Fresh off of a rehabilitation program made necessary by the soul crushing experience of attempting to attend classes at Purdue University and live in the isolated industrial hell of West Lafayette Indiana, I decided in 2005 that it was time I gathered up all of my gumption and got that little problem of graduating college out of the way. So, lump in my throat and doubt in my heart, I packed up a collection of clothing and hand me down furniture and moved down to the mystical fairy woodland known as Bloomington Indiana; home of Indiana University. If you are a kid who grew up in Indiana you have exactly two choices of where you will go to college: IU or Purdue. IU is the sober yin to Purdue’s raging yang. Where the landscape of Purdue is bleak and empty with boxy brick buildings, IU is wooded and natural and populated with architecturally interesting buildings made out of local limestone. Where Purdue caters to the engineering and agricultural pursuits of the world, IU is a hotbed of art and culture. Suffice to say, my time attending IU went much more smoothly than my attempts at wedging a round peg into a square hole at Purdue. Why I tried to go to Purdue instead of IU in the first place is a mystery. What can I say? I was the first person in my family to go to college and I just blindly followed the majority of my friends into the gates of hell. A little advice leading me in the opposite direction would have probably been nice. A few years out from my graduation and I now question why I had to go to one of these big state schools at all, and why I couldn’t have just put myself somewhere in Chicago, where I would have gotten a head start at getting out of the rural and suburban black hole that is life in Indiana. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20. Or at least that’s what people say. With all of this life changing stuff going on in 2005 I didn’t have much mental energy left to direct toward movies. I went to the theater pretty regularly, and yet film was never at the forefront of my mind. But somehow, the first rumblings of my future as an obscure online film critic began to emerge. That summer after my first semester at IU I tried to better structure some of my time by writing my very first movie reviews. Looking back on them they were a bit too snarky and gimmicky; but the basic idea that this was something that I could do was there. Ultimately I had too much change going on in my life to stick with the pursuit and make something out of it, and by the time I had to head back to college that fall there was little time left to write any reviews at all. But still, it was this period that I looked back on earlier this year when a desire to better structure my free time reached critical mass. And it was probably the work ethic that I acquired getting through all of my literature classes at IU that has allowed me to stick with this review writing thing on a weekly basis for almost a whole year now. I guess I had the desire to put the puzzle together back then, but I’d yet to get my hands on all of the pieces. Early on in my teen years my obsession about film developed, and then into my early twenties it took a backseat to more pressing life concerns; but when nearing my thirties it became a more focused way of forgetting about that slow slide into oblivion? Oh brother, that’s bleak.
10-Brick ***
This was writer/director Rian Johnson’s first shot at a feature, and while I wouldn’t call it a complete success, I thought that it was intriguing enough to serve as a strong launching point for a future career. So far, I haven’t seen much of that promise come to fruition. Other than a couple of television episodes, he hasn’t directed anything since this, other than 2008’s The Brothers Bloom, which I haven’t seen, or even really remember what it was. Regardless, the real strong point of Brick was its script. Set in a modern day high school, Brick nonetheless lives in the world of classic film noir. That girl in your homeroom class? She’s a femme fatale, not to be trusted. That bully who always picks fights in the quad? He’s the local drug kingpin’s hired muscle. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the lead character of Brendan. Bespectacled and shaggy haired, he looks very much the part of the put upon detective protagonist. He emotes well and sells the gravity and danger of the film, but I found him to be a bit too mumbly when delivering the mouthfuls of stylized pulp dialogue. Often I found myself hitting the rewind button trying to figure out what he said during long bits of exposition. Factor that in with the utilitarian, but not very interesting photography, and Brick was a script that didn’t quite live up to its potential as a finished product. If the production design and photography was able to just muster up a little more of the mood that the film was shooting for, or if JGL had been able to spit out the long winded noir tirades with a little more panache, this could have been a solid four star effort and a hell of a debut for Johnson. As is, it’s an interesting project that has me intrigued for what he will do with 2012’s Looper.
