The Best (and Worst) Movies of 2009

“The Best (and Worst) Movies of 2009”

2009 was not a great year for movies. In fact, this was a year when I found myself somewhat actually struggling to choose ten truly memorable movies that stayed with me. This awards season may have been nominating movies like Inglourious Basterds, The Blind Side and Up in the Air but they represent solid goodness, not greatness and would be less distinguished in a better cinematic year. In hindsight, I think 2009 will be remembered as a year for overrating and over-praising.

Yet, there were movies to write about from unusual places. There was The Hurt Locker, a movie that started small but gained power as people could not deny its impact and the fact that it was the first movie to tackle the Iraq war in a ruthlessly focused yet brutally honest light. There were a handful of good movies from South Korea such as Take Off, which was a sports movie more engaging and unpredictable than The Blind Side, and Mother, which meshed a murder mystery plot and a story of maternal love in several sublimely unexpected ways. There were also some independent American gems like Goodbye Solo and Precious, which exist on totally different worlds but each shed a truthful light on the human condition and spirit.

Perhaps the biggest pleasure, however, came from seeing the growth and maturity of the family movie genre. The Pixar studio scored another triumph with Up, which broke numerous genre traditions of children’s adventures and opened its adventure story to a reflection of life itself. More surprising was the potent impact of Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s book, Where the Wild Things Are by bringing an usually objective look at what it means to fully enter humanity as a child. Here is hoping that more bona fide auteurs will tackle the family genre and tackle the subject of simply growing up in unexplored emotional avenues.

So here are the 10 best movies I saw in 2009 and a small list of honorable mentions (that is far less than usual, which is once again indicative of the generally low quantity of quality films).

10. Take Off – While audiences stateside found much inspiration in the more conventional sports movie, The Blind Side, Korean audiences got to see a more realistic inspirational story very loosely based on the lives of athletes in the Korean Olympic ski jumping team. While not without a few sports movie clichés, you know that a sports movie has achieved something when you do not care about whether the protagonists win a medal or attain their dreams but just simply care about them as people.

9. Paju – Many independent films from South Korea have a way of creating slow-burning stories that tacitly portray characters who brood on their own emotional turmoil and this little-seen film by Park Chan-ok (not to be confused with Park Chan-wook of Thirst and Oldboy fame) is a great example. Set in a Korean town named Paju, which is geographically just right below the North-South Korean border and which most Koreans who live outside this town even know very little about, this story of a very complex relationship that forms between a woman and her brother-in-law (and it is not necessarily a love story as you think) weaves a fascinating tapestry of flashbacks and flash-forwards with a clear emotional through-line and bearing at all times.

8. An Education – The coming-of-age movie genre got a fresh new jolt of vitality in this film by Lone Scherfig that treads through a questionable relationship between a 16-year old girl and a 35-year old man and turns it into an empathetic story of valuable learning. Much of the movie's success in negotiating its tricky themes with charm is a tribute to Carey Mulligan, who delivers that kind of luminous performance that generates its own star power from the ground up and shows that she is here to stay.

7. Goodbye Solo – A movie that touchingly focuses simply on an unusual and unlikely friendship that is allowed to grow usually makes for a great piece of cinema and if 2008 had The Visitor, 2009 had this film. In telling the story of a friendship between a perpetually smiling Senegalese cab driver and a perpetually grizzled older man, this modestly elegant movie confirms director Ramir Bahrani as a filmmaker to watch. As seen in his past movies, Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, he is not only skillful in delineating the grounded realism his characters require but is also keenly perceptive to the ever changing face of America.

6. Where the Wild Things Are – Along with Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, 2009 proved an interesting year for serious filmmakers to tackle classic children’s stories and Spike Jonze’s expanded adaptation of the Maurice Sendak classic was a surprising artistic triumph. The best quality is in Jonze’s single-mindedness to stick to an uncompromising vision that remains faithful to the Maurice Sendak book but deepens the story’s emotions and implications to far more heartbreaking depths. All this he achieves with a technical wizardry that brings the fantastical creatures from the boy’s imagination as close to our own physical and emotional reality as they can be.

5. Mother – A movie that uses one of the most unpredictable murder mystery plots in recent years to plumb through the perhaps unsettling depths of maternal love, this follow-up by director Bong Joon-ho to The Host is a slow-burner that sneaks up and grows in its effect the more you think about it after. With the most sublime performance from veteran Korean actress, Kim Hye-ja’s career, the movie further proves Bong as a master in shrewdly combining the artistic and the commercial and subtly brewing his story’s depths beneath his stylish visual surface.

4. Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire – No movie was more draining to watch than this one and yet few films so rewarding. Much praise (and deservedly so) is going to Mo’Nique who gives a chilling performance as the vitriolic mother of the tormented teenage heroine that she considers as "competition" with herself for the affections of the sexually abusing husband and father. However, it is Gabourey Sidibe who delivers the female performance of the year as the heroine who discovers that the only source of freedom from these cruel surroundings can come from within and ultimately finds it.

3. The Hurt Locker – Here is the first definitive portrayal of the Iraq war that proves the best way to find a universal perspective on a subject is to be ruthlessly focused on a narrow, personal arena. By focusing on bomb disposal experts who are intoxicated by the hostile and almost unbearable tension they encounter day in and day out, director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal brilliantly captured that paradoxical mid-point within a battle soldier’s mind that feels so oppressively weighed down by being so close to death every moment and yet completely addicted to that very same danger.

