Best Movie Posters of 2010

I tend to like simple, striking images that evoke a film's themes but that are also somehow compelling as stand-alone art. Interestingly, my favorite posters of 2010 often line up with my favorite films of 2010. Or maybe there's some logic to that connection. Regardless, as it happens, there's another theme that unites three of this year's posters that I didn't even notice until I uploaded them into Blogger. Silly me.

So, tell me, what did I miss?

Writing What She Knows: Somewhere

The first shot in Somewhere lasts just over two minutes. It feels longer. From a fixed position, the camera observes a black Ferrari driving laps on a tight circular bit of road that’s stained with skid marks. Zoom, the car goes by in the foreground. Then, a bit later, zoom, it goes by again. And then again. And then again. Four times. Finally the Ferrari comes to a stop and a handsome yet disheveled man climbs out and looks into the distance, as if hoping to find inspiration. The man is Johnny Marco, a Hollywood actor who spends his days holed up at the famous Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood, living a pampered yet monotonous existence. The opening shot evokes the tedious sameness of Johnny’s (ugh!) circular way of life in which he’s stuck (ugh, again!) on a road to nowhere. Or at least that’s what this shot, and several others much like it, is ostensibly designed to do. In effect, however, the shot tells us less about Johnny Marco than it does about the film’s director. Somewhere is Sofia Coppola’s movie, and she never lets us forget that she’s there.

Just like the early films of Darren Aronofsky seem to play under a neon sign proclaiming “This film was directed!” so, too, does Coppola’s latest, albeit for entirely different reasons. Whereas Requiem for a Dream attacks us with fast-cut excessiveness, Somewhere is an assault of minimalism – both technically and emotionally. In stretches the camera moves so infrequently that you’d think it weighed two tons and needed military tanks to maneuver it into position. Ambient noise – usually the growl of Johnny’s Ferrari – fills the soundtrack. Slow Altmanesque zooms are passed off like bravura flourishes. And any scene in danger of being lively is extended to the point of monotony, or worse. Early in the film, for example, Coppola forces us to endure a choreographed dance routine performed by a pair of twin blondes in nurse outfits who spin around on collapsible silver poles while the Foo Fighters’ “My Hero” plays softly from a boombox on the floor, failing to obscure the sound of thigh flesh squeaking on metal. It’s a decidedly unsexy spectacle, but perhaps awkwardly humorous, and so as if to assure we take none of this lightly, Coppola brings the blondes back for another lengthy routine, thereby ensuring our boredom. In a film that attempts to demystify the Hollywood celebrity lifestyle while underlining the solemnity of Coppola’s artistry, cheap thrills are not to be tolerated.

The Conversations: Darren Aronofsky (Part II)

Put on your ballet slippers and dance on over to The House Next Door, because Part II of The Conversations: Darren Aronofsky, covering the recently released Black Swan, is live! If you’ve haven’t seen the film, you shouldn’t even open the link. (Spoilers abound, as usual.) But if you have, well, it’s the kind of movie that’s sure to inspire debate. Did I like Black Swan? Did Ed Howard? You’ll have to read the piece to find out. For now, I’ll say only that it was a fun film to discuss, and I’m eager to hear the thoughts of others about the movie.

So head on over to The House Next Door. If you missed it, here’s the link to Part I.

Jackpot: Pony Excess

As the “30 for 30” series winds to a quasi-close, executives at the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports have many reasons to celebrate. ESPN Films’ unprecedented documentary series, which provided 30 different filmmakers with carte blanche to explore their own sports fascinations from the past three decades, has been remarkably successful, turning out at least two highly engaging films for each clunker, with only one outright flop. At its best, the series has observed the point in which the athletic world and the real world collide (June 17, 1994 and The Two Escobars), probed into athletes’ troubled minds (Run, Ricky, Run and No Crossover), made us laugh (Winning Time), made us cry (Into the Wind), rejuvenated memories of fallen heroes (Guru of Go) and resuscitated bygone villains (The U). It has allowed us to look back on past events with perspective. Often, it has reminded us of how different things once were. But with its final* film, the “30 for 30” series looks back to the past to bring us to the present. Pony Excess is about the college football dominance of the pay-to-play Southern Methodist University Mustangs back in the early 1980s, and as chance would have it, the film premieres immediately following the ceremony in which Auburn University’s Cam Newton will almost certainly be awarded the Heisman Trophy as the nation’s most outstanding college football player in 2010. Over the 14 months that ESPN has been releasing these films, effort has been made to match the documentaries with the sports that are in season, but this is synergy of a whole other level. Bill Simmons and the series’ other creators must be high-fiving one another about the timing.

