#21: Borat

In which Sacha Baron Cohen introduces America to his alter ego Borat Sagdiyev, a television reporter from a small town in rural Kazakhstan.  To learn about American culture, Borat and his producer Azamat Bagatov travel to New York City, where Borat falls in love with CJ, the beautiful blonde... er... character played by Pamela Anderson on Baywatch.  While Borat pursues Pam Anderson across the country, Cohen plays Borat's 'foreign' quirks off against the bizarre undercurrents of American society.

Probably the best way to view Borat, if like me you tend to be a fairly sensitive and caring individual, is to remember that every single event that occurred in the movie occurred in front of a camera and was as likely to have been staged as any other.  (And most of the 'Kazakh' is actually Hebrew, with a little Polish thrown in every once in a while.)  With that out of the way, one can allow oneself to collapse with laughter at Borat's hilariously crude antics and the terrifyingly bigoted statements he manages to bring forth from the Americans he meets without even trying. Because none of it is real, right?

No, it's true - Borat is uncomfortable and exploitative at several moments, and sometimes ditches its explorations of the darker side of American culture for slapstick gags and gross-out humor.  But what I took away from Borat is that it is viewable on three levels.  First there is 'reality': Cohen's disturbing exposé on American bigotry.  Second, as I mentioned before, in the mental realm where none of it is 'really' 'real', there is the slapstick comedy, with gags and shenanigans and a great deal of sex jokes.  Third... if you're really willing to go the extra mile with suspension of disbelief and take the film at face value, Cohen has ultimately created a film with a coherent storyline, in which the small-town reporter learns some valuable lessons about friendship, kindness, and the meaning of real love.  It's actually almost heartwarming.

#20 - The Songcatcher

Denied her full professorship by the machinations of academic bureaucracy, musicologist Lily Penleric is at a loss for what to do with herself.  While staying with her sister Eleanor in her school in a small Appalachian town, Lily discovers that the British folk ballads she studied in her classroom are alive and well, carried down from generation to generation among the mountain people.  And thus she begins a project to collect and record the music of the mountains.

I had been wanting to see The Songcatcher for quite a while after listening to the soundtrack over and over, despite being annoyed with some of the country-fied versions of the ballads recorded by Dolly Parton and her ilk.  I was pleased to discover that none of those versions were actually in the movie.  Instead, the music that can be heard on the soundtrack is the real deal, with all the raw emotion of music that exists to bring hope and life to the people who make it.

The Songcatcher doesn't take a completely traditional approach to storytelling.  Many of the plot's loose ends are left open.  Sometimes I was left wondering when I would get closure.  Other times, I felt like what I was seeing on screen was...life.  While a large portion of the dialogue, plot points, and characters feel hollow and cliché, this film is infused with the same love of traditional music that drove me to watch it in the first place.  And with performances like Janet McTeer's as Lily and Aidan Quinn's as Tom, the mountain musician who eventually becomes her lover, a few of these stereotypes burst into life, with magnificent depth that almost manages to match the stunning glory of the Appalachian landscape and of course, the music that fills it.

#19 - Inception

Dominic Cobb (Leonardo diCaprio) sees a lot more action than your average white-collar criminal.  Why?  Because the setting for his thefts is the subconscious, where everyone's secrets may be laid bare.  Trouble is, no matter whose dream Cobb is breaking into, his own deep dark secret - a dangerous lost love - keeps getting in the way.  When Cobb's team takes the biggest assignment of their lives, their new architect (Ariadne, played by Ellen Page), in charge of designing the layout of the dream, may endanger the job with her curiosity - or perhaps she'll save Cobb from himself after all.

Everything you've been told about Inception is wrong.  Okay, not everything - I'm just being a bit overdramatic - but this film keeps getting billed as a mind bending psychological thriller.  It's not.  It's an action movie.  It's an action movie with a gorgeous, indulgent backdrop of expansive dream-scapes, made tangible partially due to director Christopher Nolan's preference for real sets over CG.  An action movie with a cast good enough to instill a lifeless script full of stock characters with real depth.  An action movie rich in imagery, with carefully designed lighting and color palettes.  Its strength is that it believes in itself, in its own complete fantasy of a premise, with the gravitas required for the audience to suspend disbelief.

