Busting ghosts in ‘Albert Nobbs,’ ‘Woman in Black’ and ‘W.E.’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 7:40 PM - 0 Comments

Glenn Close (left) and Mia Wasikowska in 'Albert Nobbs'

We have three period films opening this week, all written or co-written by women, directed by men, and all about tormented folks in what we used to call the British Isles. Two of them, Albert Nobbs and The Woman in Black, are both adapted from stories that originated in 1982; both take place in dour climes of the Victorian era; and both feature Janet McTeer in supporting roles. What all those coincidences mean, I have no idea.  W.E.,  as in Wallis Simpson, is unlike anything else. It shuttles between the 1930s and the present—but for all intents and purposes it’s set in the thoroughly post-modern mind of Madonna, its self-possessed writer-director. All three films, meanwhile, feature bold attempts at transformation: Glenn Close playing a man, Daniel Radcliffe not playing Harry Potter, and Madonna playing at being an auteur.

Glenn Close has a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her uncanny performance in the title role of Albert Nobbs, as a woman who disguises herself as a man to work as a hotel butler in 19th-centry Dublin. For Close, Nobbs has been brewing as a passion project ever since she starred in a 1982 stage version of the story. And her command of the role is so complete it’s creepy. Close is mesmerizing as Nobbs, a character who is so fastidiously repressed he/she is like a ghostly apparition on screen, even more haunting than the supernatural spectre that stalks Daniel Ratcliffe in The Woman in Black. The role is not about cross-dressing so much as annihilating identity. Nobbs is like an asexual alien; a visitor from the same austere planet that brought us Edward Scissorhands and any number of characters played by Tilda Swinton. She’s not the only cross-dresser in the movie. Janet McTeer portrays a robust lesbian who masquerades as a married man, an example that inspires Nobbs to embark on a deluded courtship, hoping to marry a capricious young maid (Mia Wasikowska) and invest her life savings into a mom-and-pop tobacco shop. Continue…

Men and beasts in ‘The Grey’ and ‘Tyrranosaur’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 2:35 PM - 0 Comments

Liam Neeson in 'The Grey'

There’s a fine line between man and beast. That’s the gist of two very different survival dramas about savagery and the human condition, both opening this weekend. In The Grey, a harrowing but preposterous thriller, Liam Neeson stars as the alpha male among a group of plane crash survivors who are stalked by ferocious man-eating wolves. In Tyrranosaur, an exceptionally grim kitchen-sink drama from Britain, Peter Mullan stars as a mean drunk who beats his dog to death in the opening minutes; things go downhill from there.

These movies belong to different genres, but both are what you could call ordeal dramas. Although I would hesitate to recommend either, each has its merits.

The Grey was shot in the snowy wilds of Smithers, B.C., so as a landscape survival saga it offers some rugged wintry vistas (just what we need in January). And as a visceral Survivorman who is doing a lot of his stunts and stuck in the cold without a decent pair of gloves, Neeson is a compelling physical presence, surviving both the elements and a relentlessly dumb script.

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Newsmakers: January 19 – 26, 2012

By Ken MacQueen and Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Thony Belizaire/AFP/Getty Images

Canada versus Iran at the Oscars

For the second year in a row, a Quebec movie based on an immigrant-themed play scored an Oscar nod for Best Foreign Language Film. Last year it was Incendies; this year it’s Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar, about an Algerian refugee who takes over a Montreal classroom from a teacher who has committed suicide. Falardeau is competing with the Holocaust drama In Darkness, a Canadian co-production by Poland’s Agnieszka Holland. But Falardeau realizes Iran’s A Separation is the overwhelming favourite. He says he saw it, “hoping to find flaws,” but didn’t see any.

For Queen and country

British PM David Cameron is rattling sabres over the Falkland Islands, that troublesome bit of rock down Argentina way, just as Margaret Thatcher did 30 years ago. Cameron vowed to protect the 2,900 residents of the British-owned islands, promising to react “quickly and flexibly” to any incursion by Argentina. Its president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, wants to wrest the Falklands from Britain, “a crude colonial power in decline” in her view. Thatcher, of course, went to war, in a conflict that cost 900 lives on both sides. Notably, Prince William, an RAF flight lieutenant, is to be posted to the remote outcrop as a search and rescue helicopter pilot for six weeks in February and March.

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Silence is golden for ‘The Artist’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 7:30 AM - 0 Comments

La Classe Americane/Ufilm/France 3/The Kobal Collection

A year ago, if you had predicted that the front-runner at the 2012 Academy Awards would be a black-and-white, silent film from France starring a pair of obscure actors, people would have thought you were insane. But this week The Artist reaped a whopping 10 Oscar nominations, second only to Martin Scorsese’s 3D children’s fable, Hugo, which scored 11. For the academy, which tends to fetishize its own history, this is a historic moment. Its two most nominated movies are both adoring homages to silent film, a genre that’s been dead for 80 years. The Artist is a French movie (finally one without subtitles) set in Hollywood at the end of the silent era; Hugo is an American movie set in ’30s Paris—wrapped around a tribute to Georges Méliès, a silent film pioneer of optical effects.

