As a member of the choir, I ran screaming from the church because of Michael Moore’s preaching in Sicko.
I’m in the minority here — the movie got good reviews and an Oscar nomination in the documentary category — but this was among the least effective films I saw all year.
Plus: the equally inept Infamous.
The final two stops on the Culture Snob tour of 2005 Best Picture Oscar nominees are striking for their similarities. Both Brokeback Mountain and Munich are patient, well-made genre movies that strip most of the politics out of charged subjects. Sadly, both are also botches.
Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for his performance in Capote, one I found a mite calculating. The film as a whole suffers from a similar malady: It seems to operate more cautiously than deliberately, a hint too restrained and with a trace of self-conscious uncertainty. Yet, fundamentally, the studied, low-key choices work.
There’s nothing wrong with Ray that a little less hype couldn’t fix. As biopics go, it’s pretty good. Jamie Foxx is convincing as the iconic Ray Charles. Writer James L. White and writer-director Taylor Hackford employ a clumsily expository flashback structure that actually pays off beautifully at the end with a startling and unexpected moment of transcendence and vision. Two and a half hours clip by briskly. And there’s plenty of Charles’ music.
With Monster, writer-director Patty Jenkins has fashioned a story of insistent, persistent desperation that is so fully embodied by Charlize Theron that I had a hard time believing the movie’s politics and psychology were so facile.
The highest compliment I can pay to Kevin Macdonald’s Touching the Void is that few people will notice how radical it is. It’s a completely gripping, horrifying movie, and it’s so good that it’s easy to overlook what Macdonald has done: seriously undercut the idea that plot “spoilers” damage the experience one has with a movie.
It’s difficult to understand a person who thought a shot-for-shot re-make of Psycho was anything more than a self-indulgent exercise, but faced with writer-director Gus Van Sant’s puzzling Elephant, I’m forced to try.
The level of self-reference in American Splendor should be too cute and modern for words or patience, but it has the strange effect of being more honest than either a straight documentary or drama.
Rabbit-Proof Fence is one of the stranger movies I’ve seen recently. It takes a relatively obscure (for most audiences, and perhaps even Australians) historical subject and treats it relatively straightforwardly, yet it feels like scorched-earth science fiction. The film has an aura of foreignness, a curious distance, that makes it seem unreal.
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was overshadowed in hype, box office, and awards late last year by that other odd, Charlie Kaufman-scripted movie, Adaptation. But Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is a superior work. It is more engaging, more challenging, and more stylish, and it packs an emotional wallop that makes Adaptation feel even more glib and cynical.
Box Office Power Rankings: September 26-28