The Savages

I'd like to apologize in advance about autobiographical material entering this review but sometimes when you see a movie, well, you just can't help but think of your own life as it unfolds. See, when I was home for Christmas last week I found myself going to pick up my Grandmother and her quite literally not recognizing me and I glimpsed a potential future wherein I end up having to move my mother into my basement, a la Jerry Stiller in "King of Queens". So seeing "The Savages" dredged up a few things for me.

The movie opens with the old, constantly irritated, slowly-losing-his-mind Leonard Savage (Phillip Bosco) telling off the home healthcare worker of his live-in girlfriend. How does he tell him off? Uh....let's see....how do I put this delicately....he tells him off by using Something Which We Do In The Toilet to write the word Prick on the bathroom mirror. Not good.

So Leonard's kids Wendy (Laura Linney) and John (Philip Seymour Hoffmann) are notified of their father's, shall we say, erratic behavior. The first time we see Wendy she is in her cubicle at work typing up a letter in hopes of winning an artistic fellowship for her plays. As she writes she is continually looking over her shoulder with fear her boss may figure out what she's ignoring her work to actually do. (That's me, people! I'm always in my cubicle writing and looking over my shoulder!)

The kids flies down to Sun City, Arizona to see what must be done about their father. (Another digression: I, too, have been to Sun City and what you see here is in no way an exagerration. When I lived in Phoenix my aforementioned grandmother lived in Sun City and so, yes, I visited. I spent Christmas there and an Easter. Oh God, Easter. Ever been to an Easter dinner where it's just your 24 year old self and a bunch of people in their 80s and all the windows are closed so you're sweating fanatically and your grandmother keeps serving you coffee in spite of this and one of your grandmother's friends is forever railing about the illegal aliens - though that's not the term she's using, believe me - coming across the border and stealing all our jobs and you're wondering how in the world you forgot to pick up a six-pack on the way over? People may question the dancing old ladies you glimpse a couple times during the scenes in Sun City but I don't think that's a stretch. If you're there long enough you tend to hallucinate.)

Anyway, the movie....Wendy and John head west to gather up their father and move him back to Buffalo, NY and to a nursing home, or assisted living center, whatever you want to call it. That's the set-up and the rest of the movie deals with the kids dealing with the inevitability of their father's demise.

Linney and Hoffmann are two of our finest actors and both are very adept at externalizing their emotions but in "The Savages" it's all about internalizing. And what else would you expect from siblings whose lives center around writing, theater, and drama. She has a relationship....with a married man. He has a Polish girlfriend but she is about to get deported and despite that fact he's not about to marry her. But neither of them really discuss their problems out loud, not about their respective relationships or about their father or their childhood. They might even lie on occassion rather than deal with the truth. Emotions only boil over after they've been hanging around quite awhile.

If you write these sorts of characters you're counting on your actors to bring their "A" games and that is the case in this film. The reaction shots, facial expressions, all speak volumes. Hoffmann clearly plays John in such a way that you can see everything going on just below the surface but he refuses - except for every now and then - to let anything out. Linney has a moment at a diner with her brother and father where you catch her looking out a window as they discuss what needs to happen after their father dies. Again, that's me! That's me across the table from my Grandmother at the Drake Diner in Des Moines as she re-tells me something I've already heard 17 times and I look out the window as if there might be someone strolling along and sees me and sees I need to be saved.

"The Savages" is a movie primarily about character. Writer/Director Tamera Jenkins puts her characters in a certain situation and watches how they react. The movie steps wrong in a few places, admittedly, but I have no interest in dwelling on those moments. All I know is this was the exact movie I wanted to see on Saturday. And as it ended I realized there are many, many reasons why I'm glad this year is about to end but the quantity of quality movies is not one of them.

Speaking strictly in relation to cinema I wish to the high heavens that 2007 would never, ever end.

(Postscript: The actress who portrays Maggie Fitzgerald's wretched mother in "Million Dollar Baby" turns up for a single scene in this movie and before she had even said a word I hated her. I downright despised her with every fiber of my being. And I realized this actress - who in real life, of course, may be a wonderful person - will never get a fair shake with me for the rest of time. I will always loathe her. Forever. Even if she plays a saintly nun, I will want the saintly nun to fall off a bridge. Maggie Fitzgerald was the coolest of the cool. You f--- with her, you're f---in' with me.)

