Margot at the Wedding (2007)

Directed by Noah Baumbach. I was so, so, so resistant to seeing this movie. I thought it was going to be like a mix of a Wes Anderson movie, a Neil Labute movie, that bad book The Emperor's Children, and "You Can Count on Me" (which, paradoxically, I remember loving, so what's my problem?) I just found the idea of watching a bunch of yuppies unload on each other so un-fun. And I guess now that I've seen this and liked it, I should probably watch "The Squid and the Whale" like everybody says I should.

Nicole Kidman (Margot) and Jennifer Jason Leigh (Pauline) are two sisters with a poisonous relationship who should probably stay very far away from each other, but seem unable to do so. Pauline is about to get married to a sorta loserish guy, Malcolm, played by Jack Black, who, although he is far less successful than Margot at his chosen artistic pursuit, is one of the only people in the movie who seems like he would actually be fun to hang out with. Margot is a terrible person, mean to her poor tween son, critical of everybody, including herself, and unable to stop poking her nose in other people's business. Pauline is less objectionable, but I still found myself wondering why she would put up with her sister's obnoxiousness. The women are at the tail end of their sexual desirability, or at least they think of themselves as being there, and that influences their relationships with each other and with men. However, you get the sense that they may have been crazy when they were young as well, which saves the movie from being one which points fingers at addled, high-strung middle-aged women (a vulnerable demographic indeed, and one which I will inhabit within the decade or so, so I'm sensitive).

Overall, the dialogue clicks, there's enough happening without the movie being overloaded with event, and the movie, and the planned wedding, take place on an unnamed island in New England, where the family has an old beach house of the genteelly shabby type. This made me pleasantly homesick.

Escape from LA (1996)

Fifteen years after his triumphal extraction of the American President from the prison-island of Manhattan, Snake Plissken is, as the poster says, BACK. This time, the powers-that-be control all of the United States and exile all undesirables to Los Angeles, which has been cut off from the rest of the country by an apocalyptic earthquake which was predicted by the evil religious President. LA is now an autonomous island (sound familiar?) ruled by freaks, gangs, and prostitutes. A South American instigator named Cuervo Jones (that name is the textual equivalent of the scene in "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars" [2001] when the guy goes to chop into a tin can to impress a girl and chops three of his fingers off instead) has invaded the dream virtual reality-space of the President's daughter Utopia and convinced her to steal an important black briefcase from her dad and meet him in LA with it. Snake is supposed to find the black briefcase and bring it back to the powers-that-be, and he only has half a day to do it in, because they've injected him with some sort of slow-acting virus that will eventually kill him unless he gets the antidote.

Russell delivers every line with a scornful hiss at the end, and there's a scene where he and Peter Fonda surf through the streets of LA, and Cuervo forces him to play a form of elimination basketball in which the penalty for not making enough baskets is death (guess what, Snake beats the system!) It's totally cheesy and delightful, and the end, when Snake decides that he is going to activate the device in the black briefcase and cut off every piece of electronic equipment in the world, thereby destabilizing everything and wrecking both the President's and Cuervo's dreams of control, only made me wish that we could see what happens next.

10,000 BC (2007)

The only good thing to come out of this movie was us. Early.

Chopper (2000)

On the heels of loving the Jesse James movie, I wanted to see "Chopper" all the more, since Andrew Dominik directed them both. I also have a strong affection for Eric Bana, for some reason, so I had been pushing for us to see "Chopper" for a while. Nick finally agreed after some resistance, since he hadn't liked it very much the last time he saw it.

Although I had no reason to think this, I had this impression that there was a motorcycle in this movie, and since I knew the film was Australian and about prison, I pictured sort of a Mad Max scenario: a convict riding around liberating people from prisons in the outback, shooting people. Lots of blood, I thought. I was right about the last part, but not the motorcycle. No motorcycle was involved.

Bana, who seems both taller and fleshier than he was in "Munich" and "Troy" (please, no laughing), is indeed a convict, who earns the name "Chopper" when he gets another convict to cut off the outside edges of his ears so that he will get sent into the prison hospital. Inside and outside of prison, Chopper leverages his charisma and his willingness to be more violent than everybody else, emerging embattled but yet untouchable (in this way, he's like Jesse James, and we kept noticing similarities between the two movies - yet another piece in the "Australian outback = American West" equation). Eventually, he becomes some sort of a media phenom, with DVDs and books produced about his story (apparently this happened in real life too).

