Contemplating the price of American freedom in The Best Years of our Lives
I haven’t found any other acceptable lists of patriotic movies. Other lists tend to be less patriotic and more jingoistic and nationalistic, less about celebrating the essential American values and triumphs (sometimes triumphs over ourselves) than about dominating some furriners in war or sport. That’s why Top Gun and Miracle show up on those lists, but not on mine.
Throughout our history, American patriots have taken risks and made sacrifices for ideas and causes greater than themselves. Here are ten movies that celebrate such authentic patriotism: 10 Patriotic Movies.
Marion Cotillard and Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris
This week, the best choices are the sweet, funny and thoughtful Beginners and Midnight in Paris. If you have kids, Pixar’s Cars 2 is an excellent choice (adults will especially enjoy the James Bond spoof thread). So is Super 8, a wonderful coming of age story embedded in a sci fi action thriller. The Trip delivers some chuckles.
In Beginners, Ewan McGregor plays a guy who tends to the depressive and sabotages his relationships. His father (Christopher Plummer) has just died after coming out of the closet at age 75. Can he make things work out with Melanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds)?
Woody Allen’s sweet and smart Midnight in Paris is his best comedy in twenty-five years. Owen Wilson accompanies fiancée Rachel McAdams to Paris, where she is intrigued by pretentious blowhard Michael Sheen, leaving Wilson to explore midnight Paris and time travel back to the Paris of the Lost Generation.
13 Assassins is brilliantly staged and photographed, and is one of the best recent action films; an honorable samurai must assemble and lead a team of thirteen to hack their way through a psychotically sadistic noble’s 200 bodyguards.
In The Trip, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon take a foodie road trip through the north of England and duel with their Michael Caine and Sean Connery impressions.
In Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig plays a woman whose insecurities keep her from seeing the good and the possible in her life; it’s funny, but not one of the year’s best.
The Hangover Part 2 is just not original enough, and, consequently, not funny enough.
Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life contains a good 90-minute family drama that is completely derailed by an additional hour of mind-numbingly self-important claptrap.
Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon take a foodie road trip through the north of England. Brydon is a compulsive impressionist, and he speaks more often in the voices of Woody Allen, Al Pacino, Anthony Hopkins, Richard Burton, et al than in his own. That’s entertaining, but when Coogan provokes a duel with their Michael Caine and Sean Connery impressions, it gets even more funny.
Along the way, they dine at some pretty tasty looking restaurants, but always with an edge: “It has the consistency of snot, but it tastes great”. There is definitely some food porn, but not quite enough to make my list of 10 Food Porn Movies.
Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting 1963’s Tom Jones on July 2. In this scene, Tom and his new acquaintance enjoy dinner (i.e., foreplay) at the country inn. This scene earned Tom Jones a place on my list of10 Most Memorable Food Scenes.
Super 8 is a wonderful coming of age story embedded in a sci fi action thriller. A group of small town kids in the 1970s are making their own horror movie when a spectacular train crash unleashes a space alien threat government disinformation. The real achievement in this film is the story of the kids – their speech, actions, fears and hopes are written to be utterly authentic. I can’t think of a movie that does a better job of depicting American 11 to 13-year-olds.
The special effects are top-rate, especially the train wreck and the alien creature. But the adult characters who propel the sci fi story are shallow and two-dimensional.
Nevertheless, director J.J. Abrams (Lost, Cloverfield) has created a very special coming of age film. I liked it.
On June 24, Turner Classic Movies is broadcasting this 1951 Alfred Hitchcock suspense thriller – one of his very best. A hypothetical discussion about murdering inconvenient people turns out to be not so hypothetical.
Robert Walker plays one of the creepiest villains in movie history. The tennis match and carousel finale are great set pieces.
In Cars 2, Pixar reprises the cast of Cars. But the champion racer Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) steps aside so the story can focus on his dimbulb tow truck buddy Mater (Larry the Cable Guy). The inspired plot sends up the James Bond genre with wonderfully Bondish British spies voiced by Michael Caine and Emily Mortimer.
I am a huge fan of Pixar. Pixar understands that the best animation in human history is not enough by itself, and also makes the effort to tell great, great stories. Pixar screenwriting is incredibly superior to that of other animation studios. Despite that, I wasn’t a big fan of Cars. In fact, Cars and Ratatouille have been the only Pixar films that haven’t made my Best of the Year lists.
I liked Cars 2 much better than Cars because of the Bond spoof. If you have kids, don’t miss it.
This week, the best choices are the sweet, funny and thoughtful Beginners and Midnight in Paris. If you have kids, Pixar’s Cars 2 is an excellent choice (adults will especially enjoy the James Bond spoof thread). So is Super 8, a wonderful coming of age story embedded in a sci fi action thriller.
In Beginners, Ewan McGregor plays a guy who tends to the depressive and sabotages his relationships. His father (Christopher Plummer) has just died after coming out of the closet at age 75. Can he make things work out with Melanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds)?
Woody Allen’s sweet and smart Midnight in Paris is his best comedy in twenty-five years. Owen Wilson accompanies fiancée Rachel McAdams to Paris, where she is intrigued by pretentious blowhard Michael Sheen, leaving Wilson to explore midnight Paris and time travel back to the Paris of the Lost Generation.
13 Assassins is brilliantly staged and photographed, and is one of the best recent action films; an honorable samurai must assemble and lead a team of thirteen to hack their way through a psychotically sadistic noble’s 200 bodyguards.
In Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig plays a woman whose insecurities keep her from seeing the good and the possible in her life; it’s funny, but not one of the year’s best.
The Hangover Part 2 is just not original enough, and, consequently, not funny enough.
Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life contains a good 90-minute family drama that is completely derailed by an additional hour of mind-numbingly self-important claptrap.
I haven’t yet seen the horse whisperer documentary Buck or the comic road tripper The Trip, which open this weekend. You can see trailers of upcoming films at Movies I’m Looking Forward To.
My DVD pick is the nastily hard-bitten noir Kiss Me Deadly.
Movies on TV this week include the Hitchcock thriller Strangers on a Train and Kiss Me Deadly on TCM.
Ewan McGregor’s dad (Christopher Plummer) has just died, shortly after coming out of the closet. As if this weren’t enough to deal with, McGregor is a depressive anyway, with a rich history of sabotaging his relationships. But then he meets Melanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds) (and they meet cute).
This is a winning comedy – one of the year’s best movies. It’s smart, sweet and original. All of the performances are excellent, especially Plummer’s, which should garner him an Oscar nomination. All in all, Beginners is a notable achievement by director Mike Mills (Thumbsucker).
Every ten years, Terrence Malick directs a film that critics call a masterpiece (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World). Here, he has created a bewildering, pompous mess.
The core of The Tree of Life is fine 90-minute family drama about a boy growing up in 1950s Waco (a superb Hunter McCracken) and the friction with his caring but brutishly domineering father (Brad Pitt). Unfortunately, there is another 60 minutes in the movie.
That additional 60 minutes is a self-important muddle that tries to lift the story to an exploration of life itself – from creation through afterlife. There are beautiful shots of clouds and waterfalls, with unintelligible whisperings from cast members. There are Bible verses, the Big Bang and dinosaurs (yes, dinosaurs). And, in case you don’t get how seriously the movie takes itself, there is an overbearingly pretentious score.
Plus, there is Sean Penn, silently brooding about his childhood from a skyscraper. And wandering through a desert in his suit. And reunited with his dead relatives on a tidal flat.
Malick’s pretense succeeds only in distracting the audience from could have been a good story and a beautifully shot film. Bottom line: painfully unwatchable.