2. Gomorrah – The harsh, brutal reality antidote to the often over-romanticized view of gangsters, this docudrama about the real-life Camorra shatters and obliterates any trace of moral justification or glorification set up in the gangster movie genre by The Godfather. Matteo Garrone’s gritty portrait of showing its characters futilely idealizing their own rise in the organization and idolizing Scarface while living in a truly animalistic world of kill or be killed. The real crime organization it portrays is so truly realistically frightening because they so pervasively infiltrate so many sectors of modern society, even those that appear as legitimate ones. It is so much so that the release of the movie has forced the author of the source novel, Roberto Saviano to go into witness protection. Winner of the Grand Prix at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.

1. Up – For two years in a row with WALL·E in 2008, the Pixar crew has created achievements that outshone and outclassed any live-action release. Maybe it was the beginning masterful, wordless montage that so beautifully captured the hero’s marriage as the kind of happy marriage that everybody would dream to have. Or it was the fact that the hero was a 78-year old man transformed what seems to start as a typical children’s adventure into a profound rumination on balancing self-aspirations and real life. Or that the hero who eluded his dreams his whole life found that his life was valuable regardless of those dreams when he finally opened himself to a new human relationship with a 7-year old boy. Whatever it was, this was the movie that allowed me to reflect on life itself in a more complete way than any other film this year.

Honorable mentions: Avatar, Broken Embraces, In the Loop, Moon, The Informant!, The Messenger, Thirst and The White Ribbon.

Worst films of the year: All About Steve, Angels and Demons, Bride Wars, Couples Retreat, I Love You, Beth Cooper, Sherlock Holmes, The Ugly Truth and Year One.

Franchise movies well past their sell by date: Terminator Salvation and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

The Worst of the Worst (and the movie for which I deliberately delayed my viewing in order to save good theater money): Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (I only cite the director's name to state that he needs to be stopped).

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

“Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire”

USA. 2009. Directed by Lee Daniels. Screenplay by Geoffrey Fletcher. Based on the novel, “Push” by Sapphire. Starring: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, Sherri Shepherd, Stephanie Andujar, Chyra Layne, Xosha Roquemore, Amina Robinson, Angelic Zambrana, Aunt Dot and Nealla Gordon.

Rating: ★★★★

When we initially meet the titular heroine of Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, we can hardly imagine harsher or nastier familial circumstances than the domestic environs and daily routine she has to endure. She is clammed up in her own shell barely registering her middle school surroundings other than when she suddenly lashes out at another student for mocking her about her weight. She is already 16 and still barely passing through middle school in reading and writing literacy. And despite being only 16, she is already pregnant with her second child from incestuous abuse by the hands of her father. Her mother does not treat her much better, as vitriolic words spew out from the mother’s inner, selfish jealousy towards her daughter for “stealing away” her man.

This is the launching point for director Lee Daniels’ film, which starts from the deepest and harshest maws of despair and somehow salvages us to an ultimately rewarding conclusion. The movie does not flinch in its portrayal of pure human ugliness with its ruthless intensity and authenticity. This is particularly true in the first agonizing 20 minutes, where we see the father knocking her unconscious and raping her and the mother not only turns a blind eye to the abuse but treats her daughter as competition for her own "love" rather than the child she should love. What makes it one of the best films of the year is how its moves to an unusually uplifting outcome that is just as authentic by having it come about from our gradual embrace of its lead protagonist’s inner spirit and the courage she finally musters up to break free from the forces that have crushed her for so long.

The year is 1987 and the heroine is Clarice “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), who unsurprisingly has simply emotionally shut down and the only escape she has is in fanciful daydream sequences shot in flashing reds and white lights in which she imagines herself as a famous fashion celebrity in the limelight. In her inner city school in New York City, the principal, after hearing about her low grades in addition to her second pregnancy, decides that she should go to an alternate school called Each One/Teach One where she can attain her GED. Precious’ coarse and vitriolic mother, Mary (Mo’Nique), of course, mocks and curses at her, seeing that she sees no use for Precious in school and would just rather see her resort to welfare. With a personal encouragement of the school principal who visits her home, however, she sets her mind to attend Each One/Teach One.

The school is where she finds her first ray of light in her teacher, Ms. Rain (Paula Patton). Of course, Precious can hardly open herself up to anything in the class and can hardly even seem to mutter when she tries to talk about herself, although that gradually starts to change with Ms. Rain’s encouragement. The second ray of light comes from a kind social worker, Ms. Weiss (Mariah Carey) and both Ms. Rain and Ms. Weiss gradually take a personal interest to help this girl perhaps because neither of them could think of anyone else who could be in worse circumstances than the one Precious has had to endure.

It is astonishing how Daniels, along with his writer, Geoffrey Fletcher, who adapts the novel, Push by Sapphire, is able to orchestrate all these harsh melodramatic elements and this unusually eclectic cast together to form an emotional whole. The casting choices may seem rather laughable and off-putting on paper just as Daniels’ first directorial feature, Shadowboxer did for the few people who saw that obscure film. That film, if you may recall, had Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Helen Mirren starring as two assassins having a tortured, incestuous step-mother and son relationship. The story in that film really tried to do too many risky and outrageous things that it ultimately shattered its own test tubes. But a director who is that bold and out there is sooner or later destined to make a great film and Daniels, who also produced other films with incendiary subject matter such as Monster’s Ball and The Woodsman, finally has with a tighter coherence and the purer emotional focus he brings to his individual characters.

That focus here extracts uncommonly strong performances from the entire cast. Mo’Nique has already been receiving well-deserved awards attention for playing the monstrous mother who, in her best and most vulnerable scene, shows that, in the end, she is also painfully human and real even if it does not excuse the way she has treated her daughter. It is also nice to see Paula Patton, who really should get more substantial lead roles, turn her naturally tender on-screen sensibilities to bring some much needed warmth to this film. The biggest surprise, however, is from none other than Mariah Carey, who delivers such an emotionally guileless and natural performance as the social worker that it makes one forget all about Glitter. Also, look for rock star Lenny Kravitz who disappears into playing a gentle nurse’s aide in one of the film’s lighter, humorous moments where Precious’ classmates are a little bit too blunt in expressing how they have never having seen a male nurse’s aide before.

