2011 Film Journal

As the days and weeks chug along, I will a keep a list of all the films I watch all year. Yep, every single one of them. Even the embarrassing and the awful.  There are a few simple criteria for a film to make the list. I will only include films watched in completion. 20 minutes of The Cable Guy on TBS won't make the list - sorry Benji Stiller.   If an entry lists two or more dates, then the film was seen in sections - one section on each date listed for that film. 

This list will include both films viewed for the first time and those with previous multiple viewings. Anything on this list was seen via Netflix Watch It Now, DVD, in the theater or on cable - please assume that anything viewed on cable was not only watched in completion, but also without commercials. Movies weren't made with ads designed to fit into the plot narrative, I prefer it stays that way
 

Each of the films on the list is rated on a scale of 1 to 10. Any reviews or notes that I've made on a film from the list will be linked. This will be an ongoing project, so please stay tuned.


JANUARY 
Jan. 3 - Laura (1944) directed by Otto Preminger | 7/10

Jan. 6 - The Damned United (2008) directed by Tom Hooper | 7/10

Jan. 8 - Three Days Of The Condor (1975) directed by Sydney Pollak | 6/10

Jan. 8 - Moog (2008) directed by Hans Fjellestad | Rating: 6/10

Jan. 11 - Blood Into Wine (2010) directed by Ryan Page and Christopher Pomerenke | 5/10

Jan. 12 - Prodigal Sons (2008) directed by Kimberly Reed | 5/10

Jan. 18 - Joan Rivers: A Piece Of Work (2010) dir. by Rikki Stern & Annie Sundberg | 6/10

Jan. 19 - The Parking Lot Movie (2010) directed by Meghan Eckman | 6/10

Jan. 20 - Cropsey (2009) directed by Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio | Rating: 5/10

Jan. 21 - Le Corbeau (1943) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot | Rating: 9/10

Jan. 22 - Bugs Bunny’s 1001 Rabbit Tales (1982) dir. by Friz Freleng & Chuck Jones | 7/10

Jan. 22 - Rome: Open City (1945) directed by Roberto Rossellini | 8/10
Jan. 26/Feb. 4 - Pickpocket (1959) directed by Robert Bresson | 7/10

Jan. 28/29 - The Wages Of Fear (1953) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot | 9/10 - Review

Jan. 29 - The Runaways (2010) directed by Floria Sigismondi | 3/10 - Review

Jan. 29/30 - Le Cercle Rouge (1970) directed by Jean Pierre Melville | 7/10

Jan. 30 - Dial M For Murder (1955) directed by Alfred Hitchcock | 9/10

Jan. 31/Feb. 1 - Crazy Love (2007) directed by Dan Klores | 5/10


FEBRUARY

Feb. 1 - Cyrus (2010) directed by Jay and Mark Duplass | 5/10

Feb. 2 - The Army Of Shadows (1969) directed by Jean Pierre Melville | 8/10

Feb. 2 - Groundhog Day (1993) directed by Harold Ramis | 7/10

Feb. 2/3 - The Grand Illusion (1937) directed by Jean Renoir | 10/10 - Review

Feb. 3 - Le Samourai (1967) directed by Jean Pierre Melville | 9/10 - Review
Feb. 7/8 - The Friends Of Eddie Coyle (1973) directed by Peter Yates | 7/10 - Review
Feb. 10 - True Grit (2010) directed by Joel and Ethan Coen  |  7/10
Feb. 12 - The Kids Are All Right directed by Lisa Cholodenko  |  4/10 - Review
Feb. 13 - Downfall (Der Untergang) (2004) directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel  |  8/10
Feb. 13 - Casino Jack and the United States Of Money (2010) directed by Alex Gibney | 6/10
Feb. 13/14 - Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010) directed by Banksy | 8/10
Feb. 15 - Wild Strawberries (1957) directed by Ingmar Bergman | 10/10
Feb. 18 - Wild & Wonderful Whites of West Virginia (2009) directed by Julian Nitzberg | 5/10
Feb. 18 - Breaker Morant (1980) directed by Bruce Beresford | 10/10
Feb. 19 - The King's Speech (2010) directed by Tom Hooper | 7/10
Feb. 20 - Au Revoir Les Enfants (1987) directed by Louis Malle | 8/10
Feb. 20 - Vive Le Tour (1962) directed by Louis Malle | 7/10
Feb. 20 - Night And Fog (1956) directed by Alain Resnais | 9/10 
Feb. 20 - The Social Network (2010) directed by David Fincher | 7/10
Feb. 21 - The Law directed by Jules Dassin | 7/10
Feb. 21 - The Red Balloon (1956) directed by Albert Lamorisse | 9/10 
Feb. 21 - All That Heaven Will Allow (1955) directed by Douglas Sirk | 4/10
Feb. 21/22 - Homicide (1991) directed by David Mamet | 7/10 
Feb. 22 - Winter's Bone (2010) directed by Debra Granik | 8/10
Feb. 26 - The Man With The Movie Camera (1929) directed by Dziga Vertov | 7/10
Feb. 26 - Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer (2010) directed by Alex Gibney | 5/10

