"Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1977)

 Bubbles in champagne

"Broken Flowers" (dir. Jim Jarmusch, 2005)

Hoops and a shadow

"The Stranger" (dir. Orson Welles, 1946)

Amateur gunslinging

"Shoot the Piano Player" (dir. Francois Truffaut, 1960)

Lights in the dark

"Field of Dreams" (dir. Phil Alden Robinson, 1989)

Money in the wind

"The Killing" (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1956)

Overwrought metaphors

"The Virgin Spring" (dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1960)

Setsuko Hara

"Tokyo Story" (dir. Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

Comforting angsty bourgeoisie

"L'Avventura" (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)

A relaxed pose

"Sans Soleil" (dir. Chris Marker, 1983)

"Duck Soup" (dir. Leo McCarey, 1933)

Groucho Marx, as per usual, the only one unvexed by his practiced unpredictability. The question for me, though, is what expression is the women in the background-right, partially obfuscated by a parasol,  wearing?

Mrs. Miniver (1942) dir. William Wyler

All The Presidents Men (1976) dir. Alan J. Pakula

“The King’s Speech” came away from the evening with four of the biggest prizes (Best Picture, Actor (Colin Firth), Director (Tom Hooper), and Original Screenplay (David Seidler)). “Inception” nabbed most of the technical awards while the big nominee “True Grit,” rode away empty handed.

In the past few years the Academy has been surprisingly forward minded with its choice of Best Original Score. Argentine musician Gustavo Santaolalla, who walked away with the award two years in a row in the middle of the decade (for “Brokeback Mountain” and “Babel”), and Indian composer A.R. Rahman (for his Bollywood-influenced score for, “Slumdog Millionaire.” This year continued that trend with Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor and his partner in crime Atticus Ross walking away with the top film score composition prize. These four wins provide the greatest hope for me that there is some semblance of a breath of fresh air in the Academy. All four take very unique and compelling looks at what a film score can sound like and show score composition can be more than John Williams (or the dearly departed John Berry) symphonics. It was a surprising and, like I said, forward thinking choice that earned a very vigorous head-nod and smile from this outside viewer.

The Reznor/Ross win was one of three for, “The Social Network,” a film that I reviewed when it was released back in October but am now thinking that I need to take a second look at. Editors Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall won for their work on the film, along with scribe Aaron Sorkin, who walked away with a Best Adapted Screenplay award. The big shock of the night came when last year’s Best Director winner, Kathryn Bigelow, opened the envelope and awarded the Best Director statue to Tom Hooper in lieu of most people’s presumptive winner, David Fincher.

Fincher, who helmed “The Social Network,” is quietly turning himself into the premier American director. He came up during a period of time during the mid-to-late-1990s with a group of young directors (like Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, David O. Russell, and Alexander Payne) that might be considered the best batch of young American directors since the New Hollywood era. All are great in their own way, but Fincher is arguably the best and his loss tonight is the only real complaint I can make about this year’s incantation of an awards ceremony that I love to hate.

I’m working on a more in-depth discussion of Fincher’s work and why he is, if not the best American filmmaker working today, at the very least the one that should be most admired. Keep those eyes peeled!

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“Black Swan,” director Darren Aronofsky’s latest ode to corporeal instability, oozes grime and sleaze out of each of its art-house baiting pores, and it’s fantastic. Natalie Portman (in a performance that is as campy as it is magnificent) plays Nina, a soloist in a fictional New York City ballet company competing for the lead role in the season opening performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake.” Company director Thomas (Vincent Cassel) has announced that he wants this rendition of the well-worn classic to be fresh and real, and in service of that goal he puts prima ballerina, Beth (Winona Ryder), out to pasture in favor of a fresh face. It is no surprise that he selects Nina, though not without a fair amount of competition from her female peers, who are all as tightly wound as the feature-distorting ponytails pulling their hair back. The stiffest competition comes from the company’s newest addition, the free-spirited Californian, Lily (Mila Kunis). She, Thomas tells Nina, is unafraid of letting herself go and surrendering to her body. It is a trait that the overly disciplined Nina doesn’t poses and it hinders her ability to fully become the darkly libidinous (and titular) Black Swan. Thomas’ advice to Nina for luring that Black Swan out of herself is to surrender to her repressed sexuality. When she does surrender to impulses, (sexual and otherwise) all bets are off. Doppelgängers lurk around every corner, skin peels off of Portman’s fingers to the audiences’ grimacing horror, only to be replaced in the next shot like the melting face in “Poltergeist.” Aronofsky telegraphs these moments of psychological confusion with eerie sound effects and spooky music cues that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Dario Argento film.