Then there is Gabourey Sidibe. I am afraid that she is already getting sidelined by her supporting cast where much of the attention is going and that is a shame because it is really her mesmerizing debut performance that really grips our attention the most like a vice. Watch the way she shows her struggling to mutter words and yet is able to suggest with her eyes that she has an intelligent mind ticking inside her desiring to learn and make better of herself. The fiery courage that will guide her is already in there waiting to flower and it is what instantly and subtly wins our hearts over for Precious.

I said that the movie is unusually uplifting by its end and I do not mean that it is so in the conventional sense we often get in the movies. There is nothing that suddenly lifts Precious from her circumstances and predicament such as someone to help her become the fashion celebrity she fantasizes herself of becoming in her daydreams. What Precious ultimately learns is that the only person who can help her situation is her own self and that solely emotional triumph and realization to live her life as she finally wants is far more rewarding and moving than any other worldly force that whisks and sweeps her away.

Mother

“Mother”

South Korea. 2009. Directed by Bong Joon-ho. Screenplay by Bong Joon-ho and Park Eun-kyo. Story by Bong Joon-ho. Starring: Kim Hye-ja, Won Bin, Jin Ku, Jeon Mi-seon, Yoon Je-moon, Song Sae-byeok, Kim Byung-soon and Moon Hee-ra.

Rating: ★★★½

From the very opening scene of Bong Joon-ho’s latest film, Mother where we see the titular character swaying and dancing in the hay field, we instantly intuit two things. One is Bong’s unique directorial trademark that presents, as in his brilliant 2003 crime thriller, Memories of Murder, a visual splendor of South Korea’s countryside that will counter the quiet oddities, pleasant or not, of the people who reside there. The other is that this will be no ordinary tale of maternal love as her slightly off-kilter movements in the field already start to play to and against the public image of its central actress, Kim Hye-ja, who has had one of the longest veteran careers of playing mother roles in Korea.

The play on Kim’s public screen persona feels more pointed and enhanced by the fact that her character is never given a name and is simply known as Do-joon’s mother throughout the film. As the movie opens, we see that her only son, Do-joon (Won Bin) is a 23-year-old, mentally handicapped man whom the mother refuses to lose sight of. She is fiercely and almost obsessively overprotective of her son and believes that she must assist him in just about everything from feeding him medicine to even tying his shoe. That certainly seems to be truer when he sustains a minor injury in an abrupt hit-and-run car accident and when she must rescue him from a police station after he gets into some trouble with the law. The one who encouraged him is Jin-tae (Jin Ku), who claims to be Do-joon's best friend but appears to have a bad boy streak in him and had gotten Do-joon to join him in provoking and even physically beating some rich, haughty golfers.

That is nothing, however, compared to the more serious trouble he gets into soon thereafter when he is suddenly arrested for the murder of a local teenage girl whose body was found on a rooftop. The police suspect that there was rape involved as well and have simply pointed the finger at Do-joon after finding a ping-pong ball with his name inscribed on it. They think it is an open and shut case and quickly get a signed confession out of him without a care as to whether Do-joon knows what he is actually signing. His mother, however, firmly believes that her son is not be capable of committing such a horrible crime and so she sets out to find the real killer herself while her son sits idly in jail.

The premise at its core, like the very little seen The Deep End with the wonderful Tilda Swinton, is the maternal extension of the old Hitchcockian wronged man story. Bong’s movie has a deceptively simpler story than the Rubik’s cube of a plot that The Deep End surrounded its lead with but his more direct and ironic approach enhances the emotionality of both the mother’s quest and the central murder mystery. It would be unfair to even hint at the specific mechanics of how Bong plays the details of his mystery with and against his typical sense of irony that is pushed this time to greater and more overt extremes. I will say that I was happy to actually be fooled and blindsided, for once, by where the film ultimately ends up and fooled so, even with all the various clues there, because of clever misdirection and not needless concealment or cheating.

As with the past films from Bong, many of the movie’s strengths are in the tiny details, even if it does not quite have as much of the cutting, deeper social commentary of South Korea’s countryside that Memories of Murder had (although it does not necessarily need it). Some of them are in the dark comedy he gets from occasionally tipping the realistic observations of the situation to just the brink of histrionic and make us wince while we laugh (such as in the crinkles he adds to the expected social prejudice against Do-joon and his mother). Others are in the ways he plays again with both movie and social clichés and the mother is able to find allies in the most unlikely people including the local photo developer wonderfully played by the always underrated Jeon Mi-Seon (who also played Song Kang-ho’s girlfriend in Memories of Murder). Also watch for the significance of the way the mother’s needle kit is applied and how each application carries such different physical and emotional weights.

Perhaps the biggest surprise, however, is that Bong has somehow managed to extract what is arguably the most subtle and delicate performance in the 68-year old Kim Hye-ja’s long career. Kim is well known for her theatrically frenzied and often way over the top acting style in playing very pushy maternal characters and, to be sure, you will certainly catch a handful of times when she shows that widening crazy eyed look of hers here. But even those instances are very carefully reined in and controlled and much of the rest of the movie is in the way she utilizes her aging face to play such different emotional speeds from unyielding maternal love to indomitability through haggardness. She is also wisely never turned into a sudden action thriller heroine and her physicality, while certainly capable in later scenes, never breaks with character or with her age.

