I'm skipping a full writeup of Cyborg in the interest of getting this out, as it looks like my day job is going to eat me alive, along with recovering from the drive to come.
Best Documentary & Biggest Surprise
Truth in Terms of Beauty
My estimation of a doc's worth is half the craft put into it and half the rarity of what I'm absorbing, and lots of them score high on craft and it comes down to splitting hairs on "precious knowledge", but this one takes the cake. It also took me off guard as one I didn't see coming that I love fervently and will cherish my next (if ever) viewing of it.
Best Woman-Centric Movie
tie
I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK
Arranged
There were a lot of great female performances, but these two movies examined really interesting subjects you rarely get to see (seeing a pattern) in mainstream, homophobic, dick and fart, generic Hollywood movies. Cyborg follows an innocent young woman lost in the cynical modern world, trapped inside her own insecurities. Most of my friends think I'm abnormal for not having seen any of Park Chan-wook's previous films. That's right, I never saw Oldboy or Lady Vengeance (I'll get to them). I think they're morons for not giving this one a chance even though they'll import some of the most generic, cheap, terrible tripe to come out of east Asia.
Arranged, as I said in my review earlier this week, focuses on the good of tradition and religion and avoids the more common general demonization of how people live their lives in these cultures. A pair of promising young actresses whose careers will hopefully blossom anchor a simple, engaging story that doesn't drag you down.
Best Film of the Week
Reign Over Me
The piece I wrote a couple days ago goes in depth enough, but I'm re-printing it here in selections so you don't have to scroll way down past all the Knocked Up stuff:
Charlie Fineman (Sandler) and Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle) went to dental school together, and have been out of touch for years. The movie deals with Charlie's grief process following the loss of his wife and three daughters on September 11th, and how reuniting with Alan changes everything for both of them. Charlie drifts from place to place every day, meanwhile Alan's wife (Jada Pinkett Smith) manages and monitors his life so closely for him that he never has time to himself alone or to start a hobby. When he meets back up with Charlie, that all changes.Oddly enough, I found Alan's marriage suffers from a similar disconnect as the one portrayed in Knocked Up, but with a much less comedic overtone. The fact that the same root problem pop up in both films may just seem like a coincidence, but I think it's indicative of something that's becoming more and more obvious and prevalent: married couples are collecting all the components of a happy life and aren't able to assemble them to their satisfaction. Nothing fits as perfectly as they'd imagined or hoped.
Terrific supporting performances from Liv Tyler as a therapist/colleague of Alan's, Saffron Burrows as an emotionally imbalanced patient, and the aforementioned Jada solidify the bond that the movie is built around, these two guys trying to get back to who they are deep down piece by piece, like they're putting together an old hot rod they used to tool around in years before to give it one more go, see a glimpse of who they were.
Binder himself pops in as he has in all his previous films, doing solid work as always, not sticking out unless, like me, you know who he is and think "hey, it's Mike Binder" when he comes in. Momentary appearances from Donald Sutherland, Ted Raimi and John de Lancie are all memorable but unobtrusive, never really detracting from the narrative just because they have familiar faces. The never-seen-them discovery for me was Paula Newsome, playing Melanie, Alan's opinionated, self-assured receptionist. She can make you laugh without saying a damn word, and she does just that whenever she's on-screen and not firing off one of her lines with pitch-perfect delivery.
So what's so great about the movie, huh?
Well for starters, Binder doesn't knock us over the head with the origin of the trauma that Charlie (Sandler) has gone through. We have information withheld from us due to looking from the outside in at Charlie, and not because the director wants to act like we're stupid. A particular breakdown scene comes to mind, which I'm really glad they didn't cut. It came unexpectedly enough that I felt as surprised as Don Cheadle looked on-screen listening to him.
The question Alan is faced with is: do we need to fix people, or should we just help them do the fixing themselves?
As much as we may want to do the work for them because we love and treasure our loved ones, Binder's film makes a strong case for the latter. At a post-screening Q&A, a woman stood up and broadsided Mike and his two stars with the fact that she had recently lost her husband, and that the grief process in the film came of as completely authentic.
"Everyone wants to just fix you, and make you go to therapy, or take pills, or..." she trailed off at one point. Awkward though it may have been, it hit precisely on what we saw on the screen.
All of that and presumably more has been shoved on Sandler's Charlie Fineman, and none of it took for the longest time. What is it about Alan that means Charlie can open up?
This has rambled and rolled, but I have to make some final major points or I'll hate this when I look at it in the morning. I've tried not to spoil anything, but still give an impression of what kind of movie you're looking at here. It's Binder's best film, from all the ones I've seen, and these are two of the best performances I've seen from either of these men, and that is saying something for both of them.
What's that? Adam Sandler isn't an actor, he's a comedian? Don Cheadle's playing the straight man, right? That's no big task, right?
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
All right, that's it. I've got a Mike Binder interview lined up soon, so watch for that too.