#200

In September 2009, I began writing film criticism and commentary for The Screening Room, a blog that has, miraculously, continued to be a staple of my life since its inception. Dismissing breaks for exams and summer camp getaways, I have written at the rate of a review a week for the last 45 months, as well as Oscar predictions, yearly recaps and top 10 lists.

One week after beginning the blog – with a column criticizing the motion picture academy for expanding the Best Picture race from five to 10 nominees – I attended my first university lecture at Carleton University. I officially graduated from that university today, with highest honours in journalism and film studies. This blog was, simply, an extracurricular amalgamation of my two major programs.

I owe much to my professors in both subject areas, who taught me about arts reportage, as well as essential information about film history and theory. Many of my film professors introduced me to filmmakers, cinema movements and foreign cultural industries that I knew little about.

The Screening Room could also not keep going without several of my peers who visited the site frequently and let me know what they thought of the films or my writing. Their words were both kind and constructive, helping me to improve as a culture writer and reminding me that an audience valued what I wanted to say about arts and entertainment. Thank you.

Alas, as my time at university winds down, so does The Screening Room. This hobby and project has been a pivotal part of my four years as a student, and the work I did for the website has helped me land internships at Tribute Magazine and SamaritanMag.com, where I have contributed my writing.

This fall, I will work as a freelance writer for three local publications: ANDPOP, a music and entertainment blog, Arbitrage Magazine, a student-oriented business publication, and the aforementioned SamaritanMag.com. I may also be writing features and reviews for Toronto Film Scene, but this position is not yet confirmed.

While I am laying The Screening Room to rest, my culture commentary will not cease. This fall, I plan to return to the web with The Balcony.

The Balcony, named in memory and in honour of the late Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who shared their opinions on several television series on opposite sides of a balcony, is going to feature more content and a more diverse assortment of writing. After I return from camp in mid-August, I will do some research into web design and try to load the site with more polls, graphics and other fun stuff.

I have not yet finalized what features The Balcony will have. I can promise a weekly review, a weekly column tied to recent news from the entertainment world and a monthly retrospective on a heralded filmmaker or screenwriter. I will also post links to arts-related web pages or articles that I enjoy.

I look forward to sharing The Balcony with you all, and would like to thank you for being such a wonderful audience over the past four years. There will still be more reviews posted over the next two weeks (including my take on The Kings of Summer, Before Midnight and Man of Steel), but The Screening Room will be complete at the end of June. The Balcony is slated to open in late August or early September.

Moreover, to mark this 200th posting, I only felt it would be appropriate to do something special. Near the time of my 100th posting, I put up a list of my Top 10 Favourite Movies. Therefore, it only makes sense to list my, yes, Top 200 films for post #200.

It would be miraculous if I could order the films from my 200th favourite to my top pick (which, if you were interested, is Magnolia, from director Paul Thomas Anderson). It would also be a waste of precious time and effort to try to evaluate the merits of so many wonderful films against each other. So, the list is presented in chronological order, with the title followed by the year of release and director (or directors). 

Steven Spielberg has the most films on this Essential 200 list, with seven titles. Other directors with several appearances: Charlie Chaplin (4 films), Billy Wilder (4), Alfred Hitchcock (3), Akira Kurosawa (3), Stanley Kubrick (3), Sidney Lumet (3), Roman Polanski (3), Francis Ford Coppola (3), Martin Scorsese (5), Hayao Miyazaki (3), Steven Soderbergh (3), Quentin Tarantino (3), David Fincher (3), Wes Anderson (3) and Paul Thomas Anderson (3)

My Essential 200 Films:

The Kid (1921, Charlie Chaplin)

Sherlock Jr. (1924, Buster Keaton)

Faust: A German Folk Legend (1926, F.W. Murnau)

Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang)

Man with a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov)

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Lewis Milestone)

City Lights (1931, Charlie Chaplin)

M (1931, Fritz Lang)

Duck Soup (1933, Leo McCarey)

Modern Times (1936, Charlie Chaplin)

Make Way for Tomorrow (1937, Leo McCarey)

The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming)

Fantasia (1940, James Algar and company)

The Great Dictator (1940, Charlie Chaplin)

The Philadelphia Story (1940, George Cukor)

Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)

Sullivan’s Travels (1941, Preston Sturges)

Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz)

Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)

The Lost Weekend (1946, Billy Wilder)

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra)

Bicycle Thieves (1948, Vittorio de Sica)

Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock)

The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed)

Sunset Blvd. (1950, Billy Wilder)

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, Robert Wise)

Ikiru (1952, Akira Kurosawa)

The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot)

Rear Window (1954, Alfred Hitchcock)

Sansho the Bailiff (1954, Kenji Mizoguchi)

Seven Samurai (1954, Akira Kurosawa)

Rififi (1955, Jules Dassin)

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, David Lean)

A Face in the Crowd (1957, Elia Kazan)

Nights of Cabiria (1957, Federico Fellini)

Paths of Glory (1957, Stanley Kubrick)

Sweet Smell of Success (1957, Alexander Mackendrick)

12 Angry Men (1957, Sidney Lumet)

The 400 Blows (1959, Francois Truffaut)

The Human Condition 1: No Greater Love (1959, Masaki Kobayashi)

North by Northwest (1959, Alfred Hitchcock)

The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder)

Last Year at Marienbad (1961, Alain Resnais)

Days of Wine and Roses (1962, Blake Edwards)

The Manchurian Candidate (1962, John Frankenheimer)

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962, Robert Mulligan)

8½  (1963, Federico Fellini)

High and Low (1963, Akira Kurosawa)

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, Stanley Kubrick)

A Hard Day’s Night (1964, Richard Lester)

The Battle of Algiers (1966, Gillo Pontecorvo)

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966, Sergio Leone)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, Mike Nichols)

Playtime (1967, Jacques Tati)

Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)

Woodstock (1970, Michael Wadleigh)

Harold and Maude (1971, Hal Ashby)

The Last Picture Show (1971, Peter Bodanovich)

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971, Mel Stuart)

The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola)

The Sting (1973, George Roy Hill)

Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski)

The Conversation (1974, Francis Ford Coppola)

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974, Joseph Sargent)

Dog Day Afternoon (1975, Sidney Lumet)

Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975, Milos Forman)

Network (1976, Sidney Lumet)

Annie Hall (1977, Woody Allen)

Star Wars (1977, George Lucas)

The Deer Hunter (1978, Michael Cimino)

Apocalypse Now (1979, Francis Ford Coppola)

Airplane! (1980, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker)

The Empire Strikes Back (1980, Irvin Kershner)

Manhattan (1980, Woody Allen)

Raging Bull (1980, Martin Scorsese)

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Steven Spielberg)

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982, Amy Heckerling)

The King of Comedy (1982, Martin Scorsese)

Tootsie (1982, Sydney Pollack)

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983, Nagisa Oshima)

The Killing Fields (1984, Roland Joffe)

Paris, Texas (1984, Wim Wenders)

Brazil (1985, Terry Gilliam)

Blue Velvet (1986, David Lynch)

Castle in the Sky (1986, Hayao Miyazaki)

Hoosiers (1986, David Anspaugh)

The Last Temptation of Christ (1987, Martin Scorsese)

Wings of Desire (1987, Wim Wenders)

Rain Man (1988, Barry Levinson)

The Thin Blue Line (1988, Errol Morris)

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, Robert Zemeckis)

Do the Right Thing (1989, Spike Lee)

Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989, Steven Soderbergh)

Barton Fink (1991, Joel Coen)

Beauty and the Beast (1991, Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise)

In the Name of the Father (1993, Jim Sheridan)

Schindler’s List (1993, Steven Spielberg)

Three Colors: Blue (1993, Krzysztof Kieslowski)

Chungking Express (1994, Wong Kar-Wai)

The Lion King (1994, Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff)

Pulp Fiction (1994, Quentin Tarantino)

Quiz Show (1994, Robert Redford)

Apollo 13 (1995, Ron Howard)

Before Sunrise (1995, Richard Linklater)

Se7en (1995, David Fincher)

Toy Story (1995, John Lasseter)

The Usual Suspects (1995, Bryan Singer)

Jerry Maguire (1996, Cameron Crowe)

L.A. Confidential (1997, Curtis Hanson)

Princess Mononoke (1997, Hayao Miyazaki)