Devil in the Details: Carlos

When Olivier Assayas’ three-part, made-for-TV film about the exploits of terrorist Ilich Rarmirez Sanchez, better known as “Carlos the Jackal,” opens with a disclaimer suggesting that it is “the result of historical and journalistic research” but “must be viewed as fiction,” it creates a truth that tells a lie. By the strictest definition, sure, no amount of exhaustive investigation and meticulous recreation could have allowed Carlos to be called nonfiction, but that doesn’t keep Assayas and fellow screenwriter Dan Franck from trying. For a whopping 319 minutes, Carlos plays like the multicolor depiction of black-and-white history, packed with journalistically documented detail after journalistically documented detail, some of them extraordinary and fascinating, others mundane and tedious. That capitulatory fabrications hold these literal-as-possible dramatizations together goes without saying, but although the movie’s cinematography sometimes recalls the steely palette of Steven Spielberg’s Munich, Carlos is hardly painted in shades of gray. Assayas’ film is less a subjective conjuring of Carlos’ inner Jackal – in fact, that nickname is never used – than it is an objective examination of Carlos’ now antiquated brand of terrorism. Those hoping to learn who Carlos was will be largely disappointed. Those hoping to learn what Carlos did will be enthralled.

Carlos isn’t a peek into a man’s heart or psyche. It’s a peek into the filing cabinet that houses the details of his life. As filing cabinet movies go, it’s tremendous. The acting is universally solid. The globe-hopping mise en scene – Carlos was shot in nine countries over three continents – is lush. The scope is epic. And, not to be overlooked, the story is interesting. To make a 319-minute movie that’s consistently engaging without a single lousy scene is an accomplishment in and of itself. Alas, Carlos feels like the work of a historian more than an artist, as if every scene should be footnoted – not to expand upon its meaning but to cite its validity. Perhaps because so much of Carlos’ life has been shrouded in uncertainty and myth, Assayas and Franck treat every corroborated detail with esteem. If they performed any dramatically-minded gatekeeping in honing their script, it’s hard to find evidence of it. Many scenes run too long, while others are included for no apparent purpose other than the show the extent of the researchers’ work. Assayas also released Carlos in a vastly streamlined 165-minute version, and while I haven’t seen that edition I’d feel confident wagering that it’s the superior cut. Simply put, the 319-minute Carlos doesn’t justify its length. And it’s in tribute to Assayas’ filmmaking, not in criticism of it, that I suspect the comparatively mini version is just as impactful, just as rich, just as thought-provoking … at almost half the time.

Little Worlds: Marwencol (and Hokahey’s Battlefields)

The only U.S. Army jeep in the Belgian town of Marwencol has years worth of wear and tear on its tires. That’s because whenever Mark Hogancamp walks into town, he drags the jeep behind him on a small stick. Marwencol, you see, isn’t a real town in Belgium, and the jeep isn’t real either. They’re both models, part of an imaginary world that Hogancamp created in an attempt to comfort his troubled mind. In 2000, Hogancamp was attacked by several men outside a bar and severely beaten. He was in a coma for nine days and spent 40 days at the hospital – learning to walk again, learning to write again – until his Medicaid ran out. Still in need of therapy, but with no money to pay for it, Hogancamp turned his attention to Marwencol, a miniature World War II-era town initially populated by Hogancamp’s G.I. Joe alter ego and 27 Barbie dolls that starred in a miniature narrative spun out of Hogancamp’s imagination. Over time, other characters entered the meticulously arranged environment, many of them based on Hogancamp’s friends, and Hogancamp documented the evolving story through intimate, carefully considered photographs. For its creator, Marwencol was a coping mechanism, a neighborhood of make-believe allowing Hogancamp to work through real-life issues. But thanks to his photographs, it was also something else: art.

Watching Jeff Malmberg’s documentary, named after the fictitious village, it’s the intimacy of Hogancamp’s art that’s most affecting. To be sure, Marwencol is a fascinating human-interest story that uses Hogancamp’s fictionalized reenactments as a means of learning about the real man – a connection that isn’t difficult to make given that Hogancamp is prone to speaking in the first person when describing the exploits of his miniature stand-in. Hogancamp is deeply invested in Marwencol. Probably too invested. It’s impossible to tell where his fantasies end and his real life begins. And without explicitly asking the question, Malmberg forces us to consider whether Marwencol is liberating Hogancamp or imprisoning him, helping him to reenter society or making it all too easy to avoid it. That there’s enough in the film to make compelling arguments either way is evidence of the documentary’s appeal as a portrait of human trauma. But for me the real-world struggles of Hogancamp are diversions from the more basic and more compelling experience of watching an artist at work. Hogancamp never meant for his scale-model dream-making to be art. His snapshots were the equivalent of a personal journal. But it was art just the same – demonstrating the compositional skills of a skilled photographer, the storytelling skills of a writer and the expository skills of an illustrator. And once Hogancamp’s photographs are married to his narrative descriptions via Malmberg’s film, it becomes the stuff of cinema.