There's a scene where Chopper's ally turns on him and shivs him repeatedly in the chest, while Chopper continues to stand up and look at the friend with reproachful eyes, finally stripping off his shirt so that everyone can see the blood pulsing out of all of his stab wounds. He's like a tree whose bark is being ripped off piece by piece. Or Christ. That's what I'll probably remember from the movie, along with the scene when Chopper pulls his flaccid penis out of his pants in order to impress a lady in a bar who's looking his way. Laughing maniacally, he watches as she tries to suppress her obvious interest, attracted as much by his madness as by the dangling member. Probably not Bana's actual banana. But hey.

Gone Baby Gone (2007)

The Casey Affleck-fest continues! This movie was directed by bro Affleck, the other one, what's-his-name, the Garner one. Casey is Patrick Kenzie, a private eye in Dorchester, MA who's called in to investigate a case of a missing four-year-old girl. Twists and turns ensue as Kenzie, his girlfriend/partner Angie, and three cops navigate Dorchester looking for Amanda.

I thought I would not be able to extract the character of Robert Ford out of Casey Affleck, and that I might find him repulsive and a bit frightening forevermore. And while occasionally, when Kenzie is at a loss for words, I expected Bob Ford's stock phrase "I'm sorry you feel that way" come out of his mouth, I mostly was able to accept the transition. The callowness of Ford, the youth and cockiness that made all of the people in "Assassination of Jesse James" want to beat him down on sight, continues in Kenzie, who pisses everyone in one bar off so much that he has to pull a gun on them to get away. But there's a much more likable moral depth there, as well.

The main problem I had with this movie was with the casting of Michelle Monaghan as Affleck's ever-present but silent girlfriend/"partner," Angie, who never does anything but just sit with him while he asks the questions. She is so much prettier than everyone else in this movie that it ruins everything every time the camera lands on her. One character, after realizing that they went to the same high school, asks Angie "Still a bit conceited, I see?" This line is trying to make the willowy, OC-esque girl actually belong to this world in some way, but since she has no back story, no accent, no feeling, no words, it's really hard to see her as a part of it. Affleck is too attractive, as well, but in his Adidas jackets and with his incipient forehead lines, you can kind of see him as a fresh-faced Irish Bostonian about to go to seed. You could, that is, if Michelle's character weren't right next to him the whole time. Together, the two look like they've been cut out of another, prettier, teen-ier movie and inserted into this one.

Apparently some people from Boston were mad that Affleck made them look so ugly. And I'm a little mad that the Afflecks, from Cambridge, claim to speak for Dorchester (am I splitting hairs?) But it's funny that this article, from Slate, which defends Dorchester from Affleck's sometimes ugly portrait, is written by Patrick Keeffe, who I happen to know grew up in Dorchester but then went to my fancy-pants high school alma mater, Milton Academy. How close does somebody have to be to a place in order to defend it or portray it properly? That's one of those koans that will never be answered, but I like what Patrick Keeffe says here: "It's Dorchester by way of Diane Arbus." Yes: there's the same sense of dirty fascination with the goings-on inside those row houses as one gets when looking at Arbus photos. The comparison is particularly apt when the film gets to the point when Affleck enters the boarded-up house where a child molester has kept a seven-year-old boy hostage. Must the child molester have a rounded head with overly slitty eyes, like he's bordering on mongoloidism? Pedophiles aren't a different phenotype, so far as I know.

But anyway. I think the film is saved from charges of exploitation by the ending. Don't read this if you don't want it spoiled. Okay. Kenzie faces a choice: take the child, Amanda, back from the kindly police captain who has kidnapped her with the help of her uncle, and give her back to her slatternly mother; or leave her to grow up a nice, middle-class life. He chooses the former, which enraged me as much as it does Angie, who leaves him for it.

But the way I read it, Kenzie has to choose to give the child back to the mother, because if he chooses the other way, he's basically saying that Helene, the mother, and tangentially, Dorchester itself are inherently toxic and dangerous. He's demonstrating faith in human nature and faith in his community. Although the film leaves you questioning whether Kenzie made the right choice, there's still a sense that in some way, the director is demonstrating his faith in Dorchester as a real, non-sensationalized place, where children don't have to be "lost" permanently.

Michael Clayton (2007)

Directed by Tony Gilroy, this movie got Tilda Swinton an Oscar and I kind of feel like it should have gotten more people involved with it more Oscars. I couldn't understand, before seeing it, how there could be such a thing as a legal thriller that was "quiet," but after viewing, I completely get it. Although the film is "Insider"-esque in its intense portrayal of the power inherent in corporations with lots of money, there's also the compelling moral journey of this Michael Clayton character.

