The Curious Case of the Holiday Film Season
The ‘quality’ season’s top contenders
By Andy Klein
It’s been a lackluster year for films – if you care about quality rather than quantity. By my estimate, there have roughly 500 films released in Los Angeles so far this year. There has been the occasional WALL•E or Tropic Thunder and Dark Knight, but the percentage has been atrocious.
Some of this is due to the ever-increasing practice of loading the end of the year with “quality” titles. We have another 64 films on the schedule in the coming five weeks – and, more to the point, they include more than half of the likeliest sources of Oscar nominations. “Quality” and “Oscar contenders” are hardly identical sets, let alone “quality” and “what the supposedly brilliant folks at the studios think are Oscar contenders.”
Nonetheless, there is some hope that the final stretch will compensate for the lackluster nine furlongs we’ve limped through so far in this year’s derby.
Haven’t the last two years sapped everyone else’s tolerance for politics as much as they have mine? I was hoping the part of my brain commandeered by obsessive election concern could luxuriate a while in post-election bliss. But nooooo! We’re about to get a bizarrely high concentration of explicitly political mainstream features. My social conscience says I should be looking forward to classy productions like Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon (about David Frost’s 1977 interview with Richard Nixon) and Steve McQueen’s Hunger (about the 1981 IRA hunger strike) – both of which open Dec. 5. They may turn out to be brilliant, but I don’t think I’m capable of absorbing both of them ... let alone in the same week ... let alone next week. (Too soon! Too soon!)
I’m saving my “seriositude” eyeballs for Steven Soderbergh’s two-part, four-hour-plus Che. With no disrespect to Opie andnot-the-guy-who-starred-in-Bullitt, Soderbergh is one of our most brilliant directors, even on an off day; and no one could physically be more perfect for the title part than Benicio del Toro. Sure, I could see Frost/Nixon and Hunger in the same amount of time, but those are less intriguing, in part because it’s easier to pick sides. (Nixon bad, hunger strikers good.) Che Guevara was a hero to my generation of lefties, and his reputation has plummeted in recent decades, so it will be interesting to see how Soderbergh views him.
By Christmas, I hope to have recovered enough for three other more or less politically centered releases. First up: Valkyrie (Dec. 25), the rumor-plagued Tom Cruise movie about the German military plot to assassinate Hitler late in the war. Cruise’s personal life has tarnished his image, but he is a good actor (as well as a genuine movie star). If he really wanted to shake up his fans, he could have played Hitler – short, dark hair, good at ranting – but he’s more modestly taken the role of Claus von Stauffenberg, the leader of the plot. Despite several delays in its release, the movie’s strongest selling point is the reunion of director Bryan Singer (X-Men) and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, neither of whom has topped their last collaboration, The Usual Suspects, in the subsequent 13 years.
Opening the same day is Waltz with Bashir, described as “an animated documentary,” which is intriguing in itself. Israeli director Ari Folman searches for the meaning of a recurring nightmare about being chased by 26 vicious dogs. Rather than accept the obvious – who’s not afraid of being chased by vicious dogs? – he travels the world, interviewing old friends from his army days.
Also due Dec. 25 is Laurent Cantet’s The Class – winner of the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It’s political in a broader sense and is another form of documentary hybrid. Cantet presents a year in the life of French schoolteacher Francois Begaudeau as he works at a racially mixed high school in a tough neighborhood of Paris. This would fully qualify as a fictional feature, were it not that Begaudeau plays himself and wrote the memoir on which the script is based. In short, it’s a two-hour reenactment. It may sound like an updated Up the Down Escalier or To Sir Avec Amour but it mostly avoids the genre’s cliches. It may also sound dreary, but it’s not.
Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, I have a guilty interest in The Day the Earth Stood Still (Dec. 12) – even though I think Robert Wise’s 1951 original is terrific, and I hate gratuitous remakes. There’s a strong chance that the fashionably requisite surfeit of CGI will destroy everything that made the old version work, but the idea of casting Keanu Reeves as a wooden, inexpressive alien – who would have thought of that one? – may even trump the perfection of del Toro playing Che.
Come Dec. 19, there is Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, which has Eastwood back in front of the camera as well as behind. It’s a sentimental choice: That a 78-year-old actor can still be a credible tough guy – albeit a cranky old “get off my lawn” tough guy – is a ray of hope for the rest of us aging types (which includes you as well, buster). Few actors-turned-directors have been as adept at exploiting their star personas, and we can imagine Eastwood keeping it up into the next decade.
It’s necessary to approach The Wrestler (Dec. 19) with some trepidation: Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s films have consistently failed to live up to his obviously lofty ambitions. And while Mickey Rourke is an amazing actor, he’s had an extremely rocky career. In his early supporting roles, he consistently blew stars off the screen, but, whenever he tried to position himself as a romantic lead, he stumbled. Here he gets to snog with Marisa Tomei, but his aging-professional-wrestler portrayal sounds more like the kind of character work he does best.
I’m a sucker for complex time-travel movies, so perhaps it’s no surprise that I got a kick out of the clever, unpretentious Spanish genre entry Timecrimes (one of the handful of these releases I’ve seen already). Thirtyish director Nacho Vigalongo has put together a droll, very nicely worked out story about a middle-aged man who is accidentally transported back an hour or so in time and desperately tries to make sure that he doesn’t mess up the things he already knows are destined. Think of it as Primer lite.
Finally, there’s the biggest oddball release of the year from a major studio, or maybe from anybody: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It’s been more than 80 years since F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this uncharacteristically surreal short story about a newborn who is, in all respects other than time on earth, a little old man. Physically he grows younger and younger, meeting his father and then his son in age. Eventually he regresses (progresses?) to infancy.
Does he then simply vanish? Fitzgerald managed to duck the issue by sticking to Button’s POV at the end – which is symptomatic of why no one has tried to film this tale before. It’s a classic case of a story that seems impossible to present visually (or at least photographically); in prose, Fitzgerald could get away with images that don’t translate to anything in the real world. So, sight unseen, we have to give courage points to director David Fincher for even attempting Fitzgerald’s story as a feature, and to Brad Pitt for taking the title role (which, among other curiosities, should render him unrecognizable for much of the running time).
See complete coverage on Holiday Film Issue:
Published: 11/26/2008
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