The Man Who Gave Us Dirk Diggler

Fantastic article today on Slate.com in reference to writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson (whose "There Will Be Blood" - starring, of course, Daniel Day Lewis - opens for us Chicagoans next week). I highly recommend giving it a read.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

I have never been what one might term a big Tim Burton Fan. But I'll get back to that in just a minute. At the end of Woody Allen's mid-90's musical "Everyone Says I Love You" the Natasha Lyonne character has a voiceover in which she explains the plot of the entire movie could "only exist in a musical". I thought of the line as the credits rolled during Burton's newest film, an amazingly dark musical opus. I know exactly why I've never liked much of Burton's work but absolutely adored "Sweeney Todd". His stories could only exist as a musical.

At the film's start the title character (Johnny Depp, who does sound a bit like Captain Jack Sparrow though after awhile you'll completely forget that) is returning to London aboard a ship with the younger Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower). A flashback advises us that, in fact, Todd's real name is Benjamin Barker and many years ago he was happy with a beautiful wife and infant child named Joanna. But the vile Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) had eyes for Barker's wife, turned the screws on Barker, sent him away to prison, and took in his wife and child. But his wife took poison and now an older Joanna spends her days locked away from the world courtesy of Turpin.

And so Benjamin Barker (or Sweeney Todd, whichever you prefer) returns to London, a bit peeved, and his old barber shop and enlists the help of Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), who owns the restaurant below his old shop which proudly sells the worst meat pies in London. Barker (or Todd), you see, is not just out for revenge on the evil Turpin, he decides "everyone must die" and constructs a special barber's chair that allows him to slash the throats of unsuspecting customers (there is more blood in this movie than in "Kill Bill", so beware), slide them off the chair and into the basement where Mrs. Lovett uses the meat for her, ahem, pies. And soon business is booming, though Barker (or Todd's) rage only seems to grow.

But since the movie is based on the stage musical by Stephen Sondheim time must be taken for a few songs to be sung (Depp and Bonham Carter admirably do their own singing) and eventually the movie does what a good movie musical should do - make you forget the fact you're watching a musical. The songs flow seamlessly in and out of the narrative. They are not merely song & dance numbers but pieces of the story.

Burton has always been an astounding visual filmmaker and the visuals here do not disappoint. This is a dark, nightmarish London and Barker's (or Todd's) barber shop is a frightening place with a window looking out over the just-as-frightening rooftops that would not really make anyone want to stop in for a cut and a shave but, hey, that's sorta' the point. The shot when Barker (or Todd) sinisterly - and triumphantly - holds aloft his precious razor and declares "my arm is complete again" made me want to stand and applaud except I didn't since I figured the rest of the audience would be a bit leery of that lunatic (i.e. Me) down front.

Despite being so accomplished with his visuals, however, Burton's ability to pace a story has never left me impressed. I've always found his movies rife with stops and starts of momentum. He's never as taken with the narrative of his films as he is with the way they look. In this case he already had his material in place and so perhaps this forced him to keep focus because the pacing is extraordinary. The acts build, one-by-one, and by the end of the third things are dizzying, though not confusing. (I had to go to the bathroom so incredibly bad - this is what I get for drinking a cup of coffee during a movie - but I wasn't going anywhere for fear of missing even of a second!) The movie builds to something and that is its finest quality.

It also wonderfully ignores typical modern-day movie-making logic by climaxing with its conclusion. There will be no extra scenes. It crescendoes with the final shot.

The shot itself is so sickeningly beautiful, so disgustingly luminous, so preposterously romantic, so perfect, that I couldn't help but think as I felt the goosebumps roll up my arm with it before me and then watched the screen fade to black that "Sweeney Todd" is the movie Tim Burton was born to make.

My Christmas List: Top 5 Curtain Lines

Okay, so this is a complete curveball. I was not set to make this one of my Christmas lists (which I know you all wait for with breathless anticipation) but upon seeing "Atonement", which possessed a curtain line that completely floored me and caused me to have a tiny breakdown in my movie theater seat, I decided it would be apropos to switch it up and make this Christmas list about my all-time favorite curtain lines.

I will not include the last line from "Atonement", even though I terribly, desperately want to, since there's a good chance you probably haven't seen it since there's a good chance it's not even out in your city. But let it be known "Atonement's" last line is just as good as any of these. (Okay, it's not as good as my #1 because my #1 is just so far beyond compare.)

