How’d the Oscars do?

I’m eternally fascinated by metacritic.com, the site that averages critics’ ratings of movies to determine how well a movie has been critically received. It’s a better gauge of critical response than Rotten Tomatoes because it only includes what it considers the 43 most important publications and websites and weighs the average to give more weight to influential publications like The New York Times and Variety. (I don’t know which pubs are given more weight, but I’m guessing those two are included.)

The top 10 best-reviewed movies list this year is interesting because the best-reviewed movie of the year was made nearly 40 years ago. Army of Shadows, from 1969, is a French film about the French Resistance during World War II that was released in the U.S. for the first time in 2006. Its average score? A 99, which makes it the third-best reviewed in Metacritic’s seven-year history. Is it really that good? I haven’t seen it, but I doubt it. My hunch is its elevated reviews are more a reflection of critical bias towards foreign film, older film and re-released classics. It’s the kind of movie a critic simply can’t pan.

Taking Army of Shadows and another older movie (also about WWII), Overlord, out of the picture, the top 10 looks like this:

The Descent: Nearly Transcendent

Debuting in 1968, Night of the Living Dead popularized the use of location shooting and graphic violence in horror movies, but it also did something more: it showed the heights a horror flick could reach when it valued character as much as terror. The possibility of a genre-wide renaissance was shot to hell in 1974, however, with the huge success of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a movie populated by such paper-thin, annoying protagonists that you end up rooting for Leatherface to kill them. Today, no one expects–or even seems to want–their horror movies to be anything more than an incoherent sequence of shocks and gore. But Neil Marshall, the writer and the director of The Descent, has higher aims.

The opening scenes aren’t particularly promising: three beautiful women are rafting down a set of Class V rapids, laughing and shrieking over the excitement of the adventure. The woman we come to recognize as the protagonist, Sarah, is a bland blonde beauty played by an unrecognizable actor, Shauna McDonald. She has a seemingly perfect life–loving husband, beautiful daughter–but tragedy strikes. A year later, the trio regathers with three of their equally tough, equally attractive friends for a caving expedition in the Appalachians. Watching them drink and bond in an isolated cabin the night before their hike to the cave, it’s not clear whether we’re watching the setup for a horror movie–or a lesbian porn.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Shepherd

In The Good Shepherd, the acting is uniformly good, the direction creates an appropriately sinister mood and the screenplay is rich with ideas. So why did watching it feel like a homework assignment?

The Good Shepherd has all the makings of a good yarn: in tracing the growth of America’s intelligence apparatus from the ’30s to the ‘60s, the plot touches on Nazi sympathizers in America, the bombing of London, the evacuation of German and Jewish scientists from postwar Berlin, the rise of Castro, and the Bay of Pigs invasion. Spies are thrown out of airplanes, tortured with LSD and betrayed by their closest friends and students. But the last thing director Robert DeNiro wants to do in The Good Shepherd is entertain you. His vision of the rise of the CIA is devoid of glamour or adventure; as DeNiro and screenwriter Eric Roth’s see it, the most successful spooks are the ones who take no chances, the ones who keep life’s joys at bay. The more soulless the man, the better the spy.

The Chilling Children of Men

I always find it distracting when science fiction movies try to imagine the clothing of the future. Characters are either dressed in all-black (The Matrix) or they’re dressed like clowns (A Clockwork Orange). The former suggests a lack of imagination; the latter, too much.

Alfonso Cuaron, the director of Children of Men, and his costume designer, Jany Tamime, avoid this problem entirely. In Children of Men, the fashion of 2027 is the same as the fashion of 2006. Watching Children of Men, it’s easy to forget that the events shown are supposed to take place two decades from now; the contemporary wardrobes make the film’s frightening vision of a world where all the women are infertile that much more immediate.

Cuaron’s handling of the fashion trap is just one of many small details that make Children of Men such a potent and convincing portrait of the future. Like many other great science fiction movies, the movie’s premise draws its power not from its plausibility but from its adroitness in exploiting our fears. As best as I know, there is no looming fertility crisis, but who doesn’t know a woman who has tried and failed to have a baby? Declining birthrates and fertility problems in Western society are more a function of choice—couples having smaller families, women waiting longer to have babies—than of health, but it’s a fear of many people nonetheless. It’s not like there was ever much chance of a sentient computer network taking over the world either, but Terminator and The Matrix still did damn fine jobs of tapping into our fears of technology.