9-Broken Flowers ***
Unlike the director of Brick, Jim Jarmusch is a pretty well known auteur at this point with a hefty back catalogue of features. For me he’s usually pretty hit or miss, and he’s never made anything that I absolutely loved. I found Broken Flowers to be one of his stronger efforts, however. This came out post Rushmore, post Lost in Translation, and it plays in exactly that same sad old man pool that most of Bill Murray’s modern films have. But this was the first time that I felt the film was borderline exploiting that persona. This felt a bit like a way to cash in on that new Bill Murray and how strongly people had responded to it more than it felt like an organically conceived character that Murray was right for. And still, the results of that were pretty enjoyable to watch. The film is slow and quiet, but that just gives you the chance to pay attention to all of the tiny little emoting that Murray does with his hangdog face. The story isn’t anything of much substance; it’s a simple road story of Murray’s character’s attempts at reconnecting with past loves. But that’s all you need for entertainment: Bill Murray sighing, scrunching up his face, and interacting with an eccentric cast of annoying characters. When all is said and done I’m pretty sure that Ghost Dog will go down as my favorite Jarmusch film, but you can do worse than this bit of Bill Murray porn. And if you’re not going to check it out for that reason, then check it out for the real porn reason of a “seriously, she’s legal?” Alexis Dziena busting out some crazy full frontal out of nowhere. OMG!
8-Match Point ****
Out of all the modern, post shooting in New York stuff that Woody Allen has done, Match Point is by far my favorite. It added a bit of a danger and a noir sort of flair to the usual Allen proceedings, and I thought that the results were very refreshing. I’m not one who’s ever been all that impressed with the Woody on autopilot doing his Woody thing films, but when he branches out and tries something different I always appreciate the effort whether the end results work or not. Here, I thought they really worked, enough for me to go a star higher on my rating than I usually do for Woody’s films. The plot is the usual, love triangle, seductive young girl, infidelity thing that Woody keeps revisiting over and over, but here the glee with which he fetishizes Scarlett Johannson in the seductive young woman role is taken to a whole other level; even for Woody’s pervy old ass. Much of the film is centered around seductive images of Johansson and the reaction that she causes in the men around her, and they are all beautifully rendered, well acted, and hard to complain about. The camera lingers. Movies have been made for far worse reasons than spotlighting Scarlett Johansson’s beauty, and with for worse results.
7-Green Street Hooligans ****
I never imagined for a minute that I would ever buy Elijah Wood in action scenes, but this little film managed to make it work. This one tells the story of a young American moving out to England and finding himself thrown in with the company of football hooligans, guys who are a sort of hybrid between street gangs and sports fans. Basically they go out to football games and willfully and purposefully engage in brutal street fights with the fans of the opposing teams. There’s a lot of talk about turf and whatnot. I’m not really sure how I stumbled about watching this one, and I haven’t really heard any talk about it since I’ve seen it; but I remember really enjoying watching it. A little research tells me that the director, Lexi Alexander, also did 2008’s Punisher: War Zone, and I can see how that would make sense as I remember that film being pretty bad but having some delightfully nihilistic and over the top action sequences and I remember what I responding to most in this film being the kinetic and exciting fight scenes. Also, I remember Wood as being really good, and impressing me with his acting for the first time since The Good Son (okay, so he was alright as Frodo). Probably it’s a little risky me sticking this on a top ten list and giving it a four star rating as I only casually caught it once and don’t remember it well, but 2005 is a kind of devoid of things that I really love overall and if I ever see this one again and decide that it doesn’t belong I’m perfectly willing to pay my penance.
6-Wedding Crashers ****
The modern age of film comedies started for me with 2003’s Old School and continued strongly here. Old School fired the first shot and then this one opened the floodgates. Before you knew it this select group of comic actors was teaming together over and over again, in slightly different combinations, at least two or three times a year. The results have been a bit mixed over the years, but in general I’ve really enjoyed the whole exercise. The director here, David Dobkin, hasn’t done anything else that I’ve enjoyed, but guys like Todd Phillips, Judd Apatow, Adam McKay, and David Wain have more than done their part to cultivate a thriving little world of film comedy and comedic actors. For my money, I could watch Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughan hang out and riff in a film a year for the rest of my life. But I guess other people’s mileage may vary. But don’t think that this film doesn’t have more to offer than just the duo at its center; it’s also full of supporting comedic performances that absolutely knock it out of the park. Rachel McAdams and Isla Fischer both perform above and beyond the standards of the usual love interest actresses in these types of films. Bradley Cooper is so smug and smarmy as the jerk antagonist that you imagine taking a baseball bat to him most every second that he’s one screen. And Christopher Walken is absolutely delightful as crazy old Christopher Walken. Of all his modern, self-aware performances, this is by far my favorite. He has so many ridiculous asides in this film that go largely and criminally unnoticed that he deserved some sort of award. I’m sure that Wedding Crashers had a funny script, but at it’s heart it is proof positive of what you can accomplish when you just get a bunch of really talented people together and film them having fun while making a movie. The structure is predictable. Fundamentally, this isn’t any different from hundreds of different comedies that we’ve seen before it; but the way the material is presented is very this decade. The looseness, the seeming improvisation of much of it; it’s the framework for the past five years of comedies. Plus there’s the Will Ferrell cameo, which absolutely kills every time I watch it with people and foreshadows nicely what a box office titan and looming presence over film he would become by the end of the decade. I think it was around the time this one was released that people finally started to discover Anchorman on DVD, and I can’t help but wonder if that is a coincidence or if there is some sort of correlation. Either way, the results were very good for Mr. Ferrell.