1.) "I can't believe it. It's right here where we live. Right here in St. Louis." - Esther Smith (Judy Garland), Meet Me in St. Louis

2.) "You have to have a little faith in people." - Tracy (Mariel Hemmingway), Manhattan

3.) "It will be a love story, for she will by heroine for all time. And her name will be Viola." - Will (Joseph Fiennes), Shakespeare in Love

4.) "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." - Walsh (Joe Mantell), Chinatown

5.) "Robert E. Lee Prewitt. Isn't that a silly old name?" - Alma Burke (Donna Reed), From Here to Eternity

Romance & Cigarettes

Every once in a great while I experience a moment where two of my great true loves converge at the same instant. Examples: earlier this year when Bruce Springsteen and the founding members of The Arcade Fire shared the stage, or the moment on "Seinfeld" when Jerry quotes Hawkeye from "Last of the Mohicans", or the moment when a girl with whom I was madly in love suddenly and entirely of her own valition spouted a line from "O Brother Where Art Thou" that a group of my friends and I once upon a time quoted incessantly. These moments are awesome, surreal, sorta' like the crossing of wires in "Ghostbusters". And midway through John Turturro's long-delayed, badly reviewed "Romance & Cigarettes" there comes a moment when.....ah, but you didn't think I'd give it away at the beginning of the review, did you?

Where the hell to begin with this movie? What words could be used to sum it up? Unfocused? All over the place (and then some)? Insane? Yes, you could use those, but you could also call it brazen. And joyful. And fearless - very, very fearless.

Plot synopsis, you say? Uh....Nick (James Gandolfini) is married to Kitty (Susan Sarandon) but having an affair with Tula (the one, the only Kate Winslet). I guess that would do it but, no, it really wouldn't. See, because once Kitty's learned of this affair she gets into an over-the-top shouting match with Nick - her three daughters lending support - and then Nick strolls out onto the street and erupts into song & dance. And to deal with the pain Kitty heads on over to the church and she and the choir bust out into a blistering rendition of "Piece of My Heart". What the movie does, you must understand, is not just have the actors sing their own versions of these songs but have the real songs themselves playing on the soundtrack while the actors sing along with them. I mean, this is great! Who among us has not in a moment of happiness or sadness or somewhere in that deadly, dreadful middle ground cranked a tune we love and sung along with it as a means to cope? And if you're dancing along to the song as you sing it, you're probably not dancing that well and that's because you're just a regular person and, well, you can't dance. You're just doing your best, damn it.

Plot? Story? The emergence of a character only to have that same character pretty much vanish with little to no explanation? Hey, if you wanna' piss and moan about that kinda' crap then just avoid the movie, okay? If you don't mind about that trivial nonsense and you want to see a movie pulsating with vim, vigor, life, passion, fervor, great music, etc. etc. etc. then.....well, you'll probably have to Netflix it. My city is lucky as hell it got this thing to come here, after all.

The cast list is extraordinary but merely seeing the names of the actors ain't gonna' cut it. You've gotta' understand what John Turturro as director has these people doing. Take Mary Louise Parker, for instance, as the punk-rock daughter of James Gandolfini. Or Eddie Izzard as the choir director at the local church. Or Christopher Walken as Cousin Bo who is possibly at his weirdest ever, and I mean that. ("She was my first true love. I traced her name in cow shit." Yes, that really is one of his lines.) Or Elaine Stritch - currently playing the mother of Alec Baldwin's character on "30 Rock" - as James Gandolfini's mother. She's pretty much the same as she is on "30 Rock" but then don't forget that this movie was shot well before "30 Rock" came into existence. Hell, even that one guy that always turns up in every Wes Anderson movie (Pagoda, from "The Royal Tennenbaums") is in this thing.

After last night I can once again proudly proclaim I've seen every Kate Winslet movie ever made and I can also say it was the first movie in which I ever saw her eating fried chicken in bed and singing a song underwater. This thing's madness - sheer madness, I tell you!

How can a movie like this - a movie so original, so unwilling to compromise about what it is - sit on the shelf for two years while a new installment of "Saw" is released every single cotton pickin' halloween? How??? This movie is bold. This movie has balls. This movie wants to be something. Is it something? More often than not, it is.

This movie has a moment - I'm coming full circle now - when Kate Winslet, my favorite actress in the whole wide world, engages in a nasty catfight set to Bruce Springsteen's "Red Headed Woman". Yup, this is one hell of a movie - one hell of a movie for a person like me.

Once.....we hold hands everything will be all right?

So as I popped my disc of "Once" into the ole' DVD player last night (the movie, by the way, is just as fantastic the fifth time as it is the first) I paused and took stock of the DVD cover. It appeared that the film's stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova were holding hands. That couldn't be right, I thought, since there is never a single moment in the entire movie when the two of them hold hands (they engage in no - as Irglova's character puts it - "hanky panky" of any sort). I thought perhaps I'd just somehow never noticed this little nugget in regards to the film's poster.

