By Ray Pride

Sunday night pitted two powerful action directors in what seems the journalists’ favorite subject of the season: what’s the difference between a movie made by a man and a movie made by a woman?

Wrathful winter rain fell on Hollywood as James Cameron won Golden Globes for the number two highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, “Avatar,” and he once more rolled out his public persona as King Of The World Of Self-Infatuated Windbags. (His speech surely shared the same writer as the one credited for dialogue in “Avatar.”) His key competition was another tall director, a woman named Kathryn Bigelow, whose formal control in “The Hurt Locker” approaches both mathematics and poetry while functioning as action film and critique of the action film, as embrace of masculine manias while suggesting they are both mysterious and eternal. The two were once married: Bigelow captures one central figure’s physicality, all swagger and smirk, and Cameron creates another of his mixed-message “chick flicks,” an eco-fable part “Aliens,” part “My Little Blue Flying Pony.” Where’s the gender divide there?

In the advance toward the Oscars on March 7, there’ll be even more journalistic comparison-and-contrast. The binary aggravations will intensify, neglecting to embrace the humanity of filmmaking, of faces and fears and hopes. I found myself reaching for B. Ruby Rich’s essential “Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement,” but what I found on the epigraph page was all I needed, a quotation from French cine-essayist Chris Marker: “Who remembers all that? History throws its empty bottles out the window.”

With “35 Shots of Rum” (35 Rhums), French filmmaker Claire Denis throws a lot of things out the window, including her own fascination with the weaknesses of men and women, to embrace a story about happiness, about community and small joys. There are traits you can identify in a director’s style and themes. But are they quintessentially matters of gender or simply of temperament? Read the rest of this entry »

Top 5 U.S. Films
“The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow
“The Limits of Control,” Jim Jarmusch
“A Serious Man,” Joel and Ethan Coen
“Two Lovers,” James Gray
“The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” Wes Anderson
—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Films
“Summer Hours,” Olivier Assayas
“The Headless Woman,” Lucrecia Martel
“35 Shots of Rum,” Claire Denis
“You, the Living,” Roy Andersson
“Night and Day,” Hong Sang-soo
—Ray Pride Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

1. “In the Mood for Love,” Wong Kar-Wai, 2000
Repetition, proximity, music, exchange of glances. Looks of desire, clouds, rain. Unconsummated romance = cinema.

2. “Yi Yi,” Edward Yang, 2000
Perfection. It’s taken for granted because it seems so simple, so easy, so natural. Family as lovingly detailed soap opera; at just under three hours, the late Taiwanese master made a multigenerational epic worthy of a novel. And, strangely befitting his background in computer science, he knew precisely where to place the camera for the most dynamic effect.

3. “Before Sunset,” Richard Linklater, 2004
Linklater knows there’s grandeur in the smallest of shared, skittery moments. This couple that never was, with dreamy memories of their one-night stand, are different people now, older, oft-disappointed, yet despite underlying melancholy, still straining for a moment of genuine contact. Read the rest of this entry »

Top 5 Domestic Films

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“Che,” Steven Soderbergh

“Paranoid Park,” Gus Van Sant

“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme

“Ballast,” Lance Hammer

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Films

“Man on Wire,” James Marsh

“Reprise,” Joachim Trier

“Happy-Go-Lucky,” Mike Leigh

“Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle

“A Christmas Tale,” Arnaud Desplechin

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Films

“Slumdog Millionaire,” Danny Boyle

“Ballast,” Lance Hammer

“Hunger,” Steve McQueen

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“In The City of Sylvia,” Jose Luis Guerin

—Bill Stamets

Top 5 Films

“Milk,” Gus Vant Sant

“The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan

“Man on Wire,” James Marsh

“Let the Right One In,” Tomas Alfredson

“Rachel Getting Married,” Jonathan Demme

—Tom Lynch

Top 5 Performances – Female

Sally Hawkins, “Happy-Go-Lucky”

Melissa Leo, “Frozen River”

Kristin Scott Thomas, “I’ve Loved You So Long”

Kate Winslet, “Revolutionary Road”

Kat Dennings, “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Performances – Male

Benicio Del Toro, “Che”

Sean Penn, “Milk”

Mathieu Amalric, “A Christmas Tale”

Michel Blanc, “The Witnesses”

Ben Kingsley, “Elegy”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Supporting Performances – Female

Ann Savage, “My Winnipeg”

Nurgul Yesilcay, “The Edge of Heaven”

Viola Davis, “Doubt”

Penelope Cruz, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”

Zoe Kazan, “Revolutionary Road”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Supporting Performances – Male

Michael Shannon, “Revolutionary Road,” “Shotgun Stories”

Danny McBride, “Pineapple Express”

Richard Dreyfuss, “W.”

