"Me and You and Everyone We Know" (2005)

At a glance, Me and You and Everyone We Know sounds like a quirk-fest, a series of scenes of whimsey and eccentricity that exist nowhere in the real world. We see this time and again in independent films that mistake quirks for depth and complexity. But in writer-director Miranda July's film, quirks are more destructive than endearing. Every character is frightened of being themselves. They have opened themselves up to people before and they have been hurt. In fact, they've done this so many times that they're forced to take deeply transgressive actions to feel any sort of connection. July has her characters skirt the lines of sexual deviancy and yet we never feel anything but sympathy for them. July empathizes with her characters, and so do we. The film strikes a daringly fragile tone that could be disastrous in the wrong hands -- warm, inviting, maddening, enchanting. As said, there is quirkiness here, and in characters who would be manic-pixie dream archetypes if they didn't seem so lonely and desperate, and like they were barely keeping it together. July grounds the disparate yet interconnected stories in a strong central theme. The film understands the difficulty of making connections, and coming into our own, in a relationship or as a young person. Being inside the film is like wrapping oneself up in a cozy blanket: the broken world is still out there, but there is still a chance to not feel so lonely and confused. This shouldn't work, but it's delicate and wise, and aware of its cuteness.

Grade: ★★★

"All is Lost" (2013)

Many have described All is Lost as The Old Man and the Sea, and it's a fitting label: a seventy-some year old man (Robert Redford) tries to survive out in the ocean when his boat is damaged. And yet, the film is better described as Man versus Environment, or, better still, Man versus Death. We never learn the man's name and barely hear him speak an utterance and while much of what happens to him is specific to survival in the waters, the physical toll and psychological tear could be transplanted to any a number of circumstances. Like its largely wordless, visually powerful 2013 counterpart Gravity, All is Lost is a film about human endurance and ingenuity under impossible circumstances. The majority of the film is simply watching Redford confront one escalating problem after the next until it seems that the film's title will become true. It's not an easy task to command screen-time so long by oneself, with no dialogue minus an opening voice-over, but Redford brings his legendary film star status forth to draw us in. In Redford's face, his weariness, we read a troubled past: he's lost many things before this moment; he's lived a long life and has seen some trying times. As the man deals with crises, he shows collected determination. He does the tasks he needs to do and doesn't crack under pressure. He's apparently a longtime seaman who knows what's to be done in these circumstances, and he keeps anticipating that things will smooth themselves out before they get any worse. They don't, and yet he keeps persevering, in ways that many people, even ones much younger than him, might not. He keeps preserving to a point where we get a sense that the only thing that has kept him alive this long, in life generally, is dogged persistence. The film is filled with simple, powerful imagery. It takes advantage of the vastness of the ocean, and emphasizes how easily the man could be swallowed up. Watching to find out is exciting and moving in equal measure.

★★★

"The To Do List" (2013)

During the late 80's and early 90's, teen comedies were able to do something few other films were capable of. At their best, under directors like John Hughes and Amy Heckerling, they could tell stories about teens that took their characters' concerns and lives seriously, and on top of this they were often really funny. Mixing raunch with swigs of sweetness, these stories could capture the milieu of high school, commenting on it but rarely judging it. The To Do List unsuccessfully tries to ape the conventions of early 90's teen comedies -- it's even set in 1993 -- but it's nowhere near as insightful and only intermittently humorous -- relying heavily on gross out moments that seem in the film almost entirely to get a reaction out of us. While Aubrey Plaza is a likable lead and a solid center for the story, the film feels slapdashed together, borrowing from so many different genre elements that it barely tells a story of its own. The film is refreshingly free of any sexual double standards, letting Plaza's summer of sexual discovery play out as completely natural and normal. However, the point of all this sexual check-listing is unclear. The To Do List has cartoony impulses that continually clash with its occasional attempts at pathos and realism. John Hughes' movies seem almost quaint these days. They're filled with a sincerity and lack of cynicism, qualities largely absent here. The To Do List feels like a teen movie trying to be an expected teen movie, and being all the qualities that give the genre a bad name.

