Possibly the best Coen Brothers movie

I haven't read the book and I never saw the original version of the movie, so the Coen Brothers' "True Grit" is my only point of comparison here, but I found the movie very compelling and entertaining. I'm up and down on the Coens, but this seems to me their best movie yet - it plays well to their strengths, which tend to be strong narrative, a good sense of place, and a feeling for the Gothic and grotesque. Sometimes they let their taste for the grotesque run away with their movies, as in the awful A Serious Man, but they use it perfectly in True Grit, as we find the main characters wandering through the Choctaw Nation in the late 19th century in pursuit of a killer - so when they come across a strange, almost alien figure (a roving doctor living inside a bearskin) or a hideous scene (a corpse hanging high in tree) it builds of the strangeness and danger of the land and lines they're transgressing. Most of the reaction to the movie is inevitably about the young Hailee Steinfeld who plays the absurdly, comically precocious 14-year-old lead - she may win an Oscar, and she does play the part really well: speaking somehow in a very archaic and highly sophisticated diction, like a 19th-century novel come to life on the American frontier. You can't really believe her, or in fact this entire adventure, if you think about it for five minutes, but I found myself very captivated by the characters and hanging on the dialogue, as unlikely as it was. Jeff Bridges in the lead is excellent, though he sure does mumble, and he's in danger of being typecast as a near-ruined alcoholic with a good heart and with principles (cf. Crazy Heart). Matt Damon his usual wooden self. Only significant flaw in the movie, however (Spoiler alert!) is the conclusion: The whole mission is to kill or take fugitive, and as it turns out he's shot and killed without much of a fuss, and then the movie becomes a kind of aimless adventure yarn as Hailee falls in a pit, gets bit by a snake - is this in the original, or a Coen contrivance? Concluding scene - Hailee as an adult - not really a satisfactory coda to the mood of this otherwise very strong movie.

A completley unpretentious movie that's surprisingly good: City Island

"City Island" is a small, low-key, below-the-radar movie that breaks no new ground and will not be studied in classes on world cinema but is quite entertaining and completely unpretentious, much better than I thought it would be. Story centers on a family of four in the eponymous neighborhood in the Bronx, dad works as a prison guard but secretly wants to be an actor, taking classes at night while his wife (Julianne Marguiles) believes he's at a poker game. Family is full of secrets, most notably dad (Andy Garcia) has a son out of wedlock whom he spots in prison and brings home to live with the family, daughter has been kicked out of college and works as a stripper, son has an obsession with overweight women, and so on. Sounds a little kooky, or kinky, and it is, but the script is very well engineered - film teachers take note, it's a very "teachable" screenplay I think - and many of the scenes are very funny - family dinner, Garcia's film audition, the grand denouement when secrets are revealed. Other aspects don't work quite as well, especially the flirtatious relationship between Garcia and acting classmate, Emily Mortimer - film can't decide the sexual-emotional content of their relationship exactly. Alan Arkin is a good bit player as the acting instructor. The film owes a huge debt to The Sopranos, in the family dynamics (the daughter especially), and in the motif of the tough guy who wants to act. It's not a believable film on a literary level, but it's not meant to be - just a good entertainment that set forth modest goals and achieved them.

After all these years, Antonioni's Blow-up holds up well

After all these years and countless pop-culture references, Antonioni's "Blow-up" holds up very well, and not just as a cultural artifact, though it is that - in fact it was a a cultural artifact even in its own time, as people watched it to get a glimpse of the swinging, artistic London scene of the 60s, seems a million years ago, Pleistocene, you could drive around London in an open Rolls Royce and find parking on the street, anywhere (at least in this movie) - but as a beautiful and well-crafted story of alienation and mystery. I encourage anyone to compare this story about a commercial artist (photographer) so alienated from life and emotions and feelings and sexual drive that he is callous to everyone and experiences life, to the extent that he does at all, only through his lens, with the recent and entirely drab and unimaginative Somewhere - well, there's no comparison. Not that this film is truly about personality - we learn and know nothing about the background or back story of any character and I believe, I may be wrong, that only one character, the photographer's agent, even has a name - but it's about a certain style and mood that Antonioni captures perfectly, with his many unusual shot compositions, the strange pastoral scenes in the London park where a crime may or may not have been committed, the studio and apartment seemingly built of oddly juxtaposed angles and facets, the streets of London, what appears to be an industrial SE district, not yet populated by artists but ready for discovery - and most of all the central mystery, never truly resolved as to what the photog sees in his blown-up prints - with the ultimate meaning that it doesn't matter, it's not about a crime but about his life - and then of course the famous closing sequences of the mimes on the tennis court - what a beautiful film!

Low IQ?: Why Intelligence doesn't quite measure up

We'll probably stop watching Intelligence after episode 3 of season 1, not that it's a bad series - it's definitely not bad - but it's just not that good, and there's so much good stuff out there, especially in the well-tended field where Intelligence has staked its claim. Face it, you can't help but compare it with The Sopranos and The Wire, and it just doesn't measure up against that level of excellence. It's a suitably complex plot - underworld figure in Vancouver, much like a Tony Soprano but younger, slicker, not part of an ethnic clan, Jim Reardon, who runs an enterprise involving drugs, strip clubs, money laundering - turns informant for the Vancouver ICU, the head of which is under great pressure because of interagency jealousy. Both she (Mary) and Reardon have complex family situations going on: a fuck-up brother, a nasty divorce, a custody battle. All that said, the family and personl aspects are barely developed and barely rise above the level of cliche. What made the Sopranos great was that it was primarily about people and families, and as it happened they were involved in this criminal line of work - a total surprise and twist. What made The Wire great was the terrific scenes of police work in action, with lots of down time, which is very true to life. Intelligence is built on a thousand very short scenes, all business - there's so much plot to spin out that nothing unfolds - Reardon rushes from one brief meeting to another, and all I'm thinking about the whole time is how to hold the plot elements together. It's kind of a different take - mob boss as CEO - but for me far less interesting than many other series out there right now.