...Well, sort of.  Because Inception dreams are not like your dreams or mine.  They are lush, on a larger-than-life scale.  They have more or less complete internal coherency, interrupted only by big stuff - explosions, freight trains, entire armies.  What happened to the dreams I know, where individual identities shift and reform?  And why does everyone's secret always appear in a really obvious place?  (There may be an explanation for this one in-movie.  Maybe.)  In-movie, the further you go into someone's subconscious, into dreams within dreams, the larger amount of time passes within the dream.  This completely falls apart when you realize that dreams actually only seem to involve a large time scale because the dreamer fill in the gaps in the dream.  Well, okay, you say, maybe that's just not how dreams work in this universe - but unfortunately, they do, because one of Cobb's tricks for determining whether he's in a dream is trying to remember how he got to where he currently is.  An actual knowledge of dreams completely shatters the plot and the premise of this film.  Enjoyment will hinge on how much you can sit back, ignore reality, allow for the probably 30 minutes' worth of unnecessary action sequences, and just enjoy the fun story and the big shiny scenery.

#18 - A Knight's Tale

William Thatcher has always dreamed of being a knight.  After he wins his first tournament in place of his dead master, he decides, along with buddies Roland and Wat, to train and become a professional jouster.  He is soon joined by Kate, the blacksmith who forges his armor, and this guy named Geoff Chaucer who likes to write or something.  Of course, even with all of William's skills and determination, it won't be easy.  First there's the matter of his parentage.  Then there's his rival.  Oh, and then he falls in love.

So A Knight's Tale is pretty formulaic, and totally simplistic.  William is brave and honest and made of the pure essence of goodness.  Roland and Wat are goofy.  Kate is witty and defiant.  Jocelyn (the love interest) is beautiful and madly in love with William.  Adhemar (the rival) is pure evil.  I could have predicted the plot events of the movie blindfolded with one hand tied behind my back.  Director Brian Helgeland had a little bit of fun by introducing anachronisms - modern music, modern fashion, modern dancing, 21st century humor - which sometimes make sense within the framework of the film (mainly the use of Thin Lizzy's "The Boys are Back in Town"), but often fall completely flat.

So thank god for Paul Bettany.  I would watch this film again and again just to see his performance as Geoffrey Chaucer.  While the film does decide to mostly ignore Chaucer's reputation as a huge pervert and focus instead on him as an arrogant, brilliant, passionate artist, who is also plagued by a gambling problem, and maybe even, in Bettany's capable hands, has some kind of loneliness inside him that is gradually eroded by the company of William, Roland, Wat, and Kate.  There are also some incredible moments toward the end of the film where by sheer force of acting, the magic feels almost real.  So often, the difference between a good film and a bad film is the cast.  This usually goes in the direction of a great script being ruined by heavy-handed acting.  Thankfully, A Knight's Tale is the opposite - what would have been a silly, childish rehashing of a well-worn formula instead becomes, well, I wouldn't call it a work of art per se, but whatever it is, I like it.

#17: Iron Man

Because I did promise this would be all the movies I saw in 2010, we have now run into the rather unusual situation of having a writeup on the original posted after the writeup on the sequel.  But well, sometimes that's just how it goes.

Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) is the world's foremost weapons developer, known as much for his caustic personality and hedonistic lifestyle as his technological genius.  But a stay in Afghanistan, held captive by the mysterious Ten Rings cabal, will change all that, as Tony gets to see the destruction his inventions cause firsthand, and decides instead to focus his energy on a new project: Iron Man.  Unfortunately, Tony's business partner Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges) is none too fond of the new direction of the Stark Corporation...

Iron Man is a movie without a dull moment.  From the beginning scenes of torture in a remote Afghan prison to the final battle as Tony's life ticks away inside his Iron Man suit, the film is constantly tense, keeping the adrenaline flowing.  The banter between Tony and (pick your favorite) his best friend "Rhodey" Rhodes (Terrence Howard) and assistant/secret crush "Pepper" Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) provide comic relief, and the antics of Tony's adorable crew of robots also stand between the audience and cardiac arrest at certain points.  As a film adaption of a comic series, Jon Favreau's Iron Man does not disappoint: he superpowers are super, the characters are larger-than-life, and the explosions are Trinity-level at least.

Of course, on the other hand, maybe you're like me and you didn't grow up reading the Iron Man comics.  Iron Man runs into some problems trying desperately to please the Marvel fanboys and girls (and 'hint' in giant neon letters at a forthcoming sequel/franchise), shoehorning in references wherever available.  For instance, it's obvious that the "Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division" initializes to SHIELD, but the film drags it out just for the final payoff when we hear it.  A payoff that means nothing to non-Marvel geeks.  There are several moments during the film where I felt this way.  If Favreau had focused instead on just making a solid movie, not trying to please everyone, this would go from a really fantastic movie to—pretty much perfect.  For now, though, your author clearly liked it well enough to watch it a third time, so that should tell you something.