Inception

I don't hesitate to say that Christopher Nolan is easily the rightful successor to, and our generation's, Steven Spielberg. His mastery of storytelling is top notch, and while Spielberg often seems to make sacrifices and compromises to sell every bit of his films to as broad an audience as possible, Nolan seems to have gotten away with being able to avoid that. Movies like The Dark Knight, Insomnia, and Memento are uncompromisingly dark, even in their sheer genius. While Inception shouldn't strike anyone as dark, it is, without a doubt, uncompromising.

The film follows a band of, well, let's call them agents (it's never defined in the film exactly what they are). Their job is to use a complex system of gadgetry, chemicals, and their own minds to inhabit someone's dream and steal their secrets. The group is led by Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), who, of course, has a complex history which most of the film hinges on. His objective is to find a legal way home so that he can visit his kids in America without being arrested upon entry for the murder of his wife (which she framed him for). He is offered a job by a mysterious Asian man (who's mind he had broken into earlier), with the promise that, upon the jobs successful completion, strings would be pulled and Cobb would get to return home legally. Cobb rallies a group of top experts to invade the mind of the heir of one of the worlds largest companies, and sets forth to do the job that will take him home.

Inception is amazing. In fact, it's beyond amazing, though I don't know what other word I could use that would really qualify just how awesome it truly is. The story is the key to it, and it's so solid, and so labyrinthine, that one barely has a chance to catch it all on the first go (the film definitely demands multiple viewings). The acting is top notch, and the effects are truly amazing. Nolan sets the bar so high with Inception, one is left to wonder if anyone will be able to top it, and if so, when will it happen?

Whip It

I'm always leery of films by actor's. When I heard Drew Barrymore was making a film, I had to weigh her career of somewhat crappy rom-coms and girl flicks against the fact that her production company has helped produce a lot of great independent movies, including Donnie Darko. When I found out that Ellen Page was in it, though, that sealed the deal.

Whip It stars Page as Bliss Cavender, a girl in her late teens, who's mother has managed, through either guilt or force, to get her to take part in various pageants in and around their little town of Bodeen, Texas (which is outside of Austin). Not feeling like she fits in anywhere, she discovers roller derby, and sneeks out of the house with her best friend Pash, played by Alia Shawkat, to go to Austin to watch the derby. One night she approaches some of the girls to express her love of what their doing, and they invite her to try out (even though you have to be 21 to do so). Bliss decides to take a chance and lie about her age so that she can try out, and makes the team. Now she just has to figure out how to balance the lies she's telling to the team and to her parents to be able to live the life she's always dreamed of.

Barrymore does an incredible job as a first time director, and her ensemble cast of the team is incredibly well put together. The story is simple, but really inspirational. Ellen Page, as always, delivers an amazing performance, and is complimented by Shawkat, Kristin Wiig, and Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern as Bliss's parents. It is so awesome to see Daniel Stern in some stuff again, and he does a great job. Surprisingly, for a film that takes place in Texas, it was mostly filmed in Michigan, but you wouldn't know it. It definitely looks like Texas, and Barrymore picked some great stuff for the shots she did in Austin. Whip It is one of my favorite's of this year, and I wish more people would see it. If you don't get a chance to see it in theater's, though, definitely check it out on DVD.

DVD- The Tracey Fragments

I can't be sure on this, but I don't think The Tracey Fragments ever got a "real" theatrical release in the States. By "real", I mean playing cities other than New York and L.A. for a week to film critics/fanatics, and whoever else happened to pick up on the fact that it was playing. I wish it would have, because this is a film that demands to be seen on a big screen. It's visual style is such, that it suffers a bit from watching it on DVD, and I would go so far as to say that you probably would be wasting your time trying to watch it on a portable DVD player or iPod.

The Tracey Fragments is a Canadian film by director Bruce McDonald, and starring one of the most incredible actresses of her generation - Ellen Page. Page is Tracey, a fifteen year old girl who can't reconcile her reality with real reality. Through a multi-frame screen, we see the bits and pieces that make up the story of her daily life, from being made fun of at school, to crushing on the new boy, to accidently loosing her brother in the woods, to spending days trying to find him. To try and describe the effect of the multi-frame screen is pointless, you just have to experience it, but it makes you feel the same way that Tracey feels - unsure of herself, and on information overload.

I LOVED this film. Page's performance is such that you completely buy into the idea that she is this fifteen year old girl, whose hypnotized her brother into thinking he's a dog, fantasizes about the 80's new wave dressed new kid, and who drives busses late at night to knock herself out of her depression. I'm not really sure what to say about McDonald's directing, because Page pretty much carries the whole story. All of the other characters almost seem like background noise, and with so many things going on on the screen, who has time to keep up with them anyway? The "Mondrian"-style panels give the film an energy and frenetic quality that is akin to the teenage life at fifteen. Your world is changing at lightning speed, and you're having massive amounts of information thrown at you at once, and this is exactly what McDonald's visual experiment does, putting up dozens of layers on the screen at once, to give you differing views of the action, and, at times, slightly different performances. It makes you really feel like you're seeing a story from all sides.