Toby Jones, “W.”

Anil Kapoor, “Slumdog Millionaire”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Directors

Mike Leigh, “Happy-Go-Lucky”

Joachim Trier, “Reprise”

Danny Boyle, “Slumdog Millionaire”

Tomas Alfredson, “Let the Right One In”

James Marsh, “Man on Wire”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Screenplays

Fatih Akin, “The Edge Of Heaven”

Joachim Trier and Eskil Vogt, “Reprise”

Simon Beaufoy, “Slumdog Millionaire”

Charlie Kaufman, “Synecdoche, New York”

Martin McDonagh, “In Bruges”

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Domestic Documentaries

“Encounters at the End of the World,” Werner Herzog

“The Order of Myths,” Margaret Brown

“At The Death House Door,” Steve James, Peter Gilbert

“The Unforeseen,” Laura Dunn

“Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father,” Kurt Kuenne

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Foreign Documentaries

“Man On Wire,” James Marsh

“Of Time and the City,” Terence Davies

“Waltz With Bashir,” Ari Folman

“Up the Yangtze,” Yung Chang

“Young@Heart,” Stephen Walker

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Follies

“Speed Racer,” The Wachowski brothers

“The Fall,” Tarsem

“Adam Resurrected,” Paul Schrader

“Australia,” Baz Luhrmann

“My Blueberry Nights,” Wong Kar-wai

—Ray Pride

Top 5 Films You Can’t See Yet

“24 City,” Jia Zhang-Ke

“35 Shots Of Rum,” Claire Denis

“The English Surgeon,” Geoffrey Smith

“Liverpool,” Lisandro Alonso

“Voy a Explotar (I’m Going to Explode),” Gerardo Naranjo

—Ray Pride

 

RECOMMENDED
“Boy A” is an overly tidy but keeningly bleak tragedy about modern society’s disbelief in the possibility of redemption. Tried as a child as a participant in a terrible crime, John Crowley’s “Boy A” is now 24, re-christened Jack (Andrew Garfield) after fourteen years in stir. Garfield’s gangly but still as avid and quick to hurt and love as a child. He’s all shy innocence amid a welter of crushing feelings of guilt. (He looks like the actor Jeremy Davies crossed with Paul Thomas Anderson and twice as fidgety.) Jack’s caseworker, Terry (Peter Mullan, bearing the weight of his usual stolid Scots manliness) is masculinity, confidence, rugged handsomeness. (This too, shall crack.) Beautifully shot by Rob Hardy and edited by Lucia Zuchetti ( editor of “The Queen,” as well as most of Lynn Ramsay’s features and shorts), it’s a measured eyeful against the scattered argy-bargy of Crowley’s earlier “Intermission” (2003). When Jack is first released, his face looks out and up at the world from the passenger side of a moving car: reflected against it, the elongated midriff of Kate Moss in an advert, astride a bearskin rug. Crowley makes extensive use of longer lenses and shallow focus. Decors confine: as Jack cowers beneath a duvet, its grid pattern holds him fast to ground. You could even make a case for how Jack and Terry’s jacket collars rhyme: this is a picture designed within a breath of its life. However gorgeous it is, Crowley’s cool pictorialism works somehow against Jack’s anxious, rabbity manner. (The few “Starman”-type “what’s that” moments pass quietly.) You can’t fault a director who nods in a mirror-walled disco spaz-out toward the jaw-dropping ending (down to the character’s two-tone shoes) of Claire Denis’ “Beau Travail,” another study of masculinity put to pasture. Jack’s attic garret serves the plot in late turns, but the simplified interiors of all the characters’ abodes are less Bresson than Alan Cavalier (“Therese”): we live in shafts of light, why do we keep walking around them? The story accelerates as we know more of the past and move toward an uncertain, yet surely unpleasant future. Who would tell the world this man does not deserve a second chance? Someone equally as quick to hurt and love, you might venture. The sound design is stellar, too, with one burst of the squeal of train to track, from wheel to steel rail, stinging, simple counterpoint to the moment. A woman’s gift of an empty wallet, ready to be filled with fortune, future and identity is so on the nose that you take a breath and then admire only the carpentry of the script rather than the hard emotions that ought to well up. Still, the many moments where the sensation of the earth collapsing beneath your feet are physicalized by Crowley and Hardy are impressive. However schematic “Boy A” may be made at times, its lack of sanguinity about the modern world is cold, discomforting and ultimately affecting. 100m. (Ray Pride)