Therefore I snagged my "Once" soundtrack (bought back in May when the film was released), examined the cover and confirmed that, in fact, they were NOT holding hands. So no, I wasn't crazy. And again I wondered why on the DVD cover they're holding hands?

This is an important piece of the film. The fact the two of them never hook up, never kiss, nothing of any kind, and yet still manage to share the deepest, most intimate connection possible for two human beings. So again WHY THE HELL ARE THEY HOLDING HANDS ON THE DVD COVER? (By the way, I noticed Jim Emerson covers this topic on his blog as well.)

I suppose the only explanation would be that some marketing department - in all its glorious and infinite wisdom - decided this little gem of a film couldn't simply be marketed by, let's say, it's 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes critcs tomatometer. No, they probably determined it needed to be played up as a conventional romance and thus decided to just photoshop up that original cover a little bit to make them appear as typical romantic movie leads. We can't scare people away from a love story where the two main characters don't - gasp! - get together at the end. Golly, no!

And so I will borrow the line Lewis Black used at this years Emmy Awards in regards to TV Network Executives and direct it at DVD marketing departments instead: "What is it you people do exactly other than come up with bad ideas?"

Once (The DVD Release)

(One of the best movies of 2007 is being released today on DVD but I've already blathered about this film enough and so rather than re-posting one of my own entries I'll offer up the review of the film from the Toronto Star's Linda Barnard, who expresses the brilliance of the movie perfectly. If you haven't seen "Once", see it. Please. Get out to Blockbuster and rent it. Put it in your Netflix queue. Something, anything. Just see this movie, whatever the cost.)

While the booming cannons of the latest "Pirates of the Caribbean" instalment clamour for our attention this weekend, it may be easy to overlook the brilliance of small and lovely "Once" quietly playing in the corner.

Which would be a shame. This indie musical is a bijou of a film that joins unaffected performances and a compelling soundtrack in a low-budget, documentary-style film that lets us watch two people fall in love to the mesmerizing soundtrack of the songs they create.

The winner of the audience award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, on its surface, "Once" is a simple story of a busker and a flower seller who meet in the streets of Dublin and spend a week writing and making music.

They don't even have names. Girl (Czech singer/musician Markéta Irglová in her first film role) meets Guy (Glen Hansard, the ringleted redhead guitar player from The Commitments and singer/guitarist for the Irish band the Frames) as he plays for loose change in a Dublin street.

She's drawn to his music. He's drawn to her, although he's unsettled by her directness at first.

But she has a small child and a husband back in the Czech Republic and the busker, who confesses painful loneliness since his girlfriend packed off for London, quickly realizes this is one Guy who won't get the Girl.

So they make music. Haunting and powerful songs. They play and sing in a music store where she often rehearses, unable to afford her own piano.

She sits at the keyboard and he joins her on his old guitar with a fist-sized hole smashed in the front. They sing on the street, in the back of a bus, the music fills the background as they take a motorcycle trip to the seaside. And best of all, the songs are played in their entirety – no frustrating 8-bar snippets or medleys.

As they begin to fall for each other, the intensity of their music grows, almost as a way to distract them from their feelings. The songs' lyrics match their stories, the film's shaky camera work making the scenes scan with realism.

Irglová and Hansard had already recorded together before Irish director John Carney (and former Frames bassist) put them on the screen in Once.

Their ease with each other shows. Irglová is utterly charming as the guileless young woman who sees no reason to ever accept "no" as an answer, while Hansard's hurt-spaniel eyes track her with wonder and admiration.

The music they make, especially the Frames' ballad "Falling Slowly," which builds from a whisper to heart-pounding intensity, is as Oscar-worthy as any tune coming out of theatre speakers in years.

There's no pretense and nothing is predictable (including an amusing scene where the two go for a bank loan to fund a weekend in the recording studio and find a wannabe rock star loans manager).

They finally make their demo disc with the help of other buskers and especially Girl, a woman who refuses to accept any limitations in life.

When "Once" slowly arrives at its inconclusive conclusion, you'll be grateful that Hollywood didn't get its mitts on this one, where the bittersweet, gentle finish would have been supplanted by a gargantuan concert scene with crane shots and 60-piece orchestra as the couple perform in triumph.

There's no need. "Once" is enough.

I Am Legend

The year is 2012. A cure for cancer has gone wrong, spawned a virus and killed off most of the world's population, save for the zombies - whoops! I meant "the dark seekers", who will work as our nefarious villains, and Robert Neville (Will Smith), a scientist partly responsible for the virus outbreak who is now alone in New York City with only his loyal dog for accompaniment. He spends his days foraging in an eerily empty Big Apple and attempting to discover a cure for the virus in his basement lab.

