Indian movie, not so great. But Indian Canyons — now, that was something.

If one is very lucky, FIPRESCI jury duty isn’t all movies and lattes; sometimes, one gets to experience a little of the host city beyond its megaplexes and coffee shops. There won’t be any of that tomorrow or Tuesday, but today our gracious jury wrangler took us out to the wilds for a mile-long hike along the foot trail through Andreas Canyon.

(Well, all of us except for one member who’s recuperating from a back injury, and really wouldn’t have been up for scuttling over rock outcroppings for an hour and a half. But the rest of us managed.)

I’ve been out to California a few times before, but never had the experience of going out to the raw earth … there’s nothing like this in L.A. or San Francisco, and Santa Barbara, on its wide, flat mesa, didn’t offer much in the way of angled hiking.

This, though … this was the West, or at least the West the way it was in every cowboy movie I saw as a kid — brush and cactus and sagebrush and sawgrass, all surrounded by magnificent rock formations and dotted with holes where the rattlers have made their burrows. And every ten minutes, all the minor struggling was rewarded with another gorgeous vista.

I’m not an outdoorsy guy. But this has been the highlight of my trip so far. After this, it seems almost wasteful to spend so much time indoors, watching movies and drinking coffee.

That said, it’s been pretty good coffee. And tonight’s party is at an Italian restaurant, which seems like a very good idea: All that walking can give a dude a powerful thirst.

I’ll do my best to strike a balance, somehow. And I’ll keep you posted.

The demands of a film-festival juror are very difficult. You start your morning with a two-hour Filipino melodrama about a 12-year-old aspiring ladyboy with a criminal family who develops a crush on the understanding new policeman in the neighborhood.

Then — because you’re kind of an idiot — you pass up a beautiful California afternoon outdoors to see David Lynch’s three-hour sketchbook “Inland Empire”, even though it’s not eligible for your award, and even though it becomes apparent well within the first act that the man’s creativity is running on fumes.

Afterward, because you need to clear your head a bit, you walk back to the hotel and put on your monkey suit, because it’s time for the black-tie Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards Gala, a four-hour orgy of awards, alcohol and really splendid food.

Continue reading Party All the Time →

My luggage turned up, unmolested, at about two AM. And the coffee machine in my room is working. No complaints.

Japan is calling, and I stand ready to face the day. With fresh contacts, a change of underwear and everything else that makes a man feel like a god.

… sorry. The air out here has a way of making one giddy. Or maybe it’s just the relief of not having to spend half one’s morning at the Gap outlet.

Anyway. Yes, today, the Japanese entry and then the Macedonian film, and then there are a couple of events we’re expected to attend, including one for the premiere of “Black Book“.

Social note: I’m not really a big party-circuit guy, but when presented with the chance to watch Paul Verhoeven drink, well … I am so there. Maybe he’s finally ready to own up to “Hollow Man”.

… literally. It’s 1 AM PST, I’ve been up for 22 hours, and my luggage still hasn’t arrived. United’s phone people say it should have got here by 9:30 PM, and can’t understand why it didn’t.

Funny. I can’t understand why I’m about to go to sleep with my contacts in.

Anyway, there’s one good thing to report: Metro’s gone back to updating its website early and often, so you can read those reviews I filed from a cell phone in Vegas. With or without your contacts in.

“Happily N’Ever After“: The title’s terrible. The movie’s worse. This actually makes “Hoodwinked” look … well, like a Disney movie. Freddie Prinze, Jr. is oddly appealing as the hero, but that’s probably because we can’t see him. Sarah Michelle Gellar, not so much.

“Perfume: The Story of a Murderer“: Expensive, elaborate, excruciating. Tom Tykwer takes Patrick Suskind’s novel about a man-monster who kills women in a misguided attempt to distill their scent, and turns it into a movie too timid to really dig into all its carefully appointed muck. Paul Verhoeven, now, he would have wrestled this thing into a masterpiece.

Trivia point: This week’s new releases feature the stars of “Snow Cake“: Sigourney Weaver plays a wicked stepmother in “Happily N’Ever After”, and Alan Rickman turns up in the second half of “Perfume”, daring to give a real performance. Do you think, halfway through the “Snow Cake” shoot, they just held each other and cried?