5-Lonesome Jim ****
This was a tiny little independent movie directed by an obscure artist that not many of you have probably heard of: Steve Buscemi. I’d seen his 1996 movie Trees Lounge before this, and while it wasn’t a bad little film, I didn’t really find it all that memorable. Of course, everybody is in love with him as an actor. And this film stars Casey Affleck, who I see as a sort of heir apparent to Buscemi’s squirrely little creepy guy acting throne. As an added bit of relevance to myself, it’s set in a tiny little town in Indiana that is clearly shot on location in a real tiny little town in Indiana. I know because I’ve been surrounded by a million of them for my entire life. This is a gritty, real film. It details the lives of a depressing sort people and doesn’t sugarcoat things for entertainment. And yet, the results are profoundly entertaining. This is a dark story about desperate people, but it’s full of funny moments. Affleck’s character has been out of town for quite a while, and now finds himself coming back with his tail between his legs. His interactions with his simple, Midwestern parents, his attempts at amusing himself in small town dive bars, and his romancing a young nurse who is raising a daughter from a previous relationship make up the bulk of the plot. And holy jeez, does every element ring true to life in Indiana. Coming back to this world is very depressing and humiliating for Affleck’s character; but he is a pretty ungrateful, despicable little jerk himself, so you’re left not really sure how to respond to the whole ordeal. This sort of moral ambiguity works in the film’s favor, as it keeps things feeling real and relatable, and it makes every interaction really hit home. And by the end of the film Affleck’s character experiences a revelatory moment that’s just small and subtle enough to remain ambiguous, but still impactful enough that I found to be sublime.
4-Batman Begins ****
I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love Batman. I love, love, love the mythology of this character. I’ve been completely drawn in and transfixed by it for as long as I can remember. Batman is something that I’ve grown up with, something that I’ve been aware of probably since the womb. These modern superheroes and their origin stories, they’re the closest things we have to Greek myths. These are the more colorful, more human Gods whose stories we orally transmit from generation to generation. These are the new morality tales that bring us up right and impart their values onto us. I absolutely love Batman. And despite this, until Batman Begins, I never truly loved a Batman that existed anywhere but on the comic book page. The campy TV version from the sixties portrayed Batman as a joke. The Burton film from 1989 was design work fetish with little understanding of the morality, depth, or character of the Caped Crusader; and all of its subsequent sequels had diminishing returns to the point of embarrassment. Batman: The Animated Series got a lot of stuff right and introduced the most interesting, faithful, cool version of Batman to the mainstream that it had seen yet; but it was made for TV, made for little kids. A lot of the darker, more adult subject matter of this gritty, street level superhero had to be glossed over. This all ended with Batman Begins. Finally there was a screen version of Batman that had a glimpse of the complexity, insanity, and idealism of the true Batman character. Finally we got a Batman that felt real, fought real criminals, and engaged in activities with real consequences. Batman is a festering wound that will never heal. He is a black hole that can never be filled. With the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents, that young boy was forever ruined, and he will never be remotely normal again. Batman is the public face of his pain. Batman is the vehicle through which Wayne seeks solace and redemption. Batman is a doomed promise to the adult world from a naïve and ruined little boy that nobody will ever be killed again. This movie isn’t perfect. It has some problems with it’s action editing. It has a romantic interest shoehorned in for no reason. It is a bit plagued with villains that seem secondary to the origin story rather than being real threats. But it got Batman right. Finally, a live action Batman was as cool as the one that comic book fans have been in love with for decades.