Clayton/Clooney is an outsider in a monied world, sort of a hired legal thug who "fixes" problems that arise for his big-fancy-pants law firm (problems like undocumented nannies, drunken car accidents, etc). When he's asked to "fix" a problem involving his friend Arthur (Tom Wilkinson), a senior lawyer at the firm who's gone off his medication and begun to blather about how the firm is wrong to be defending U-North, a giant pesticide company, against a multi-plaintiff lawsuit, Clayton begins to have second thoughts about his life. The best parts are the ones where he goes to family reunions at shabby suburban houses in upstate NY, or interacts with his cop brother, or has man-to-man talks with his little son (I told Nick that one particular conversation of theirs was one of the only on-screen parent-child sentimentalities I've ever felt moved by).

One problem only—the movie has a weirdly inverted structure—there's an intro, and then a "four days earlier" screen, a la "Alias"—which feels unnecessarily "Memento" and unneeded.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

This move got totally shafted by only getting one Oscar. We both thought it was incredibly beautiful to look at—it won the statute for cinematography—but it was also a sort of brain-bending, quiet, sad human story.

Robert Ford, played by Casey Affleck, joins Jesse James' band of outlaws right at the tail end of their exploits. He's a handsome young man who nobody likes or wants to be around, because he is so insecure that he seems dangerous, like a stretch of quicksand or a bridge held together by string. Affleck's eyes shift around constantly as he tries to ingratiate himself into the gang. Despite his good looks, he's completely unappealing.

Watching Affleck's Ford reminded me of the phenomenon childhood studies scholars talk about in questioning people's reactions to being around young children. They point at the horror that adults feel upon realizing that a particular child seems to be faking cuteness in order to be loved. That moment lays bare all of the assumptions that the adult has had about adult-child relationships and their naturalness and goodness, by exposing the power dynamic that's always present. Like the cute-faking child, Affleck's Robert Ford tries to play the part of the handsome young gunslinger, but the responses of everyone around him show that he is failing. And like that child might, Ford lashes back by becoming more and more angry and confused. He loses his initial hero worship of James, and as he begins to think that James is going to kill him and his brother (played by the awesome Sam Rockwell), he forms the resolve necessary to kill James first.

Meanwhile, Brad Pitt's James is mercurial, likeable at one point, unlikeable at the next, and always in control of every situation. By playing off of Ford's hero worship and insecurity, James creates a situation in which he practically aims Ford's gun at his own head and pulls the trigger.

The barren, muddy old-West landscapes (the movie was actually filmed in Calgary, Edmonton, and Winnipeg) and and the cold, unvarnished frontier interiors make every scene look paradoxically clean and perfectly arranged.

Right At Your Door (2006)

Dir. Chris Gorak. There's a bunch of bombs that go off in LA! They have dirty-ness in them, some undefined disease! (I thought dirty bombs were supposed to have radium in them, or something, but maybe I was wrong?) There's a couple, and the husband stays at home because he's an unemployed musician, and the wife, a real ball-breaker, goes to work in her convertible, and ends up stuck in the middle of the melee. When she comes back to the house, the husband has already sealed it up with plastic and lots of duct tape, like Tom Ridge told him to do, and he refuses to let her in. I thought that a lot of the movie was supposed to involve them debating their relationship and its flaws, but there's really only a second or two when they actually do that. Mostly they're crying and trying to figure out what to do.

The movie's major flaw is that it doesn't have enough budget to show the destruction of LA in proper apocalyptic style. Instead of real visions of destruction, we get exposition about the whole scene from media outlets or from the wife ("I went to the hospital! They weren't letting anyone in and people were jumping into the windows from parking lots nearby!" Nick said, "That would be really cool, if you showed it!") The "destruction" that's on this poster never actually shows up. Instead there are a couple of shots from the couple's house toward the street of what looks like smoke from a smoke bomb set off by a production assistant a couple streets over.

This wouldn't matter as much if there weren't major holes in the plot, like when you find out at the end that the husband is the one who's actually screwed because he sealed himself into the house with a particularly deadly strain of the virus—yet, he hasn't been at all sick, while the wife, who's been outside the whole time, has been coughing to beat the band.

I still teared up when she talked on the phone to her brother, though, but mostly because I have been playing phone tag with my own brother for two months and I miss him.