A Bug’s Life (1998, John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton)

Central Station (1998, Walter Salles)

Rushmore (1998, Wes Anderson)

Saving Private Ryan (1998, Steven Spielberg)

The Truman Show (1998, Peter Weir)

American Beauty (1999, Sam Mendes)

Election (1999, Alexander Payne)

Fight Club (1999, David Fincher)

The Insider (1999, Michael Mann)

Magnolia (1999, Paul Thomas Anderson)

The Matrix (1999, Andy and Lana Wachowski)

The Sixth Sense (1999, M. Night Shyamalan)

Almost Famous (2000, Cameron Crowe)

Amores Perros (2000, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu)

Billy Elliot (2000, Stephen Daldry)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, Ang Lee)

Traffic (2000, Steven Soderbergh)

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, Steven Spielberg)

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001, Peter Jackson)

Memento (2001, Christopher Nolan)

Monsters, Inc. (2001, Pete Docter and David Silverman)

Moulin Rouge! (2001, Baz Luhrmann)

Ocean’s Eleven (2001, Steven Soderbergh)

Adaptation. (2002, Spike Jonze)

Bowling for Columbine (2002, Michael Moore)

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002, Peter Jackson)

Minority Report (2002, Steven Spielberg)

The Pianist (2002, Roman Polanski)

Spirited Away (2002, Hayao Miyazaki)

Talk to Her (2002, Pedro Almodovar)

Y tu mama tambien (2002, Alfonso Cuaron)

Capturing the Friedmans (2003, Andrew Jarecki)

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003, Quentin Tarantino)

Lost in Translation (2003, Sofia Coppola)

Seabiscuit (2003, Gary Ross)

Shattered Glass (2003, Billy Ray)

Whale Rider (2003, Niki Caro)

Before Sunset (2004, Richard Linklater)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Michel Gondry)

Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004, Quentin Tarantino)

Cache (2005, Michael Haneke)

A History of Violence (2005, David Cronenberg)

Munich (2005, Steven Spielberg)

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005, Martin Scorsese)

Casino Royale (2006, Martin Campbell)

Children of Men (2006, Alfonso Cuaron)

Little Miss Sunshine (2006, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris)

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006, Guillermo Del Toro)

Thank You for Smoking (2006, Jason Reitman)

United 93 (2006, Paul Greengrass)

Atonement (2007, Joe Wright)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007, Julian Schnabel)

Into the Wild (2007, Sean Penn)

Juno (2007, Jason Reitman)

Persepolis (2007, Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi)

Ratatouille (2007, Brad Bird)

There Will Be Blood (2007, Paul Thomas Anderson)

The Dark Knight (2008, Christopher Nolan)

Frost/Nixon (2008, Ron Howard)

In Bruges (2008, Martin McDonagh)

Slumdog Millionaire (2008, Danny Boyle)

Wall-E (2008, Andrew Stanton)

Coraline (2009, Henry Selick)

The Cove (2009, Louie Psihoyos)

Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009, Wes Anderson)

500 Days of Summer (2009, Marc Webb)

Hunger (2009, Steve McQueen)

The Hurt Locker (2009, Kathryn Bigelow)

The Messenger (2009, Oren Moverman)

A Serious Man (2009, Joel and Ethan Coen)

Up (2009, Pete Docter and Bob Peterson)

Where the Wild Things Are (2009, Spike Jonze)

Another Year (2010, Mike Leigh)

Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010, Banksy)

A Film Unfinished (2010, Yael Hersonski)

Incendies (2010, Denis Villeneuve)

The Social Network (2010, David Fincher)

The Town (2010, Ben Affleck)

Toy Story 3 (2010, Lee Unkrich)

Trigger (2010, Bruce McDonald)

Hugo (2011, Martin Scorsese)

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011, Sean Durkin)

A Separation (2011, Asghar Farhadi)

The Tree of Life (2011, Terrence Malick)

Amour (2012, Michael Haneke)

The Master (2012, Paul Thomas Anderson)

Moonrise Kingdom (2012, Wes Anderson)

Stories We Tell (2012, Sarah Polley)

Use Your Illusions, Abuse Your Story

Now You See Me

**½  out of ****

Directed by: Louis Leterrier

Starring: Mark Ruffalo, Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Isla Fisher and Morgan Freeman

Running time: 115 minutes

Magic’s influence on the cinema goes back to the late 19th century. Many early films, which stretched at that time to a whopping five minutes, displayed simple conjuring acts taken directly from the vaudeville stage or a magician’s repertoire. The magic was striking and memorable, and the new breakthrough of film gave performers a new resort to present their most alluring tricks.