The first half of this movie is surprisingly strong. As we fall into Neville's daily rhythms with he and his dog, and get oh so many glimpses of a deserted New York, you will find yourself riveted. Much of the credit for this has to go to director Franis Lawrence doing what The Coen Brothers did on "No Country For Old Men" and Ben Affleck did on "Gone Baby Gone" before them - he generates tension from silence. Note how in so many early portions of this movie there are no musical chords served up to guide your emotions. He lets you find the emotions yourself. There's a breathless sequence inside an abandoned building that comes at you the same as it comes at Neville. Without the soundtrack telling you what the film is up to, it becomes terribly dramatic. Good, good stuff.

(One interesting thing to note is that you could actually take a scene each from "I Am Legend" and "No Country For Old Men" and compare how silence works more effectively than musical cues. In each movie there is a moment when an evil dog is charging our main character and the main character guns it down. In the former it has music and is far less effective than the latter which goes for quitet and total reality.)

SPOILERS AHEAD!! SPOILERS AHEAD!!

Be honest, people. Did you really think Neville was all alone? Did you really think Hollywood would be so bold, so brave, as it make a film with only a single human being for the duration of its running time? No chance in hell. So yes, in the third act a couple more humans - a mother and a son - swoop in at precisely the instant the story requires them so they can save Neville. They have also arrived to speak of the inevitable "colony" of humans. She advises Neville she thinks she has been "sent by God". This little development is wretched for two reasons. 1.) It's the film trying to work in some sort of spritual subplot and not doing it well. It feels rushed and unconvincing. It feels like they wrote themselves into a corner and had to quickly write themselves out. 2.) I fear in the future that every time a movie has a deus ex machina show up they'll simply have the deus ex machina exclaim "I was sent by God" and presto! Everything's solved! God sent them? I mean, who's gonna' argue with that?

So what prevents "I Am Legend" from completely caving in? I'll tell you what, Will Smith. This is a magnificent performance. He doesn't play a bit of it wrong. When he encounters the other humans for the first time he reacts, I suspect, just as a person in this situation might. ("I was saving that bacon.") My friend Rory the Movie Idiot talks in his review of a "particularly powerful scene" and how "Smith play(s) it pefectly". I think I know what scene he's speaking of and if I do, well, I agree. I thought it was the finest moment in the whole enterprise. Gut-wrenching. And even at the end, even as the story starts sputtering, he keeps it grounded.

The movie is far from perfect but it's nice to know that great acting and a strong sense of style (for an hour, at least) can still turn up every now and then in a Hollywood blockbuster.

Juno

This is the funniest movie of the year. It's laugh out loud funny. Usually, I can count on one (perhaps two) the number of times I laugh out loud during a movie, even at the so-called "comedies". But by about the fifteenth minute of "Juno" I'd already lost count.

It's comedy that comes from dialogue. Line after line after line after line is razor-sharp, brilliant, and hilarious. I'd like to spend the whole review simply quoting it but that would 1.) Ruin it for you and 2.) I can't even remember 75% of what I heard because there was so much of it. ("I think I'm gonna' go to Women Now because they help women now.") It's comedy that comes from character. All the characters here feel real and grow even more real as the film progresses. It's comedy that comes from a gang of high school runners who function as some sort of wordless Greek chorus. In a cinematic year where we continue to be blessed with great films, lo and behold, here's another one.

Juno McGuff (Ellen Page) is pregnant. The father is Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). "Paulie Bleeker?" says her father (J.K. Simmons). "I didn't think he had it in him." She briefly ponders abortion (which will no doubt get some asinine protest group of some sort that hasn't seen the movie and knows nothing about movies to get pissed off, but I digress) but instead she decides to seek out a couple seeking adoption. She quickly finds Mark (Jason Bateman) and Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) in an ad in the paper, "next to exotic lamps".

You know the type of the home they have - something for which the term perfection was invented. Mark once had dreams of being a rock star but now writes commercial jingles. Vanessa is desperate to have a baby but we get the sense right off the bat that Mark maybe isn't quite as desperate.

There you go. That's the plot. You won't get anymore from me even though I really want to just sit here and, as I said earlier, quote lines ("dream big" - it's out of context but wait until you see it) but I think I'll just stop. Whenever it's released in your city, go see it. "National Treasure 2" will be everywhere when it opens but everyone has to wait for "Juno". Typical.

