If, for some reason, you ever wanted to screen a film festival at a retirement home, this year’s indie/arthouse crop would yield three films you could show in succession.   

Start with “Alexandra,”  a Russian film about a elderly woman who visits her grandson, who is in the military and engaged in the Chechnyan conflict.   She wanders around and clucks a lot, and builds an unlikely friendship with a Chechnyan woman.    Then show “Cherry Blossoms,”  a German film about an elderly man who visits his son in Tokyo, who isn’t very excited to see him and leaves him alone most of the day.   He wanders around and marvels at how different things are in Japan, and builds an unlikely friendship with a homeless dancer.   

Then you can show “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,”  an American film about an elderly Chinese gentleman who visits his daughter in America, who isn’t very excited to see him and leaves him alone most of the time.   He wanders around and takes notes on English slang, and strikes up an unlikely frienship with a Lebanese neighbor.  

His daughter doesn’t like him very much, and we get the sense that he wasn’t a good father while she was growing up.   She also doesn’t much like that he’s still a believing Communist.   He is very worried about her, her marriage prospects, and the way she eats.   She doesn’t seem very happy, but she certainly doesn’t want his help in fixing that.  

Part of the problem with “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” lies in its structure.  In the last few minutes of the movie, there is a revelation that changes just about everything the daughter thought she knew about her father and his life.   It is a heartbreaking revelation, but it comes so late in the movie that it’s hard to start caring.    The movie is based on a short story by Yiyun Li, and I can imagine this kind of heartbreaking revelation working much better at the end of 25 pages of mostly nothing happening.  2 hours of mostly nothing happening is a lot to take.

Seems like so many independent/arthouse movies these days absolutely revel in being “demanding.”   They demand that you find some significance in the slow pace, the lack of plot or characterization or dialogue.   They hold on a kitchen table scene for six seconds too long, they revel in scenes of characters doing pretty much nothing.    They call this realism, and mock you in your desire to see movies in which things happen.   As if an interesting conversation were equivalent to a car chase or an explosion: only Philistines demand such things in their movies.   

“Reprise” puts all those movies to shame.   Like them, it’s not really about much.   There are two main characters (Anders Danielsen Lie and Espen Klouman Heiner)who write and want to be writers; there’s a circle of friends around them, some who embarass them, some who inspire them, and some that just seem to have nothing better to do.  Lie gets a novel published, and then has a mental breakdown.  A girl(Viktoria Winge) is involved, or gets blamed, or perhaps she’s just in the wrong place at the right time.   Klouman-Heiner cares about him, and struggles to strike the right balance between checking up on him and letting him live his own life.  They go to parties and punk rock shows, they meet their idol, they go on TV shows to promote their books, which nobody reads.  None of this really amounts to a plot.   It all happens pretty episodically.   Essentially, it’s a movie that follows a group of guys around for a few years, and hopes that you find them interesting.   

What sets “Reprise” apart is that it really does hope that you find them interesting; it never demands that they are interesting.   Director Joachim Trier’s filmmaking if full of energy and life; he is clearly a student of the French New Wave, though he’s able to bring the techniques of that movement to the screen without the nihilism or arrogance.    The result is that you do care about these two young men, and you don’t mind that nothing in “Reprise” really leads to any big climax or story arc.   Perhaps because the movie invites you to care, instead of demanding that you do so.

1. Gone Baby Gone
Hands down my favorite movie of the year. I think more attention was paid by critics to the nespotism – Ben Affleck behind the camera, Casey Affleck in front of it – than to the actual story, and the telling of it. A movie that wrestles with difficult moral questions, while still managing to me a remarkably good detective story.

2. Lars and the Real Girl
The funniest, saddest, sweetest movie of the year. Granted, it’s a strange premise, but if you can look past that – as the people around Lars were able to – you’ll find a heartfelt movie about loving broken people where they’re at, and hoping for better things for them. I’ve been recommending this movie to just about everyone I meet since I’ve seen it.

