Brick doesn’t usually have movie reviews. But it’s the turn of the year — not the decade as it actually ends Dec. 31, 2010 — and a couple are worth a shout. It’s far from a complete assessment, as I often wait to see movies on DVD. Also, this comes from Northwest Arkansas where so many of the movies we hear about won’t arrive until the Oscar nominations are announced, in early February. From the reviews, though, I can’t wait for Crazy Heart starring Jeff Bridges and the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man.
Besides, there’s a need to even out the vitriol that Avatar caused me. It wormed under my skin like a Pandoran parasite.
What comes to mind are Up in the Air for grown-ups and the family-friendly Where the Wild Things Are. Neither show will be hurt by seeing on video when they’re released, but the big screen does them justice.
If Tom Hanks is our James Stewart, then George Clooney long ago earned the wings to be our Cary Grant. Clooney’s Up in the Air is a witty drama (serious comedy?) with not only realistic main characters but accurate minor ones, not to mention the unexpected documentary snippets of unemployed people. Clooney plays a hit man, hired to conduct layoffs across the country. That makes him legal, not an outlaw, though the carnage gives pause. He has a romance on the road, and he trains a protege. Everyone is smart, including the real-life cameos. From the start, he faces the risks we all do, if on a more suave, Cary Grant scale, and he and we learn from them. That’s the show, tight and seamless. Lie the screen that’s showing this movie flat over the seats, and I bet you could bounce a quarter on it.
I avoided Where the Wild Things Are until near the end of its fall run. The Maurice Sendak award-winning book was my childhood favorite, and it wasn’t yet a classic. I have two copies in different spots of the house now. They remind me that imagination always will be key, even at this time when so many wrongly think that the pursuit of truth rules out imagination. Still, I avoided the show because in expanding the 1963 picture book to a full-length picture, Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers had to surround the little boy with realism. Sum-up of book and movie: Bad Max is sent to his room, where he discovers a world he can rule. The movie’s Max, by having just a mom and a sister and deep snow in winter, no longer resembled little Ben or many other 8-year-olds. Not coloring in allows anyone to see themselves. I bought a ticket when I decided it wouldn’t cloud my memory. It turns out that showing Max’s family and street was a minor issue. What’s crucial is the movie tells its story start-to-finish through the perspective of a child. That has to be hard; it’s sure unusual. A child can see his truth with nearly friendly monsters, which makes as much sense to him as the fact his older sister’s friends play rough, not from malice, just size.
In our award-happy society — and that goes from schools to well-meaning employers — we forget that a good job doesn’t need praise. Sure it’s nice when it happens. It certainly is an overstatement that a good job is its own reward. Sometimes it seems we witness quality rarely so we don’t recognize it. Other times quality is so common in American goods and services we stop seeing it. In these two movies, everything from writing to acting to set design is flawless. Maybe that deserves awards, especially when you consider all the dreck around. But I can’t see Clooney being nominated for acting or Jonze for directing this year. All they did was exactly the right things.
