2010 Film List (Reviews, Discussion, Tracking) - Page 3

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam Lenhardt 

All the President's Men captured an event that changed our nation, and that made it a public interest story. For all of the exhaustive coverage, the story of Joe Wilson and his wife did not. It's the story of a couple getting screwed over by a handful of petty politicos, all but one of whom managed to avoid trial. The course of the country didn't change, and because of that most people won't care.

I don't disagree with your ultimate conclusion, but the comparison is interesting. As it happens, I watched All the President's Men this weekend on HD cable. I suspect you and I view it very differently (assuming the d.o.b. in your profile is accurate).

For a viewer born after, say, 1970, ATPM is history. Its outcome is a foregone conclusion, and it's easily classified as "an event that changed the nation". But what, exactly, was the event in question? The "third-rate burglary attempt" at the Watergate (in Ron Ziegler's famous phrase)? The sabotage of the Muskie campaign? The general operations of CREEP? The entire 1972 election? The Senate investigation? The discovery of the Nixon tapes? Nixon's resignation (which occupies about 5 seconds of the film)?

See, for me ATPM still feels like current events, because I remember when all of this was up in the air, no one knew where it was going, and no one knew how it would end.

From the vantage point of one couple, Fair Game provides a window on how the country went to war (a war that isn't over, BTW). There's a decent argument that the course of a country changes whenever it goes to war, no matter what the reason and no matter where one stands on the decision. But I think a big part of the reason these films (including Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, Green Zone and Stop-Loss) do poorly at the box office, whatever their merits, is that there's no ability to look at them as a closed episode (i.e., history). They're still current events, and there's no general audience appetite to see current events addressed in the cinema. I find it interesting, but then again I also go to foreign films.

The only one of those I've seen is In the Valley of Elah.  IMO it probably did poorly at the box office because it was boring as hell (the implication that returning veterans are likely to be psychotic couldn't have helped, either). 

I said "whatever their merits" precisely to avoid such a discussion, but since you insist on volunteering: I found In the Valley of Elah to be a gripping and beautifully crafted character drama. I bought the Blu-ray and watched it again, and my opinion didn't change.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Adam Lenhardt 

 

I think to some degree it reflects the increased partisanship of the American public generally, since Republicans for the most part will shun films like this one. But that can't be the whole story, because then fervent Democrats would be flocking to them and they'd be do a pretty brisk business at the box office.

"If you want to send a message, call Western Union!"

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aaron Silverman 

"If you want to send a message, call Western Union!"

Consider the source.

At first glance, The King's Speech  looks like another dull BBC history lesson about British royalty, but it's really an oddball buddy film about the strange friendship between George VI (the current Queen Elizabeth's father), who suffered from a terrible stammer, and the Australian speech coach who helped him overcome it, Lionel Logue. Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush dominate the film, and they keep it firmly in their hands even when faced with luminaries like Michael Gambon and Derek Jacobi, who play key supporting parts.

It's well-established that George was a reluctant monarch, having never expected to occupy the throne; he ascended only because his older brother, Edward, abdicated within a year after their father's death, so that he could marry a divorced American woman, Wallis Simpson. (Edward is played, with pitch-perfect self-absorption, by Guy Pearce.) Firth plays George as someone with a grave sense of responsibility and a crippling self-doubt. Rush plays Logue as a fascinating bundle of conflicting impulses. On the one hand, he's irreverent enough to treat the future king (who's still a prince when they first meet) as just another patient; but on the other hand, there are moments when he acts like a loyal subject called to serve the empire. Most of all, he comes to admire his star patient's sheer determination.

Logue was an actor, and many of the exercises he had the future king perform don't exactly comport with standard notions of royal dignity. Rush and Firth play these scenes for all they're worth. The audience I saw the film with laughed out loud, repeatedly. There's some dry wit from Helena Bonham Carter as George's wife, whose birth wasn't considered sufficiently noble to raise her above the level of commoner and who declined his proposals for two years, because she wasn't sure she could stomach life as a royal. Clearly, the future king was an excellent judge of character.

The film concludes with the radio address George delivered on Sept. 3, 1939 after war was declared between England and Germany. Immediately after watching the film, I searched out a recording of the actual address on YouTube. Firth's delivery is an astonishingly precise recreation, but it's also more. It's like seeing history come alive for a few minutes.

Is there going to be a separate 2010 top 10 thread?