The same goes for Won Bin who gives his best performance to date and abandons his pretty boy looks from past movies to play her mentally handicapped young son without judging or condescending to the character. His role, of course, is more limited than Kim’s but is responsible for two very tricky dramatic shifts in his relationship with his mother that he avoids sentimentalizing by playing the notes with as much dull dispassion as hidden agony. The other supporting performances from Jin Ku playing the best friend to Jeon Mi-seon playing the local photo developer are also quite tricky as they present characters that both may or may not plausibly be allies to the mother character, if they should be at all.

For director Bong, Mother is a shrewdly modest story after his 2006 megahit, The Host (which is the highest grossing film in South Korea to date). But it proves yet again, like Memories of Murder, how few directors today can match him in blending the artistic and the commercial; to craft a story that makes its own eccentricities so matter-of-factly and yet stylishly accessible while brewing the audience slowly with the hidden depths it unveils. Bong said he wanted to explore how far a mother’s fierce love will go and when we later see the mother dancing again, we understand and are unsettled by what he means.

Up

“Up”

USA. 2009. Directed by Pete Docter and co-directed by Bob Peterson. Screenplay by Bob Peterson and Pete Docter. Story by Bob Peterson, Pete Docter and Thomas McCarthy. Starring: the voices of Ed Asner, Jordan Nagai, Christopher Plummer, Bob Peterson, Delroy Lindo, Jerome Ranft, John Ratzenberger, David Kaye, Elie Docter and Jeremy Leary.

Rating: ★★★★

The latest wonderful movie from the geniuses at Pixar, Up at last brings us an adventure that so cheerfully and confidently goes against the grain of today's culture over-fixated on youth by presenting a hero that also happens to be a curmudgeonly old man. Most family adventure stories present their protagonists as the typical young gung-ho personalities that are at times actually too callow to realistically deal with their surroundings and as a result the adventures themselves are often so considerably dumbed down. This film, by centering on an older hero who has retained a nugget of adventurous idealism his whole life allows all the characters and story to have more real emotions and stakes.

The film first opens with wide-eyed, 7-year-old adventure scout named Carl Fredricksen, who dreams of going to a lush place in South America called Paradise Falls. He then meets his match in a girl named Ellie, another young explorer who shares the same dream and is even more avid than Carl is. This at first seems like the setup for a typical children’s adventure but then quickly and surprisingly segues into a lovely opening montage of their eventual courtship and later marriage. They save money to pursue their dream of traveling to Paradise Falls but everyday life and welfare intervenes with their savings. A tire breaks down, the house needs repairs and hospital bills stack up particularly as Ellie becomes progressively ill in their older years. This montage that is so impeccably and movingly told without dialogue and serves as merely the setup for our 78-year old protagonist, Carl (Ed Asner) and the rest of the movie is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Soon, Carl is left as a widower and is then threatened to be placed in a retirement home. So what does he do to honor Ellie’s memory and fulfill their dream without ever actually stepping outside his home? He tethers thousands of balloons to his house to float it to the sky. Everyone who has seen the poster or the previews already knows that but the sequence of the house making its ascent in its entirety is a pure, colorful marvel to behold on screen, particularly with the equally elegant score by Michael Giacchino, as it perfectly captures that blithe feeling one gets when seeing a hot air balloon lift off the ground.

Just when Carl is about to relax by himself all the way to Paradise Falls, however, he suddenly hears a startling knock on the door and finds that there is a stowaway on board, an Asian-American boy named Russell (Jordan Nagai) who is aspiring to be an adventure scout not unlike how Carl was when he was young. Carl, being the initially cranky man that he is, finds him a nuisance particularly after due to his earlier encounter with Russell and his unusual persistence to help out an elderly man for a merit badge from his scout leader. Of course, Carl does not have the option to kick him out of the house (although there is a brief, funny fantasy moment in which he fleetingly entertains that thought).

Much more about their eventually very touching bond and the rest of their adventure, I would hesitate to reveal, including the villain of the story that Pixar wisely makes a point of not revealing too much and does arrive as something of a meaningful surprise in this one. What I will mention are some ingenious, inspired sights and ideas in the film. One is how they skewer the old, silly cliché of talking dogs with some dogs Carl and Russell encounter. Audiences have complained for years about how dogs moving their mouths to talk about humans always look so ridiculous, no matter how hard they try to make it convincing with special effects (the truly awful Good Boy! comes to mind from several years back). This movie comes up with the brilliant, satirical solution of having collars around the dogs’ necks that hilariously act like ventriloquist sound devices that translate the dogs’ thoughts into human language.

Another is the huge, magnificent airship that Carl and Russell later end up in, which perhaps takes its slight cue from some of Hayao Miyazaki’s films such as Castle in the Sky or Howl’s Moving Castle. All the tiny details including the methods of steering, the wings and the ropes that tether the ship to its ballast are meticulously introduced to deliver all kinds of surprises in the climactic adventure. That it belongs to the story's antagonist is crucial, as contrasting it to the protagonist’s vehicle symbolically signifies the disparate personalities they represent in balancing self-aspirations and reality.

Up, after Ratatouille and WALL·E, is the third great movie in a row for Pixar and a personal triumph for director, Pete Docter for whom this is a significant leap forward from his last film, Monsters, Inc (in addition to having contributed to writing the Toy Story movies and WALL·E). It has, of course, become passé to say that Pixar is making more mature stories that will give adults as much, if not more, reason as children to go see these animated films. However, in another sense, just as many English scholars would give so much of their knowledge to relive their first thunderstruck impression of reading a Shakespeare play, I would envy children who get to enjoy these films on their own level and then later discover deeper levels anew as they grow up with repeat viewings over the years.

