My family always gets me movies for Christmas, so this season I was showered with a wealth of Bluray goodness. While I haven't watched my Copland, Casino or Pandorum discs, I can attest to loving those films and am looking forward to giving them a spin in the near future. I will now dig into the gifts I did watch and the films I was otherwise inspired to revisit.I've often mentioned my Father's monumental impact on me as an enthusiast of film. There are many motion pictures he (and my Mother) took me to growing up that sowed the seeds of cinematic appreciation, but few effected the evolution of my understanding of the art form like the early Coen Brother's masterpieces Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink. I mean seriously, how cool are parents that not only were aware of these films, but would take their budding cinephile son to see them in the theater? So, to receive the Coen Brothers Bluray box from them was a sort of perfect poetic punctuation. I tore into the films, watching Blood Simple first, then Raising Arizona followed by Miller's Crossing. Blood Simple is the Coen film I'm least familiar with and was the most welcome re-watch. It's astonishing how perfect they were right out of the gate, their singular perspective and slightly off sensibility showing through budget limitations to approximate a potently timeless 1980's Texas Neo-Noir. Raising Arizona is always welcome, if a little more on their slapdash, screwball side. The Nicholas Cage dream narration coda sneaks up on me every time, making me misty with its mannered, yet meaningful message of hope.
Miller's Crossing is a film so magnificent I can scarcely comprehend it. The witty banter and period specific turns of phrase that liberally season its superlative screenplay never fail to plaster a smile on my face. Talk about a world you want to get lost in! The clothes, the hairstyle's, the hats, the Tommy-guns, the speakeasy's. Of course everybody is marvelous in it, but I need to single out J.E. Freeman as the Dane. One of the great villainous performances ever and one that doesn't get talked about nearly enough. Its beautifully realized evocation of the roaring 20's gives way gorgeously to the ghostly 1940's Hollywood of Barton Fink, my favorite Coen Brothers film. A thoughtful, melancholy meditation on the correlation between creative types and the common man, not to mention the insoluble dichotomy of art and commerce, Barton Fink is the summation of the Coen's genuine love of the foibles of the Hollywood studio system and their seeming inability to work within it. It's a film of bottomless sadness and boundless hilarity. It's the Coen's stab at a David Lynch style slow burn nightmare in which they've grafted their clever comedic sensibilities onto a truly horrific descent into despair, isolation and madness. The definition of essential.
This Coen festival occasioned me to revisit A Serious Man, their most curiously under rated effort. I don't know what it was, but this viewing floored me and I found myself in stitches far more than any Big Lebowski screening. This might be the damn funniest film in their career. I can think of few moments in their filmography more indicative of the skewed comedic perspective of Joel and Ethan Coen than the gentleman grunting "Jesus Christ" while struggling to hold aloft the gigantic scroll during the films climactic Torah portion sequence. It's the faintest and most fleeting of moments, but one so indelibly intertwined with the Coen's distanced, bemused observation of the human race they are nominally members of.
The Dark Knight Rises prologue whetted my appetite for the apocalyptic elegance of Christopher Nolan's work, so I have been fervently occupied in revisiting Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception. Perhaps people were so blindsided by the inventiveness of Memento, they were predisposed to be unimpressed by Insomnia, his follow up effort. The truth is, it is an absolute masterpiece every bit on the level with any other of his works. Its slippery, strung out morals serve as the springboard for one of Pacino's finest performances. Wally Pfister's cinematography impossibly manages to be both frigidly cold and invitingly warm, blindingly bright and oppressively dark. Thesis papers could be written on the fog drenched shootout that kick starts the narrative alone.
Batman Begins is vastly better than I remembered it being. It's impressively propulsive early on in how it artfully, efficiently deals with doling out the expected origin story all the while setting the stage for an intriguingly dark and novel vision of Gotham, its inhabitants and the titans battling for its soul. Nolan may be meticulous, but the Batman films have brought out his playful, pulpy side with unexpected casting choices and quirky, occasionally clunky dialogue. Cillian Murphy is marvelously droll as The Scarecrow and Tom Wilkinson is a hoot as Falcone. I love how Nolan has given nearly every major role in this most American of all series to a Brit. The Dark Knight holds up to the hype and may well end up being one of the defining films of the decade alongside There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. It's the final statement on our morally and legally shaky reaction to the terror attacks of 9/11 and the resulting escalation our overzealous efforts gave horrible life to. Ledger's Joker is iconic and of infinite importance with or without the baggage of his death. My guess is that there was an element of fate at play in that unfortunate turn of events, the burden of such staggering relevance is often a costly one.
Inception holds up very well and I am ceaselessly grateful that we have a director as young and talented as Nolan turning out one masterpiece after another, like clockwork every couple of years. Ditto the Coen Brothers. I feel that 2012 will be a high water mark for cinema along the lines of 2007 and I look forward to documenting for posterity and potential future recrimination all that transpires. Thanks for reading and Happy New Year!
0 comments:
Post a Comment