Blue Valentine

Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine courted a lot of controversy when it was making the film festival rounds, and was looking at a possible NC-17 rating for graphic sexual content. Cianfrance made cuts and ended up with an R, but not before winning numerous awards for the story of two people falling in love and, eventually, falling back out of love.

Ryan Gosling plays Dean, a Brooklyn furniture mover who meets Cindy (Michelle Williams), when he has to deliver an elderly mans furniture to the same rest home that Cindy's grandmother lives in. Dean falls in love at first sight, and the courting begins. As time goes on, though, there relationship begins to show evidence of the wear and tear of time.

Blue Valentine is shown in a non-linear fashion. We start off with Dean and Cindy when they've already been married for several years, and flash back and forth to them as a young couple meeting and falling in love for the first time to their love dissolving before our very eyes. Gosling and Williams love and hate each other with such passion in this movie, you would think they must have plumbed the depths of their past relationships that have dissolved (Gosling was in a long term relationship with Rachel McAdams and Williams was partners with Heath Ledger, though they broke it off before his death). Absolutely every emotion feels genuine, which makes it all the more devastating when their love turns poisonous. The films cinematography sticks in close with its characters, using close ups most of the time, which gives the audience an almost uncomfortable feeling of being right there when everything happens.

The only thing that confused me is why Cindy hated Dean so much. He never really seemed to do anything horrible, or, at least, it wasn't expressed that he did. He could be child like (not childish, which is different), but that's part of what she fell in love with in the first place, so it's confusing that she so completely hates him by the end of the film.

Barring that, though, this film was one of the most beautiful, well acted, and devastating pieces of work I have seen in a long time. If Gosling and Williams don't rack up nominations and awards for this, people don't have their eyes open. Many people won't see this film because it's "depressing", but the thing that I love about cinema is how it can bring to life, on a massive scale, the basic human problems we all face, and give us hope and conciliation and make us feel like we are not alone. That's what Blue Valentine does - For anyone who has had a relationship that started off good and went bad, for anyone who has loved someone who didn't love them back, for anyone who has fought hard to keep the things they've built, but the other person won't fight too, this film is like a best friend giving you a hug and telling you it's okay to feel the way you do.

Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese is one of American cinema's great artist's. He's earned that title from over forty years of making classic films (and, like many of his contemporaries - Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, De Palma, etc. - has made his share of mistakes). The last decade has seen him team up with Leonardo DiCaprio and produce some of the best work of his career, including The Aviator, The Departed, and Gangs of New York. With his latest film with DiCaprio, Shutter Island, Scorsese doesn't miss the bar that he's set with those other films, but he doesn't quite hit it either. It's more like... He sidesteps it.

Shutter Island opens to a thick fog, and a ferry boat cutting through it, that carries DiCaprio's character Teddy Daniels. He's taking the ferry, with his new partner and fellow Federal Marshal Chuck Aule (played by Mark Ruffalo) to Shutter Island, a prison/asylum for Massachutses' worst criminals. We learn, as he reveals to Chuck, that his wife was burned to death in a fire in their apartment building, and the man who set the fire, Andrew Laedus, is here at Shutter Island. Of course, their here to solve the mystery of a missing inmate, but Teddy has Laedus on his mind. As the search for the missing inmate progresses, though, Teddy and Chuck begin to put two and two together, and realize that there is a lot more going on at Shutter Island than they fully understand, and if the staff has anything to do with it, they may not be going home.

It's hard to review this film without giving stuff away, but I will do my best. Visually this film is stunning. The acting is, for the most part, top notch. I thought Ruffalo was WAY off the mark, but, due to a twist in the story that I can't reveal, I realized only later on that his acting was actually quite amazing. It feels like Scorsese uses Kubrick's The Shining as a jumping off point for a lot of what goes on at the island, and his use of dream/fantasy sequences bring a bit of further dimensionality to what would otherwise be a straight up film-noir style crime procedural. On the other hand, some times these dream/fantasy sequences come off as a little tongue in cheek, and its not always easy to take them seriously (like the rat at the end of The Departed). Did I like Shutter Island? Yes and no. I would like to see it again, at some point, to REALLY make a decision. I think it's a well made movie, but I'm not completely sure it succeeds in the realm of entertainment.

Synecdoche, New York

I don't know how to describe this film. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as Caden Cotard, a theater director who receives a genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and decides to use it to create a massive stage play that he spends twenty years of his life trying to create. That's about the best I can do. The film, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, is... amazing. That being said, its almost impossible to do it justice in a paragraph. It's just one of those movies you have to see. It's, basically, Cotard's life, from shortly before he receives the grant, into his very old age. It is funny, awkward, truthful, and far out all at the same time. Kaufman really creates his own world, going way beyond the strangeness of his previous writing efforts like Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. Just see it. That's all I can say. You'll either like it, or you won't, but you'll never forget it.

Spout.com interview - Kelly Reichardt

Karina Longworth, formerly of Cinematical, now writes for Spout.com, and recently interviewed Kelly Reichardt, the auteur of such films as Old Joy, and the all new Wendy and Lucy, starring Michelle Williams as a broke twenty something, trying to make her way to Alaska to work in the lucrative cannery's. It's a great read. I really enjoyed Old Joy and have River of Grass on my Netflix queue (now that its on DVD).