We want to love our movie characters, right? Isn't that how it works? When we go to a movie we want characters up on the screen that when we leave we can think about how much we loved them. Whether it's Captain Jack Sparrow, or Maggie Fitzgerald, or Rick Blaine, or Briony Tallis, we want those loveable characters to take us along for the ride. Well, I loved every character in "Juno". Every damn one of 'em. I loved Paulie Bleeker and his horribly short shorts. I loved Juno's parents (notice how her father talks just like her). I loved Mark, who will probably be seen as an overgrown child but then what man isn't? I loved Vanessa, if only because she was who she was and made no excuses for it. And I loved Juno. I loved the way she talked, and the way she said she didn't what kind of a girl she was and then slowly came to find out, and the fact she loved Patti Smith.

In fact, I would be proud as hell to have a daughter like Juno McGuff.

(Note: The screenwriter of this film bears the first name Diablo. Is this what it takes to make it in Hollywood? Maybe if I changed my first name to Teufel I could sell a script.)

My Christmas List: Top 5 Movie Crushes

Who among us has not emerged from a revelatory movie-going experience having not just fallen in love with the movie itself but with a particular character from the movie? Now I'm not talking about falling in love with the actress. I'm not talking about having on a crush on, say, Sienna Miller smoking a cigarette while pouring a glass of scotch in "Interview" (heavenly God). No, I mean falling in love with the character. The actress, of course, has something to do with it because the character looks like that actress but it's the person the actress creates. You leave the theater and you wish you could bump into that person on the street and talk to them (or, in my case, run away in fright). The first time I recall getting that feeling was with Sloane Peterson of "Ferris Buller's Day Off". And since then these are the five most memorable occurrences.

1.) Celine, "Before Sunrise/Before Sunset". Is this because I yearn to meet a neurotic, passionate French woman who looks like Julie Delpy on the train and spend the rest of the day with her discussing the most intimate mysteries of life before parting ways and then having her haunt my memories for the rest of my life? Of course, it is.

2.) Sara, "Serendipity". I think most men would tuck tail and run if a woman (played here by Kate Beckinsale) they liked took them to a hotel lobby and instructed they get on separate elevators and a choose a floor to get off on and that if they chose the same floor then they would be meant to be together. I am not among these men.

3.) Clementine, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". Jim Carrey's Joel is at a party and has secluded himself off to the side and away from everybody with a plate of food. Kate Winslet's Clementine comes over to him and says, "I saw you over here all by yourself and thought, Thank God, someone who doesn't know how to interact at one of these things, either." And if you don't know why that's a complete and total turn-on to me, well, then you don't know me.

4.) Ann, "State and Main". Is this because I'm a wannabe' screenwriter and I yearn to meet a woman (portrayed by Rebecca Pidgeon) who's clearly not cut out for the small town she lives in, though she still loves it there, and doesn't want kids ("never saw the point of 'em") who assists me in breaking a rancid case of writer's block on my latest script while simultaneously causing me to swoon? Of course, it is.

5.) Lindsey, "Fever Pitch". Perhaps to truly understand my love of Drew Barrymore's character (or to understand the film itself) you have to possess an undying, borderline insane love of a particular sports team. Luckily, I do. And if you do as well all that needs to be done when watching this movie is insert your own sports team in place of the Boston Red Sox. So when she's at the game with Jimmy Fallon and wearing the Red Sox tee shirt and drinking the beer and kisses his cheek, I simply imagine she's wearing a Nebraska Football tee shirt. And when she sits down with all the Red Sox books and wonders who Carl Yastrzemski is, I simply imagine she's wondering who Tommie Frazier is. (Her: "Explain to me again about Tommie Frazier and the 1995 Orange Bowl." Me: "Can we make out?")

The Golden Compass

Rory the Movie Idiot and I hash out a film about talking polar bears and Sam Elliot as himself at Cinematic Arena. Read it now.

Atonement

A few weeks ago I had a semi-argument with friends regarding the presence of DVD players in automobiles. I declared if I were ever to have kids my car would not possess a DVD player. Why? This can only hamper a child's imagination. If a child is assaulted with electronics at every turn, including the car, how can they ever find time to imagine?

Now you could watch "Atonement" and say a child's imagination is as susceptible to bad as to good. I, however, having watched "Atonement", will say it is one of the most powerful, persuasive arguments for the power of the imagination - good or bad - I've ever seen. In one felled swoop the imagination can change lives, but it can also atone for sins of the past. "Atonement" - adapted from a novel by Ian McEwan of the same name - is not just one of the best films of the year. It is one of the best films of the decade. A towering achievement. A flat-out masterpiece.

