Our Beloved Month of August: Burden of dreams

I’ve started and stopped this review so many times it’s like I’m practicing Kegels while peeing. Fitting, too, considering my subject, a fictionalized documentary (think Through the Olive Trees) about its own crew searching for inspiration to film the outright fiction of its last act after a dead financier imperils the project, all of us—me, director Miguel Gomes, the fictional characters played by a fire warden and a hockey player he finds in central Portugal—spinning our wheels until we discover how to adapt to our obstacles and get on with our lives, or art, which are so inextricable in Our Beloved Month of August that you wonder if Gomes’ creation myth is as fabricated as the naturalism he so carefully cultivates in the editing bay, like a homeless-looking actor’s spectacularly disheveled coif. Whatever the factual truth, the film’s as dry as sandstone and just as porous, sparking less in the regional portrait of its ostensible documentary or the 35 Shots of Rum-style family drama of its film-within-the-film than in the twilight between, a self-conscious odyssey into the frustrating transcendence of creating art.

Super 8: Plan 9 from the Spielberg Home for Daddy Issues

The problem with making an entire movie about the wonder and torment of lens flares is that the human eye is hardwired to detect artifice. You don’t have to be a middle school student with as much passion for filmmaking as you have for french fries to know that midnight scenes with no onscreen light sources don’t produce parallel neon blue lines obscuring the action. The only way that happens is to shoot much wider than you need and crop out the light source causing the flares (which still doesn’t explain the cave scene, where hero Joe Lamb goes spelunking into a Las Vegas rave). Well, that or CGI, a brilliantly simple way to simultaneously remind us we’re watching a film, envelop us in nostalgia, and keep us in the moment, or it would if all that weren’t a mere wave breaking against the bulwark of our graceful bullshit detector, the human eyeball. Instead it’s just JJ Abrams playing with his toys as the child director in his film just shakes his head and walks away to a better project.

2011 Dream Emmy Ballot: Comedy

The only thing I enjoy about picking Emmy candidates is finding pictures of my favorite performers. The rest is a bulldozer that flattens my critical personality—which found Breaking Bad offputtingly sloppy, Community rarely up to the tasks it sets itself, 30 Rock one of the great media satires, and Glee a shockingly transcendent vision—until it resembles People, all of us nominating the exact same shows. Sure I can set myself apart by snubbing Best Comedy Modern Family and holding off on Game of Thrones, however fun the ride, until it comes up with a more meaningful raison d'etre than a bunch of rich dudes fighting over who gets to tell whom to kill whom this week, but because I find Community breathtakingly ambitious and sometimes just breathtaking, I consider it one of the six best works of comedy on television despite feeling nothing so much as disappointment. Welcome to the leviathan.

X-Men: First Class: I have a wet dream

I guess X-Men: First Class was set in the ‘60s to better reflect Matthew Vaughn’s thoughtless patriarchal identification, because it damn sure wasn’t about civil rights, the Cold War, liberation, or the Holocaust, weighty abstracts whittled into icons, the better for Vaughn to pretend his film has some deep, world-historical meaning instead of actually doing the work of investing his social commentary, or his doomsday scenario, or his gay allegory, or his coming of age with genuine depth. The story thrills—Magneto hunting Nazis, Xavier assembling a team, our heroes saving the world—but the screenplay is a bag of bones, going from civilian to superhero with the whoosh of a montage, racing from scene to scene so we don't think about it too hard, and pivoting on several sudden betrayals by those sneaky racial minorities, a black wasp hooker and a blue-skinned, naked chameleon (which I think is taking pride a little too far). What’s more, the reversals are prompted by dialogue that couldn’t convince you January Jones has boobs, not that you could possibly miss the twin subjects of this adolescent fantasy, protesting its feminism while objectifying every curve in sight.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: Raiders of the lost ark

It isn’t simply that I like Dead Man’s Chest better than Curse of the Black Pearl, that my sui generis brain chemistry arbitrarily prefers squid-pirates to skeletal specters and sexy rogues to straight-laced do-gooders, thought that’s certainly true. But, despite a few extra pounds that should have been a warning sign, Dead Man’s Chest is also the stronger film, a classical, swashbuckling tragedy across the Disney fantasyland where wood looks plasticky and water chlorinated. Curse of the Black Pearl is a terrific children’s entertainment, the best film adaptation of you and your friends playing pirate that ever existed, but Dead Man’s Chest boasts fewer “Try wearing a corset” clunkers, more boundary-pushing action thrills, and CGI that would make James Cameron drool if he were biologically human.