The two pictures present an astonishing convergence of cinema’s past and future—between a movie that revives the magic of silent film, and one that uses 3D to restore cinema’s first acts of visual wizardry. In embracing these movies, the academy may be on a nostalgia trip, celebrating a lost heritage in an age of franchise blockbusters. But there’s something else going on. Audiences are discovering the beauty of silence. That’s why The Artist is still the movie to beat for Best Picture. Silence is the new 3D.

From the moment it premiered to a rapturous response in Cannes, The Artist became the year’s most unlikely crowd-pleaser. Essentially it’s a romantic comedy, a frothy confection that poses no challenge to the audience. Despite the title, The Artist is not an art film. It’s the kind of movie Woody Allen would like to have made. In fact, like Allen’s Midnight in Paris (which has four nominations), it’s a reverie for a golden age. But its elegant conceit is more inspired, and instead of an American director rhapsodizing about Paris, we have a Frenchman (writer-director Michael Hazanavicius) mythologizing Hollywood. And nothing, not even British royalty, is closer to Oscar’s heart than Hollywood myth.

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‘Monsieur Lazhar’ is Oscar-worthy

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 12:01 AM - 0 Comments

Mohamed Fellag stars in 'Monsieur Lazhar'

With impeccable timing Philippe Falardeau‘s Monsieur Lazhar is being released just three days after its Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language film was announced. It’s not favoured to win. Even Falardeau would be surprised to beat Iran’s hugely acclaimed A Separation, which is also nominated for Best Original Screenplay.  But Monsieur Lazhar, which racked up a string of honours (including the Rogers Best Canadian Film Award from the Toronto Film Critics Association) is eminently Oscar-worthy. This is a small but perfect gem of filmmaking.

It bears a certain resemblance to last year’s Canadian Oscar nominee, Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies: it hails from the same producers, it’s based on a Quebec stage play, and has an immigrant theme. But as Falardeau himself has pointed out, it’s a less ambitious picture on a smaller canvas. While Villeneuve’s locations ranged from the Montreal to the Middle East, most of the action in Monsieur Lazhar is confined to a classroom. It’s reminiscent in some ways of Laurent Cantet’s Entre les murs (The Class), which won the Palme d’Or  in Cannes in 2008. But Cantet’s film was about the culture shock in a French classroom between immigrant teenagers and the formal Frenchman teaching them. Falardeau’s movie offers a different spin: an Algerian refugee wrapping his head around a classroom of Quebec kids. Continue…

Oscar anoints ‘Hugo,’ ‘The Artist’—and ‘Monsieur Lazhar’

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 3:17 PM - 0 Comments

Silence is golden, and this year silence may lead to Oscar gold. The Academy Awards nominations were announced today, at an early morning press conference in Los Angeles hosted by actress Jennifer Lawrence. The two pictures that topped the list of  nominees announced both pay loving homage to the vanished art of silent film. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, which leads the pack with 11 nominations, is a 3D children’s fable wrapped around a tribute to French silent film pioneer Georges Méliès. Just behind it with 10 nominations is The Artist, the year’s breakout phenomenon, a French black-and-white silent film set in Hollywood at the advent of talkies. Riding a tide of critical acclaim, and already winning a key best picture award from the Producers Guild of America, it remains the favorite to win Best Picture at the Oscars, which take place Feb. 26.

It’s a good year for Canada, as Monsieur Lazhar, a gem by Quebec writer-director Philippe Falardeau, secured a nomination for best foreign-language film—though even Falardeau admits he’ll have an uphill battle beating Iran’s widely-acclaimed A Separation, which won the Golden Globe and has also received an Oscar nod for best screenplay. Falardeau will also be competing with a Canadian co-production in the foreign-language category—In Darkness, a gripping Holocaust drama by Polish veteran Agnieszka Holland, set in the sewers of Lvov, Poland.  Canada, meanwhile, has two of the five animated short film nominees—Patrick Doyon’s Sunday and Wild Life by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby. These are the NFB’s 71st and 72nd Oscar nominations, and you can view them on the NFB’s website.

The Canadian nominee who seems most likely to bring home gold is Christopher Plummer, nominated for his supporting role in Beginners as a gay man dying of cancer who finally comes out of the closet. Plummer is up against a wildly eclectic field—a theatrical Kenneth Branagh (My Week With Marilyn), a deadpan Jonah Hill (Moneyball), a stolid Nick Nolte (Warrior) and a silent Max Von Sydow (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). I’d  love to see someone try to cast them all in the same movie. Continue…

Sundance mourns indie film champ Bingham Ray

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 7:25 PM - 0 Comments

Bingham Ray attends the Talent Lab at TIFF2011 (Photo by Jason Matos/Getty Images)

Bingham Ray, one of the most beloved champions of American independent cinema has died. Ray, co-founder of October Films and lately executive-director of the San Francisco Film Society, suffered a stroke Friday while attending the Sundance Film Festival. He died today in hospital surrounded by family. He was 57.

