The first film is Drive, and this one came out all the way back in September. If you aren’t familiar with it, and judging by the box office that might be a distinct possibility, this was one of the many Ryan Gosling starrers that came out this year about, a stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway man and gets pulled into a gangster plot. Without a doubt, this is my favorite film of the year so far. Nicolas Winding Refn is a masterful director, and he created one of the few films that deserves to be called “Hitchcockian.” He uses the camera is such beautiful ways, and the offbeat surreal quality is just so mesmerizing. Most of the performances are rather quiet, but engaging nonetheless, particularly from Albert Brooks playing against type as a villain, and Carey Mulligan in a fantastic role as a “supporting wife” kind of character with layers of complexity. I loved pretty much every frame of this film: it is an exercise in cool in cinema. This film was a godsend for me, especially coming off the absolutely abysmal summer. It was dark and brooding, but it was also fun and an incredible joy to sit through. I can’t recommend it highly enough.The other film that really captured me this year is one with even less of a profile than Drive. It’s a little movie called Weekend, not to be confused with Godard’s 1967 film. This one is a gay romance film, set in London, about two men who meet on a one night stand then take the next few hours to decide whether or not they will attempt to continue a relationship or break it off as one moves to the United States for two years. What struck me so profoundly about this film is that it gets the relationship just right. There’s elements in this relationship that draws parallels to the tribulations of heterosexual ones, thus making the connection that people involved in romances, no matter who they are, face the same problems. However, it also adds flashes of issues that would only pertain to a gay relationship, and that’s something that’s very rare in most films dealing with this subject matter.
The movie itself is simply wonderful. Writer-director Andrew Haigh has a wonderful sense of the world and the characters, and he adopts a real fly-on-the-wall style that brings you into real intimacy with the characters. The performances here, too, are marvelous. The two men are played by newcomers Tom Cullen and Chris New, and they bring an incredible amount of joy and sadness to their roles. This is a tender, heartbreaking romance that is most certainly going to be on my list for the top films of the year.After that, there’s another group of movies that I found were pretty good when I saw them, but didn’t do quite enough for me to become overly excited. The best of that group is probably 50/50. If there’s any reason at all to like the film, it is because of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s performance. He’s good in pretty much everything he’s in (except G.I. Joe), and here he’s able to realize the sad journey this character goes through. He’s terrific in the film, and so is Anjelica Huston as the overbearing mother with a few sad secrets of her own. Some characters get shortchanged and there’s oddly not a real sense of resolution either in the screenplay, but this is the first film of the year to make me cry, which should mean something.
Filling out this tier are probably Moneyball and, oddly enough, Kevin Smith’s Red State. I was a bit skeptical about the former, but I wanted to see what Bennett Miller could do after his impressive debut with Capote. I thought Miller did a great job at creating an engaging and entertaining “inside baseball” story that I was captivated by. The script by two great writers, Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zallian, is also great. As for Smith’s film, it’s certainly not going to get nominated for anything, but I’m a big fan of Smith as an entertainer, and everytime I watch his latest film I do get pulled into the world, particularly because of the menacing and fantastic performance from Michael Parks as the villainous preacher. It probably won’t be in the very top, but as of now it is standing shoulders above many others.
The rest of the films I saw over these last two months have ranged from simply good to mediocre at best. Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous is a nice conspiracy thriller that suffers from too many third act twists, Martha Marcy May Marlene has a terrific breakout performance from Elizabeth Olsen, but the direction of the film takes on a monotonous and dull tone after a while, Margin Call has some good moments of writing and acting, but it’s a bit stale and can’t make the finish line, and Melancholia is a Lars von Trier film I did like, but the second half had to make up for a whiney and passive-aggressive first half.So that pretty much sums up what I’ve been doing for these few weeks. I’ll try to update this as much as I can (tomorrow I’ll be seeing J. Edgar), and hopefully as I near the end of phase one of my college term, things will calm down a bit just in time for the holiday season to really get started. Until then, it’s just surviving and seeing as much as I can.
