other issues highlighted with little graphics like on VH-1's Pop-Up Video. And you have to admit, as suave as the guy is, he could use a little multimedia bling at this point in the race. But will anyone vote for him just because they liked the jump cuts?

Some of my friends sit around every evening and they worry about the times ahead ...

The Obama campaign's trying to translate its support among young voters into results in the early caucuses. I love how this video, clearly geared toward youth, looks like the kind of educational films we used to watch before these kids were even born. The title graphics are uncanny, yet there's something strange about simulated film scratches suddenly being cool. By the way, note the (signed?) This Year's Model cover image on precinct captain Gordon Fisher's desk, which gives him the all-important post-Boomer cred.