Aronofsky’s film is as much of that pulpy milieu as it is of the art house aesthetic that shows up in the handheld shots that bob along behind Nina’s head. It is a near point-of-view shot that is as irritating as it is ubiquitous. But getting the audience into Nina’s head is his primary concern, and putting a camera behind Portman’s head is just one of several tricks he employs to achieve this end. The sound is carefully designed so we hear every crack, pop, and crunch when she adjusts her damaged toes. We’re in the next stall every time her finger is stuck down her throat. Unfortunately, Aronofsky largely fails when he tries to pull the rug out from under his audience, but it’s less because of a lack of empathy for Nina’s situation and more because Aronofsky can’t quite achieve an adequate level of psycho-dramatic confusion. His shots and visual effects are too tied to a specific reading that they can become truly chaotic and confusing. On a purely visual level, he takes a lot of time to emphasize Nina’s point of view only to force the most obvious reading possible: the quest for an unattainable, artistic perfection drives one to the brink of insanity.

What makes the film so enjoyable and so readily able to overcome its short-comings are the multiple readings that float underneath its tortured artist gloss. A tale of women self-mutilating in order to achieve the perfect self haunts the film, as does a story about a girl’s maturation into being a woman. It is this second reading that I find most compelling. Nina is infantilized by an overbearing mother (played by the marvelous Barbara Hershey), which leads to sexual repression and sexual confusion. Once she is encouraged to explore her sexuality there is confusion, the rejection of the mother, idealization of a masculine figure (Nina informs her mother of the role in, “Swan Lake” by saying, “he picked me,” as if she were still in middle school), the schizophrenic feelings that come with maturation and finally, well, I don’t want to give anything away.

Such intellectualization, while not without merit, distracts from the roller coaster ride that, “Black Swan” goes on. It is, by turns, horrifying, comical, self-serious and half-baked.  Little odes to the other death-shrouded ballet film, Powell and Pressburger’s “The Red Shoes,” pop up here and there along with nods to “Carrie” and “Raging Bull.” But Aronofsky’s primary precursors are his own, self-destruction obsessed films. The stories of Nina and “The Wrestler”s Randy the Ram run oddly parallel courses. But where his past films were about the depiction of self-destruction and self-mutilation (remember seeing Mickey Rourke get hit with a barb wire-wrapped two-by-four?), “Black Swan” is mostly about depicting the physical and psychological results. Aronofsky doesn’t care to show us Natalie Portman dancing herself into a nervous breakdown; in fact the dancing sequences aren’t about dancing but instead about camera movement. There is more dancing in the chopped up spectacle of Baz Luhrmann than there is here. No, it’s about results. It’s about what happens after the psyche becomes as emaciated as the body.

Those results are only occasionally interesting and never surprising. The heavy-handed dialogue and even heavier reliance on cliché by Aronofsky and screenwriters Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz and John McLaughlin is also about exploitation. Exploitation of the actors (especially Portman, who looks, alternately, truly vanquished and predatory), exploitation of the film’s own foundational clichés (suffocating mother, struggle for perfection, martyr for art), exploitation of visual tropes (mirrors as a motif for duality), exploitation of characters (Aronofsky seems to revel in the mangled hands, warped feet, bubbling skin, and puncture wounds that various characters sustain over the film’s hour and fifty minute running time), and exploitation of the audience. The entire film was comfortably uncomfortable, which might have prevented it from having some of the true jolt that it was capable of, but I recommend taking the time to watch it, if for no other reason than to see what all the fuss is about. It is goofily ostentatious and its sleazy rendition of art house cinema is worth seeing once, but once is probably enough for me.

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I’m sure there was a generation of kids who grew up with Disney’s 1982 film, “Tron,” and that those now-grown kids were clamoring for a sequel to that first foray into digital animation. I was not one of those kids. When I saw it, as a sophomore in college, it was like listening to a Yaz record; memorable only as a curious artifact from an earlier cultural time whose echoes still resonant. And yet, I was intrigued when I heard about a sequel and positively enthralled when the first concept images first appeared online in the summer of 2009. I kept abreast of developments and trailers, and walked into the theater with high expectations, some of which were met, others not.