While Harvey Weinstein is the only indie mogul to become famous, we’ve seen less celebrated U.S. distribution executives driven by a passion for the art, men like Tom Bernard and Michael Barker of Sony Classics. Bingham Ray was one of them.  I met him when I was researching my history of the Toronto International Film Festival, Brave Films Wild Nights: 25 Years of Festival Fever (2000). He was a generous interview, a joy to talk to, and bracingly candid. Here’s a passage from the book about a legendary bidding war between Bingham and Harvey Weinstein for Robert Duvall’s The Apostle at the 1997 edition of TIFF:

“. . . By midnight Miramax and October were slugging it out. Harvey Weinstein was in New York, bargaining by phone—he had watched The Apostle at a simultaneous private screening that night. Bingham Ray, October’s buyer, had left the Toronto premiere after forty-five minutes to make his bid. He was desperate to get the film. Octdober had just been bought by Universal that summer and was itching to take on Miramax. ‘We were dealing with the studio’s money, the house money,’ Ray explains, ‘and we wanted to stir it up to send a signal. There are all kinds of reasons to buy movies. The right reasons are because you love them and there’s an audience for them and you can build long-lasting relationships with the people who made them. Then there’s just trying to get on the map in a big, sexy way. October wasn’t bought by Universal to be a nice high-end art-house company. They wanted a vehicle to really compete with Miramax. I think that’s folly. Harvey had become a serious mogul. At October we were just getting our feet wet.’  Continue…

Angie, meet Gina—the new warrior queen

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 20, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

INFUSNY-198/USPA-11/CP

The heroine of Haywire, a new spy movie from director Steven Soderbergh, is a role that could have been written for Angelina Jolie. She’s distaff 007, a femme fatale with a cold gaze and a dominatrix flair for putting men in their place when not beating them to a pulp. It would be a typical assignment for Jolie, a warrior queen who has played secret agents in Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Wanted, Salt and The Tourist. But Soderbergh was aiming for a realistic upgrade of the spy genre. And as he says in Haywire’s press notes, “I knew there had to be a woman other than Angelina Jolie who could run around with a gun.”

So just as he recruited a real-life porn star to play a prostitute in The Girlfriend Experience, the director cast a real-life warrior in Haywire—but with more spectacular results. Gina Carano, a top-ranked fighter in the brutal sport of mixed martial arts (MMA), makes an explosive screen debut as hard-boiled heroine Mallory Kane, a ruthless black-ops agent working for a private security firm. She not only performs her own fights and stunts, but carries the movie in what feels like a landmark role. Outside the Asian martial arts genre, she must be Hollywood’s first female action star drawn from the ranks of real-life gladiators.

Just as Carano has left the MMA cage to step in front of the camera, Jolie has broken out of her gilded cage to step behind it. She has written and directed an ambitious drama that frames atrocities in Bosnia with a star-crossed romance between a prisoner and his captive. In the Land of Blood and Honey is a foreign-language film with an all-Bosnian cast that tackles a still-controversial subject. Although reviews so far have been mixed, Jolie’s directorial debut (it opens this week, along with Haywire) is surprisingly strong.

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Quebec and Croneberg lead Genies

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 1:45 PM - 0 Comments

Evelyn Brochu in 'Café de Flore,' which received 13 Genie nominations

Café de Flore leads the field competing in the 32nd annual Genie Awards with a total of 13 nominations, including best picture and director. The film marks a virtuosic return to form for C.R.A.Z.Y director Jean-Marc Vallée after his rather subdued work-for-hire, The Young Victoria. By vaulting ahead of the pack in the Genie nominations, which were announced today, Vallée wins some vindications after being repeatedly upstaged  by Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar—which won TIFF’s $30,000 award for best Canadian feature, the Toronto Film Critics Association’s $15,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award—and was picked as Canada’s official submission slot at the Oscars for best foreign-language film. Monsieur Lazhar ranked third among the Genie nominations, scoring in eight categories, behind David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, which received 11 nominations.

The big shock among the nominees was that Take This Waltz, the star-studded second feature from writer-director Sarah Polley received just two nominations—best actress for Michelle Williams and best make-up. That’s extraordinary given the depth of talent in the cast (Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby, Sarah Silverman) and the fact that Polley’s sensational feature debut, Away From Her, won seven Genies and received two Oscar nominations. Continue…

Is Ricky turning into the Globes’ Billy Crystal?

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, January 16, 2012 at 12:07 PM - 0 Comments

There’s a fine line between mean-spirited and warm ‘n’ fuzzy. Ricky Gervais swung from one extreme to the other in a twinkling last night, morphing from the hostile host who would never get invited back to the man who looks poised to become the Golden Globes’ Billy Crystal. And the Globes themselves—always the ‘fun’ party compared to the quasi religious ritual of the Academy Awards—even seems to have usurped some of Oscar’s dignity and gravitas. Where were the drunken gaffes? The sloppy acceptance speeches. Aside from Meryl Streep forgetting her reading glasses and stumbling through a speech before being played off by the band, everything went like clockwork. And was Gervais even drinking that beer on the podium?