The movie also marks the first Pixar film rendered in 3-D and, although I am still not convinced about the necessity of the technique’s existence, I will say that it is as well done here as I have seen in any film so far. There are a few sequences that do get more visual enhancement due to the 3-D such as the dazzling house floating sequence in the beginning and they wisely completely avoid having objects purposely flying out of the screen to “grab” the audience (if anything, for me at least, that actually prevents me from getting closer to the movie itself). But the real strength of the film, as with all Pixar features, lies in the storytelling that, as of yet, 3-D has yet to really make a contribution to. Until the technique can offer something beyond a small, extra sense of visual spectacle (and perhaps James Cameron’s long-anticipated live-action 3-D film, Avatar coming in December will change this), there is not much lost watching a great movie like this in just the 2-D format.

Beyond the astonishing, crisp visual sights, however, what remains the most indelible in the end is Carl himself, so wonderfully and wittily voiced by the veteran actor, Ed Asner. This is where the montage is once again so key because we need it to understand the depths beyond Carl who may seem like just a lonely, cranky old man we see around the block before the adventure starts where he proves to be more physically agile than we expect (though never in an impossible way). The contribution of writer, Thomas McCarthy, whose last film was the wonderful The Visitor, must have been invaluable to understanding that similar theme of a man breaking free from years of emotional inertia and regaining vitality and meaning in his life. And the movie never makes the misstep of having Carl foolishly sidelined or outsmarted by the child, Russell (adorably voiced without cloying by newcomer Jordan Nagai). Not that Russell does not serve as a nice point of empathy for kids but Carl remains the hero and this is centrally his story.

As aforementioned, Up, like all true and great family movies, will appeal to kids and adults in different ways but I would particularly recommend that grandparents take their young grandchildren to see this or vice versa. By having younger audiences cheer for a hero who carries a lifetime of experience and heart and the adults identify with a hero who rejuvenates himself through adventure, watching this could bridge some gaps that neither they nor their grandparents knew existed. And if that sounds a bit too serious, only the Pixar folks can combine that with an exuberant adventure that resists conforming to Hollywood clichés and familiar genre conventions.

Ip Man

“Ip Man”

Hong Kong. 2008. Directed by Wilson Yip. Screenplay written by Edmond Wong. Starring: Donnie Yen, Simon Yam, Ka-Tung Lam, Yu Xing, Siu-wong Fan, You-Nam Wong, Chen Zhi Hui, Lynn Xiong, Hiroyuki Ikeuchi, Yu-Tang Ho and Shibuya Tenma.

Rating: ★★★½

There is a point in the Hong Kong martial arts movie, Ip Man in which an angry, combative opponent of the titular hero mocks the latter for practicing a style of martial arts called the Wing Chun Fist that had been originally invented by a woman. I wonder if that man actually knew the rest of the old story. There have been various tales and legends debated over the years about the origin of the Wing Chun but the most widely told and accepted states that a woman named Yim Wing Chun invented it as a response to a man who tried to force her into marriage. He challenged that he would accept her refusal to marry him if she can beat him. She quickly went to a Buddhist nun, learned how to fight and invented her own boxing style to ultimately defeat the coercive man.

The film's title character, Grandmaster Ip Man, before becoming one of the most prominent proponents of Wing Chun and later the famed teacher of the late Bruce Lee, faced an even greater conflict and threat of subjugation during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 and Wilson Yip's fictionalized account of his life is a worthy addition to the old wushu epics based on a real-life Chinese hero that crosses biography with a slight bit of lionized folklore. That trend seemed to have diminished in the face of overdone stylizations of martial arts such as Hero and House of Flying Daggers (both directed by Zhang Yimou). But I, for one, have always preferred the more traditional genre films that just let the martial arts style speak for itself such as the Once Upon a Time in China films and the recent Fearless and Ip Man is one of the most rousing to come along in a while.

Like the hero in Jet Li's Fearless, Ip Man (Donnie Yen, in a true career highlight performance and who incidentally played Wing Chun's later husband in the 1994 film version of Wing Chun with Michelle Yeoh) is already a proficient and virtually unbeatable martial artist, although he does not display the boastful arrogance in the beginning that propelled Huo from Fearless to seek out fights to test his might. The fights rather come to him as, in the opening scenes, masters from other martial arts schools constantly come to challenge him as he is rumored to be the best martial artist of Foshan, a town that has a historical reputation for breeding highly trained wushu experts. Although he himself deliberately chooses not to open a martial arts school despite the urging of his businessman friend, Zhou Qing Quan (Simon Yam) to take his son as a disciple, the repeated challenges that come to Ip's door annoy his wife (Lynn Xiong) who thinks he is too carried away with his fighting and training to pay attention to his family.

Thus, when a group of cocky out-of-town folks believe they can trample on the reputation of Foshan by beating all the martial artists, of course they will eventually land on Ip's doorstep as well. That sets up a terrific, prolonged fight sequence that shows the countless, lightning-quick punches Ip can land on his opponent's face and chest in the blink of an eye and how he uses merely the stick of a window duster to defeat an opponent with a large sword. When he wins the battle, the whole town including the local cop, Li Zhao (Ka Tung Lam) praises him as a hero despite having earlier criticized the validity of martial arts.

All of that fills the generally lighthearted half hour of the movie but it turns out to actually be a setup for the sudden transition into the darker historical event of Japanese military occupation that triggers the Sino-Japanese War during WWII. Information in captions reveal the town's population is decimated to a quarter by the Japanese soldiers, thriving factories are destroyed and the remaining people's properties are confiscated including Ip who is forced into abject poverty and must look for menial labor to barely feed his wife and son. He finally swallows his pride to work at the coal mines despite not having the right clothes to wear for the job (echoes here of Russell Crowe’s Jim Braddock during the Great Depression from Cinderella Man).