The film opens on a luxurious English estate on the eve of WWII. Cecilia Tallis (Keira Knightley) is the daughter of a rich Englishman who has assisted in putting one of their servants Robbie (James Mcevoy) through Oxford. They harbor a passion for one another and this will come to a front in the richly beautiful passage that opens the movie. But there is also Cecilia's younger sister Briony (played by three actresses - Sairose Ronan, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave - as the movie spans several decades), who will become the film's key player. She is - as Cecilia puts it - "fanciful". The first time we see her she has, despite her age, just completed her first play.

There is an encounter at a fountain between Cecilia and Robbie, seen first from Briony's point-of-view and then from the point-of-view of the two involved. In truth, it is a romantic episode between people that probably love each other. Briony, however, in the throes of her own crush on Robbie, sees it differently. A rape happens to another houseguest. Briony gives a version of the event contrary to what actually happened and events spiral out of control.

Robbie is taken away by the police and given the choice of jail or enlisting in the army. He enlists. We catch up with him later during the war, separated from his group during a "strategic withdrawal". Cecilia meanwhile has become a nurse, and the older version of Briony has done the same - perhaps to atone for her sin.

This is our set-up and I will give no more specifics of the plot, except to say it only gets deeper and richer, entering into that realm of human mystery where only a few films ever traverse. It is most fascinating to watch how the episodes of WWII work to symbolize what has already happened, deepening the plight of each character. Everything here is wrapped up together, barreling toward a conclusion that seems inevitable, except it's not.

Mention also must be made of a tracking shot that follows Robbie and two fellow English soldiers. It is among the great technical achievements in filmmaking history. The reason for its greatness? It's thematic. The entire film works as a war between reality and imagination and here we find one person realizing the true toll of war all at once and so we experience it as he does - with nowhere to hide, it just keeps coming. It's reality contrasted against the imagination. It's hypnotic. I confess to missing what happened in the following scene because I was still trying to recover.

But back to that conclusion. It left me in literal tears. An eloquent, powerhouse summing-up of the argument I made in the opening paragraph. The imagination, whether for good or for bad, is our most powerful tool. No film made has said it better.

This is a weekend in which I planned to see "The Golden Compass". But my office is moving and my last day at the old building was Friday, which meant it was the last day I could indulge in one of my favorite Chicago activities - hiking down Michigan Avenue on a Friday after work to catch the 5:30 show of a movie the night it opens at the AMC 21. "The Golden Compass" did not have a 5:30 show. "Atonement" did. That's why I went.

I hope and pray before every movie I see that it will leave the screen behind to step down to where I'm sitting and punch me in the gut and speak to my soul. Unfortunately, my prayers often tend to go unanswered. But last night they did not. "Atonement" left the screen. It punched me in the gut. It spoke to my soul. This is the movie of the year.

My Christmas List: Top 5 Uses of Pop Songs in Movies

Using pop music in cinema has become one of the greatest arts of the medium. But merely using a great pop song doesn't make its use in the movie great. For instance, the appearance of Bruce Springsteen's "Growin' Up" in Adam Sandler's "Big Daddy"(the only good part of "Big Daddy") is not neccesarily a great use of pop music in a movie. If you can only remember the song being in the movie, and not the scene the song went with, it can't be considered all that memorable. A great use of a pop song in a movie means that when you hear that song the first you think of is the movie scene that used it.

Martin Scorsese is the most famous pioneer of the cinematic pop music movement and Quentin Tarantino has since become arguably even more skilled at it. That being said, I could fill my whole Top 5 List with selections from their movies but I will resist. I will also not include the most obvious Scorsese/Tarantino selections (i.e. "Then He Kissed Me" and "Stuck in the Middle With You"). The list will also exclude "Tiny Dancer" from Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous" as that one has become almost as obvious. Therefore, my list will be more personal. These are the uses of pop music that have affected me the most. And go right ahead and list the ones that have affected you.

1.) "Star Lfur", The Life Aquatic. For anyone who hasn't seen this film let's recap the song's appearance in it. Bill Murray plays the Jacque Costeau-like Steve Zissou. At the outset of the movie, Zissou's best friend has been killed by a so-called Jaguar Shark and so Zissou makes it his mission to find this shark and kill it. At the end he finds the location of the shark and descends to the depths of the ocean in a tiny submersible crammed with every key character of the movie to do just that. They find the shark only Zissou realizes it is too beautiful. He can't kill it. He fights back tears, and as he does every key character leans forward and rests a comforting hand on Zissou. And this song - by the band Sigur Ros - plays over the whole thing.

