February 17: Vampyr (1932 -- Carl Theodor Dreyer)

February 16: Pina (2011 -- Wim Wenders)

★★★★★

February 15: Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts (2011 -- Various)

After we watched the live-action nominees, Linda, Carlos and I stepped out for a beer to talk about work and movies before coming back in for the nominated animated shorts.  While we responded to different things in the live-action shorts, we were pretty much on the same page for our favorite here:  The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. I'd be very surprised if it doesn't win the Oscar.  In another year, a film like  Luna or Sunday/Dimanche  would have a good shot at it, but  Fantastic Flying Books is in a class by itself.

★★★★ Patrick Doyon: Sunday/Dimanche -- This is a fun little Canadian movie that evokes small-town, family-centric, flat Canada through the fantasy eye of a kid.  Dream, reality, imagination, and a taste of childlike deadpan humor meld in this fun animation.  You gotta love the crows....and the fish.

★★★★★ William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg: Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore -- There is more creativity in thirty seconds of this film than I've seen in many feature-length movies.  Starting out in a hurricane in New Orleans with more than a few glances to The Wizard of Oz, Lessmore moves to a land of color and books where Joyce and Oldenburg manage to breath real life into bound sets of paper.  Life on this side of the rainbow suggests life in Snow White's kitchen with all its magical help, but in addition to the inventive animation and rustling soundtrack, Lessmore has a touching story that moves to poignancy at its end.  And a life lesson.  This is an amazing film.

★★★★ Enrico Casarosa: Luna -- Pixar's nominee in this category has a lot of heart, too.  Luna is a fairy tale about the moon and its phases, but it's also about a boy and his relationship to the men in his family.  And the way the men relate to each other.  And the coming of age of the boy.  Luna accomplishes all this in a short seven minutes, an outstanding, if at times cliched, achievement.  There's no question though about the inventiveness of the visuals here.

★★★ Grant Orchard: Morning Stroll -- I've never been a fan of zombie movies or Adult Swim animation, but I did enjoy seeing Orchard defamiliarize those genres in this short film and reduce them to style conventions.  It's about time.

★★★ Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby: Wild Life --  In this understated, intelligent Canada animation, a Brit heads to frontier flatland Canada to make his fortune.  There's a social as well as historical comment here.  I kept thinking of Into the Wild while watching this short because, though the interspersed comet lore lends this a complexity lacking in the Alaska film, the face-off between nature and culture is familiar.

February 15: Oscar Nominated Live-Action Shorts (2011 -- Various)

I checked out this program with Carlos and Linda, and it was good to see what's happening in short films.  I never encounter these movies in my daily life.

We had a range of opinion on them.  Carlos liked my least favorite, Pentecost, and Linda responded to Shore, a film I had a little love for.  I most enjoyed Tuba Atlantic though.  Clearly there is something for everyone here.

★★★ Peter McDonald: Pentecost -- I find this Irish film more clever than anything else.  It's draws a parallel between altar boys who celebrate mass and a team that plays football.  We hear the priest exhorting his boys to fight the good fight.  The film doesn't go much further than that conceit, though it's humorous and warm.

★★★★ Max Zähle: Raju -- This German short packs a lot into its short run:  It gives you Calcutta in just a few shots, it portrays an entire relationship in just a few scenes, and it advocates against illegal adoption practices overall.  The lead child is cute, big-headed, and big-eyed, while the lead actor has  strikingly handsome good looks.  There is a lot packed into this short.

★★★ Terry George: Shore -- This is another effective Irish film, and like Raju, it packs a lot of info into just a few minutes.  Here we see a complex relationship among three people who have decades of history, and there is a strong sense of local color with the men living on the shore.  And there must be something about Irish humor because, like in Pentecost, humor plays a big role, though one such scene gets too much of the limited time available in the film.  It's easy to respond to the warm affirmation that this movie leads to.

★★★ Andrew Bowler: Time Freak -- I like this American film; it's a clever take on time travel and uses that spin for both humor and character development.  It's very juvenile but very fun for that very reason.

★★★★★ Hallvar Witzo: Tuba Atlantic -- This film from Norway is my favorite of the group.  While quirkiness doesn't always appeal to me, it's hard not to like these characters, and the technique here is as fun as the issues are heavy.  A grumpy old man realizes a life ambition and reconciles with his brother at the end of his life, while an archetypal teenager grows.  A little.  There's a lot in this film that resists pigeon-holing.  And it all happens in a bleak Norwegian landscape with distinct local color.  I'm sure I'll sometimes think of the Death Angel from this film when I hear the sound of a scooter.   

