tongue-tied lightning

Broken Embraces (Almodovar, 2009)

Hell’s Hinges (Swickard, 1916)

Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich, 1955)

Love Exposure (Sono, 2009)

Odd Man Out (Reed, 1948)

Earlier this year, as I was tidying up my top ten of 2008, I considered writing an essay on the films of Kelly Reichardt and Ramin Bahrani.  I played around with it a bit but couldn’t come up with anything I was really satisfied with.  Since then A.O. Scott has penned an article on ‘Neo-Neorealism’ (I was going to title mine ‘A New American Realism’) and Roger Ebert has called Ramin Bahrani ‘the new great American director.’  So maybe it appears I’m hitching my apple wagon to their stars, but that’s beside the point.  As someone who watches around 250 films for the first time each year, the vast majority of them disappear from my memory without a trace.  However, even Man Push Cart, which I wasn’t sure I liked after my first viewing, stuck with me, improved in my mind over time, and colored my perception of the world.  That is something special.

It was with Chop Shop that Ramin Bahrani went from someone I was interested in to someone I admired.  It may have just been my difference in age, but it connected with me in a way Man Push Cart didn’t.  Both films are similar in both style and substance, utilizing verite camerawork and unprofessional actors to create a documentary feel, focusing on the Sisyphean efforts of the impoverished to maintain happiness and optimism in a world seemingly tilted against them.  The difference, I believe, lies in the main characters.  Ale is joyful and infectious whereas Ahmad comes off as more than a little cold.  It’s still a wonderfully assured debut, but in each of Bahrani’s films the performances have improved, and so, perhaps coincidentally, have the films.

Which brings us to Goodbye Solo.  It is undeniably a Ramin Bahrani film, but in many ways serves as a departure from his first two films.  We’re not in New York anymore, and while Solo is still an immigrant and far from wealthy, he is a step up the ladder from Ahmad and Ale, but those are just cosmetic differences. Solo features professional actors in the leading roles and makes use of conventional filmmaking devices like shot/reverse shot.  There are also thematic differences, here instead of a man vs. society, Bahrani is examining the relationship between two men.  And perhaps most startlingly, there is the presence of a linear plot.

Given the lyrical beauty of Chop Shop, it would be possible to view some of these developments as negatives, but as the last 15 minutes of Goodbye Solo prove, Bahrani has not lost his knack for poetry.  Far from ’selling out’ (as the trailer may have suggested) Goodbye Solo is Bahrani being Bahrani, but  adding some new tricks to his bag.  He still utilizes months of rehearsal (for Bahrani rehearsal involves two actors going out for ice cream, or an actor working the job his character will have) and absurd numbers of takes to capture the naturalistic feel present in his earlier films.  The more conventional additions to Solo only benefit the film, flourishes highlighting what is already present.

Bahrani’s next film is purported to be a Western set in the 19th century, an even more dramatic departure (coincidentally Kelly Reichardt has revealed her next project to be a Western as well).  With Chop Shop he made one of the best films of 2008, and with Goodbye Solo he has one-upped himself and made one of the best films of 2009.  It’s been about three years since I saw Man Push Cart and in that time Ramin Bahrani has proved himself to be, if not the “new great American director,” one of the most interesting young filmmakers working in an era seemingly dominated by the giants of the 90s.

I saw so many good films in August that narrowing it down to just five was actually a bit tricky.  Anyhow, here they are.

Christmas in July (1940, Preston Sturges)

Goodbye Solo (2009, Ramin Bahrani)

Hail the Conquering Hero (1944, Preston Sturges)

Inglourious Basterds (2009, Quentin Tarantino)

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955, Ingmar Bergman)

From the very first scene of The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow makes it abundantly clear that anything can happen.  This is a great choice and lends the subsequent bomb-disarming and battle scenes an air of gravitas absent from most war films.  To make a trite comparison, watching a John Wayne film, you are fairly certain The Duke isn’t going to die in battle, which robs the battle scenes of the suspense they shoud possess.  Similarly, you are positive Tom Hanks isn’t going to die storming Normandy.   This is not a problem in Bigelow’s film.   The scenes are so well choreographed and edited they create a sense of suspense that would make Hitchcock proud, and indeed, the master’s Bomb Theory is realized quite literally.  I say this with no basis for comparison in reality, but never before has a war film felt so real to me.