Flying out to the Palm Springs International Film Festival tomorrow, to join my FIPRESCI colleagues in a twelve-day parade of subtitles.

Seriously: Our jury is tasked with screening all the national submissions for the Best Foreign-Language Oscar. You can find a rough list here, though there have been some changes; only fifty-five of the titles on that page are still eligible for our award.

And yes, fifty-five films in twelve days might be a daunting task, but the festival thoughtfully sent us a package of screeners back in December, so I’m arriving prepared. If I’ve got the math right, I’ll have to see less than twenty films at the festival, which leaves me a little time to catch a few non-competing titles.

I’m particularly eager to see David Lynch’s “Inland Empire”, even if it does run three hours, and Michael Verhoeven — who guaranteed himself a place in cinema heaven with “The Nasty Girl” back in 1991, but hasn’t been seen much since — is coming with his new documentary, “Unknown Soldier”. Those are the top two on my personal wanna-see list, though of course I remain open to recommendations.

I’ll do my best to post frequent updates — with photos, even! — so check back whenever you can.

Oh, and Metro’s finally put all my holiday movie reviews on its main review page, here. So that’s nice.

Two more movies opened yesterday, and I plumb forgot to mention them. This is probably because they are both eminently forgettable.

“Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus”: Imaginary is the key word here, as in: Steven Shainberg and Erin Cressida Wilson imagined that their silly little “Beauty and the Beast” riff would gain resonance and weight if they claimed it “happened” to an actual artist. Also, Nicole Kidman has got to stop giving that Very Intense Person performance. Sure, Robert Downey Jr. is appropriately seductive as the Chewbacca-looking circus freak who plays James Spader to her Maggie Gyllenhaal, but it’s a performance he could give in his sleep. Or perhaps I dreamed the whole thing.

“The Painted Veil”: Speaking of actors who have to stop being Very Intense, here is the curious case of Edward Norton, a brilliant, intuitive screen presence who has evidently decided to expend great energy getting dream projects made, and then to be the least interesting thing in them. Like “The Illusionist” and “Down in the Valley”, “The Painted Veil” is an excuse for Norton to wear nifty period outfits and be all intense, without actually doing anything interesting. Meanwhile, director John Curran demonstrates he’s studied the Merchant Ivory catalogue very carefully, and learned all the wrong lessons: Naomi Watts and Toby Jones do try to color outside the lines somewhat, but the movie has no real interest in their performances; all that subtlety gets in the way of the scenery, don’t you know.

Tomorrow, we talk about DVDs. Alert your Member of Parliament!

(Still having trouble with WordPress’ Java console. Anyone know what I’m doing wrong?)

(As seen in yesterday’s Metro, for those of you in meatspace.)

A top ten list, by definition, excludes a whole bunch of other worthy contenders. So feel free to seek out “Brothers of the Head”, “Friends with Money”, “Old Joy”, “Superman Returns”, “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” and “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story”, all of which came awfully close to making the final cut.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Sacha Baron Cohen takes his merrily ignorant reporter – and his hidden cameras – across America for a convulsively funny, and disturbingly revealing look at that country’s insular culture. Friends are made, and lessons are sort of learned; it’s “E.T.” with naked wrestling and a bear.

Brick

Rian Johnson gives 1940s film noir a new context with his ingenious murder mystery, which takes place in a contemporary California high school. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a fine choice for the cranky shamus, and Nora Zehetner – recently seen as the manipulative Eden on “Heroes” – makes one hell of a femme fatale.

Caché

The Austrian director Michael Haneke delivers his doctoral thesis on guilt and paranoia with this harrowing study of a French TV personality (Daniel Auteuil) who starts receiving mysterious surveillance videotapes. For creepy, ambiguous intensity, there was nothing else like it … though that’s probably a good thing.

Children of Men

Alfonso Cuaron shakes off the shackles of the “Harry Potter” franchise with this astonishingly realized action-thriller set in a desolate, infertile future; not only is the movie’s fictional England utterly convincing, but Clive Owen’s subtle performance gives it a furious emotional kick.