This film isn't for everyone. The panels might throw the casual movie-goer out of the story. The story, itself, is also fairly simple, and, had McDonald not used the panels and multiple take in the same shot (in other words, if he had told it straight-forward, nothing special), the film would probably be a little boring. It's McDonald's commitment to his style, and Page's electrifying performance, though, that make this film one that you need to watch.

Trailer's below - 

FCP and The Tracey Fragments

There's an interesting article on Apple's FCP site about the use of Final Cut Pro to create the multi-frame sequences in The Tracey Fragments, a new film starring Ellen Page (ahhh... Ellen Page...). To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here's the trailer, which uses the same effect - 

Smart People

Smart People stars Dennis Quaid as Lawrence Weatherhold, an English professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, who has little interest in the lives of his students, or his children. After losing his wife suddenly, he retreats into the world of his own intellectual superiority, completely ignoring everything and everyone around him. His daughter Vanessa, played by Ellen Page, idolizes her father, and works towards being his intellectual equal, at the cost of any normal teenage life. His son James, played by Ashton Holmes, has accepted his fathers disconnected nature, and built his life away from his family.

When Lawrence has an accident, which leaves him unable to drive for six months, he grudgingly accepts his brother's offer to chauffeur him in exchange for free room and board. This ends up causing Lawrence a lot more pain than it takes away, when Lawrence becomes interested in the doctor who helped him in the ER, a former student of his, named Janet, played by Sarah Jessica Parker. Vanessa, who, as I said earlier, idolizes her dad, becomes embittered with him when he begins dating the doctor, going so far as to make a pass at her uncle, who is adopted, and therefore not a blood relative (in her mind making it perfectly okay).

Smart People is, unfortunately a little to cookie-cutter indie for me. It feels like we've seen these characters before, seen this situation before, but with more humor and less recycling of the standard independent film bag of tricks.

Quaid's performance is confusing, and Parker's nothing to write home about, though Ellen Page continues to amaze with her ability to bring out the most interesting characteristics of someone who seems rather two dimensional. Thomas Haden Church is also funny as the adopted brother who comes to help Lawrence, though his performance is very reminiscent of a lot of the characters he has been playing lately.

Juno

Juno is, probably, one of my most anticipated films of the year, behind Control. Ever since Arrested Development, I've been a fan of Michael Cera (who played George Michael Bluth), and Jason Bateman (some of you may be old enough to remember him from Silver Spoons and Valerie, as well). The film also stars Ellen Page, as the title character Juno, who I have a semi-embarrassing crush on (she's only twenty, and looks even younger than that, so, it just feels weird).

The film is the story of Juno MacGuff, a sixteen year old girl who, after having sex with her best friend (played by Cera), ends up pregnant. She decides to keep the baby, but only long enough to have it, and then give it up for adoption. Along with her best friend, the tragically cliche Leah, she seeks out a couple to adopt her baby from the local pennysaver, and stumbles upon a well to do couple who is unable to conceive (played by Bateman and Jennifer Garner). While Juno is going through the ordeal of being quietly ostracized by her parents, and openly ostracized by her peers, she's trying to reconnect with her best friend and the father of her baby, Pauly Bleeker (as always, played hilariously by Michael Cera).

I'm not going to talk too much more about the plot, because I'd hate to give away any of the most interesting subplots that go on in the film. I will say that Page, Cera, and Bateman excel in their art form, in this film. The script, written by newcomer Diablo Cody, was well directed by Jason Reitman (yes, the son of legendary comedy director Ivan Reitman), though, I will say that Juno suffers considerably from a case of self-conscious filmmaking. Reitman wears his influences on his sleeve, especially in art direction, and his indie sensibility, while sharp, never-the-less sometimes feels like it has been cobbled together from other directors Mise-En-Scene. For instance, the amount of detail in the art direction in Juno's room, or her house for that matter, almost hearkens back to the painful amount of attention to period detail in, say, a Wes Anderson film. 

And the wall to wall indie music soundtrack, while made up of great music, did get kind of old. I mean, how many Belle and Sebastian songs can you have in one movie! But Reitman is a newcomer, trying to find his place away from his father, and trying to find his own voice, so I'm sure as time goes on, he will develop his own style. 

My only other problem with the film was the way the characters (primarily Juno and Leah), would talk sometimes. The words and phrasing they would use at times just felt SO self-conscious and written, as opposed to spontaneous and real. Some of their interactions felt scripted, as opposed to natural.

Page really made me fall in love with Juno. By the time the film was over, I was crying, and wishing I was Pauly Bleeker, sitting there on some front porch in Washington state, singing Moldy Peaches songs with Juno.

Ellen Page and Jason Bateman at Juno Premiere