Gervais, of course, had promised he wasn’t going to soften his act to appease critics, but there was a definite spoonful of sugar surrounding the satirical barbs this year.  He actually said some nice things about people. And it helped that he arrived at 69th annual Golden Globes riding a huge wave of hype. The audience was primed, the stars were ready to be roasted, and that made all the difference. Even Gervais seemed surprised by the tone of goodwill in the room, as he noted midway through the show, “It’s going well, isn’t it? You’re so much better than last year’s audience. They had a right stick up their ass.” Continue…

A Dangerous Method in Cronenberg’s madness

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, January 13, 2012 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Fassbender (left) as Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Freud

Any film by David Cronenberg is an event. One that usually takes you by surprise When I saw A Dangerous Method amid a welter of pre-screenings for TIFF, I was shocked. . . shocked that I wasn’t shocked by a Cronenberg film. From the opening frames, a classic period sequence of a -carriage hurtling down a country road, I felt we on a strangely un-alien planet for this filmmaker. Then as the narrative unfolded with the elegant cadence of a Viennese waltz, I realized we were in a genre, but not one that Cronenberg had tried before: the period biopic. Though “biopic” seems not quite right; it’smore like a bi-biopic, a portrait of the galvanic relationship between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen).

The film triangulates the birth of psychoanalysis via their intersection with a fierce Russian named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a volatile patient of Jung’s who who seduces both of them as she herself graduates from paranoid case study to headstrong psychoanalyst.  The film is based on a play, which is based on a book—The Talking Cure by screenwriter  Christopher Hampton (best known for another dangerous title, Dangerous Liasons). And much of the script is  lifted directly from Speilrein’s writings, which lends the dialogue an unusually literate, essayish intelligence. This is disconcerting from a filmmaker who has specialized in serving up flesh, with sashimi acuity, as a metaphor for the unconscious—rather than engaging in intellectual discourse about the id, the ego, and the cold war between death and sex in the human psyche. Continue…

Toronto critics love ‘Monsieur Lazhar’

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 11:33 PM - 0 Comments

Andrea Martin and David Cronenberg at the TFCA Awards. Photo by George Pimentel/TFCA

I must be the last journalist in town to blog last night’s 15th anniversary awards gala of the Toronto Film Critics Association. That’s because I’m TFCA prez, and thousands of small details have forced me to neglect the blogosphere and the tweet box for the last few weeks. We ramped up the TFCA Awards a notch this year, moving our champagne gala to the august art-deco Round Room of The Carlu. For the movie biz, it’s still an unusually intimate evening, with about 230 folks attending—the cream of Toronto’s film community. We consider it our annual truce between the critics and the industry. The presenter of our flagship prize, the $15,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award, fell sick at the last minute. But Andrea Martin—Emmy-winning SCTV legend and Tony-winning Broadway star—stepped in like the trooper she is to present the Rogers Award. It went to Quebec director Philippe Falardeau for Monsieur Lazhar (also Canada’s official Oscar entry in the foreign-language film category), edging out the other two finalists, Jean-Marc Vallée’s Café de Flore, and David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method. Continue…

Spielberg’s creatures, great and small

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Paramount Pictures

Creatures have been good to Steven Spielberg. His career took off with Jaws, which starred a mechanical shark, got a stratospheric boost from E.T.’s animatronic alien, and made prehistory with Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs. Now he’s about to dominate the holiday season with a one-two blockbuster punch—a wartime epic about a horse trying to find his way home, and the animated tale of a Belgian boy detective and his wonder dog. But perhaps the most unstoppable creature of all is the man himself: the 800-lb. gorilla who leaves the biggest footprint in Hollywood.

There isn’t a filmmaker alive who is as powerful, successful or wealthy as Steven Spielberg. No one comes close. Over a 40-year career, the movies he’s directed have grossed over $8 billion worldwide, while movies he has produced have earned $12 billion. His personal net worth is estimated at $3 billion. And as the principal partner of DreamWorks, he’s also the only Hollywood director who controls a major studio. Despite winning three Oscars (for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan), Spielberg’s accolades haven’t always kept pace with his commercial triumphs. Lately he has left producing credits on a load of junky sci-fi—Super 8, Transformers 3, Cowboys and Aliens and Reel Steel. But after a three-year hiatus from directing—his last movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, was arguably his worst—he’s back in the game. Spielberg the Artist has finally pushed aside Spielberg the Mogul.

The director has two high-pedigree blockbusters opening within days of each other: The Adventures of Tintin (Dec. 21) and War Horse (Dec. 25). Spielberg is also in the thick of filming Lincoln, a biopic about Abraham Lincoln starring Daniel Day-Lewis. The director, who turns 65 on Sunday, has never been busier. When he finds time in his Lincoln shooting schedule to squeeze in an interview after postponing it twice, you can almost hear the meter ticking.