“Tron: Legacy,” begins in 1989, with Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) tucking his young son Sam into bed with tales of cybertronic glory. It isn’t long before young Sam is orphaned and his father’s company, ENCOM, reverts to less-than-altruistic hands.  Twenty years later Sam undertakes James Bond-eqsue missions to ensure that ENCOM’s latest software adheres to the open source vision his father. The opening is one of the few action sequences not in 3D, although it may just as well have been. Director Joseph Kosinski, a commercial director helming his first feature, keeps his camera tight, focal length long, and shot length short, mimicking a 3D visual style as closely as possible. Kevin’s former business associate, and original film holdover, Allan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) seeks Sam out to tell him that a page was received from Kevin’s old phone number, disconnected twenty years earlier. Curiosity gets the best of Sam (played by the plucky Garrett Hedlund), who returns to his old man’s video arcade and workshop. From there, “Tron: Legacy” more or less follows the arc of the original film. Sam gets sucked into the original’s digitized computer programming world, but it’s a world advanced by several thousand generations. Sam is mistaken for a program, forced to compete in gladiatorial combat, fights the big program, needs to escape, etc., etc., etc.  The beats between the beginning and the unsatisfying conclusion are slightly more intricate, but it’s tough to parse out nuances when they’re surrounded by such loud backgrounds.

But oh, what backgrounds. The jet-black foundational glass shimmers from the streaks of blue light that run through everything. The visual metaphor for interconnectivity is strained, but it looks fantastic. Movement is emphasized by streaks of yellow, orange, and green, which solidify into walls that cut programs in half and blow up the vehicles that appear line by line in seconds and disappear just as quickly. Everything looks great from the visual effects to the tight leather costumes to the production design in the white, Mod abode that Sam finds his father living in outside of Tronopolis.

As the elder Kevin Flynn, Jeff Bridges is campy. The goatee and Zen catch phrases he spouts off never let us forget that he will always be The Dude. He lives with and mentors Quorra, played by the doe-eyed Olivia Wilde in a charming, impressive performance as a living, breathing cartoon character. Garrett Hedlund gives a similarly solid performance in the unenviable role of straight man amongst all of this visual effect hocus-pocus. Of all of the performers, Michael Sheen, playing a Bowie-esque club owner, does the most with the mostly clunky dialog provided by scribes Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz. He alone seems to realize that in order to stand out from the computer generated scenery one needs to be larger than life. It lifts up the film’s middle when it seems like everything is being taken a little bit too seriously.

But, the real star and main performer is the visual effects. They marry so seamlessly with the bass and percussion heavy score of Daft Punk and the zippy sound effects that it creates an almost perfect visceral package. It’s a moving auditorium away from being a theme park ride, which I’m sure Disney already has in the works.  The only problem is the digitally younger Jeff Bridges, playing the role of main baddie, Clu. It falls in an uncomfortable purgatory, obviously computer generated but nearly lifelike.

Ultimately, the film is little more than special effects wizardry. I saw it in IMAX 3D and I can’t really imagine experiencing it any other way. The technical expertise at work is breathtaking on such a large scale. It was almost enough to make me forget my fundamental disdain for 3D filmmaking, not quite, but almost. “Tron: Legacy” makes no bones about what it is or where its influences lie. This is all about video games, from the Pong-like nature of the gladiatorial combat to the camera angles behind the futuristic motorcycles to the, “defeat the big boss,” mentality of the final scenes. It lacks the watery environmental message of “Avatar” and the Freudian pretensions of “Inception,” its two closest big budget, visual effects laden rivals. By avoiding such weighty themes it avoids equally weighty distractions, and it makes for a more involving experience.

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For public figures, a voice is just as important as an image. Take poor, silent film stars like John Gilbert, a man who fell out of public favor when his high-pitched voice didn’t match the public’s expectations. The search for a voice that suits one’s public persona is the quandary befalling British Prince Albert, Duke of York and stutterer extraordinaire. As the subject of the new film (and Oscar supplicant), “The King’s Speech,” Prince Albert (better known to modern audiences as King George VI and father of Queen Elizabeth II) makes for a surprisingly compelling viewing.

