2009 Catch-Up, part 2

A few more notable movies I saw during the past year that I haven't already written up here:

Playing By Heart (1998)--Though over ten years old, this film still feels like an archetypal current-day indie movie: several narrative threads whose connections aren't clear until near the end; quirky characters; a mix of big-name actors, soon-to-be-famous actors, and actors who didn't go anywhere; and conflicting tones of comedy and melodrama. It also has a "newbie" element, in that the project feels very personal for the first-time director/writer (Willard Carroll, though technically this was his second film). The film follows the paths of several couples, some romantic, some not. Sean Connery and Gena Rowlands are an older couple dealing with his cancer diagnosis and with some unresolved past issues; fragile Gillian Anderson dates flippant Jon Stewart; Ellen Burstyn reconciles with her gay son (Jay Mohr) who is dying of AIDS; at the center is the strange on-again/off-again relationship between party girl Angelina Jolie and an attractive but chilly boy toy (Ryan Phillippe). Dennis Quaid also appears as a guy who pops into bars, chatting up strangers of both sexes with clearly made-up tales of his life. Though we don't see the connections until near the end, virtually everyone winds up together in a climactic wedding scene which, despite seeming inevitable, does come off as fairly clever. The performances are all over the map, with Jolie and Anderson faring the best. The comedy is never very effective (the cast members in the above publicity still look far happier there than they ever do in the movie) and the melodrama is often trite, but there is still something winning about this small-scale production.

Caché (2005; aka Hidden)--A comfortably upper-middle class French couple (Daneil Auteuil and Juliette Binoche) are terrorized by a stranger who constantly videotapes their comings and goings and leaves the tapes on their front porch--the above picture of the couple's neighborhood becomes very familiar to the viewer. The husband soon connects the threatening surveillance to a shameful secret from his boyhood involving an Algerian man who, as a boy, had been briefly adopted by his family. This is a fairly effective thinking person's thriller, using Hitchcockian tension to tell a story of suppressed guilt and politics. There's not a lot of action or violence (except for two short scenes which are quite shocking) and the long takes become a bit wearing, but overall this kept my interest, and its ambiguous ending works well.

Brick (2006)--A film noir homage set at a high school, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a drab loner who plays private eye when his ex-girlfriend vanishes and is later found dead. He goes through his paces as a downer Bogart and most of the noir cliches are present, including hard-boiled slang, violence, and a femme fatale, but it just doesn't come together. Gordon-Levitt is good, as is Lukas Haas as a kind of tall and skinny Sydney Greenstreet figure, but the other performances, the plotting, and the visual style are all forgettably bland. This probably sounded good on paper but it's not worth catching.