Grade: ★★

"In a World ..." (2013)

Lake Bell is one those talents who's been floating around the film industry for awhile with no one really sure how to utilize her. It's the story of countless performers, especially female ones. Bell decided to take things into her own hands, writing and directing a film, In a World..., perfectly suited for her, but also for many of those she has fill out supporting roles (This is some of the best work Rob Corddry and Demetri Martin have ever done). While providing some humorous insight into the ironically little talked about voice-over industry, Bell tells a story about a woman, Carol (played by Bell), struggling to make it by in a male dominated profession. There's romance and goofy, lighthearted subplots, but it's also a razor-sharp witted look at the sexism built into the entertainment business (but the film also taps into larger, more problematic gender expectations). The voiceover industry has literally caused women to be voiceless and Bell contends that how we use our ability to speak matters just as much as that ability itself.

Grade: ★★★

"12 Years a Slave" (2013)

Director Steve McQueen has chosen to make films with brutal subject matter and told with a brutal frankness appropriate for those subject matters. Whether it be a prison hunger strike (Hunger) or sex addiction (Shame), McQueen looks on his subject matter with an unbearable unflinching gaze and dares you to not turn away. This makes McQueen well suited for telling the most frank and honest depiction of slavery ever put to film in 12 Years a Slave. Based on the real life account of Solomon Northrup, a free black who was kidnapped and forced into slavery in 1840, the film tells its story from a distance but never without a real empathy. McQueen’s detachment shows horrible, atrocious incident after incident that afflicted Solomon, forced to take up the slave name Platt, and makes us simply take it in. But the film’s strength isn’t just in the physical toll on display but also the psychological undercurrent. There’s a ruthless psychological realism that takes what is already gut-wrenching and turns it into something harrowing. The depth of characterization isn’t just given to the slaves but their masters as well, who are thoroughly complicated. Solomon’s first master (Benedict Cumberbatch) is seemingly a “good white”, but is equally as complicit a part of the systematic abuse of the slaves as anyone with more externalized racism. His second master (Michael Fassbinder) is more obviously monstrous, but he’s also not a caricature. He has complex motivations on display, particularly in regards to Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o), the slave he takes as his comfort slave despite his wife’s (Sarah Paulson) obvious infuriation. He has deep feelings for Patsey but hates himself for loving someone who he sees as less than human, and these contradictory emotions come out in searing, violent and sad ways. What sets apart 12 Years a Slave apart from its other period counterparts that deal with race is how it immerses us back in the time it depicts. The film never projects modern values onto the past. Most racially charged period dramas boil down to this: “Racism is bad, but, boy, things have gotten a better. White people are bad, except for some who are decent”. 12 Years a Slave’s thematic concerns are far more nuanced. It uses Solomon’s story to examine the numerous intersecting factors that led to slavery to exist. It’s also interested in the very culture surrounding slavery, the twisted, contradictory justifications and bargains made in its name. At its center is a fantastic performance by Chiwetel Ejiofor. At every turn, Eijifor is the story’s anchor, a broken man who suffers indignity after indignity, and tries not to lose what little of his humanity remains. As Solomon suffers, we see Eijifor show us the depths of Solomon’s despair and sadness while he puts on a brave face to survive yet another day in abject cruelty. This is America’s history. We know it happened but we push it to the back of our mind and act like it’s just some awful thing from our past, but it’s not. This is something we must own up to every day as we live in a society that may not have slavery but begs ignorance to the ways its effects still endlessly ripple into the present. Perhaps more than any other reason, 12 Years a Slave is difficult to sit through due to the fact that we rarely look this head on at the subject.