The film centers around Jeremy Renner, who is the team leader of a three man bomb-disarming squad.  The film’s epigraph states “war is a drug” and it becomes clear early on that Renner’s character sees it as such.  Bigelow does a fantastic job of making the audience complicit in his addiction.   Certainly the adrenaline rush he gets from disarming bombs is similar to the feelings we get watching horror or action films, and as each scene builds upon the suspense built up in the last this becomes more and more apparent.

The film is not perfect.  While I enjoyed the scenes between missions that gave depth to Renner’s character, particularly a few involing an Iraqi boy selling pirated DVDs, the story arc of the Sgt. Eldrige character seemed a bit too… easy?  He certainly never breaks out of a character type present in many war films.  And while Anthony Mackie turns in a wonderful performance, aside from one telling scene we are never given much insight into his thought processes, and even then it is to provide contrast to Renner’s character.

There is a wonderful shot towards the end, of Renner, home from war, grocery shopping with his wife.  Standing in the cereal aisle, he is overwhelmed by it and we realize he hasn’t had to make a choice like this in over a year, never has he had so many options and never have they had littler effect on his life.  This leads to the conclusion of the film that is as tragic as it is inevitable.

Five Graves to Cairo (Billy Wilder, 1943)

In The Loop (Armando Iannucci, 2009)

Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)

My Dinner With Andre (Louis Malle, 1981)

On The Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954)

Nearly two hours into Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince I thought I was watching the best Harry Potter film yet.  The pacing felt very natural to me, never rushing anything and spending time with the characters.  David Yates has kicked his directing up a notch, there were a few shot compositions I really loved.  It’s funny, touching and has a sense of peril greater than anything in the previous installments.  Unfortunately, the last half hour abandons several of these traits leading to a climax that feels rushed, incomplete and unsatisfying.

I’m quite sure had I not read the books I would’ve had no idea what was going on at that point.  The horcruxes are not explained very well, and the film not explaining Dumbledore’s journeys and cutting out much of Tom Riddle’s backstory made the cave scene seem abrupt and a bit out of left field.  For it being the title of the film the Half-Blood Prince plotline is given very little weight and resolved in a sentence.   The biggest change, and the one that confused me the most is that Harry is mobile during the final scene, in the book he was paralyzed and thus his inaction was comprehensible.

There is still alot to love here.  It’s been great watching the actors and actresses grow up in these roles, and while the adult cast has always been stellar there have been some weak spots amongst the students.  Rupert Grint and Tom Felton are two who irked me in earlier installments, but both were particularly impressive this time around.   I really enjoyed Helena Bonham Carter in her first scene and Jim Broadbent is a wonderful addition to the cast.

Alot of the first two hours focuses on relationships and these scenes were excellent.  Lots of humor, mostly involving Ron, naturally.  The dynamics of the Ron/Hermione relationship and the Harry/Ginny relationship were finely tuned and felt very real to me.  These were my favorite moments of the film, the humor, the snogging, the intentional and unintentional intoxications.

I liked the way many of the action sequences were shot like a horror film.  I’m thinking particularly of the necklace scene and the fight in the wheatfield outside the Weasley’s house, though there were more.  The latter scene was particularly effective even though it ended up being more or less inconsequential, but it evoked a greater feeling of terror than either the cave scene or the attack on Hogwarts.

It’s hard to coalesce my feelings as I was greatly enjoying most of it, and then it has such an unsatisfying end.  I really loved the subtle way the director got across Malfoy attempting to fine tune his vanishing cabinet, but then there are scenes like when the student body point their wands to the sky over a dramatic bit of score.   It has many of my favorite scenes in the entire series, but is ultimately a disappointing film.