By Ray Pride

2011 held the release of a bruised, suggestive, over-the-top, under-the-radar, potential narrative masterpiece about the sensations and emotions of 9/11: Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret.” Depicting the fragmented consciousness of a seventeen-year-old girl coming to intellectual and emotional life in Manhattan in 2005, it worked as a suitable voice for the times after that fateful day.

In the luxuriantly appointed “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, the voice chosen to exert a similar effort is that of an eleven-year-old boy, Oskar Schell, his mind also anxious with multitudes, but head-on. The literary conceit of Foer’s admittedly precious narrator comes across on screen as something else: a careening depiction of the life of the mind of a small madman and a protracted attempt at wreaking profane sentimentality from the culturally shared emotions of those events. (Plot details are revealed in the remainder of this review.) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A simple scrim, lightly dancing, a sheer of muslin, ripples across the screen at an acute angle, like a movie screen, but translucent, in the briefest instance of prestidigitation introducing the 3D element to Wim Wenders’ “Pina,” a film for his late friend, dance choreographer Pina Bausch. In its own fashion, it’s as revolutionary a way of introducing the rare, effective stereoscopic effect as James Cameron’s slow reveal of the far reaches of the highly active spaceship in the opening shot of “Avatar.” Wenders was extremely articulate about the low-budget experimentation that led to the form of “Pina” in a keynote address to June 2011′s Toronto International Stereoscopic 3D Conference, which is worth finding on his website.  Read the rest of this entry »

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The great strength of Jennifer Fox’s documentaries is her directness, and considering that her best-known work, “Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman,” is longitudinal in the extreme, a six-hour survey of her romantic life and the lives of women she meets across three years, from the ages of forty-two to forty-five, and her “My Reincarnation” (2010) encompasses twenty years of experience, it’s certainly a virtue. Read the rest of this entry »

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A lifelong master of investigating the dramatic potential of confined spaces and encroaching claustrophobia, the seventy-eight-year-old Roman Polanski prepared his adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s boulevard comedy-cum-sketch “God of Carnage” during his confinement to his Swiss chalet while resisting deportation to California. The result, “Carnage,” is confined to a single apartment in Brooklyn, patterned within a Restoration Hardware-inch of its life by veteran production designer Dean Tavoularis (“Bonnie & Clyde,” “The Godfather: Part II,” “One from the Heart,” “Apocalypse Now,” “Zabriskie Point”). Even on a small screen, every element is pointed, as you’d hope from a Polanski picture. Take even the characteristic Brooklyn fireplace plopped at one end of the living room, whether ersatz or even Carrera marble, it’s a modest arch not known for triumph, but simplest hominess. The accuracy of each element as the camera roams the rooms is devastating, as is the hard accumulation of each character’s agitated—yet keenly right—posture and gestures. They, the entire quartet, are dismal shits, quarrelers whose life rises above the script’s homiletic disdain by some heavy lifting by each actor. Read the rest of this entry »

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Seven shorts from the 2011 edition of the Sundance Film Festival make it down the slopes via The Sundance Institute Art House Project, including one of my favorite shorts I saw last year. (The best short I saw from Sundance, David Lowery’s tale-spinning bedtime story of the American empire, “Pioneer,” isn’t in this selection, but it elevates issue 14 of DVD “magazine” Wholpin.) Ruben Östlund’s Swedish “Incident by a Bank” (12m) is a single-take reconstruction of a failed bank robbery in Stockholm in 2006, the camera taking a Altman-cum-Asperger’s route around the story’s particulars, and it only gets better by the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

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Actors long to play the bad guys, and even better, to find the “privileged moments” that define some kind of “humanity” or poetic truth beneath, beyond their essential callousness. Working from a screenplay by British savor-of-the-month Abi Morgan (“Shame”), “Mamma Mia!” director Phyllida Lloyd works across the scrim of the advanced mental failings of elderly Margaret Thatcher to create an acting showcase for the great Meryl Streep. The great Meryl Streep—in the conflicted, confounding, sometimes risible “The Iron Lady.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Synopsis is the devil, but sometimes the devil is in the details. Here’s Tribeca Film’s synopsis of writer-director-actor-producer Edward Burns’ microbudget romantic comedy and fan letter to New York’s upscale Tribeca neighborhood, “Newlyweds”: “Buzzy (Edward Burns) and Katie (Caitlin FitzGerald) are a newly married couple living a seemingly conflict-free life. But when Buzzy’s damaged and impulsive half-sister Linda (Kerry Bishé) arrives at their doorstep expecting to stay for an indefinite period in their Tribeca loft, her antics threaten to disrupt the couple’s commitment to an ‘easy’ marriage.” Sounds like any romantic comedy, but it’s more like Woody Allen on a designer shoestring. Read the rest of this entry »

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When the dream to become an astronaut can be attained only by having already become a decamillionaire… That’s the world we live on, and some of us hope to rocket from. Videogame designer Richard Garriott’s father was an astronaut, but his own hopes were dashed when he developed nearsightedness in childhood. (Garriott was one of the founders of MMORPGs, or “Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games.”) But what if you had the money in advancing years to found a company—”Space Adventures”—and could scrawl your name onto a $30 million check to buy your way onto Russia’s Soyuz and the International Space Station? Read the rest of this entry »