Quick takes pre-awards season

I want to post these brief reviews before a) the onslaught of end-of-year blockbusters; and b) my annual critique of the Golden Globe nominations.

Let's start with two foreign films:

I've Loved You So Long

(FRANCE)

This film is dominated by an award-worthy performance by Kristin Scott-Thomas as a just-released convicted murderer who goes to live with her estranged younger sister and her multi-cultural family: sis and her husband adopted two Vietnamese girls--I don't know why I note that fact, except that the two girls are quite annoying. [The title, apparently, comes from a French lullaby.] Scott-Thomas completely drains herself of all charm, beauty and emotion to inhabit this role -- quite fearless for an actress who (in my eyes) always appears charming and beautiful, if a bit cool emotionally. See The English Patient. But it is not a scenery-chewing role. You have to wait until the end for a big emotional outburst; in the meantime, the characters and the lives they inhabit are so real that you come to care about what happens to them.

Just as good as Scott-Thomas is Elsa Zylberstein as younger sis Lea. She brings just barely to the surface all the conflicting feelings of a sibling who is both trying hard to reconnect with a sister she still looks up to, while still harboring resentment for her abandonment. Other actresses would try to out-act her co-star; Elsa reveals her character in the small moments that make it all the more powerful.

Let the Right One In
(SWEDEN)

Consider this vampire movie the "anti-Twilight." First, the two leads are quite ordinary-looking tweeners, not the tabloid-ready, pretty faces of the Twilight teens. Second, this movie reminds you that feasting on human blood to survive is very messy business. Grisly and gruesome, too. Finally, it takes place among the working class denizens of stark apartment blocks, cold cafes, and frozen streets of urban Sweden (I didn't catch in which city it takes place). Not something Bergman ever showed us.

Sounds rather bleak, doesn't it? Still, I walked out afterwards both impressed by the filmmaker's technique and moved by the story. Except for a couple of cheap special effects, the scenes are artfully filmed (if you aren't turned off by throat-slitting, decapitation, and a pack of angry cats!) I was very pleased with the performance of the cats in this film: most of these movies use pets only as quick snacks for a thirsty vampire. Here, the cats -- with the aid of some discreet animation -- are the aggressors against the undead. They mean business, too!

The story involves a lonely boy with divorced parents who is the victim of bullying at school. He forms a friendship with the at-first reluctant neighbor who is a loner like him, but unlike him, she can take care of herself and instills in him the courage to do the same. They form a trusting and accepting friendship that leads to an inevitable conclusion. As a side story, the sad sack adults who unwittingly get caught up in all of this violence do not fare well at all: one-by-one they get murdered or bitten, yet they show a strange reluctance to seek the aid of the Police! Unwitting and witless, perhaps, but you still feel sorry for them.

Next up:
Changeling (Dir: Clint Eastwood)
Happy-Go-Lucky (Dir: Mike Leigh)