One day, Li who is now working as an interpreter for Japanese soldiers comes to the coal mine to try to recruit any Chinese people to challenge and fight students of a Japanese martial arts training school in order to win bags of rice. Ip is initially uninterested in this but a tragedy that hits close to home shakes up his personal patriotism and hence he goes to the training school himself, which sets up a far fiercer fight sequence where he challenges ten Japanese students and shows his fearsome and bone-crunching might and a style of punching for which the word, “swift” is a severe understatement. This, of course, grabs the attention of the head Japanese General Miura (Hiroyuki Heichi) and his sadistic guard, Sato (Shibuya Tenma) and embroils Ip in progressively greater conflict even though he quietly tries to work in the small fabric factory mill his friend, Zhou has just started.

This kind of general story outline will be familiar to fans of the martial arts genre whose films such as Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury and Jet Li’s Fist of Legend in 1994 are very often propelled by the feeling of Chinese nationalistic pride and no wonder considering the endless tyrannical savagery that the Japanese people inflicted throughout Chinese history. The visual palette by cinematographer, Sing-Pui O reflects that when, once the occupation starts, it switches to a grayer, ashen-like color scheme that suggests the town Ip Man is in has become almost like a tomb both physically and mentally. Some people starve to death when unable to scrape a meager living and others who cannot find jobs become bandits wielding axes to extract money out of factory owners, and director Wilson Yip (who is a regular collaborator with Donnie Yen) and writer Edmond Wong subtly suggest more than show the almost dooming atmosphere to full dramatic weight within a brisk and efficiently paced 106 minute running time.

Against that backdrop are the brilliantly staged martial arts sequences that reminded me of how much I missed good old-fashioned, grounded, realistic choreography as opposed to the overused wire-assisted flying and scaling up on walls. The fights that are mostly hand-to-hand combat are some of the best from the veteran action director Sammo Hung (who is the best in the business alongside the better known Yuen Wo-ping). They are also some of his fiercest, which is justly fitting considering the untrammeled directness of the Wing Chun Fist that was founded on the notion that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The camerawork also very wisely goes back to basics in deftly shifting between medium-length spatial shots of combat with brutal close-ups of rapid fists and punches crunchily hitting faces without unnecessary slow-motion. The musical score by Kenji Kawai is also one of the more stirring in blending the tones of looming sadness with pulsating notes to compliment the action scenes.

Then there is Donnie Yen. He is not that well known in the US and has been under the shadow of some of his contemporaries like Jet Li whom he had fought on screen as an antagonist in a few movies like Once Upon a Time in China II and Hero. Some may initially think that Yen is the only remaining actor to be tapped on since Jet Li has announced his leaving the traditional wushu epic genre but the extra, edgy ferocity Yen usually brings in his combat style actually makes him a more ideal fit to the role regardless. And because he so thoroughly embodies such a thoughtful, composed and sane personality to ground the very intense physical requirements of the character (he had to train intensively for four months to learn the Wing Chun fist) and later his individual crisis of questioning the value of his own martial arts, it is difficult for me to picture anyone else who could have played this role.

The supporting cast including the ubiquitously reliable HK actor Simon Yam is all solid but one true standout performance comes from Ka Tung Lam playing the cop turned interpreter who, in many ways, is the most complex and dynamic character in the movie and also presents the biggest departure from the conventions of the martial arts genre. When we first see him, we hardly like him as he seems like such an oily weasel that frowns upon martial arts and later a coward and a “lackey” as Ip calls him when he is actually helping recruit Chinese martial artists to fight for bags of rice. But Lam and the screenplay modulate his unlikely character to become the one who may be subtly moved by Ip Man and his dramatic arc gradually reveals his own depth of patriotic loyalty and even defiant heroism rather than just standing in a helpless position of watching his countrymen die.

Yes, there may be some who complain the film as a biopic fudges some historical facts (and one detail the movie leaves out is that Ip Man himself in real life served as a police officer in pre-WWII China). But just as a boxing style is surrounded by so much folklore and legends, the truest things at the center are the integrity and elegance of the style and the concentration of body, mind and spirit that it builds in its practitioner in difficult times. By simply relying and focusing on those important elements and stripping away unnecessary stylistic flourishes to distract from them, Ip Man creates a fine, classical entertainment in the martial arts genre.

Observe and Report

“Observe and Report”

USA. 2009. Written and directed by Jody Hill. Starring: Seth Rogen, Ray Liotta, Michael Peňa, Anna Faris, Dan Pakkedahl, Collette Wolfe, Jesse Plemons, Celia Weston, John Yuan, Matt Yuan, Randy Gambill, Alston Brown, Cody Midthunder, Deborah Brown, Aziz Ansari, Patton Oswalt, Eddie Rouse, Lauren Miller, Rafael Herrera and Ben Best.

Rating: ★½

Observe and Report finally confirms two long-running suspicions I have gathered hints about in Seth Rogen as a comedian and an actor over the years. One is that there is a continual mean streak to his playing the same old clueless schlub he consistently typecasts himself in. The other is that his depth of range to play such a character does not go very far beyond that of an average sketch on Saturday Night Live. Thus, when he is given considerably darker comedic material here to work with in this film compared to the past raunchy sex and stoner comedies he has somehow built a household name through, he and the filmmakers make us feel squirmy rather than unsettlingly amused.

