I’ve walked out of the movie theater smiling quite a bit this year. I’ve seen a lot of great films that all left me with something different to take home. “This is it” was no exception. It shot me with a jolt of love straight to the spirit. I’ve always been a big MJ fan ever since I was little, and the man (in spite of his personal issues) left a big impression on me. From his grooves to his moves, it all boils down to an energy that reflects positively on everyone around you. And that glow comes across vividly here.
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In Scott Hicks’ The Boys are Back, the camera swoops and soars over the Australian outback, finding a golden, carefree freedom in the vast expanses of scraggly trees and windblown grass. Then, an hour in, it suddenly runs smack into the cold, blue walls of a British boarding school and is suddenly penned in, trapped, staid. The striking contrast runs throughout the film, and is all at once stunning and silently at home in a film that is concerned primarily — if not entirely — with the essential and inescapable conflict between freedom and security. It’s a drama that will probably go largely unnoticed, but there’s no denying that it has a quiet power all its own.
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For those unitiated into the exciting world of film buffery, a “high-concept” film is defined as a movie you can sum up in a single sentence: “Giant lizard attacks Tokyo”; “Will Ferrell as an oversized elf”; “Die Hard, but on a battleship.” Stuff like that. The (extremely accurate) theory is that most Hollywood producers won’t bother to take the time to read an entire script, so you have to come up with something you can sell in a few words. The same is likely true for prospective audiences as well, so as the bean counters took over Hollywood, Hollywood was taken over by this type of fare — for good or for ill.

Ricky Gervais’ (star/writer/producer/etc. of the original British version of The Office) new vehicle, The Invention of Lying, is a prime example of a “high-concept” film — so much so that the concept itself is the title (I believe that the last time so little credit was given to audiences, snakes were on a plane). What if, the film asks, humankind had never developed the ability to state anything other than the facts? And — yes — what if one man figured out how to do otherwise? Ready? Go!
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Word-of-mouth and the Hollywood hype-machine will launch Paranormal Activity into the stratosphere (made for $11,000 and it’s already grossed $33 million) before turning around and stabbing it in the back. Overheard I’m-not-making-this-up quotes include “the second coming of horror!” and “the scariest movie of the decade!” Such hyperbole might be merited in a vacuum, but now that the cat is out of the bag (i.e., the Internet), proclaiming it The Savior of Horror will only tarnish the experience for future audiences.
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Jane Campion has made a career out of making films that are richly textured and visually luscious. Whether it be a dysfunctional melodrama (Sweetie), a rather askew coming of age tale (An Angel at My Table), a damning portrayal of love and desire (The Piano), an elaborate acerbic drama of ill manners (Portrait of a Lady), an intensely drawn character study (Holy Smoke), a sexually taut thriller (In the Cut) or a poetic lovelorn tragedy (Bright Star), Campion’s auteuristic signature is a deeply arousing delectability in both visual style and content. With her deep dark colour palette and concupiscence of character, Campion paints the most rapturous of motion picture artworks and then thrusts them upon the decreasingly unsuspecting public as if they were just another love story, albeit twisted and usually quite tragic, for her fans and critics to contemplate. Yet instead of mere contemplation we are handed the most complex quasi-romantic visualizations. Even the filmmaker’s lesser works (and even Campion’s lesser works are still better than many a director’s best) are so rife with passion and eroticism, one feels they must devour her films before her films devour them.
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If you want to bear witness to a few moments of perfect cinema, watch the first couple minutes of Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are.  Here we’re introduced to the indefatigable young Max as he builds a snow fort in his neighbor’s yard.  He’s packed the snow tight into an igloo and slides in and out of the opening he has made without a care in the world.  The icy tones of the image, the crackling of the snow, Max’s breathless panting, the smile on his face; this is childhood, and a moment perfectly suited as an opener to the long-awaited adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book.
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A modernized telling of the early stages of humanity adept with modern language, fart jokes, the ingestion of fecal matter, and  a multitude of offenses in regard to religion and history, Year One was something a grand comic genius like say, Mel Brooks (History of the World Part I) could have pulled off.
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If nothing else, Jay DiPietro’s non-linear love story Peter and Vandy (taglined as “a love story told out of order” as if you may not notice the shifting timeline) is an interesting, if not wholly original, experiment in filmmaking. Unfortunately, as it made its debut within 24 hours of Marc Webb’s equally non-linear (500) Days of Summer (at this year’s Sundance Film Festival), many tossed this movie off as a low rent copy of Webb’s film. Of course, such a thing is not the case. DiPietro adapted his own play, from 2002, into this film, so if anything, his was the first out of the proverbial gate. This little nugget of truth doesn’t change the fact that Peter and Vandy is pretty much a low-rent something-or-other – though it is still probably somewhat superior to the aforementioned (500) Days.
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Let me be frank: Kirby Dick’s documentary Outrage is completely unwatchable. Agonizingly, tortorously unwatchable. It’s an hour and half of cheap, ugly, digital photography and some of the least interesting interviews and most ear-gratingly awful music ever conducted. It’s a boring, self-congratulating, almost-never-ending mess. I have never been less entertained in my life, and I have never been so amused by playing with my wedding ring. (Eventually I lost control of it and it went flying across the theater; when it did, I found that looking for it on my hands and knees was much more entertaining than the film.) I can’t think of a single reason to see it, and I can’t think of a single person — friend or foe — that I would recommend it to.
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The Brothers Bloom is a whopper of a tale. It follows the typical con-man falls for the con plot, but The Brothers Bloom is far from typical. It’s fantastical, farfetched, and riveting. Writer/director Rian Johnson, who brought us the neo-noir film Brick (2005) is back in action, and clearly having a hell of a time.

The story follows the lives of con-men Stephen (Ruffalo) and Bloom (Brody) from their early days when they were kids to the height of their deceptive prowess. After their latest escapade Bloom decides that this isn’t the life for him. Years later, Stephen shows up with one last con for the duo to pull off.

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Let’s start at the beginning. There are only a handful of possible sports movies. To simplify even further, a sports movie can only end one of two ways: either they win the Big Game (Rocky II) or they lose it (Rocky). Add to that that no one will want to root for the reigning champion, and you’ll find that all sports movies have to be underdog stories. Add to that that the characters have to progress, and you’ll see that all sports movies have to be coming-of-age stories. So we’re narrowing down the possibilities pretty fast here, right? Yes, all sports movies are basically the same. So the question is: is that really such a bad thing?
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Every time I watch a new Michael Moore film, I inevitably ask myself – just who the hell is this guy making movies for? He acts as if he is a voice of change – showing us the moral and political indignities perpetrated against the American people by the despotic, elected (and sometimes not elected) leaders of our country. Yet, for anyone who is even the most modestly informed, not much the director spouts into his booming megaphone is any real revelation. Anyone and everyone who reads even the occasional newspaper or catches the occasional passing TV tuned to CNN or MSNBC (something other than the maniacally manipulative Fox News, that is) should know at least the basic ins and outs of what is going on in and around Washington and Wall Street. Nope, Moore does not make his films for these people.
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