Grade: ★★★★

"Beyond the Hills" (2013)

Director Cristian Mungui's deal with people working within larger structures and finding themselves overwhelmed. Of course, the people don't see their circumstances as being the product of forces beyond their control. It's well-intentioned people trying to do the right thing, only for the right thing to become a more complicated and difficult task than initially imagined. The structure is Nicolae Ceausecu's former dictatorship in Romania and the corruption and infrastructural shortcomings that caused people to be limited in there options. Beyond the Hills is a story dealing with exorcism, but it looks almost nothing like any exorcism ever told. It's not a horror film, but a sparse, austere neo-realist narrative based on a real life incident. The film is set at a remote monastery, where a young nun (Cosmina Stratan) invites her lonely childhood friend (Christina Flutur) to briefly stay, only for her friend's personal demons and illnesses to disrupt the modest way of life of the church. The woman is likely suffering from schizophrenia or some similar mental health illness but the near-by hospital is underfunded and can't keep her, and she has no one else to take her in, having grown up in an orphanage and foster care. She's asked to stay at the church until she recovers, much to the displeasure of the nuns and the doggedly conservative priest who runs the place. It's not really a question of whether things will go wrong but when they will go wrong, and they do in horrifying and unsettling ways. Mungui's superb 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days carries the weird honor of being the only film to nearly make me hyperventilate. He sets his eyes on tragic subject matter and tells it in long, unbroken takes that make what already feels unnervingly real all the more vital and palpable. While Hills is deliberately paced, Mungui sets about observing the daily beats of monastery life and how the orthodoxy has colored every aspect of the lives of those individuals who live there. Everyone means well, but this was possibly the worst place the young woman could have gone for recovery, and yet sadly it was the only place she could have gone, making it all the more moving and harrowing.

Grade: ★★★★

Double Feature: "Captain Phillips" (2013)/ "A Hijacking" (2013)

When re-creating historical events, it's really easy for films to simplify, moralize or demonize and that does a massive disservice to that history they try to tell in the name of entertaining. Captain Phillips is the rare historical film which is rigorously told and yet highly engaging. It's a ceaselessly intense thriller based on the 2009 Somalian pirate hijacking of the USS Alabama. But what really makes the film stand out is Paul Greengrass's direction and Bill Ray's script, which together blow up any binary of good versus bad. In Captain Phillips, everyone is a victim, in their own way. The biggest villain of the film isn't the pirates but globalization. Greengrass makes parallels between Phillips (Tom Hanks, never better) and captain of the pirates Muse (Barkhad Abdi), suggesting they have more in common than we might think. Both are answering to bosses that care about nothing greater than the bottom line, both have crews who don't think all that fondly of them and question their command, and both are in way over their head. Greengrass forms a film that is deeply humanistic. It's a story about people under stress and duress, and the central humanity that bleeds out in these moments. It's a story about how economic structures uncaringly chew up and spit out people. It's a story about people just trying to do their job. Nobody is in the wrong here. The pirates don't want to be hijackers but need to in order to survive in a cruel world. Most of them don't actually want to hurt the crew, but don't see any other options. And Phillips and Muse begin to realize their shared commonalities, but also understand that there's still an unbreachable gulf between them. But such is often the case in the modern, interconnected world.

★★★

By strange coincidence, there was another film about a Somalian pirate hijacking released in 2013, the Danish film A Hijacking, about a fictional ship hijacking. While less conventionally thrilling than Captain Phillips, it's often a perfectly paired thematic counterpart to Phillips. The film doesn't solely focus on the hijacking but on the negotiations between the pirates and the company that owns the ship, and the story is even more concerned with how larger, modern business structures eat up the little man. Counterpointing the desperation and humanity aboard the ship with the clinical, rational negotiations (which are treated more like a business meeting in a board room rather than a hostage crisis), the film underscores the inhumanity, greed and destructive power of corporations and their singular interest in the bottom line. There's tension in the film, but the film often purposely sucks some of it away to emphasize the awful conditions that set in once the negotiations become protracted. Unlike Phillips which occurs over a brief but harrowing period of time, A Hijacking's story sprawls over a nearly two hundred day period, during which the ship runs out of supplies, everything begins to smell foul, and cabin fever and psychosis sink in. While it's a film keen on showing how corporate capitalism is inhumane, there's plenty of humanity in the film, as the film finds the human cracks in the business attire and reminds us of the human cost expended amidst the negotiations.

★★★