Christina Waters

In his gorgeous new film, director David Cronenberg [see post below] has taken an enormous bite into the unconscious cravings of those struggling to fit into “polite society.” But he also works to unpack some of the deepest conflicts—between Freud and Jung, for example—which plagued the new field of psychoanalysis in the early 20th century.

Was the new “science” to be based upon some rational architecture of the irrational? the Oedipal desires, repressed sexual connections afflicting family hierarchy, and diagnostic answers based upon the inner logic of illicit sexual desires—as Freud insisted? Or were there even deeper channels within psychiatric patients tapping down into archetypal roles and tensions shared by all humans, archetypes such as the Wounded Warrior, and tensions uniting love and death in an eternal embrace—as Jung was beginning to suspect?

A Dangerous Method is now playing at the Nickelodeon.

Here’s what you’ll find:

1) this stunning film oozes Viennese sophistication, with ravishing costumes you would swear were designed by Gustav Klimt. More…

A French kiss of a film, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo enfolds its cinematic heart in a bittersweet quest for redemption. It seems that the feisty film director still remembers what it was to be a child, and to believe in artistic magic with a child’s appetite for adventure and delight.

Astonishingly, Hugo is filmed in non-gratuitous 3D that actually moves the film along its kinetic tracks.
The atmosphere of Paris between the wars is exuberantly painted right down to steaming cafe au lait and seamed stockings. The child of the title, (played by Asa Butterfield) is an orphan who lives high atop a train station tower where he daily sets the intricate clockworks.Watching the bustling world below from his perch behind the face of the station clock, young Hugo mourns the loss of his father (Jude Law), a clock maker and engineer who left the boy an unfinished mechanical figure as a legacy.

Hugo, himself an eager mechanical tinkerer, undertakes the completion of this project. Thanks to parts pilfered from the repair shop of an eccentric More…

If you’ve seen both of these films then you know what I mean — Hugo and The Artist make terrific side-by-side movie experiences. Each deals with the enchanted, tumultuous world of filmmaking. Each is riddled with the ecstatic triumphs and the anguished failures of the studio system. And, to the credit of the filmmakers, each is obviously a labor of love.

Yet, as I discovered once again last week….timing is everything.

Once I had seen Martin Scorsese’s agile love-letter to pioneer silent film director Georges Méliès—Hugo—I was unable to fall under the spell of The Artist, no matter how seductive and winning its leading man, and his scene-stealing little dog. After Hugo, The Artist was small and thin. A tasty amuse l’oeil, but not the generous feast that was Hugo. Perhaps because I am an addict of actual silent movies in all of their historical richness, period authenticity and frame-by-frame atmosphere of discovery, I found The Artist lacking save as a vehicle for Jean Dujardin, an actor who could give charm lessons to George Clooney.

Oh French director Michel Hazanavicius’ deserves More…

A feast for the mind as well as the eye, the shabby paranoia of Cold War espionage makes a bracing cinematic cocktail, neither shaken nor stirred. A dirty patina of brown and grey adheres to every engrossing scene of this version of John LeCarre’s spy saga Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Relinquish any fears that the indelible performance by Alec Guinness as spy master George Smiley in the archetypal 1973 BBC series might upstage this film version. The confidence of director Tomas Alfredson and his astonishing cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema will dispel all doubts

Even for those who have read the book and gorged upon the multi-part television series, Le Carré’s tale is dense and labyrinthean as only a cold war spy tale can be. This is, after all, a tightly buttoned world in which there are no good guys. The ugly underbelly of bureaucratic betrayal makes a bracing cautionary bulwark for those still under the illusion that espionage is glamorous. There are no Sean Connerys here.

We meet the career MI6 agents—a sorry lot of paranoid professionals who have sold their individual dreams to a collective nightmare—just as a secret deal to bring in a high-ranking Soviet defector has gone horribly wrong. More…

I thought I was going to see George Clooney win an Oscar. I didn’t. He won’t. But The Descendants stayed with me and continued to spin out and unfurl deep-tissue feelings and puzzles and bits of beauty long after I left The Nick last weekend and headed out into the blustery twilight.