February 12: Rules of the Game/La règle du jeu (1939 -- Jean Renoir)

★★★★★

February 11: Moneyball (2011 -- Bennett Miller)

★★★

This is a fairly classic movie, but it completely drew me in.  It’s the beaten down outsider who throws himself against a huge institution and changes the institution, it’s the triumph of the underdog against the enemy, and it’s the leader with his own insecurities who continues to lead.  And it’s baseball.  It’s hard to be more American than this, but films like it aren’t always done well.

Moneyball is done well.  The main character here, Billy Beane, has a lot of complexity, which is not common in such sports movies.  We like as he butts heads with his own institutional scouts and his tradition-oriented manager, but we squirm a little as we see him making hard calls by firing nice people, feeling conflicted about his own failure to pursue an education and succeed as a player, and trying to be a part-time father.  There’s a mix in the character of estimable and conflicted that you don’t usually see in mainstream Hollywood, and that makes the center of the film, Billy, more interesting.

Being about baseball, this is a guy’s movie, and the guys pull it off well enough.  Brad Pitt plays in his typically limited range here, so he’s a better general manager than ex-husband or part-time dad.  His numbers cruncher Peter Brand as Jonah Hill has a similarly limited range, but that works for him, too, in the role of a young geek with authority for the first time.  In contrast to those two, Philip Seymour Hoffman owns every scene he’s in.  He is the A’s manager, an immersion that Pitt nor Brand is able to pull off.  But the acting works here; Moneyball doesn’t necessarily need more from the central roles as written.

I was very engrossed in the film, so engrossed, in fact, that I eventually came to use the highly-manipulative soundtrack to help me reduce my anxiety: minor key vibration means something bad is going to happen, major key tone means something good.  When the story suspense got too intense, I focused on the music soundtrack, and the music's helped me reduce my anxiety.  Without them, the suspense would have been harder to bear.

This is a notch above average film.  I felt I was getting a little look behind what runs MLB as well as some good, capable entertainment.

February 10: The Lady Vanishes (1938 -- Alfred Hitchcock)

★★★

With Jenny back from Chile, we decided to resurrect our movie series starting with some Hitchcock that has recently come out on blu-ray.  It’s  a mystery to me why blu releases would be available for films like The Lady Vanishes while classics like Vertigo, Rear Window and Strangers on a Train are still not available, but there is some pleasure in this 1938 outing.

For one, it’s thoroughly engaging and has a good deal of suspense to it.  Because of the omniscient camera, we know that something’s up with Miss Froy’s disappearance, but we can only assemble the clues as Iris and Gilbert find them to construct the plot behind the abduction.  And no sooner is that question answered than the film presents another: Will the heroes escape?  So the film is fairly suspenseful once the characters finally get on the train.

But before they leave the station, the expository beginning of the film is a bit long.  That said, the scenes in the hotel establish a range of characters that provide a richness in the rest of the film.  And Hitchcock uses this variety of Brits for social commentary and satire.  There’s a spineless adulterer who has aspirations of being a judge and his much clearer-thinking mistress.  There’s the comedic, stiff-upper-lip duo of cricket fans who are so ingrained in their British convention that they have no interest what’s happening around them, though when finally aroused from their nose-to-the-ground stance, they capably resist the bad guys.  A gallant, young musicologist, too, rises to the occasion by helping solving the mystery and aid Britain.  Of course, the governess Miss Froy is an understated patriot.  And a British collaborator with the forces of Bandrika takes a moral stand and joins those seeking to save Miss Froy when the evil of the Bandrikan plot becomes apparent.  It’s hard not to see a vague allegory here with the Germanic bad guys pushing around this eclectic set of Brits until the later are roused to successful resistance.

Other aspects of the movie also please.  The dialog is often snappy and witty in the way of dialog in a screwball comedy, and it’s also fun to see this early film as presaging later Hitchcock elements.  Psychology is already an interest here with the idea of hallucination as a result of a blow to the head, and the character of menacing Baroness certainly prefigures future threatening mothers and housekeepers.  There is also a love story wrapped in the thriller, and lots of play with cinematic devices like sound and reversals.  And a cameo by the director.  A lot of Hitchcock is already apparent in 1938.

The Lady Vanishes isn’t the tightest or most compelling of Hitchcock’s work, but it’s fun.  And it certainly hints at what’s to come in Hitchcock’s career.