Now I am not saying that one cannot make a good, black comedy about Rogen's one-track mind security guard, Ronnie Barnhardt, whom some have described as Paul Blart: Mall Cop from earlier this year filtered through the mind of Travis Bickle. In fact, a character similar to that of Bickle in Taxi Driver was already seen through morbidly comedic lenses by Scorsese and Robert De Niro as Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy. But good comedy, no matter how morbid, requires a real basis in truth and heart in its backbone and writer/director, Jody Hill (whose first film was the lame and almost as mean-spirited The Foot Fist Way) lacks the skill to connect the laughs with what should be elements of character empathy. Hence, we cringe at some of the supposedly hilarious parts that are based entirely on shock value and we scratch our heads throughout when it later tries to take itself seriously with the antihero's bipolar disorder and sociopathic behavior.

We first meet Ronnie Barnhardt as he takes his job as head of security at a shopping mall very, very seriously. A flasher has been on the loose in the parking lot and when he ends up harassing Ronnie's long-time crush, Brandi (Anna Faris), who works at a cosmetic stand at a mall, Ronnie makes it his personal mission to find this flasher. The mall's CEO, Mark (Dan Bakkedahl), however, does not really trust Ronnie and since it is a criminal matter, he calls in Detective Harrison (Ray Liotta) to handle the case. But then when a store robbery takes place during the mall's closing hours, Ronnie, who has had dreams of being a real police officer, recruits his own “task force” consisting of his right-hand man, Dennis (Michael Peňa) and Asian twins, John and Matt Yuen (John and Matt Yuan). There is also Nell (Collette Wolfe), a coffee and donut shop worker who gets mocked by her fellow employees and especially her boss for merely being a little immobile due to a cast around her leg.

There are some funny one-liners here and there in these opening scenes but one-liners are all they are and they can already be found in the red-band trailer. Moreover, there is instantly a snaky, nasty streak that grows in Rogen's character as he poses and cruises around “investigating” but really just picking on minority concession stand owners such as the rather tastelessly named Saddamn (Aziz Ansari). The latter results in a big, long, unimaginative cursing match that simply goes on and on and on. Then there is a gaping misogynistic hole that the movie never recovers from when Ronnie forces Brandi to an odd date, watches her get drunk to the point of throwing up and commits what is essentially date rape, which is supposed to be outrageously funny and endearing because he says, “I accept you” and kisses her after she vomits. Anna Faris has gone on interviews to state that she thought this scene would never make the final cut and I think this scene should work as an acid test for the ladies unfortunate enough to see this as a date movie: If the guy is laughing at this scene, date the guy no more.

Then, about a third of the way through, the movie abruptly shifts to try to introduce the more serious elements in Rogen's character to try to explain his sociopath behavior and this is where it just about breaks into two. Just like drama, comedy, especially when it turns dark, requires a realistic entry point at its core and the only way we can care about this one-track minded guy with bipolar disorder is to treat it with at least a smidgen of gravitas. This, of course, puts the movie entirely on Seth Rogen's shoulders and this is where he is way behind his fellow comedic actors like Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler or even Will Ferrell in properly playing up enough drama to even be darkly comedic (which is probably why even in Knocked Up, his character's supposed transformation to end up with Katherine Heigl was frivolously rushed with a mere five-minute montage). When we see him strutting around acting up in brutal, lewd or hostile fashion with a squint and maybe a few tears, there is a flippant clownishness that he wears like an obnoxious funny hat he refuses to take off. Because he never takes his own role seriously, we cannot either and it is just as much writer/director Jody Hill's fault that he cannot properly gage in his star how much he wants his character to be mocked or embraced.

I know that some may think that I am just being high-minded and prudish but vulgarity and political rudeness are not necessarily what I am complaining about. I am complaining about the simple lack of an actual approach from director Hill in dealing with this material. He thinks that pushing as far as he can go in terms of political incorrectness and crudeness will be enough to get the laughs. But as I have said before, shock humor is the easiest and knee-jerk way to get a response as is the gratuitous violence on display when Rogen's nightstick graphically breaks bones. It takes real wit and a conviction in situation to redeem it for catharsis. Think of some of the dark British comedies like Hot Fuzz or Shaun of the Dead that alternate tones with ease and the key is that they manage to create a fully realized and somehow believable absurdity within their scenarios rather than having the characters just performing cheap vulgarities. But despite the opportunities to mix in smarter consumer satire scenarios within a shopping mall, Hill hardly explores any of them and without a consistent credibility in character or situation, you have a movie that is uneven and tone-deaf.

The dearth of overall inspiration extends to the casting as well. Besides Rogen who seems either unwilling or unable to take himself seriously enough to just dive into his character, most everyone else seems predictably and lazily typecast. Ray Liotta's hard-boiled cop ready to pop act is awfully trite by now and Anna Faris is once again playing up the overdone clueless blond stereotype from past movies that is rendered far worse here by the aforementioned horribly demeaning aspects in her character. Michael Peňa does extract precious few laughs with some exaggerated glances trying to look cool although not enough to move past being a comic caricature while John and Matt Yuan just seem to be there to be the token Asian twins as they are really given absolutely nothing to do except to be the butt of Rogen's silly line, “You are my infantry. If one of you dies, God gave me another one.” And what is a nice girl like the one played by Collette Wolfe doing in this movie? She seems transplanted from another movie that gives the mean-spirited protagonist some undeservedly sappy scenes where she inexplicably falls for him simply because he is the protagonist.

As for Rogen, I do not know: With every successive movie he headlines from Knocked Up and Pineapple Express to Zack and Miri Make a Porno, there simply grows an indignation inside me about how this guy is not cut out to be a comic leading man (his only decent role in my book was a supporting one in the still very funny The 40-Year-Old Virgin with Steve Carell). Now putting him in the muddier material of Observe and Report clarifies for me why. Moreover, he also seems stuck in his own world where he plays roles where he can continually get away with acting like the juvenile teenagers from Superbad and as jerky towards everyone around him, particularly women, in the veil of comedy. I do not mind dark, vulgar or raunchy comedies in and of themselves because I believe that comedy can redeem most anything but even as a guy, I get increasingly bothered by Rogen's characters and would like to tell him to get out of his own basement, grow up and learn some manners within his movies before he can pick up the refined tools for cathartic comedy. And you know what, even Kevin James as Paul Blart: Mall Cop, for all its various silly inanities, is way ahead of him.