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The shape-shifting Meryl Streep

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady

In the opening scene of The Iron Lady, an elderly woman walks into a London convenience store, dithers in front of the dairy rack, then buys a pint of milk. The sight of her comes as a shock that never wears off. Though old and frail and addled by dementia, it is unmistakably Margaret Thatcher. Part of the surprise is seeing a legendary icon so enfeebled by age; the other part is seeing her so eerily incarnated by the shape-shifting Meryl Streep. By the end of the film, after watching Streep play the former British prime minister over four decades of her life, the likeness—from the imperious look to the mellifluous diction—is uncanny.

Looking not at all like Thatcher, Streep is holding court in a luxury two-storey suite with a fireplace, cathedral ceiling, and a vast bank of windows overlooking Manhattan’s Tribeca district. Her silky hair framing a unlined complexion, the 62-year-old actress looks casually stylish in a long purple jacket cinched with broad belt, black pants and sensible black boots with chunky heels. The suite belongs to the Greenwich Hotel, which is owned by Robert De Niro, who co-starred with Streep in The Deer Hunter, for which she received her first Oscar nomination 33 years ago. After a record 16 nominations, the woman who is routinely called The World’s Greatest Living Actress has won just two Oscars, and has been shut out since Sophie’s Choice (1982). She is overdue. Her tour de force in The Iron Lady, the crowning performance of her career, may be destined to break the losing streak.

But at this point does winning a third Oscar really matter? You expect Streep to demur with some modest words about art being its own reward. Instead, her Mona Lisa smile dissolves into a girlish laugh: “I’m very greedy!” she says.

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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo 2.0

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 12:01 AM - 0 Comments

There was good reason to be skeptical about a Hollywood remake of  The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. There was nothing wrong with the first movie, except that it was in Swedish and came with subtitles. (Strange paradox: while millions of  readers are capable of plowing through novelist Steig Larsson’s turgid prose in English translation, not so many are willing to read a few subtitles). Also, it was hard to imagine another actress improving on Noomi Rapace’s ferocious performance as Larsson’s cyber-punk heroine, Lisbeth Salander. But if anyone was qualified to take another crack at Larsson’s franchise, it would be director David Fincher, who has showed his mastery of the ritual murder genre in both Se7en and Zodiac.

Well, Fincher has succeeded admirably. His Girl With the Dragon Tattoo improves on both the book and the first movie. Right from the opening credits, we realize that this Tattoo will be a more luxurious, enjoyable ride. The über-cool black-and-grey title sequence, with bodies flowing like liquid mercury, could serve as the opening of a Bond movie. Of course, the current 007, Daniel Craig, stars as the Man Without the Dragon Tattoo—investigative journalist and Larsson alter-ego Mikael Blomkvist—but Craig is in strictly civilian mode here. Although his pyramid torso doesn’t quite match the book’s disheveled image of the hard-drinking, chain-smoking Blomkvist, Craig gives a modest, almost diminutive performance, leaving ample room for Salander to cut a swath through the story.

Rooney Mara rises to the insane challenge of the title role and nails it. She doesn’t take anything away from Noomi Rapace, who was sensational. But while Rapace cleaved to the Super Goth template set by the novel, Mara manages to make Lisbeth more human, and more believable, yet no less ruthless.That deep fault line of vulnerability—scarred over by a litany of childhood abuse—is always dimly visible, as a glint of desperation behind her bravado. Also, the love affair between Lisbeth and Blomkvist is also given a little more heat. In the book, she’s not permitted a shred of romantic feeling. In the film, as our feral avenger beds a man old enough to be her father, there are stirrings of emotional complexity.

Forgive me if I don’t labour through a byzantine plot summary. Even if you haven’t read the books, you probably have some familiarity with the story by now. But for those unafraid of spoilers, here’s the gist: Blomqvist is convicted of libel, set up by the tycoon he targeted. He’s then hired by industrial patriarch Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to investigate the 40-year-old disappearance of his niece, presumed murdered by a family member. Leaving behind his editor/girlfriend (Robin Wright), Blomqvist buries himself in research on a cold and remote island off the Swedish coast. Eventually he joins forces with Salander, who outstrips him with her computer-hacking skills, and slides naked into his bed. She, meanwhile, has been raped by her state guardian, and wreaked vengeance, blackmailing him in ink and blood.

For much of the story, Salander and Blomkvist drive separate narratives, and the film skates between them with great finesse. The movie is a flat-out masterpiece of editing. Also it’s not easy to make dry research compelling, but Fincher shoots, cuts and collates text and photographs and web images with the dexterity of a card shark; I’ve never seen a more virtuosic dance of stills in a movie. There’s a long history of solving mysteries by photo editing, and in watching Dragon Tattoo I was taken back to the seductive power of images in its early prototype: Antonioni’s Blow-Up.

Screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, Moneyball) does a superb job of upgrading, and streamlining, Larsson’s narrative without losing essential ingredients. If anything, the story seems to have more substance and depth than on the page, or in the previous film. Even though the running time clocks in at 2 hours and 32 minutes, the movie flies by. The Hollywood budget brings a lustre to the filmmaking that the Swedish movie could not afford—from Lisbeth’s motorcycle rides through the night to the glass hilltop mansion occupied by the Venger dynasty’s  CEO (Stellan Skarsgård).  It’s not as if Fincher has softened or sold out the story for a mass audience. Although the violence is slightly less lurid, and the romance more fully-fleshed—both welcome tweaks—it’s still a tough R-rated thriller.