The Departed

Martin Scorsese stops trying to win awards and gets back to making movies with a pulse. With top-flight performances and breakneck plotting, this is the best thing he’s done since ”
“GoodFellas” … and, ironically, might be the picture that gets him that Oscar after all. (Here’s hoping the Academy notices how good Martin Sheen is, too.)

Kings and Queen

Arnaud Desplechin’s astonishing film spends two and a half hours watching two Parisians struggle with their personal baggage. As gripping as any thriller, with incredible performances from Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Almaric. Naturally, it went unreleased in Canada for two years. Don’t wait that long to pick up the DVD.

Lady Vengeance

For the final installment of his vengeance trilogy – in which wronged characters exact horrible revenge upon the people they hold responsible for their suffering – Korean virtuoso Park Chan-wook delivers a study in icy justice that dares you to turn away from the screen, even as Lee Yeong-ae’s performance keeps you glued to it.

Pan’s Labyrinth

Guillermo del Toro’s magnificent fairy tale for grown-ups follows a young girl who flees from the Spanish Civil War into a supernatural underworld that may or may not be entirely in her head. Enchanting and disturbing in equal parts, this is the film del Toro has been working towards his entire career. See it on a big screen.

A Prairie Home Companion

The last film of the iconoclastic director Robert Altman is, somewhat fittingly, a quietly moving meditation on death – as experienced by the cast and crew of a live radio show on the night of their final broadcast. And the scene between Tommy Lee Jones and Virginia Madsen is a master class in acting.

Stranger Than Fiction

Will Ferrell makes his mark as a dramatic actor as an ordinary man who starts hearing the story of his own life, as written and read by Emma Thompson; even more impressive is Maggie Gyllenhaal, who couldn’t be ordinary if she tried, as the baker for whom Ferrell falls. Extra points for dragging Wreckless Eric out of the dustbin.

… well, sorta. In a normal world, Metro’s website wouldn’t still be hibernating, and I’d be able to link to all of last Friday’s reviews, and the three new ones I’ve got in today’s Boxing Day issue, and the 2006 Top Ten that’s in there too. Not even a PDF link available. Bugger.

However, because I am kind and generous, here’s the skinny:

“Children of Men”: Alfonso Cuaron’s brilliant, despairing drama — based on a novel by P.D. James that I am officially dying to read — folds an absolutely portrait of a dystopian near-future England and a stunning visual sensibility around a tremendous leading performance from Clive Owen. Plus, it’s surprisingly funny.

“Dreamgirls”: I feel the same way about this overwrought, overdirected, over-everything Broadway adaptation as I did about “Chicago” … yeah, there’s a lot of singing and dancing, but what’s the big deal? That said, Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson are tremendously watchable, even if the songs they’re singing ain’t got nothing on real Motown music.

“Pan’s Labyrinth”: Have I not yet convinced you to see Guillermo del Toro’s magnificent nightmare? Did this post, and this post, and this post fail to convince you it was worth twelve bucks and two hours of your life? Really, just see the damn thing already.

Top Ten tomorrow. And guess what? “Pan’s Labyrinth” is on it!

There won’t be too many opportunities for blogging over the next couple of days, so I’ll leave you with a couple of small but important pieces of advice:

– If you haven’t had the experience of “Woodland Critter Christmas”, you can find it here. Before you head off to bed tonight, take 22 minutes and experience the greatest and most demented of all the “South Park” Xmas specials.

– Ricky Gervais, Steven Merchant and Karl Pilkington have left a tiny little present on your lawn: A special Christmas podcast of “The Ricky Gervais Show”, available at the Guardian’s website here … along with the Halloween and Thanksgiving episodes recorded earlier this fall.

– And finally, if you feel like escaping the family and catching a movie tomorrow (and really, who won’t?), then you must see “Children of Men” and “Pan’s Labyrinth” on the biggest screens you can find. They’re two of the year’s best films, equally enthralling as emotional and cinematic experiences, and they continue to reward long after the end credits have rolled: I’m still grooving on “Pan’s Labyrinth”, and I saw it in August.

That’s it. The in-laws beckon. Enjoy the break.