Later on, when the cinema focused more on the story and characters than flash-in-the-pan spectacles, filmmakers like Buster Keaton and Georges Méliès integrated the magic into the plot. More often than not, though, the main attraction that courted and pleased the crowds were the miraculous effects; the story was secondary.

That spirit for spectacle is omnipresent in Now You See Me, a new mystery set in the realm of performance magic. The film is a polished and briskly paced thriller that emphasizes the intrigue and dazzle associated with visual trickery over plot coherence and character dynamics.

Now You See Me focuses on four performers: obnoxious street magician J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), equally obnoxious mentalist Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), daredevil Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) and pickpocket Jack Wilder (Dave Franco). Their brief character intros at the start are witty but, unfortunately, misdirection: we only remain with these folks intermittently throughout the film.

Instead, the protagonist is Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo), an FBI agent called to investigate the four aforementioned illusionists – who have renamed themselves The Four Horsemen and put on elaborate shows for enthusiastic, sell-out crowds. At a Horsemen show in Las Vegas, the four concocted a trick that teleported an audience member straight to the vault of a Parisian bank.

Authorities apprehend the Horsemen after the $3 million stored in that vault rains down on the Vegas audience. In that crowd is Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), an ex-magician who revived his career and his bank account by exploiting magicians’ secrets to millions of online viewers.

Bradley helps Rhodes and his Interpol partner, Alma Vargas (Melanie Laurent), learn the secrets behind the tricks of that trade, as the police track the Horsemen to shows in the Big Easy and the Big Apple. The magic makers may be breaking the law to keep their elaborate ruses working.

Now You See Me comes from director Louis Leterrier, who helmed the first two Transporter films, and keeps on with those films’ manic, throttling action and ludicrous plotting.

A fan of sweeping camera shots, Leterrier also uses the point-of-view shot to dazzle the moviegoing audience as the Horseman's crowd, as well. In an early scene, Atlas performs a trick where he tells a woman to choose a card from a deck he flips through quickly. Viewing the scene from her eyes, we notice that Atlas pauses briefly when the seven of diamonds appears. Alas, the woman chooses that card, too.

Since the four performers are such cunning directors of audience attention, complete with playful quips and personality, they please the crowds in the fictional story world about as much as they attract interest from Now You See Me's audience. Those who find it hard to resist riveting showmanship will become easily absorbed in the surprises and revelations.

However, the more that screenwriters Ed Solomon, Boaz Yakin and Edward Ricourt rely on the same tricks the magicians do in intriguing the crowds – misdirection and mirrors, primarily – the easier it is to see through later plot twists.

During the final act, that time when a thriller is required to up the stakes, one has become so accustomed to the tricks already thrown at the audience that one knows what to expect. The intrigue and thrills dilute what has been a riotously entertaining ride so far.

As an ensemble vehicle that champions the complexity of convoluted storytelling, it is hard to identify with any of the characters. The sly magicians are fun performers to watch, but their icy cocksureness (and their resilience to ethics) makes them hard to root for.

Meanwhile, Ruffalo and Laurent fare a bit better, although since they are compulsively chasing the Horsemen around, the spark of romance between them gets little room to work its own magic. The best scenes in Now You See Me, unsurprisingly, come from Freeman and Michael Caine, the latter of whom appears in an extended cameo as the Horsemen’s insurer. Watching these veteran actors engage in sly chitchat is short-lived but delightful.

The film’s opening voice-over informs the audience not to look too closely. If you do, you are going to have many plot holes to sift through. The more one enjoys this crafty and often surprising thriller depends on how often one stops to ponder about the mechanics of the story.

You have a choice: succumb to Now You See Me’s nimble thrills and intrigue, or try piecing the incoherent strands together and have the whole thing evaporate on behalf of its own implausibility.

