High (Matthew Lombardo)

Avatar (James Cameron)

Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz)

So, as we were leaving the parking garage after watching Life During Wartime, the cashier asked "What movie did you see?" Told her. "What did you think?" She's obviously polling her customers. "We really liked it. What have the others said?" "The last group said it was weird, crazy, and perverse." "It was. But it was so interesting."

Life During Wartime picks up the lives of the extended family Solondz depicted in Happiness (1998), boldly examining the aftereffects of incest, pedophilia, and suicide on the perpetrators, yes, but more significantly on those left behind to clean up the mess. As Solondz shows, the clean-up is consistently imperfect. Because is characters cannot, do not know how to talk truthfully about what they witnessed, they are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Moreover, because the situations are realistically complicated, there's no way the characters can resolve the problems. They are doomed to plodding along as best they can.

The first scene, between Joy and her husband, Alan, is a good example of Solondz's expertise with dialogue and keeping his audience de-stabilized. They are dressed up, in a booth at a nice-ish restaurant; she is weepy, he is teary, and we don't know why. Come to find out, they don't seem to know either. Because he is so solicitous and she seems so dysfunctional, my sympathies were with him, especially when she cannot pull things together when he gives her a thoughtful anniversary gift. Then he begins to say how hard he's worked at cleaning up all areas of his life, but that one area continues to give him trouble. Oops, I'm beginning to understand why she's crying. And then the server comes to the table, recognizes his voice, calls him a pervert, and spits on him. Joy begins to apologize for him, saying that he's changed. Clearly, things are much more complicated that they initially appeared to be.

Solondz's films are not for the fainthearted or the squeamish. No gore, no on-screen violence, just lots of uneasy truths.

Highly Recommended. With the foregoing caveats--plus the recommendation that you see Happiness first.

Restrepo (Junger and Hetherington)

The War (Film) March continues, this time with a documentary of a company's deployment in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. Combining digital footage shot by soldiers and the documentarians, as well as post-deployment interviews, the film provides witness neither to the tedium nor the excitement of war. Instead, it asks the audience to face the unrelenting terror (and frustration) (and grief) of establishing and holding an isolated outpost deep in Taliban territory.

This film certainly asks us to wonder why the Bush administration thought we could successfully fight two wars simultaneously when one was in this inhospitable and foreign land.

Highly recommend.

Dinner for Schmucks (Jay Roach)

On the surface, nothing about this movie appealed to me, from the title to the stars. However, we had a couple of under-25s around, an un-air-conditioned home in early August, and assurances from A. O. Scott (NYTimes) that it was a passable comedy in which "nearly every scene...draws laughter from an impressively eclectic array of sources, both obvious and new." Sounded good enough for our purposes.

We were led astray! Let me be clear: do not waste your money or your time. If you need an air-conditioned spot for a couple of hours, pile into your car, get stuck on I-95, and listen to commercial radio. It won't be any more excruciatingly boring--and it will be a lot cheaper.

Avoid.

The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko)

This fine film certainly marks the mainstreaming of the "two-mommies" phenomenon--not because it features a family with two mommies (as well as a daughter, a son, and a sperm donor), but because the adult characters are flawed enough to be mildly irritating. For example, Nic (Annette Bening) the alpha-female in this pair may be a feminist lesbian, yet she still repeatedly refers possessively, even patriarchally, to the family as "my family" and to her right to determine how its individual members behave. Jules (Julianne Moore) can be as annoyingly impractical as the worst stereotypical suburban housewife, and Paul (Mark Ruffalo) remains stupefyingly self-centered. Nevertheless, the film works because all the characters are earnest in their attempts to work out problems common to all families, as well as those limited to gay families.

Recommend.

Winter's Bone (Debra Granik)

A director any less bold that Granik would have made this movie to be about either hope or despair. Granik avoids both, instead making it about perseverance in an environment where everyone else has given up. Responsible for caring for two younger siblings and her withdrawn mother, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) must find her father, dead or alive, before he misses his court hearing and their home is forfeited to the bail bondsman.

Visually, each shot of the Ozark back country is filled with copious amounts of bleak minutia that in less assured hand would merely depress the viewer. These details provide the unspoken back story that Ree negotiates. This is clearly the country of illegal meth cooking, a fact that forms the backdrop to the oscillations between violence and indifference that Ree must face down. That she accomplishes her mission is no cause for hope. No ray of sunshine breaks through the gray sky, no white knight prances in to deliver these foresaken children. And yet, and yet.

For a lyrical homage to the film, see David Denby's review in 5 July 2010 New Yorker.

Highly recommend.