MARCH
Mar. 1/2 - Classe tous risques (1960) directed by Claude Sautet | 6/10
Mar. 4/5 - Le Doulos (1962) directed by Jean-Pierre Melville | 7/10
Mar. 5 - Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope (1977) directed by George Lucas | 8/10
Mar. 6 - Stagecoach (1939) directed by John Ford | 8/10
Mar. 7 - Capturing Reality: The Art Of Documentary (2009) directed by Pepita Ferrari | 7/10
Mar. 7/8 - The Young Savages (1961) directed by John Frankenheimer | 4/10
Mar. 8/9 - Paradise Now (2005) directed by Hanny Abu-Assad | 8/10
Mar. 12 - Millions (2004) directed by Danny Boyle | 6/0
Mar. 13/15/17/20 - Triplets Of Belleville (2003) directed by Sylvain Chomet | 7/10
Mar. 20/21 - The Death Of A Cyclist (1955) directed by Juan Antonio Bardem | 8/10
Mar. 25 - In The Mood For Love (2000) directed by Wong Kar-Wai | 9/10
Mar. 27/31 - The Birds (1963) directed by Alfred Hitchcock | 6/10

APRIL
Apr. 2 - God's Country (1985) directed by Louis Malle | 8/10
Apr. 3 - Brute Force (1947) directed by Burt Lancaster | 6/10
Apr. 5 - The Ascent (1976) directed by Larisa Shepitko | 7/10
Apr. 5 - Zak and Miri Make A Porno (2008) directed by Kevin Smith | 6/10
Apr. 8 - Back To The Future (1985) directed by Robert Zemeckis | 7/10
Apr. 11/12 - Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) directed by Jacques Becker | 6/10
Apr. 13/14 - The Hit (1984) directed by Stephen Frears | 8/10
Apr. 16 - The Pixar Story (2008) directed by Leslie Iwerks | 6/10
Apr. 17 - Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: Roderick Rules (2011) directed by David Bowers | 2/10
Apr. 30 - Frankenstein (1931) directed by James Whale | 9/10
Apr. 30 - Never Cry Wolf (1983) directed by Carroll Ballard | 8/10

MAY

May 7 - Easy A (2010) directed by Will Gluck | 7/10

May 10 - Baseball: Inning One (1994) directed by Ken Burns | 8/10

May 10 - Baseball: Inning Two (1994) directed by Ken Burns | 9/10

May 10 - Baseball: Inning Three (1994) directed by Ken Burns | 9/10

May 11 - Baseball: Inning Four (1994) directed by Ken Burns | 10/10

May 12 - Baseball: Inning Five (1994) directed by Ken Burns | 8/10

May 14 - Baseball: Inning Six (1994) directed by Ken Burns | 9/10

The Kids Are Alright - Review

Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are Alright deserves credit for a few things, not the least of which is that it treats gay marriage as a thing that exists even if it isn't legally recognized.  The lesson that Cholodenko should have learned was that this fact alone was not enough to propel a mediocre film to higher places.


Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) have been together for two decades.  During that time they have raised two children that they sired using donated sperm.  Shortly after Joni (Mia Wasikowska) turns 18, her 15 year old brother Laser (Josh Hutcherson) talks her into contacting the donation bank to learn the identity of their biological father.  Meet Paul (Mark Ruffalo) a restaurant owner and one time sperm donor who will turn their world upside down.


Of course, Nic and Jules are reticent about inviting Paul into their lives and this tension begins to scratch the surface of a union that is already rocky.  Nic drinks too much.  Jules is flighty and doesn't have a regular job.  There are moments of cliched relationship criticism that are designed to not only draw attention to the issues of the connection between these two, but also remind us that marriage is hard.


Jules ends up having a fling with Paul.  It's not a question of her becoming interested in men, but she needs someone to have a connection with.  Here is where the film asks for narrative forgiveness because its set-up is so unique.  It doesn't work.  The first 30 minutes of the film do a very nice job establishing that this is a marriage like any other and when it begins to crumble under the weight of mistrust and infidelity it attempts to fall back on the crutch of their relationship's unique ingredients.  The problem is that it's difficult to care.