The Beautiful and Damned, Part 2

The Great Gatsby

**½  out of ****

Directed by: Baz Luhrmann

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, Tobey Maguire, Joel Edgerton and Isla Fisher

Running time: 142 minutes

Few directors are more attuned to the intoxicating decadence that F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled in his 1925 classic novel than Baz Luhrmann, the shimmering pop stylist behind Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet.

The director’s decidedly ‘Nouveau Riche’ interpretation – presented in glittery Technicolor with a CGI palette and 3D – is flashy and often fresh. However, the more Luhrmann and co-screenwriter Craig Pearce insist on ramming the novel’s symbolism down the audience’s throat, the less this Gatsby can shake free of its literary shackles.

For those who didn’t read Gatsby in high school (or perused the Cliff’s Notes), here’s a plot summary: cautious stockbroker and narrator Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) arrives in New York City during the early 1920s, drawn by champagne, dollars and all that jazz. He takes up residence next to a mansion that looks more like a casino, which is owned by the mysterious Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio, sleekly combed).

Gatsby throws decadent parties that bring in the city’s richest heiresses and businessmen as they misbehave, embracing the chemical madness of the Roaring Twenties. He draws in the crowds but seldom makes an appearance. The parties are a ploy to ignite the interest of Gatsby’s old flame, Daisy (Carey Mulligan), who lives in a mansion across the river. The lonely millionaire stands on the edge of his dock every night, looking out at the green light that blares from Daisy’s manor.

The hyperactive editing that overwhelmed Moulin Rouge! is scaled back here, although Luhrmann’s penchant for ostentatious CGI backgrounds and glittery set design has not waned. He brings to the big screen “the inexhaustible variety of life” that Fitzgerald wrote about. (The lavish set design comes from Ian Gracie and Beverley Dunn, and costumes from past collaborator Catherine Martin.)

Also in heavy supply, as usual for a Luhrmann production, are the anachronisms. The same director who updated Shakespeare to South Central Los Angeles and brought Nirvana and Madonna to 19th-century France brings tunes by Lana Del Ray, U2 and Jay-Z (who served as an executive producer) and mixes them with the flair of Gershwin and Cole Porter.

Nearly a century’s separation in music does not, surprisingly, clash. The songs of lovelorn grief and racial struggle that trumpet through the Jazz Age boast the same energy and style. When Luhrmann plays a Jay-Z tune over a black musician performing on a New York balcony, he is connecting nearly 100 years of African American music. The results are illuminating more than distracting.

And speaking of Jay-Z, this Gatsby has quite a few problems – and Scott Fitz is one. Luhrmann restricts his visual freedom by keeping with Fitzgerald’s prose, insisting on having the words from his text flutter onscreen, even though they are just as intoxicating as his visual schematic.

Luhrmann also makes the strange decision to structure the story with Carraway stationed at a psychiatric ward in the aftermath of the 1929 market crash, driven to write about Gatsby to save him from the drink and his own great depression.

Instead of keeping the story flowing, Luhrmann cuts back intermittently to a catatonic Carraway typing away, a monotone voice-over interrupting the illustrious presentation.

Meanwhile, the actors fare well in their roles. Maguire may be ten years too old to play Carraway, but DiCaprio hits his mark memorably as the cool, confident, charismatic title character, arresting to look at but also showing an aching vulnerability in his unsteady romantic come-ons to Daisy.

The scenes between DiCaprio and Maguire have more chemistry than our leading man’s moments with Mulligan, though. Also impressive is Joel Edgerton (Warrior) as Daisy’s brutish husband, Tom Buchanan. As a man who loves his wife but carries on with a flurry of affairs and deceit, Edgerton manicures both of these angles to deliver some powerful, soul-searching moments in the last third.

This adaptation is as crisp and flashy as a $100 bill and as bright as a marquee, although the film misses the opportunity to, beyond the musical motifs, comment on the similarities between the glamour of 1920s America and the 2000s, especially considering the financial woes that later struck citizens in both decades.

The film looks amazing but is sometimes aimless, superbly acted if stiffly paced (unlike the original text). Even when the running time begins to strain, Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby captures the grandness of the freewheeling American zeitgeist in the 1920s. He keeps the novel’s enduring legacy alive, even though topping off the film with narration lifted right from the book becomes redundant.