Abiding Heart

CRAZY HEART

There's been some "Oscar buzz" (as we in the industry call it) about Jeff Bridges's performance in Crazy Heart. It's a good film, and he's certainly good in it, but if he wins it would be one of those instances of a performance award being de facto a lifetime-achievement award. I, for one, would never begrudge him that, though.

And someone (Tom, maybe) said that Crazy Heart pretty much looked like a country-music version of The Wrestler. Having now seen it, that's actually not that far off: a performer past his prime trying to get his life—both professional and personal—back together, an estranged child, a possibly redemptive love interest. That said, The Wrestler is the better film.

It's pretty apparent, though, that first-time writer and director Scott Cooper is a big fan of at least one other installment in Bridges's filmography. Let's look at the evidence:

- Our protagonist sits at the bar in a bowling alley, with the lanes visible behind him over his shoulders.

- He fishes his sunglasses out of a less-than-sanitary receptacle.

- He collapses in an intoxicated stupor, with the camera right under his face looking up, in a room darker than a steer's tuckus on a moonless night.

- He meets an Hispanic guy named Jesús.

On one level, they were a bit too clever in an eye-winking kind of way, taking me out of the drama and pathos the film was trying to convey. On another level, however, it was fun spotting them.

A Singular Film

A SINGLE MAN

The start of the spring semester, a less-than-stellar late-fall, early-winter film season, preparing for the beginning of Lost's final season, revisiting Arrested Development, and my recent acquisition of Modern Warfare 2 have all conspired to keep me from posting the last few weeks. But it's merely neglected, not forgotten. So to keep the flame of online amateur film discussion alive (emphasis on the "amateur"), I'll say a few words about one of the better films to come out of this season that I've seen, A Single Man (trailer).

First off, I don't want the post title to give the wrong impression. It makes it sound like I thought the film was the end-all, be-all cinematic event, a life-changing experience through the medium of the motion picture. It was quite good, but it's "singular" only in the sense that it was the first not-so-bad title I thought of after about ten seconds' thought. Well, there goes my journalistic integrity.

On to the film itself. Set in 1962 at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, it depicts a day in the life of George Falconer (Colin Firth), a gay English expat teaching literature at a Los Angeles university. To his disillusion with the political condition of America and the world and at the denseness and indifference of most of his student is added his despair after learning that his longtime lover (Matthew Goode) has died in a car accident. He prepares to commit suicide—strangely enough, not only are these preparations played for laughs, but this actually works—but comes across elements of his life that seem to whittle away at his despair: his old friend from London, Charley (Julianne Moore; funny hearing her and Goode, whose character's American, trade accents), a young Spanish hustler (Jon Kortajarena), a handsome, charming, and intelligent student (Nicholas Hoult, the boy from About a Boy), and other small, simple pleasures like a friendly child from the neighborhood and a dog of his favorite breed. Though the initial premise sounds pretty depressing, the film ends up being surprisingly joyful and life-affirming.

The film largely depends on Firth's performance, since he's in every single scene as far as I can remember, and he proves himself to be more than up to the task. Over the course of the film we see the layers that George builds around himself to cope with being both a gay man in 1962 and a bereaved lover slowly stripped away, and Firth accomplishes this so subtly and convincingly you hardly even see it happening until you realize that the man at the end of the film is so different from the one at the beginning. Though I've been aware of Firth for a while, I think the only other leading role I've seen of his was in 2003's Girl with a Pearl Earring. (I never saw the Pride and Prejudice mini-series that brought him to fame, The Importance of Being Earnest, or Love Actually, I don't even remember him in The English Patient or Shakespeare in Love, and through some inexplicable, egregious oversight I haven't seen either of the Bridget Jones films or Mamma Mia!) But I've seen him turn up here and there, and A Single Man makes me really look forward to seeing more of him (though hopefully not sharing the screen with Renée Zellweger).

I was shocked to learn that this was Tom Ford's first film. It's remarkably confident in its patience, simplicity, and delicacy. Even its visual gimmicks, which one often finds in first-time directors eager to make their mark—in this case, the brightening of the film's otherwise faded colors whenever something stirs George's emotions—are subtle and unobrusive. The photography and composition are exquisite; I could see some people being turned off by its being a bit too perfect, like a feature-length Ralph Lauren ad (which makes some sense, given that Ford was head of Gucci), but, as I've said before, I'm a sucker for a pretty movie. Both the fantastic aesthetics of the film and Ford's deft handling of the story, themes, and characters makes me very hopeful that his second career will be as successful as his first in fashion.

AVATAR3D

AVATAR

Actually, the post title is just what was printed on my movie ticket, since I saw it in 3-D. But it also looks like I'm calling Avatar retarded. See what I did there? Mine is a wit for the ages.

To put it succinctly, I thought Avatar was an alright two and a half hours at the movies, an entertaining diversion, but—except where the visual effects and 3-D are concerned—nothing more. The story is just a retread of familiar (often painfully so) action/adventure beats from the '80s and '90s, in a setting taken out of Dune, Dances with Wolves, FernGully, The Last Samurai, etc. (i.e., an outsider is taken in by his "barbaric" enemies, is taught their ways, goes native, and leads them in battle against the world he's left behind). In terms of story and characters, we've seen it all a thousand times before, and in many cases much better. The story's predictable and unimaginative (some elements seem taken directly from Cameron's own films, like Ribisi's corporate scuzball basically being Burke from Aliens), the characters are one-dimensional (granted, a few, like Weaver's character, occasionally achieve two whole dimensions), and a good deal of the dialogue is so bad I would've been embarrassed to write it. On top of it all is a voiceover that removes any opportunity for thought, much less ambiguity, by explicitly stating everything that Jake thinks or feels. (If Star Wars—like Avatar a piece of popcorn entertainment but much better executed—had done that, we would've heard Luke thinking, "I knew I should leave Tatooine when I saw my aunt and uncle's charred bodies," "I was really upset when Vader killed Ben," etc.)

(Over at CHUD, Devin Faraci discusses a version of the story that Cameron wrote as a "scriptment" around 1995 called "Project 880," that has some pretty interesting differences from the film we got. He goes into some detail, so it's definitely worth checking out.)

Avatar's main attraction is its visual effects, and in that department it really is remarkable. The scenery porn is spectacular, with floating mountains, a variety of bizarre and beautiful flora and fauna, and lots of soaring through the sky and swinging from tree branches. The realism achieved in rendering the Na'vi is also a big step forward, especially since their faces are human enough that they're really skirting the edge of the uncanny valley; while they still have a ways to go in giving CG objects a real sense of volume and weight, the work in convincingly conveying facial expressions and emotions outdoes even Peter Jackson's Gollum (both were by Weta).

The area where I was especially impressed was Avatar's use of 3-D. Up to now I've been very skeptical of 3-D as anything more than a gimmick; some uses of it (Up) have been better than others (My Blood Valentine), but it's always just been a fad that waxes and wanes in popularity (first in the '50s, again in the '80s, and again today) without really adding any more to the medium than did Smell-O-Vision or Percepto. What Avatar achieves, however, is 3-D with a real sense of depth and space, not just some flat images at different distances from the audience like in a View-Master, or a series of money shots of things lunging at them. The fact that after the first ten or fifteen minutes I mostly stopped being aware of it, rather than constantly being made aware of it, was really surprising and speaks volumes about the sense of immersion that it created. 3-D will never make the kind of impact on cinema that sound or color did, and sadly I doubt that many future 3-D filmmakers will give it as much effort and care as Cameron did, but Avatar has brought me around on the potential of 3-D genuinely to add to the filmgoing experience.