While Moore and Bening are perfectly fine in the film, there just isn't much there to work with.  These characters are simply not very engaging and the film plays like a lesbian retelling of a poor John Updike short story.  The kids are rebelling in the way that teens rebel against their parents whether they're black or white, gay or straight.  But it never goes anywhere.  No emotional wells are mined and no truth is ever revealed.


The Kids Are Alright just can't ever seem to make up its mind as to what it wants to grow up to be one day.  One moment it's two teens searching for a biological identity.  The next it's diving into the deep end of a lesbian marriage and a infidelity saga told like a low-level version of a Douglas Sirk melodrama.  It's a melange of good ideas and half-starts, but the film is lettered with disappointments, screw-ups and apologies that never seem to be truly honest.    Yes, marriage is hard no matter who is involved.  As it turns out, so is making a movie about it.

The Grand Illusion - Review

The Grand Illusion (1937)

directed by Jean Renoir

If someone ever made a Rupert Murdoch biopic, they’d have no choice but to compete with Citizen Kane  -- and they would come up short.  There is no other option; the story of a media tycoon has been told already, and it was done artfully and beautifully enough that in all likelihood no filmmaker will ever surpass it when making a film about a media tycoon.  It’s inevitable.  

Geniuses, auteurs, propangandists and budding filmmakers have been dutifully making war movies in the 74 years since Jean Renoir made The Grand Illusion.  Many of the films made in that time have been truly great, yet in one way or another they are forced to stand in the shadow of this World War I epic.

After their plane is shot down over enemy territory during a reconnaisance mission, Lieutenant Marechal (Jean Gabin), a blue collar pilot and his commanding officer, the refined, upper class Captain Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) find themselves in the custody of the German army.  Because they’re officers they are well treated and they find compatriots in their fellow French captives. Renoir displays a wonderful knack for using humor and music to convey the bond between the imprisoned men without giving his audience the mistaken impression that the life in camp is simple and easy.  Food is shipped in to their well heeled bunk mate Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio) and they have blankets, books and a stove.  Things could be worse.  Yet, they are not free.  Naturally, they attempt to escape.  

Their plan is to dig a tunnel under the barracks (sound familiar?) that leads to the outside garden and from there they can sprint to their freedom.  However, before they can implement their plan to completion, the prisoners are packed up and shipped off to another camp deep inside the German lines.

It is in the new camp that Capitan Boeldieu has the added benefit of finding himself in the generous good graces of his captor Captain von Rauffenstein played with an elegant vigor by Erich von Stroheimm.  Rauffenstein senses an immediate connection with Boeldieu because they share a bond of old world class and all the proper social graces. The two share cigars and talk about life before the war.  These sequences not only reinforce the class warfare angle in the film -- which never becomes boorish -- but also help to greatly humanize the German captor.  Stroheimm’s effortless ease with multiple languages and his empathy for his new French friend make him seem the most cosmopolitan and gentle warden one could possibly imagine, furthering the sensation of absurdity in wartime mores.  It is also a marvelous device to display the identical nature of the day to day life of the French and German soldier before they were charged with killing each other.  These are just a hint of the brilliantly subtle masterstrokes used by Renoir to make his anti-war statements without ever stooping to soapbox aggrandizement.  

Boeldieu eventually uses cunning and his connections with Rauffenstein to give his comrades Marechal and Rosenthal an opportunity to escape.  The sequence that follows is a simultaneously thrilling escape scene and an exceedingly poignant display of selflessness.  In Renoir’s capable hands, the mood is never overstated nor does the action ever become didactic. Renoir doesn’t merely explore these themes of sacrifice, duty and the struggle of survival, he reinvents them; shattering preconceived notions on the barbarism of war and the cut and dried natures of its participants.

Gabin and Fresnay are wonderful together.  Their class differences supply the subtext for virtually every interaction they share without falling into tedium.  And while there is never any actual rift between the two, this separation of upbringing translates into wonderfully palpable tension between a pair of soldiers angling for the same gain; their own freedom.   

The supporting cast is astonishingly good, especially Dita Parlo who plays the lonely farm woman Elsa.  Her beautifully quiet presence is a beacon in the last third of the film and she shines within every frame that she occupies.  

This is Gabin’s film though, and he flourishes.  He is at times coarse and vulgar, other times lovable and humble.  It's an emotional honesty and profundity that is rare and almost non-existent in today's cinema.  Gabin’s Lt. Marechal contains a complexity so richly honest he forges a completely visceral presence on-screen. 