Tattoo‘s blockbuster pulp origins likely won’t allow the film to achieve the pedigree of, say, Fincher’s previous movie, The Social Network. Although his movie is better than the book, it will be difficult for it to be seen as anything but a subsidiary of the Larsson franchise. Hopefully, however, the box office will allow this new franchise to play itself out, and Fincher won’t lose interest. After all, the only good film in the Swedish trilogy was the first one, directed by Niels Arden Oplev. He didn’t direct the second and third installments, and they played like cheesy TV movies. Lisbeth Salander deserves better—and Rooney Mara has got her back.

The art of cruelty in ‘Young Adult’ and ‘Carnage’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 3:15 PM - 0 Comments

Charlize Theron in 'Young Adult'

This is a week of movies messing with our expectations. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol defies the odds, breathing fresh life into a flagging franchise. Conversely,  Young Adult, the fourth feature from Jason Reitman—the Canadian director who could do no wrong—turns out to be a surprising disappointment. Reitman has had a charmed career. His first three movies— Juno, Thank You For Smoking and Up in the Air were all critically acclaimed hits. Each had a dark edge of satire, and potentially unlikeable characters managed to win our affection with appearing to make an effort. With Up In the Air, Reitman graduated from glib, and ventured into more mature territory, opening a chink in George Clooney’s emotional armour that Alexander Payne would blow wide open in The Descendants. For Young Adult, Reitman has re-teamed with Juno‘s Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody to create a movie that is as perversely self-destructive as its heroine.

Charlize Theron gives a raw, outrageous, multi-faceted performance as Mavis, a burnt-out writer of young adult novels who decides to win back her old boyfriend, Buddy (Patrick Wilson)—although he’s newly married with a baby. Carrying her miniature poodle in a pink shoulder bag, she waltzes into her the small Minnesota town she once called home, expecting Buddy to fall at her feet after a couple of drinks. Needless to say, things don’t turn out as planned. Continue…

Mission: Impossible—Rebooting Cruise, Le Carré and the Cold War

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 12:14 PM - 0 Comments

Paula Patton and Tom Cruise in 'Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol

I came to Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol expecting the worst. Five years have passed since the previous installment, which was so lame it looked like Tom Cruise’s days as super spy Ethan Hunt were numbered. But what a surprise!  Ghost Protocol, the fourth movie in the series, kicks the franchise back to life with a defibrillator thump of adrenaline and a sharp sense of style. There’s a great line in the movie—”Failure for a terrorist is just a rehearsal for success”—which may also apply to producers of  blockbusters. Here they took a gamble that paid off, by handing the reins to Brad Bird, who has made animated hits like Ratatouille and The Incredibles but has not made a live action feature until now. You’d never know it. The action scenes pop and sizzle, with a vertiginous sense of perspective that seems inherited from his animated work. Architecture plays a leading role—from Cruise rappelling off a 123-storey skyscraper in Dubai to dropping through the spiral core of automated parking garage that looks like a car-and-concrete version of the Guggenheim. High tech shades of Vertigo.

Cruise, who handles a lot of his own stunt-work, looks ageless, toned and torqued. He has a strange body, especially when he sprints, his arms jack-knifing to cartoon-like heights. Tom is always the Man Who Tries Too Hard. In this well-oiled machine of a movie he’s one well-oiled machine of a man. He’s so immaculate you can’t help but wonder if Tom Cruise is, in fact, an alien. Or simply a Scientologist. Fortunately, he is surrounded by actual human beings, including two terrific character actors.  His fellow operatives are a haunted analyst (The Hurt Locker‘s Jeremy Renner), a very funny rookie communications whiz (Shaun of the Dead‘s Simon Pegg), and a no-nonsense babe (Paula Patton). Continue…

Golden Globes shine on ‘The Artist,’ Gosling and Clooney

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 12:02 PM - 0 Comments

Ryan Gosling (in a scene from 'The Ides of March') will compete with 'Ides' director George Clooney, nominated for 'The Descendants'

The Golden Globes nominations were unveiled this morning, and The Artist—France’s silent black-and-white valentine to retro Hollywood—continues to charm its way down the long road to the Oscars by topping the Globes with six nominations. The Descendants and The Help are tied for second place with four nominations apiece. Both George Clooney and Canada’s Ryan Gosling are golden. Clooney snagged three nominations, as best dramatic actor for Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, plus best director and screenplay for The Ides of March.  Gosling was nominated in the comic acting category for Crazy, Stupid Love, and in the dramatic acting category for  Ides, which has him going head to head against with Clooney. Unlike the Oscars, the Globes break down the best picture and acting categories into dramas and comedies-or-musicals, which allows the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) to better spread the wealth. But the rationale is often wonky. The Descendants, a quirky mix of comedy and drama, is classified as drama, presumably because someone dies; My Life With Marilyn was considered a comedy-or-musical, but though it’s got a couple of tunes, it’s not a musical, and despite some laughs, it’s much less of a comedy than The Descendants. Go figure.