3. Michael Clayton
Smart, sharp, and committed to its story and its characters. Tom Wilkinson chews scenery in the best possible ways and George Clooney shows he’s no slouch as an actor. As a corporate thriller, it dwelt in the real world far more than other movies in the same genre.

4. The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford
If I had an Oscar ballot, Best Actor would’ve gone to Brad Pitt and Best Supporting Actor to Casey Affleck. Or you could switch that. Such different parts, but both actors load their performances with nuance and subtext. Which makes this a fascinating movie to watch, gloomy though it is.

5. Juno
Everyone’s been talking about Juno. Either you love it or you hate it. I loved it – I thought Ellen Page did a remarkable job straddling the line between sarcastic and snarky. An inch further one way and she would’ve been unbearable, and inch further the other and the movie would’ve lost its edge. As it is, it is sweet, sarcastic, and incredibly funny.

6. I’m Not There
This bizarre biopic found unity in diversity, and reinvented the genre. Bob Dylan has always been an enigma, which is probably why a movie’s never been made about him before. Kudos to Todd Haynes for taking on, and pulling off, such an ambitious project.

7. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

It could’ve been depressing, and it coud’ve been schmaltzy – a story about a paralyzed man who writes his biography by blinking his eye. But instead it feels like a stubborn tribute to the human spirit – and an incredibly artistic technical achievement.

8. No Country For Old Men

Twenty minutes longer than it needed to be, and so terribly bleak – besides that, it would’ve been higher on this list. An absolutely masterful, completely spellbinding cat and mouse story shows the Coen Brothers back on their game.

9. Once

Witness the reinvention of the musical. Instead of overwrought and melodramatic, it’s simple, underplayed, and completely lovely. And the songs still get stuck in my head.

10. The King of Kong

A documentary that forgets it’s supposed to keep its distance, and just gets wrapped up in its story — which might be the best sports rivalry since, I don’t know, Magic and Bird?

Honorable Mention (the top 30)

11. Breach
12. This is England
13. Knocked Up
14. Deep Water
15. Zodiac
16. Sweeney Todd
17. Black Book
18. Into the Wild
19. No End in Sight
20. Atonement
21. Control
22. Across the Universe
23. In the Valley of Elah
24. Superbad
25. Away From Her
26. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
27. Eastern Promises
28. The Savages
29. There Will Be Blood
30. Offside

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

By Willie Krischke – August 5, 2008

“The Band’s Visit” is a small miracle of a film, about the small miracle of real communication. A lot of love went into this filmmaking. Shots are carefully composed, scenes are skillfully underacted. It moves slowly, but never a moment is wasted; it’s directed with a patience and purpose that conveys the director’s confidence that, if the story is told well enough, the audience will wait for it. It was a sweet break from the frenetic pace and overzealous production of most American films. I was so impressed with the composition of this film that I just kept pausing it and looking at the images; I’m going to litter this review with those images so that you get to see how good they are, too.

The film follows an Egyptian Police Orchestra – one of those totally pointless but absolutely important institutions – who get stranded in a small Israeli town and must rely on the hospitality of the Jews there to get back on track. Traditionally enemies, “The Band’s Visit” shows both Egyptians and Jews to be simple folk, often lonely or confused, often relying on protocol to get through life, and woefully unequipped to cross the borders between each other. And yet they try, and sometimes, they succeed. Those are the sublime moments, the kind of moments you go to movies to experience.

Much of the movie is concerned with the ability of music to bring people together, in small ways. Almost all of the band members are clearly the kind of guys who took to music because normal human interaction just wasn’t working for them, and they’ve found a way to express with their instruments something completely beyond their ability with words or gestures. Even the one handsome band member, a ladies’ man, woos women with a Chet Baker pickup line and tune. He uses the same line and hums the same tune every time. Music is great stuff, “The Band’s Visit” seems to say, and we completely agree.