The camera loves Clooney almost as much as it loved Marilyn Monroe. There simply are no bad angles on this beautiful man. And while it’s clear he can hold the center of a film, he does so by sleight of hand. He is a quiet vortex around which all of the action, the drama, the storming and revelation takes place. Somehow his winning features—the thoughtful brow, the sensitive facial muscles, the glowing eyes, the gorgeous legs—get close to the point, but never quite land on it.

He doesn’t convince me, even though his character—an Hawaiian heir to a huge land trust, with two out-of-control young daughters and a dying wife—did.

After a long gestation, Terence Malick’s fifth film, Tree of Life, has entered our cinematic bloodstream. It is a lengthy elegy on nothing less than desire, loss, faith, love and the cosmos. What else could we expect of a man who once translated Heidegger and taught philosophy at MIT?

In Tree of Life, Malick the existential ruminator meets Malick the filmmaker’s filmmaker, and the result is a controversial, overly-long, unforgettable work that took this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Whatever it isn’t (more on that later), Tree is a deeply moving portrait of an American family, set in Texas of the 1950s. However much Malick attempts to lay on baroque opulence in the form of digressions into cosmic imagery, digressions that literally unfurl the creation of the universe, digressions in the form of achingly beautiful classical music — the soul of the film is the complex and stormy relationship between a father (Brad Pitt) and his sons (the eldest, Jack, played by an astonishing young Hunter McCracken).

Pitt is a revelation as the ambitious father whose dashed dreams More…

Dark, mercurial, intelligent and yes, dear reader, romantic—the most recent screen version of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is utterly captivating. With its Pre- Raphaelite doorways, its Caspar David Friedrich fog-drenched forests, and its gothic vistas of sight (cinematography by Adriano Goldman) and sound (music by Dario Marianelli), this film will satisfy the pickiest audience on the planet—Brontë groupies who adore this tale of a “small, plain” young woman whose fierce spirit secures her place in literary Valhalla.

Director Cary Fukunaga (a UCSC alum) has deepened the sense of mystery surrounding the manor house of the restless More…

Think Inception, Groundhog Day and a touch of The Matrix, and you’ll begin to see why this crisp bit of cinematic distraction is more than simply entertaining.

Source Code, directed by Duncan Jones, stars a resilient and compelling Jake Gyllenhaal as Sgt. Colter Stevens, a fighter pilot assigned to Afghanistan who suddenly “awakes” in another man’s body. Another man’s body on a commuter train about to be blown sky high.

Gyllenhaal has landed back on his feet with this part, and with his sweetly feral face set to register every nuance of his character’s situation, he completely owns this film from heart-pounding start to almost satisfying ending.

Turns out, Gyllenhaal’s character is a man suspended between worlds, literally, More…

Best Actress - Annette Bening (okay, even sacrificing a chicken couldn’t stop Natalie Portman from taking the Oscar for Best Performance by eyebrows and collarbones)

Best Actor - Colin Firth (duh) (he was great in the film, but his acceptance speech will go down in history as one of the dullest, most awkward moments in public speaking)

Best Supporting Actress - Melissa Leo (Her’s was the quintessential “why did we give the Oscar to her?” moment. A real moment of low-brow emoting. An utterly phony display of fake emotions, matched perfectly by her gown of flea market crocheted doilies.)

Best Supporting Actor - Christian Bale (Proof that Welshmen are in a class by themselves, and easily the best-looking guy on the stage that night.)

Best Director -Darren Aronofsky (or maybe the Coens)  (I blew this one)

Best Film - The Kings Speech (Safe and predictable, just like the Oscar “awards” themselves.)

Longtime policy analyst, filmmaker and historian of the Latin American revolutionary scene, Saul Landau comes to town next week for a screening - March 2 at 7pm - of his new documentary film Will the Real Terrorist Please Stand Up?
Sifting through the knotted entrails of US/Latin American relations over the past 50 years, Landau has unearthed priceless eye-witness interviews, rare footage of Fidel Castro and disturbing evidence exposing the criss-crossing trail of “extreme prejudice” between Washington, Miami and Havana.

While most of us have forgotten the convoluted steps leading up to the Bay of Pigs showdown, Landau has not. More…