The Globes gave a boost both to The Ides of March and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which have been ignored by most of the critics’ awards. Tattoo‘s cyberpunk heroine, Rooney Mara, hacked her way into a heavyweight actress slate,  competing with Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady), Viola Davis (The Help), Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs).

The most notable snub was ignoring Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which won the Palme D’Or in Cannes and has been honoured by several critics’ groups, including the Toronto Film Critics Association. However, its star, Brad Pitt, was nominated for Moneyball in the dramatic acting category, along with Clooney, Gosling, Michael Fassbender (Shame) and Leonardo DiCaprio (J. Edgar). Honouring DiCaprio instead of Take Shelter‘s Michael Shannon underscores the HFPA’s tacky pedigree as a gang of junket whores who never saw a superstar they didn’t like. (If you think that’s too harsh, Ricky Gervais has said much worse things about the HFPA, yet they’ve hired him back to host the Globes, which adds a curious S&M kink to the junket whore role.) Continue…

Toronto critics name ‘Tree of Life’ Best Picture

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 12:01 AM - 0 Comments

Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain in 'The Tree of Life'

Breaking news from the Toronto Film Critics Association. (Full disclosure: I’m TFCA president, so if  much of what follows may appear to plagiarize the official press release, that’s because I can write this stuff only so many times.)

Two cosmic dramas about stubborn American patriarchs emerged as the biggest winners of the 2011 TFCA Awards. The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s transcendental epic about boyhood and the end of innocence in 1950s Texas won Best Picture, while Malick was named Best Director. Also honoured with two TFCA awards was Take Shelter: Michael Shannon won Best Actor for his portrayal of a father plagued by apocalyptic visions, and Jessica Chastain was named Best Supporting Actress for her role as his conflicted spouse. (Chastain was also a runner-up in the Supporting Actress category for The Tree of Life.)

By championing The Tree of Life, the TFCA diverged from the New York and Boston critics groups, which both chose The Artist, and from the L.A. critics, who picked The Descendants—two films that ranked as runners- up among the TFCA’s three Best Picture nominees.

Michelle Williams was voted Best Actress for her seductive, in-the-moment portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in My Week With Marilyn. Canada’s Christopher Plummer won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Beginners as an elderly man who comes out of the closet after learning he has terminal cancer. And Best Screenplay went to Moneyball, the story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, written by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, story by Stan Chervin, based on the non-fiction book by Michael Lewis. Continue…

Avoid ‘New Year’s Eve’—it’s no guilty pleasure

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, December 9, 2011 at 1:33 PM - 0 Comments

Katherine Heigl and Jon Bon Jovi in 'New Year's Eve'

It’s a classic choice. You’re looking for an easy-going, no-brainer date movie. Everyone is raving about The Artist, including me. But it’s silent and black-and-white, and New Year’s Eve is beckoning with all those stars and shiny colours. You wonder if, just maybe, it could be a guilty pleasure. Stop!! Back away from the multiplex!! Don’t let the all-star cast fool you. The glitzy lure of New Year’s Eve, not unlike the night itself, is a trap. This regrettable confection is directed and produced by Garry Marshall, who also gave us Valentine’s Day, and the formula remains the same: movie as celebrity mix tape. Recruit as many stars as possible, throw them together in a gaudy holiday punch bowl of sentimental shlock, and wait for the box office to get high. But watching this movie was like going on a bender and mixing too many multi-coloured drinks. Usually I don’t mind watching bad movies. It’s my job, after all, and even the worst movies tend to offer some some bonbons of pleasure, guilty or not. But NYE, which takes place in NYC, is exceptionally toxic. Waiting for that ball to drop at Times Square felt like an effing eternity.

The script plays like the Hollywood casting version of a computer dating program. Continue…

The top 11 films of 2011

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, December 9, 2011 at 8:50 AM - 0 Comments

Bérénice Bejo in 'The Artist'/ The Weinstein Company

In 2011 the big screen resembled a rearview mirror more than ever before. The death of originality has never been more evident: 2011 saw a record 27 sequels, including eight of the 10 top-grossing films. On the other hand, the box-office champ, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, was a rousing finale that pointed to a positive trend: flashes of convergence between Hollywood muscle and creative nerve. Tabloid dad Brad Pitt showed us the actor behind the celebrity with superb performances as utterly different fathers in Moneyball and The Tree of Life. And it was a thrill to see movie stars take risks in both Tree and Melancholia, two cosmic visions of humanity that tried to bust poetry out of the arthouse. Even 3D acquired some class, bringing prehistoric art to life in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and uncovering the magic of early cinema in Hugo. Between Hugo and the silent black-and-white delight of The Artist, film went far enough back to reclaim some of its vanished pedigree.