An evil mountain man turns out to be a lovable eccentric: Welcome to Hollywood!

When a gruff mountain hermit threatens intruders by blasting at them with his shotgun, chases terrorized children off his land, posts a "no damn trespassers" sign, speaks in monosyllables, and beats a bystander over the head with a wooden pole, and then turns out to be a soft-hearted eccentric well versed in Indian lore and natural homeopathy who keeps an image of his long-lost beloved taped above his headboard, speaks in wise parables, and is so generally good-natured and benevolent that he built an entire church by hand for a nearby black congregation just as a favor to the folksy preacher, we can be in only one place: Welcome to Hollywood. "Get Low," a Robert Duvall-Bill Murray-Sissy Spacek vehicle is set in the 20s/30s in what looks to be the Ozarks, and is just as believable as any Ozark yarn - but less compelling. To the extent that there are any surprises in the movie, you will figure them out in minutes - way, way ahead of any of the characters. The very basic plot outline is that eccentric hermit Duvall comes to Murray's funeral parlor and asks for a "living funeral" at which people will come to tell stories about him (presumably, about his evil ways). Oddly, this never happens - but at the big funeral that wraps the movie Duvall confesses to the great sin (he loved a marrried woman! she died in a fire and he couldn't save her!) that has driven him to 40 years of hermetic existence. This movie - aided and abetted by its soundtrack - is about as heavy-handed as they come, but there are a few strengths: the acting of the principals is very strong, especially Murray, who has become a better and nuanced actor with nearly every serious role. I wish the movie had been about him, an itinerant confidence man trying to make a buck. Or I wish it had been written by Stephen King, who would've made the Duvall character much more frightening, complex, and credible.

The best film ever made about nomadic Kazakhi shepherds

Tempting to say that "Tulpan" is the greatest Kazakhastani (sp?) movie ever made and leave it at that. However: part of what we love in movies is that they can take us to places we've never been, real and imagined (Avatar), and show us lives that we've never seen or even imagined. Much of the great world cinema of today does this, and any serious viewer of world movies has gotten to know and understand the lives the wealthy and the impoverished from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, everywhere - and Tulpan brings us with what looks to be documentary realism, and probably a cast of amateur actors, into the lives of nomadic shepherds on the Kazakh steppe. Who knew there's a story to be seen and told here, and a flat and desolate landscape, amid camels and sheep and a few goats, people living in yurts and getting about in a jeep of some sort that looks to be cobbled together from spare machinery parts. Some of the scenes are strikingly graphic: we get to see one of the character assist in the birth of a lamb, definitely not faked or digitized. This is a world few of us will ever visit or see again in any other form. If you want to see what it's like to live inside a smoky, cramped yurt where mom spends the day churning buttermilk, here's your chance. The plot - a failed attempt to forge a marriage contract - is thin as paper, but it's just enough to keep a little forward movement in this film. All that said: the film at times is so slow I thought the image was freezing onto my flatscreen, and it's not the easiest thing in the world to convey isolate, insular lives, in which the characters endlessly sing the (seemingly) same chanting song over and over and over. It's a film I appreciated more than enjoyed.

Can I have the 90 minutes back?: Movies I wish I hadn't watched in 2010

Not to be too curmudgeonly on New Year's Day, but to complete my thoughts on the Best Movies of 2010, let me round it out with - not the worst movies of 2010 because who would even go to see the absolute worst, but the worst movies that I watched or tried to watch. Can I please get back the 90 minutes I spent watching:

Bright Star. Thought it would be great. Was and am really interested in Keats and the Romantic poets. Has there ever been a less romantic movie, though? Or a more ludicrous depiction of the art of creating poetry? It did get me to re-read some odes and sonnets, though.

An Education. A movie without a shred of honesty about how a criminally exploitative older man takes advantage of a troubled teenage girl. Amazingly, it did get many good rerviews.

Inglourious Bastards. Couldn't finish it. Nazis were horrible? Gee, I never knew! So let's watch some Jewish thugs take them on with baseball bats.

It's Complicated. Rich people suffer just as much as we do. They struggle as they work with the architects to plan the latest addition to their mansions. Sometimes, they have to settle for a modest hotel suite in New York while their thoughtless ex takes an executive suite. It's not complicated, it's ludicrous.

The Lovely Bones. If it makes you feel good to believe that murder victims live a life after death in which they roam through an unpopulated landscape designed by Peter Jackson, maybe you'll go for this movie.

Where the Wild Things Are. The book was a short classic. The movie: bloated, pointless, chaotic. Who exactly is supposed to like this film? Not kids, not adults, not me.

You Kill Me. Another one I couldn't finish. The first 30 minutes were not credible in any possible way - a screenwriter's attempt to create yet another zany mob comedy movie, with no wit, knowledge, experience, or original insight.

And two other movies, not in wide release yet, but worth avoiding in 2011: I Love You, Philip Morris, and Somewhere.

With these behind us, let's hope for great movies in 2011!