Renoir’s anti-war masterpiece is perhaps the finest film ever made about war, but maybe even more lastingly, it also defined many of the individual aspects of the entire genre.  There are prison break sequences that helped to set a course for films like The Great Escape.  The boredom and comraderie of POW life displayed so artfully here are echoed throughout Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17.  Many of Renoir's anti-war devices are also implemented quite well into anti-war classics like Breaker Morant and Paths Of Glory.  And these examples can only begin to scratch the surface of its sphere of influence.

Much like Casablanca after it, The Grand Illusion has been copied so many times because it is so perfect.  Every worthwhile war film made since seems merely to be an homage to this peerless classic.  And Renoir does it all with fewer than ten gunshots.  How's that for efficiency?  If war films were lightbulbs, Jean Renoir would be Thomas Alva Edison.

The Friends Of Eddie Coyle - Review

The Friends Of Eddie Coyle (1973)
directed by Peter Yates

Robert Mitchum’s quiet and shabbily dignified Eddie Coyle is well aware of the score; he is about to go to prison after getting busted driving a truck full of stolen goods.  The sentence is likely to be two years and when he goes away, his wife and children will have no choice but to go on welfare.  In Coyle’s eyes, needing a hand out for his family is a much bigger disgrace than a two year stay in the pen.  But he’s not bitter.  This is how things go when you’re in the business of small time crime.

Unlike other cinematic gangster types, Coyle has no appetite for the big score or the long con.  He leaves the machinations of big crime to the idea men.  In one of the film’s early scenes, Eddie tells a young buck gun runner about the time when his fingers were crushed in a drawer as punishment for a screw up on a job that landed the wrong guy in jail.  Mitchum relays this tale in an utterly non-dramatic and unsympathetic way.  To Coyle this is a lesson he learned the hard way and he plans not to repeat the experience again.  

The narrative weaves between a trio of bank robbers (one played by Alex Rocco) that Eddie is supplying guns to as he attempts to stockpile cash before he heads to prison; bar owner/Fed informant/gun for hire Dillon (Peter Boyle); a conniving US Treasury agent Dave Foley (Richard Jordan) and the youthful and brash gun peddler that Coyle gets his weapons from.  

It’s the treasury agent that becomes the thread that weaves all these lives in tighter with the cloth of Eddie Coyle.  A promise of reprieve from his prison sentence is held over Coyle’s head if he can prove to “Uncle” that he is working on their behalf.  The closer the prison stay gets the more Eddie considers handing some of his “friends” over to Uncle if only to help protect his family.  This inner dilemma becomes  interspersed with the comings and goings of Eddie’s colleagues to create a pitch point of culmination in the film’s final 30 minutes.

The Friends Of Eddie Coyle is a beautiful film to look at, despite its bleak and sometimes hopeless story.  Yates masterfully captures the early 1970s Boston crime world with peeks into parking lot meet-ups, stakeouts, pool halls and dive bars.  This is a blue collar crime world where these men would be going to work in a ship yard or a steel mill were they not gangsters.  The crime here is not elegant.  These are men of meager aspirations.  At one point, Coyle waxes poetic about being able to have enough money to retire to Florida.  It’s a humble goal and the subtext of Mitchum’s delivery belies Eddie’s own realization that the dream will never, ever become reality.

This is not a perfect film.  Too much attention is paid to the bank robber angle and the details of three separate jobs they pull.  Yates handles these scenes with a certain panache and they are done quite well for what they are, but they remove us from the Coyle story line and after more than one sequence they become redundant.  Dave Grusin’s score is also terribly distracting and utterly out of touch with the film’s make-up and characters.  A vaguely funk-oriented instrumental soundtrack that might have worked brilliantly in other films of the time, here just seems out of place and haphazard.

The film’s climactic sequences (no spoilers) seems almost anti-climactic by the time it arrives.  Yet Yates builds suspense and tension by incorporating a Bruins game at Boston Garden into the mix.  Dillon remarks at seeing Bobby Orr, “What is that kid, 24?  What a future he’s got.”  It’s a future that Coyle and his “friends” will never have.  It is a future of security, peace and prosperity.

In the world of Eddie Coyle, no one tells the truth.  At least not the whole truth.  The only real and genuinely ardent fact in Eddie’s immediate realm is that he’s stuck in his early 50s with a dead end dilemma that allows for no easy choices.  

Ultimately, it is Mitchum’s restrained and toughly honest performance that elevates The Friends Of Eddie Coyle to be greater than the sum of its parts.  Dignified gangsters who live by a jagged criminal code are a dime a dozen, but Eddie Coyle carves out a niche in the genre because he's not hunting for respect or hustling to move a rung up the ladder.  He is genuinely trying to do things the right way in the only ways he knows how.  The decisions are flawed and the results are doom-like.  The path to hell is paved with the best of intentions.