joehavermann

Sebastian Schipper’s flawless masterpiece is a potent reminder of why I love cinema. It expertly evokes the entire gamut of human emotion, and its actors have some of the best chemistry that I have ever seen in a film. More than any film this year, “Victoria” is best viewed without knowing too much about the plot. The film consists of a single, 140 minute take, and yet it ends so far away from where it begins that it is easy to forget that the story unfolds in real time: A young woman from Spain meets a group of German guys as she is leaving a club in Berlin. You get the sense that she’s lonely, bored, and frustrated with her life, and so she continues to hang out with them, even when things don’t seem quite right. She’s drawn to Sonne, the charming young man who initially approaches her: most of the first half of the film shows their carefree and playful interaction. The audience falls in love with the characters at the same time as the two main characters fall in love with one another... And then something happens, and would Victoria be willing to do just one, small favor? There is nothing gimmicky about the fact that the film is a single shot – actually one shot, not edited to appear that way: it’s a decision that thrusts the audience into the film, in the same way that Victoria is thrust into the events of the story. At first blush the plot might seem absurd, and yet, emotionally and logically, each sequence seems to follow inescapably from the sequence that precedes it, and the viewer is left with the sense that none of the characters ever quite grasp the gravity of the decisions that they are making. “Victoria” is powerfully well made – it’s my favorite film of this year, and one of my favorite films of any year.

*MILD-TO-NONEXISTENT SPOILERS: Describes a couple of the stories, but in the type of depth that you'd expect from a traditional newspaper review* A man half-heartedly looks at a series of exhibits in a museum before pausing with mild interest at a pigeon on a branch: it's dead, obviously. In the distance is a skeleton of a dinosaur, ancestor to the modern bird. So begins this extraordinarily dry, Swedish existentialist comedy – a collection of vignettes that poke fun at the absurdity of the human condition. In an early scene, a man lies dead on the floor of a cafeteria that looks like it's located in an airport. Unfortunately, the EMT reports, the man cannot be revived. But this creates a dilemma because, as the cashier explains to the authorities, the man had just paid for a beer and a shrimp sandwich. Yes, the authorities agree, it would be unethical to charge people for a meal that has already been paid for. And so the cashier calls out to the gawking onlookers: "Would anyone like a shrimp sandwich? Or a beer? It's free." I don't think I'm ruining anything when I say that arguably the film's crescendo is a debate among people standing at a bus stop over what day of the week it is. The stories are told with extreme irreverence, and at times they tread into the surreal. They are so thematically similar that the work feels more like a feature-length film than a series of shorts. This film is an example of the sum being greater than the whole of its parts. Told individually, the stories are funny, but taken together, they create a film that is thought-provoking and strangely moving.

Although it follows the lives **** of young, homeless heroin addicts in New York, this deeply unsettling film is far removed from the typical Hollywood “junkie flick.” I have known people like the characters it depicts, and I was immediately struck by the film’s raw authenticity. Only later did I learn that the directors hit on the idea for the film after befriending (becoming infatuated with?) Arielle Holmes, the lead actor who was then living on the streets; they encouraged her to write about her experiences, paying her by the page, and eventually convinced her to star along with her friends in a film adaptation of her writing. Despite what has been charitably described as a “nano budget,” “Heaven Knows What” is extremely well made. The score creates a sense of unease, and every shot in the film is expertly framed.

“The Big Short” tells an engaging story with an excellent cast. Nevertheless, there are times that the film feels like a docudrama directed by Michael Moore; as a person who sometimes enjoys Moore’s work, I say that more as an observation than a strict criticism. But like Moore’s work, the film is sometimes preachy in an overbearing way, and like Moore himself, writer/director Adam McKay doesn’t trust the audience with serious material: the film assumes that the audience must always be entertained. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything of substance when I mention that the film literally takes breaks from the story in order to have celebrity guests like Margot Robbie, Selena Gomez, and Anthony Bourdain explain complex financial instruments directly to the camera. The scenes are presented in a way that’s meant to come across as fun and irreverent. As somebody who followed the financial crisis as it unfolded, and read about it afterwards, I found the whole tack to be vaguely insulting. Still, McKay probably recognized that he had a fascinating and important story, and realized that he needed a way to convey this information to members of the audience without boring or confusing them; he can’t be faulted for operating from accurate assumptions. The film follows the interesting characters who took the daring position of ‘betting’ against the housing market in the mid-2000s (through short selling). It should be noted that these weren’t the first people to notice the housing bubble -- just the ones who profited from it. (Dean Baker, who also accurately predicted the tech bubble burst, wrote about this as early as 2002; see ‘The Run-Up in Home Prices: Is it Real or Is it Another Bubble?,’ Aug 2002.) Pointing this out doesn’t make their stories any less engrossing. I found Christian Bale’s performance in the role of Michael Burry particularly noteworthy; Carrel and Gosling are also terrific. “The Big Short” is not the best of the year, and I don’t think it deserves the Oscar nomination it will surely receive. But it’s good. And it is fundamentally accurate in its depiction of the financial industry as driven by fraud and fueled by greedy incompetence.

If the art teacher from "Ghost World" decided to make a video tribute to her deceased pet, it would be this film, and the fact that I managed to sit through the full 75 minutes is a testament to my masochism. I actually had free admission; after it was over, I wanted my money back. The film's whispered, sing-songy narration is an incoherent mess. Anderson engages in an intellectual name-dropping that's calculated to impress the type of person who desperately wants to be well-rounded but doesn't like to read. She quotes David Foster Wallace and Kierkegaard and Wittegenstein - though I'm sure she's really quoting Bartlett. What she quotes is devoid of context and, of course, depth. I suspect her greatest intellectual influences are actually the hits of acid she dropped back in the 1970s, or perhaps the pamphlets she picked up from the airport Krishnas. She refers very liberally to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the one work I'm sure she's read. I suppose the film is meant as some kind of personal essay; if so, it has no overarching argument. It's more a pastiche of totally disconnected musings. If you pepper your conversations with phrases like "getting locked into your thought flow," then this film just might be for you. For me personally, as she flashed words onto the screen with pictures of snow-covered trees, YouTube-style videos of her dog, and then tried to connect it all to 9/11 and the national security state, I began to wonder: am I being punked? Is somebody filming the audience right now? Is this film the abomination that it so clearly appears to be, or is this supposed to be a comedy? "Heart of a Dog" is self-indulgent, excruciating New Age garbage. Instead of wasting your time on this monstrosity, do the following: watch a short film by Maya Deren; go to "The Intercept," and skim an article chosen at random; search online for "cute dogs," and play whatever videos pop up; and finally, go re-read the terrible poetry you wrote when you were in sixth grade. The fact that "Heart of a Dog" has a significantly higher rating than this year's "Victoria" I regard as evidence that most critics are frauds.