This scene, simply put, is ludicrous. And yet - yet! - it's also amazingly poignant. I don't know how it does it. I can't explain it. It walks the tighest, finest line in cinematic history. It works on both levels simultaneously and effectively. This is the best example I've seen of what I'll term Loony Poignancy.

And I realized while watching this that I think as a "screenwriter" I specialize in Loony Poignancy. I want to make films full of Loony Poignancy. And then I look at "The Life Aquatic's" middling box office and mixed critical reception and that freaks me way out.

2.) "Tracks of My Tears", Platoon. There comes a moment when the "stoners" of the platoon are off the front lines and so they partake in a bit of the ganja and wind up playing Smokey Robinson's great "Tracks of My Tears" and singing along and dancing about as those who may have smoked a bit of the ganja would. I have never been high and I have no plans to ever be high. But I have been drunk. And I know there comes a point when you're in the perfect state of drunkeness that you put on a perfect song and sing along and dance about to it and, quite frankly, it's one of the best feelings in the world. No scene in any other movie has ever captured an inebriated sing-along, dance-along better.

3.) "Best of My Love", Boogie Nights. This song accompanies the magical tracking shot that opens the film and seems to last forever. The camera whirls around the nightclub, introducing us to all the main characters, this disco tune whirling right along with it. It was the first time I recall leaving a movie theater and thinking I've got to get that soundtrack because I've got to hear that song.

4.) "Across 110th Street", Jackie Brown. I think this one best illustrates the mad genius of Quentin Tarantino. It goes with the opening credits which consist of nothing but Pam Grier as the title character riding an automatic walkway at the airport. That's it. Couldn't be simpler. And yet, somehow, it's one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I recall vividly the massive grin I wore at the theater where I watched this for the first time. How Tarantino knew this song would work and work so well is totally beyond my comprehension. But I'm glad it wasn't beyond his.

5.) "Damn It Feels Good to Be A Gangsta", Office Space. Perhaps if you've never worked in an office this one doesn't resonate quite as much. But if you've ever been assigned to a cubicle or heard the hum of a flourescent light for 8 hours, well, you pump your fist when you hear it. Office drone Peter Gibbons has essentially told his place of employment off and has chosen to make his life all about doing "nothing". And so we see his newfound joyous existence in montage with this song to emphasize the point. A person like Peter Gibbons may never be an actual gangsta but coming in late to work without fear of reprisal, chopping up a fish on a TPS report and watching kung-fu movies with the woman he loves are as close as he'll ever get.

Sharing the Passion

My friend Rory (i.e. everyone's favorite Movie Idiot) has posted a review of the Coen Brothers' "No Country For Old Men" on his own site and it seems his love of this film trumps even mine. It's a beautiful heart-on-the-sleeve review, a glorious summing-up of the majestic joy you'll feel as you watch such a stunning cinematic achievement unfold before you, and I encourage everyone to read it right now and then go out tonight and watch this movie, if you haven't already. After all, we don't get as many movies like this as we deserve.

A Digression: Welcome Home, Bo (And Never Leave Again)

In 2003 when then Nebraska Football head coach Frank Solich hired an aspiring young NFL assistant coach named Bo Pelini to be his defensive coordinator I sent an email to my friend Dan calling him "The Savior of Lincoln, Nebraska". This was true.....for one season. He turned our rather ordinary defense into the #11 ranked defense in the whole country (#1 in turnover margin, thank you). Unfortunately, He Will Who Not Be Mentioned chose to fire head coach Frank Solich at the end of the season and thus "The Savior of Lincoln, Nebraska" went with him.

The 4 years after Bo Pelini exited with Coach Solich has been the dark time some may refer to as the Bill Callahan Era. There are many details regarding this era - too many, in fact and so let me give you a quick summary: West Coast Offense, Kevin Cosgrove, Lucky Off-Tackle, Texas Tech - 70 Nebraska - 10, No Victories When Trailing At Halftime, NFL Mentality, The Mysterious Disappearance of Cody "Remember That Time I Scored A Touchdown Against USC?" Glenn, so on and so on.

All we need know is that era has ended. We could have and should have hired Bo Pelini four years ago. We didn't. But we also didn't make the same mistake twice. Bo is officially back. The Callahan era is history. Therefore I will turn to "The Simpsons" and borrow their words to "further decree that everything will be just like it was before all this happened! And no one will ever mention it (i.e. The Bill Callahan Era) again under penalty of torture!"

An article culled from the Lincoln Star Journal this morning bears the following quote - not made up or embellished - in regards to Pelini: "He enjoys Bruce Springsteen."

Oh yeah, baby, our Savior has come home.