The time has come for Christopher Nolan to scale back. After four straight films that actually fit hyperbolic descriptors like “grandiose” and “epic,” one senses that a trend is emerging. As Nolan’s images become increasingly grand and assuredly awe-inspiring, the returns on the substantive aspects of his films are steadily diminishing. The trend, unfortunately, continues with his latest blockbuster, “Inception,” which was released this week on Blu-Ray and DVD. 

Leonardo DiCaprio leads the cast of “Inception” through a twisty, turny, but mostly convoluted plot that borrows bits of “Last Year at Marienbad,” “Mulholland Dr.”, “La Jetée”, and “The Matrix.” DiCaprio, playing the awkwardly named Dom Cobb, is an international fugitive specializing in the extraction of secrets from a person’s subconscious while they dream. The wealthy and enigmatic Saito (Ken Watanabe) hires Cobb to implant an idea into the subconscious of the weakling son (Cillian Murphy) of a dying competitor (Pete Postlethwaite). For reasons that remain intentionally vague, Watanabe needs Murphy to believe that the perishing patriarch wants his son to break up his inherited energy conglomerate. In exchange for this service, Saito promises to return Cobb to America and his children with a single phone call. The stakes are high, as inception is a difficult and risky procedure that requires entering dreams within dreams within dreams. Nothing comes easy when dealing with the subconscious.

When enumerating the many problems of summer blockbusters, the lack of thoughtful (and thought-provoking) big-budget spectacle seems to be the problem mentioned most often. Bombastic action movies, adolescent comedies, and CGI-animated kid films monopolize the screens at multiplexes, leaving little room for anything whose goal is to inspire as much thought as awe. In this respect, “Inception” is an exceptional film. No matter how derivative the plot feels at times, the film is an action blockbuster that asks you to think. Nolan deserves a lot of credit for the images he creates: deserted cities crumble into a subconscious sea; trains plow through streets full of cars; Paris folds in on itself; extremely slow motion is used extremely liberally (but never wears out its welcome); and zero gravity fights give way to Joseph Gordon-Leavitt lassoing a group of his floating compatriots and hauling their weightless bodies into an elevator. Nolan, even in all of this eye-popping grandeur, never loses focus during the small moments or lets the big spectacle overwhelm the frame. His camera is always flawlessly placed and his staging always flawlessly executed. At this, he remains masterful.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film falls flat. The performances aren’t bad, per se, but they’re lifeless. Nolan simply doesn’t know what to do with the enormously gifted cast he has assembled. Ellen Page’s natural charm struggles to shine through her character’s role as an exposition depository. The enormous talent of Gordon-Leavitt is similarly wasted as clunky dialog rips away his mischievous gravitas. He typifies a problem most of the cast faces (Marion Cotillard withstanding) in that the characters are little more than husks and Nolan’s elaborate, mechanical plot doesn’t allow them room to fill that vacuum. DiCaprio fares the worst, though. Cobb lacks a compelling inner struggle, forcing DiCaprio to glower and sulk gloomily in lieu of portraying genuine emotion. It is a good performance, but ultimately one that is ill suited for the film, which might’ve fared better had the portrayal been lighter. As it stands, DiCaprio’s brooding demeanor overwhelms nearly everyone around him and forces a severity and over-importance on all.

Nolan’s biggest problem isn’t the dialog. It isn’t the performances, Hans Zimmer’s thudding, ubiquitous score, or even the needlessly complicated plot construction (it’s not as complicated as you’ve heard, but it does require your constant attention). The big problem is that Nolan simply isn’t up to the task that he put in front of himself. He is too literal-minded in his depictions of a dream world to create a compelling rendition of the unconscious. Portraying the subconscious as a construct lacks the courage to depict it for what it is; a jumbled, hazy maze of thoughts, memories and fantasies where reality is never entirely clear. Nolan’s is more like several realistic action films jammed together; everything is clear, everyone is recognizable. Placing the majority of the action within the subconscious affords Nolan the ability to flex his $160 million dollar budget and come up with some memorable images in the process, but it doesn’t ever explore the subconscious in a meaningful way. Where David Lynch had the courage to confuse, reverse course, and circle back to images and scenes in his dreamscape film, “INLAND EMPIRE,” “Inception” reveals Nolan’s unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to adequately address the nature of dreams, the unconscious, or the perception of reality. Questions linger at the end of this two and a half hour tome, but none of them are particularly compelling or worth the weighty thought the film pleads with the audience to them.