But the heart of the movie is the relationship between Tewfiq, the aging conductor, and Dina, the owner of the restaurant where the band ends up. Both have lived lives full of regret, and are old enough to know that they don’t have much to look forward to. Dinah gravitates to Tewfiq, even though the younger men pursue her, and Tewfiq hides behind protocol and immaculate manners, which maybe is what attracts her to him. In a “traditional” movie, these two would sleep together, and that would be called a payoff. In this movie, it would cheapen their relationship.

Recommended

• For those with patience, and an eye for small wonders
• For anyone who’s ever played in a community band.

Not Recommended

• For those who needs lots of explosions, bank robberies, affairs, and/or heart-on-their-sleeve characters in their movies.
• If you hear “Arabs stuck in Israel” and you think geopolitical tensions. It’s there, but deeply buried, and not what this movie is about.

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

By Willie Krischke – July 22, 2008

In the process of learning to write decent movie reviews, I read a lot of reviews. And I’ve come across certain terms used often by movie critics that don’t mean anything to me. When a critic says a movie is “richly textured,” I’m lost.  Or “the tone was off” – what is that? Maybe someday I’ll learn be admitted in to the elite Critic’s Club where they hang out, and there on the ornate shelf will be the Critic’s Lexicon. Until then, I’ll just have to use plain English.

“21” is a pretty awful movie, but I’m thankful now that I’ve watched it, because I can hereby add a terms to my homemade copy of the Critic’s Lexicon.   Flat. This is what you call a movie that ought to be exciting but isn’t.  ”21″ is flat. It’s got a great plot, featuring genius MIT students, a ruthless professor, card-counting, Vegas, gobs of money, double-crosses…yet somehow it never really gets going. It feels like director Robert Luketic has told this story at too many cocktail parties, and now is a little bored with it himself. If you’re a wannabe movie critic, and you want to know what “flat” means, watch “21.”

Luketic relies heavily on two of my least favorite movie tricks – the montage and the voiceover. Both are shortcuts lazy directors take when they can’t be bothered to tell a story efficiently and well. I’d say roughly half of “21” is either montage of voiceover. The rest – well, there are a lot of underwhelming slow-mo shots of casinos, and an awful lot of bad acting (Kevin Spacey looks particularly anxious to get on to his next picture – almost every scene he’s in feels rushed, like he’s getting it over with as quickly as possible.) There are, just for fun, some absolutely ridiculous costumes and an alarming amount of really bad advice on how to cheat a casino. (Tip to the attentive: if you don’t want the security guys to know you’re a team of students working together to cheat the casino, you may not want to a) walk into the casino together, b) regularly gather in each other’s hotel rooms, or c)hang out in the restaurant together, celebrating your winnings) Oh yes, and some of the worst dialogue this side of Bollywood. “Our window of opportunity is closing in on us,” our hero confides to his mentor at one point, in all seriousness.

“21” is based on the nonfiction book “Bringing Down the House,” by Ben Mezrich. A little research yields some fascinating facts — the card counting team actually pulled from several different schools, involved competing teams, brought in outside investors, and operated for over twenty years. It sounds like a fascinating story, and it ought to make a great movie – or even a series of movies. Too bad “21” is what we get instead. How long before someone else – someone with a real artistic sense, as well as knowledge of Vegas, maybe even someone who read “Bringing Down the House — can make a different movie from the same source material? What’s the statute of limitations on remakes?

Recommended

• if you know absolutely nothing about Vegas or Blackjack, and next to nothing about storytelling, good filmmaking, or human nature.
• If you want to know what a movie critic means when she says a movie is “flat” or “lacks energy.” “21” could be used in film class to define the terms.

Not Recommended

• if there’s anything else available.
• If you’re looking for “Blackjack Cheater’s Guide to Vegas.” Please, please don’t try anything you see in this movie.