3-The Squid and the Whale *****
I was so put off by Noah Baumbach’s debut film Kicking and Screaming that I immediately wrote him off as a filmmaker and never gave him another look. His story of boring, self-involved ivy leaguers and their inability to cope in the face of privilege didn’t really connect with me at all. As Baumbach’s films tend to do to some circles, it annoyed me; it kind of disgusted me. Many of his characters are neurotic, damaged, and obscenely selfish. How you react to his films relies largely on how well you are able to manage spending time with unlikable people. For Kicking and Screaming I wasn’t able to manage well at all; I never wanted to spend time rolling around in Baumbach’s head again. It wasn’t until he got a co-writing credit nine years later in 2004 for Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic that he popped back up on my radar and I decided to give him another chance. I was more than surprised when I gave this 2005 film a chance and despite the fact that it was more time spent with selfish, dysfunctional, white people of privilege, my reaction to the material was completely the opposite to my reaction of Kicking and Screaming. Where there I was annoyed by the self-involvement, here I was amused by it. There I was put off by the characters struggles in invented crisis, but here I was engrossed by the very real moments of pain and difficulty that the breaking apart family of The Squid and the Whale were struggling with. This film is soaked in black humor. It’s full of great performances led by a Jesse Eisenberg, five years before his breakthrough role in The Social Network, but handling the work of supporting a film handily already. Despite the fact that these characters are pretentious intellectuals who largely treat each other horribly, we are always clued in to the places of pain that their actions come from, and we are always able to relate with their struggles. And really, those are the fundamentals of telling a good story; make me laugh and make me relate. If you’re able to accomplish that, then everything else should be gravy. Add in William Baldwin playing a painfully stupid tennis instructor named Ivan and you’ve probably got something special. I’ll never completely write Baumbach off again.
2-Serenity *****
If you’ve ever been anywhere around the internet you’ve probably ran afoul of fanboys of the show Firefly at least once or twice. They are fiercely protective of this strange little space western and unabashedly pushy about trying to get you to watch the show. It’s kind of a strange phenomenon, as I find that most fanbases of things that are kind of underground or unknown tend to react very negatively when that thing they love gets pushed into the mainstream conscious and isn’t their special, elitist secret anymore. But fans of Firefly and its creator Joss Whedon are exactly the opposite. They want everybody on the planet to give recognition to that thing that they love. Sometimes so much that they end up turning off possible converts with their pushiness, and end up giving Whedon’s work the stink of something that can only be enjoyed by overly obsessed nerds. I think that Firefly fandom expresses itself in this way because it comes from a place of pain. Lasting only one, fourteen-episode season, Firefly was cancelled almost before it got off the ground due to lack of interest. While most television shows take a little while to find their voice, get their footing, and start putting out really great episodes, Firefly seemed to burst from the womb fully formed and inspired. What that show was able to accomplish in fourteen episodes is extraordinary. They were at the same time wholly satisfying as a television experience and bursting with unlimited potential for further development. It’s that loss of potential that really hurts. This first season was so great, what would the show have been able to become if it had a few more to expand its scope and develop its characters? The fact that its network under promoted it and the highly episodic structure of the season was subverted by the episodes being played stupidly out of order just pours salt in the wounds of the fans. If only they had got the word out, if only people had been able to watch the story unfold in its proper context, maybe they would have watched it. Maybe it wouldn’t have had to be cancelled. And despite the fact that this is a very genre heavy western story of frontier exploring set in the very sci-fi world of a star-ship, it’s actually still very accessible. The characters are all likable, well crafted, and heading interesting places. The stories are action packed and filled to the brim with very effective humor. Watching Firefly isn’t a task. There isn’t new science to understand or fantasy worlds with new physical laws for us to wrap our heads around. Anybody could jump right into this very human centric world and fully enjoy the viewing experience. If only they had given it a chance, then maybe we could have had more. Well that desperate dream of more seasons never really came true for Firefly fans, but Serenity was the next best thing. This film serves as both an introduction to the characters for the uninitiated, and the wrapping up of some very dangling storylines from Firefly. Great pains were made to try and skirt that line between creating a complete viewing experience that could be watched on it’s own by anybody, and also something that would deal enough with what had already been established in Firefly to give fans a bit of satisfaction. This is a very hard job, but I think it was performed wonderfully, certainly better than I’ve seen it done in any other jump from the small screen to the big. I’ve heard Serenity described as Star Wars if the main character was Han Solo instead of Luke Skywalker, and I agree with this. But I would explain that changing of perspective further as saying that this is Star Wars if it was aimed at adults instead of at children. That film’s focus of creating potential action figures and cartoon spinoffs is jettisoned in favor of focusing on mature, character driven, yet stakes heavy storytelling. The characters here are all as rich, entertaining, and well embodied by their actors as they are in the television series. The laughs are back. The action is bigger. The scope is wider. Serenity is a film that can be enjoyed by absolutely anybody, fan or non-fan. But the best way to see it is after watching all fourteen episodes of Firefly. Go on; give it a try. Share the pain and regret of what could have been. If only you had got on board sooner, maybe we could have got more episodes of the show. Maybe we could have gotten a sequel to the movie. If only.
1-The 40 Year Old Virgin *****