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It must be tough being Mark Zuckerberg. “The Social Network” is just the latest bit of bad press after a string of books, magazine articles, editorials and news reports painted him as a cold, detached technocrat who cares little for the privacy of the users of his multi-billion dollar startup. There isn’t really any way for Zuckerberg to catch a break; in the Internet age that Zuckerberg built his fortune on everyone is a critic and everyone has a microphone with which they can share their opinion. Zuckerberg can do no right because no amount of work on his site’s privacy concerns will ever be enough. He can’t do anything right because someone will always be envious (not to mention litigious) of his success and because a $100 million donation will never be enough to erase the (perception of a) fundamental change he has made in the way we communicate with one another.

Really though, Columbia Pictures is creating its own zeitgeist to surround its zeitgeist film. Ironically, they build this zeitgeist not around the enthusiasm for Facebook but around the myth of Mark Zuckerberg as told by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and his source material, the 2009 Ben Mezrich book, “The Accidental Billionaires.” Portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg, Zuckerberg is affectless and detached. He’s out there somewhere, but it’s never entirely clear where. During a deposition he is asked by an attorney representing the Harvard WASPs who claim Zuckerberg stole their idea if he has captured the young entrepreneur’s attention. Zuckerberg responds that his attention is, indeed, elsewhere: the offices of Facebook. But even his self-assured and mocking response to the lawyer’s condescending questions rings a bit false. Thinking about his nascent company would imply that he cares about something. The Zuckerberg presented by Sorkin and director David Fincher doesn’t seem to care for or about anything.

The film’s tone is set immediately as the first scene puts Eisenberg across a table from the girl that dumped him, thus prompting his creation of FaceMash– a Facebook prototype. The two spew pages of dialog about the elite of Harvard in seconds while Fincher, using his typically dark color palate, cuts between the pair with energy to spare.  The film poses interesting observations about what drives our online interactions, but ultimately the tying of the creation of Facebook to Zuckerberg’s insecurities is unsatisfying and creates a rather shallow, simplistic impression of him. Sorkin, whose typically acerbic dialog is in top form, is smart to offer few concrete answers regarding the motives of the enigmatic Zuckerberg. For the time being, Mark Zuckerberg will be all things to all people, and Sorkin wisely avoids trying to pin him down. The irony of a young man with few social skills creating a social network is not lost on Sorkin, but his script doesn’t make many cheap shots. The Zuckerberg of “The Social Network” sees himself as the smartest guy in the room, and more often than not he is right.

But that isn’t enough for us to forgive him when he sells out his friend and Facebook co-founder, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield). Saverin is rendered as the better angel to Napster founder Sean Parker’s bitter demon (a phenomenal Justin Timberlake). “This is our time,” Parker tells an obviously enthralled Zuckerberg while at a San Francisco club. “This time you’re going to hand them a business card that says, ‘I’m CEO, bitch.’” This voice of imprudence wins out against Saverin’s sensible approach to Facebook’s future. In the climactic confrontation– the film’s best line is saved for this clash: “Sorry, my Prada is at the cleaners, along with my hoodie and my ‘fuck you’ flip-flops, you pretentious douche bag!”– after Saverin smashes Zuckerberg’s computer to bits he channels Jedediah Leland by yelling, “I was your only friend!”

The “Citizen Kane” references don’t fit as well as they might seem, though. The general shape is there, but Fincher and Sorkin have a hard time making the emotional connection from audience to character. Although Zuckerberg, like Kane, loses his personal relationships as he becomes more successful, the story never really hits at a gut level. Fincher’s color scheme and detached style leaves the film feeling frigid, and Sorkin’s script keeps the characters talking but they never say anything revealing.

The trouble is the film isn’t bad. Fincher’s deep-focus photography and fast, take-no-prisoners pace serve the film well and keep everything incredibly exciting. Sorkin’s script is full of spectacular one-liners and the type of quick speak that justifiably earned him praise on “The West Wing.” The performances are universally excellent, from Timberlake (is there anything this man can’t do?) to Garfield to Jesse Eisenberg. Eisenberg is an actor that I’d always had doubts about, but he manages to erase them all here in a wonderfully detached performance. But I just didn’t care when the final credits started to roll. The film never coalesced into the “film that defines a generation.” It’s a film that, much like the website which prompted it, makes things feel closer (and more relevant) than they really are.