Reunited and it feels so good: Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater's Before Sunset. Courtesy Warner Independent
Before Sunset
Almost a decade after their Eurail Passers’ one-night-stand,
an American man (Ethan Hawke) and a French woman (Julie Delpy)
meet again for 80 minutes of walking, talking, talking and
more walking – and then…? Richard Linklater’s deceptively
simple sequel to Before Sunrise is a romantic meditation
on the slow-fast passage of time and the compromises we make
along the creep towards middle age. Infused with the sadness
of missed love and the exhilaration of reconnection, Before
Sunset is a “romantic comedy” that rescues the term,
showing how pain can enrich a relationship rather than end
it.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Almost a companion piece to Before Sunset, Eternal Sunshine
is about what happens when one refuses to endure the pain
of romance; the yin-yang goes off balance, and the love rush
is erased, too – literally. Joel (Jim Carrey) undertakes a
procedure at a dubious medical facility called Lacuna to remove
his memories of flaming-haired, flaming-tempered Clementine
(Kate Winslet). Writer Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation)
is a master of absurd invention – Joel’s head, i.e. his inner
life, is like a funhouse refraction – but he’s actually restrained
here; the movie is never so clever as to forget that it’s
really a gut-wrenching elegy for a relationship gone bad,
and an optimistic paean to love’s fortitude.
Touching the Void
An astonishing portrait of the glory and folly of man in nature,
and one jaw-slackening piece of filmmaking: a docu-drama for
thrill-seekers. The “reenactment” is usually the kiss of cinematic
death, but the actors who play climbing legends Joe Simpson
and Simon Yates are so bearded and frost-covered that you
can’t see their faces long enough to be annoyed by any lack
of resemblance to the real guys. In 1985, the young maverick
climbers were thwarted by killer weather in the Peruvian Andes,
and Yates made the decision to “cut the rope” – the one holding
Simpson above a hell-deep crevice – and save himself instead
of waiting for the cold to kill both of them. The repercussions
rocked the climbing community, and in contemporary interviews
told directly to the camera, Yates is still defensive, Simpson
still completely on his side. The latter’s miraculous survival
is ridiculously tense; you wouldn’t believe this story if
it weren’t true.
I’m Not Scared
Young Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) is as golden brown as the
Southern Italian wheat fields where he spends his summer days.
During his boyhood investigations, he pulls back a piece of
corrugated tin covering the ground near an abandoned farmhouse
to find a creature in a hole; half-ghost, half-human, it lets
out a spine-grabbing cry that we later identify as the sound
of Michele’s childhood ending. A beautiful film and a suspenseful
noir – around every corner, a twist – that director Gabriel
Salvatores lights like a Terrence Malick landscape. Perfectly
captures a child’s foreboding sense that the world around
him is not as safe as it once seemed.
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring
Serene and then shocking, South Korean writer-director Kim
Ki Duk extracts the fundamental spirit of Buddhism from this
tale of a monk and his child disciple. They live alone on
an island in the middle of a still, empty lake where the little
boy is first seen gleefully tying rocks to small animals;
a frog and a snake struggle as he laughs. Lesson one: the
monk ties a stone to the boy, bidding him to set free all
the animals. If any have died, he tells him, “you will carry
a stone in your heart for the rest of your life.” Episodic,
with the consistency of a fable, each season tests the boy.
A meditative tale about the cycle of life, natural and human,
that speaks to the profound connectedness of all things.
Sideways
Yes, the hype is annoying, and yes, it’s deserved. Sideways
is the kind of funny, literate American film that everyone
complains doesn’t get made anymore. Miserable oenophile and
failing novelist Miles (Paul Giamatti) and unflappable C-actor
Jack (Thomas Haden Church) hit the road in the Santa Ynez
Valley for a wine-and-golf-week bachelor celebration. Jack’s
getting married, but he’s still determined to get laid and
to help Miles do the same, though their prospects – a “pour
girl” (Sandra Oh) and a grad student-cum-waitress (Virginia
Madsen), respectively – are far too sharp to be used. Co-writer
and director Alexander Payne (About Schmidt) lets
his misguided characters wade through the tragic muck and
out the other side with something like dignity. That we like
these men at all is remarkable, but we do so because Payne
lets us see in their endless mistakes something universal:
striving and neediness, and a desire for companionship, whether
in the form of dying friendships, or new love.
Birth
Okay, so no one liked this but me. I’m right, though, and
the world is wrong, as usual. Nicole Kidman plays Anna, a
patrician New Yorker whose dead husband returns in the form
of a ten-year-old boy. Neither horror film nor body-swapping
comedy, Birth is that rare thing: a deeply considered
film about the limits (are there any?) of love (yes, there
are). Director Jonathan Glazer proved himself a great creator
of worlds in the fabulous gangster film Sexy Beast.
This time, he gives us a family of New York WASPs – headed
by a fierce Lauren Bacall, playing Anna’s mother – whose emotions
are as impenetrable as the heavy doors of the well-appointed
apartment that can’t contain this improbable, unearthly event.
Maria Full of Grace
The snarl on the pretty face of Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino
Moreno) isn’t mere adolescent snarkiness. She’s poor, Columbian
and recently walked away (or stormed off) from a demeaning
job pruning flowers, her family’s main financial support.
She becomes a drug mule, swallowing thumb-sized capsules of
heroin and taking her first flight to New York. Made in Spanish
by an unknown first-time American director, Joshua Marston,
Maria Full of Grace has the tenor and meticulous
detail of a documentary, but the title character is so strong-willed,
such a fleshy, flawed person – so much not a Third-World
victim – that the film never feels like pat social tragedy.
The Saddest Music in the World
Because it labels Winnipeg, 1933, the “World Capital of Sorrow.”
Because Guy Maddin’s imagination is humungous. Because he
creates worlds that could only exist in the movies. Because
it’s a black-and-white movie that’s not black and white. Because
it’s a silent movie that’s not silent. Because Isabella Rossellini
plays a beer heiress balancing on glass legs filled with lager.
Because Saddest is joyful, exuberant and achingly
beautiful.
Million Dollar Baby
Clint Eastwood seems utterly oblivious to the fact that we’re
living in the age of irony, and thank God. His films are throwbacks:
old-fashioned stories told carefully, slowly, and without
trickery. After directing last year’s stellar Mystic River,
he proves again that at 74, he’s one of the most vibrant
filmmakers around. Playing a crusty gym owner and fight manager
dragging a cartload of Catholic guilt, he reluctantly agrees
to train a determined woman boxer from the poorest corner
of Arkansas (Hilary Swank). A great sports movie that’s also
a great father-daughter movie, overlaid on Eastwood’s favourite
theme – redemption – with a surprise turn that challenges
that most athletic, and religious, idea: sacrifice.
Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.
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