I’ve compiled 11 personal favourites for 2011. Strong contenders that missed the cut include Le Havre, Café de Flore, A Dangerous Method, Bridesmaids, The Trip, 50/50, Attack the Block, War Horse and Martha Marcy May Marlene. And some of the best performances were not always found in the best films: Michelle Williams in My Week With Marilyn, Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, Michael Shannon in Take Shelter and Michael Fassbender in Shame. At press time I had yet to see a couple of titles.The list has since been revised online since its publication in Maclean’s.

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‘The Artist’: the year’s most unlikely crowd-pleaser

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 11:59 PM - 0 Comments

Bérénice Bejo in 'The Artist'

This time of year I get a lot of people asking me to recommend movies. Whenever I urge them to see The Artist, the reaction is predictable. Something along the lines of, “Yeah, yeah, I know it’s supposed to be great, but I’m more in the mood for a movie-movie. Something that won’t be a chore.” And it’s really hard to convince someone that a silent, black-and-white film is not some cinephile specialty item but a ‘movie-movie’—a broadly entertaining romp that takes no effort whatsoever to watch. In fact, the reason I always recommend The Artist as my default pick is that it’s a safe choice no matter who’s asking—the year’s most unlikely crowd-pleaser.

In Cannes, where watching films in competition can be an endurance test, The Artist received the most jubilant response. It was like recess. In fact, the main knock it received from high-pedigree critics is that is was too broadly entertaining. Since then, after charming audiences at TIFF, the film has had remarkable staying power. It is emerging as one of 2011′s most unassailable Oscar candidates. And it also reflects a curious trend. Along with Hugo, Martin Scorsese’s uncharacteristic foray into 3D family fare, it has exhumed silent film from the art-house vault and given it a new populist pedigree. The Artist is, ironically, not an art film.

In trying to convey its  appeal, I’ve found it useful to say it’s the kind of film Woody Allen would like to have made. But it’s much better than Woody’s Midnight in Paris. The nostalgic reverie it inspires is more original; though it doesn’t advertise its intellect, it’s smarter. And  it actually is a French movie, one that has no need for subtitles. Continue…

‘Surviving Progress’—the eco essay as eye candy

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 5:36 PM - 0 Comments

Author Margaret Atwood in 'Surviving Progress'

Turning ideas into seductive, irresistible cinema isn’t easy, especially if they’re the kind of ideas that are good for you.  An effective propagandist like Michael Moore, who pulls in a big audience, does it by swinging for the fences of melodrama and farce. And the more sober agit-prop artists often have trouble breaking out of the festival circuit. But a fresh genre of populist persuasion has emerged in recent years that’s met with remarkable success: the dynamic docu-essay . Some notable examples include The Corporation, an likely hit that  diagnosed capitalism’s basic organism as a psychopath; The Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s power-point polemic, which put global warming on the map; and Inside Job, a forensic inquiry into Wall Street’s 2008 financial meltdown. The popularity of these films (the last two won Oscars) underscores a genuine appetite for global analysis that the fragmented vision of the news media fails to provide. Also, advances in digital cinematography, graphics and editing have sexed up the docu-essay to the point that ideas can be presented as virtual eye candy. The latest example is Surviving Progress, a Canadian documentary about the increasing weight of the human footprint of the planet. It’s a high-level lesson that is enlightening, engrossing and beautiful to look at.

Written and directed by Canadians Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks—and inspired by Ronald Wright’s best-seller, A Short History of Progress— the film confronts the issue humanity driving itself into ecological debt. Literally digging holes in the planet. The way we treat the the Earth’s natural capital becomes synonymous with the way Wall Street treats wealth.  If The Inconvenient Truth and Inside Job had a brainy love child, it might look like Surviving Progress. Continue…

Clash of the biopic titans

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Monroe

Here’s a pretty safe prediction: when the Oscars are handed out next February, the contest for best actress will come down to a duel between two icons, a bombshell and a battle-axe—between Marilyn Monroe and Margaret Thatcher, as portrayed by Michelle Williams and Meryl Streep. Oscar has always had a soft spot for biopics, especially if Brits, royals or showbiz icons are involved. The main event at the last Academy Awards was an unfair fight between The King’s Speech and The Social Network, as King George VI handily trumped the Machiavellian Facebook guru Mark Zuckerberg. And as the current award season warms up, it looks like real-life figures will dominate the field as never before.

They are led by a trio of heavyweights: Streep’s Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Williams in My Week with Marilyn, and Leonardo DiCaprio as Hoover in J. Edgar. Bringing up the rear in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method are Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud and Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung. The Lady adds a Nobelist wild card to the race with its portrait of Burmese opposition heroine Aung San Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh). Don’t count out Brad Pitt as Moneyball’s Billy Beane, the legendary manager who rewrote baseball’s bible and irrevocably changed the game. And trailing far behind the pack is W.E.’s Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), the woman who forced the abdication that gave us that stammering George VI.

In Hollywood, where making history is almost as important as making movies, the biopic craze shows no signs of slowing down. Steven Spielberg is currently shooting Lincoln, with Daniel Day Lewis carving out his own Rushmore portrait of the American president. And next year, ghostbuster Bill Murray gains gravitas as Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson, which has FDR and Eleanor mingling with Queen Elizabeth and King George VI (him again).

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