I’ll Pass on the Layercake

I’d been hearing great things about Layercake for well over a year, but after seeing it last night, I have to say I’m awfully disappointed.

Layercake seems to be going for the stylistic flash of Snatch and the moral heft of Trainspotting, but without the humor of the former or the credibility of the latter. When Daniel Craig’s character offers his rules on how to be a good criminal at the beginning of Layercake (“avoid amateurs at all costs,” “keep things small,” “have a plan and stick to it”), he is essentially defining his character–and the movie–in opposition to typical gangster movies, which are full of flashy criminals, the kind of folks his character deplores. When a movie so boldly attempts to define itself as “the real deal,” as Layercake does, there are two ways the narrative can go. The movie can either:
a) Illustrate how to execute a perfect crime based on the narrator’s rules of engagement.
b) Use the story of a crime to undercut the narrator’s rules and show that any approach to crime that doesn’t involve a heavy dose of chaos theory is bound to fail.

In either case, the narrative is bound to a higher standard of credibility–if not realism–than the typical gangster pic.

Top 10 from 2006? Not quite…

I jotted down some notes the other night that will form the embryonic beginnings of my top 10 movies from 2006; it’s way too early to attempt an official list yet, as there are more than a dozen movies that I feel I need to see before I can intelligently write this list. (Last year, I didn’t feel ready to do a top 10 from 2005 until June 21.) I’ll break down my candidates for this list into several categories:

Movies that will definitely make the final cut: Notes on a Scandal, United 93, Borat, Superman Returns

Movies that will likely make the final cut: Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, The Departed, Thank You For Smoking

Movies that may make the cut, but I’ll be surprised if they do: The Queen, Little Children, X-Men: The Last Stand

Movies that I have yet to see but will almost definitely make the cut when I do: Half Nelson

Movies that have a good chance of making this list if I see them: Children of Men, Letters from Iwo Jima, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Last King of Scotland, Casino Royale, The Good Shepherd, Inside Man, Lady in the Water (seriously)

Movies that I need to see even though they probably won’t make the list: Dreamgirls, Babel, Cars, The Prestige

Movies that I will almost certainly not see before I make the list, but I’m bummed that I won’t, because I have a feeling that I’ll like them a lot: Volver, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Brick, Sweet Land, Science of Sleep, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Sherrybaby

Movie that is getting inexplicable recognition from critics and industry groups: Little Miss Sunshine

Movie that everyone else has seen but I very well may not see before I die: Pirates of the Caribbean II

Movies that I suspect I will enjoy with the same mixture of guilt and pleasure that comes from watching good porn: Little Man, Take the Lead

Notes on a Scandal: Deliciously Vicious

The British have a special knack for making awfulness engaging. From Shakespeare’s Richard III to Mike Leigh’s Naked to Steve Coogan’s “I’m Alan Partridge,” there is a rich English tradition of making great art out of unapologetically malevolent protagonists. The latest entry into the genre is Notes on a Scandal, directed by Richard Eyre, written by Patrick Marber (Closer) and based on a novel by Zoe Heller.

Notes on a Scandal stars Judi Dench as Barbara Covett, a bitter veteran of decades of teaching history at a lower-class London school. Cate Blanchett plays Sheba, a new art teacher who Barbara instantly loathes for her “trendy politics” and “abhorrent jacket.” But Barbara, who lives alone, changes her tune when Sheba extends an offer of friendship. When Barbara discovers that Sheba is having an affair with a 15-year-old student, her first impulse is to report her to the headmaster, but she quickly has a better idea: she can use her knowledge of the dalliance to blackmail Sheba into being her best friend.

The King of Queens

The Queen did something I never thought possible: it made me care about Princess Diana.

Maybe it’s because I was too young to catch the royal wedding, or maybe it’s because my American sensibilities are not refined enough to see how occasionally smiling in public was so scandalous, but Princess Di struck me as little more than a bejewelled mannequin who was beloved mainly because she happened to marry an ugly man who didn’t love her back.

The interesting thing about The Queen is that it doesn’t engender sympathy for Diana by showing us who she was–in fact, she’s barely in the movie–but by demonstrating how cruel the royal family was to her, even in death. In this, The Queen is not so different from Cinderella or Snow White, movies about dull, innocuous princesses who we care about only because they’re treated so badly.