Two Lovers

“Two Lovers”

USA. 2008. Directed by James Gray. Written by James Gray and Ric Menello. Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw, Moni Moshonov, Isabella Rosselini, John Ortiz, Bob Ari, Julie Budd, Elias Koteas, Samantha Ivers, Jeanine Serralles, David Cale, Evan Lewis, Anne Joyce and Marion McCorry.

Rating: ★★★

Few actors working in movies today can essay inwardly tortured, brooding characters more convincingly than Joaquin Phoenix, which is why it is unfortunate that he has become the subject of publicity jokes since his announcement to quit acting. Part of it probably has to do with how many people shun the idea that a serious actor like Joaquin Phoenix would decide to become a hip-hop rap artist considering the majority of rap artists or singers who fail to make the leap to becoming a serious actor. Then there was that comic skit by Ben Stiller at the 81st Academy Awards ceremony that attempted to emulate Phoenix's new bearded look from his appearance on an episode of The David Letterman Show (and was embarrassing and actually horribly lame and unfunny).

All of that, along with the fact that writer/director James Gray publicly criticized Phoenix for complaining about tiring of acting on the set, may be contributive to why his latest film, Two Lovers has only gotten a muted release in the US. Despite that Phoenix may be somewhat at fault for that, that is still a shame because the movie is a fine acting showcase for his talents. It is also a more focused effort for writer/director James Gray who has a tendency to put way too many plot points in his movie blender but here creates a deeper character study of a man with bipolar disorder who incidentally finds himself shaken by the dilemma of falling for two radically different women at the same time. And after numerous years littered with feathery, lame romantic comedies, it is nice to see a romantic drama that actually contains some feelings we can empathize with.

The movie opens quite starkly as we see Phoenix's Leonard Kraditor suddenly jumping off a small bridge in New York City into a river in an attempt to drown himself. He is rescued by other passersby and returns to his Jewish home where his parents, Reuben (Moni Moshonov) and Ruth (Isabella Rosselini) quickly figure out that he had made yet another suicide attempt. Believing that perhaps being introduced to a new girl in his life might help him break out of his sad shell, they introduce Leonard to Sandra Cohen (Vinessa Shaw) who is the daughter of family friends, Michael (Bob Ari) and Carol (Julie Budd). As Reuben then explains to Leonard, the parents of both families also hope the union of the couple will help complete a merger of their Jewish families' laundromat businesses.

Then, one night on his way home, Leonard comes across an apartment neighbor, Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), who seems to be running away from someone in her apartment. Leonard offers to let her hide in his family's apartment for a little while and is instantly drawn to her feisty personality. He obviously knows who his parents would prefer and although Michelle brings out a little seen side of him when she invites him over to the dance club with her friends (which humorously shows some of Phoenix's break dancing moves), we start to see that she could potentially spell more unhealthy emotional trouble for Leonard. But he somehow seems more smitten with Michelle perhaps because he feels he can show more of his affectionate protective instincts around her as opposed to the other way around when he is with Sandra, who wants to share more of her own protective warmth around Leonard.

Director Gray, as he similarly did for the Russian crime neighborhoods in his previous efforts, Little Odessa, The Yards and We Own the Night, displays an instinctive visual feel for the middle-class Jewish neighborhood he depicts and also does not settle for obvious caricatures or clichés in familial relationships. There is no reason to doubt that both Leonard and Sandra come from loving and caring parents who have their best interests in mind. It also avoids the typical convention of the women knowing of each other's existence and that allows the eventual repercussions and rationale for Leonard's feelings and dilemmas to remain entirely interior and personal. That it works so well is largely due to Phoenix's nuanced portrayal of this withdrawn yet gentle character who may be unwise in letting his romantic longing be swayed by his urge to avoid his own problems rather than properly face them.

Besides Phoenix's anchoring performance, the two actresses playing his potential love interests also deliver fine work playing against their usual types, even though Vinessa Shaw ends up slightly getting the shorter end of the stick. Gwyneth Paltrow delivers some of her strongest work as a woman who is probably more manipulative and sneakily enabling of Leonard's problems than meets the eye but with enough of a dose of naiveté to evade admitting that even to herself. I only wish that Shaw was afforded the same amount of complexity and that Gray and his co-writer, Ric Menello wrote her to move beyond the obligatory and default nice girl that the family approves of. Isabella Rosselini, on the other hand, stands out among the parental figures as she has a subtle, crucial scene that reveals either a surprising trust and understanding in her son or a firm belief that her motherly patience with him will eventually be justified in the end. I should also mention the always reliable Elias Koteas who is in just two scenes in the film but establishes a key flesh-and-blood presence that I will leave you to discover.

For director James Gray, Two Lovers marks a departure from his usual crime fare. His previous films, while often skillfully directed in individual scenes, always fell short of winning me over due to a consistent, overambitious sense of plot crowding. But somehow his shift to observe the matters of a love triangle has freed him from that and allowed him to look more intently than most recent films in the romance genre. Based on this movie, he and Phoenix, who has now collaborated on three of the director's four movies, could have made even more interesting character pieces if the latter had not decided to give up his acting career in favor of his hop-hop rap phase. Well, even Sean Penn said that he wished to quit acting before and hopefully Phoenix will return to his serious acting roots again.