The screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, cobbled together Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, but the hybrid hasn’t been plotted out; it’s a pastiche. One may not be sure why Alice is afraid to face a dragon that she thinks is imaginary, or whether the Red Queen’s vizier (Crispin Glover) recognizes Wonderland’s Most Wanted. (When he corners Alice in the corridor is he on to her or coming on to her?) Carroll didn’t let narrative get in the way of his paradoxes, which he structured like algorithms or derivatives—flawlessly meaningless. In this new Alice in Wonderland, paradoxes push the narrative forward. It moves full-steam ahead without having anywhere to go, even when a scene is worth loitering over. Burton maintains the suspense only sparingly—as when Alice sneaks about the cage of a toothy mongrel, prompting the gooiest cinematic lick since Gozu. But, on the whole, this movie would’ve flunked calculus—and its driving test, too.

In some ways, however, this adaptation is Wicked: The Mad Hatter has become Dorothy’s dimwitted Scarecrow. Even beneath a Lady Gaga pancake—and Mountain Dew-daubed irises the size of manholes—Depp grimaces better than anyone else in Hollywood. He gives the picture a much-needed emotional core. No longer burnished into terseness, as he was in Public Enemies, Depp is back in weirdo mode. He playfully backhands the Carroll-tinged dialogue, but his Hatter is a sad clown rather than a mad one—and Depp’s Chaplinesque proficiency makes Alice’s disregard all the more painful. Even in the original book, she wasn’t a particularly endearing character; she was the arbiter of the Age of Reason. But you can’t make her foil lovable if you don’t provide someone to love him. Dorothy’s teary departure from Oz might be a little mawkish for modern tastes, but when Alice says farewell to her friends, she may as well be flipping them the bird. In a coda as implausible as anything in Wonderland, she promptly rejects her beau, tells off the aristocracy, and woos her would-be father-in-law into making her a venture capitalist. She has all the P.R. charm of a Martha Stewart when she announces her intent to open trade routes to China. What will she trade? Let me guess—opium? Despite the ominous, oblong production design, a skirmish between Reds and Whites worthy of Tolkien and Eisenstein, and some snappy surrealist repartee, I was through with this looking-glass long before the brat set sail. If she only had a heart…

Recently, Burton’s imagination has fizzled when applied to the intellectual properties of others—even though Sleepy Hollow is a Halloween treat, and Batman Returns one of my franchise-film favorites. His Sweeney Todd was messy, too, and when Depp moonwalks in Alice, I flashed back to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory—a bad trip. Maybe, to me, a superheated mess like The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is preferable because it was an iteration of the filmmaker’s mind; the squiggly story-line seemed to mean something to Terry Gilliam, even if the audience felt it was on the wrong side of his imaginarium. Where the Wild Things Are was a little sleepy—if not hollow; Spike Jonze clearly loved the material. His vernal warmth would’ve melted this icicle Alice. But Burton’s large-scale, Disney-financed perennial seems chilled by frantic labor and compromise. The mash-up will probably leave children feeling blue. It’s not the world-soul melancholy that the (somewhat creepily) death-aware Coraline left one with; Alice will merely jumble kids’ sympathies. Burton directs the way the White Queen (a surprisingly spunky—and surprisingly platinum—Anne Hathaway) concocts a magic elixir: with a pinch of underhanded wit, but as jittery as if there was a gun pointed at her head.

(Yes, I know I’m missing The Blind Side; that doesn’t mean I feel I’m missing out. If it makes you feel better, I’ll substitute my review of Invictus, another feel-good, family-friendly ravager of racism that—to my surprise—didn’t ravage the doting hearts of the Academy.)

1. Up
2. Inglourious Basterds
3. The Hurt Locker
4. District 9
5. A Serious Man
6. An Education
7. Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire
8. Up in the Air
9. Avatar

Best Picture of 2009

Wanna know my pick for whom the Oscar should go? Too bad. But if you peruse these exquisite pieces of filmtastic analysis, you’ll probably get a good idea.

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A pair of U.S. Marshals—Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck (Mark Ruffalo)—disembark a mist-shrouded ferry and set foot on Shutter Island, home of the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a maximum-security prison in the Massachusetts Bay. One of the inmates—whom the chief psychologist, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), refers to as “patients”—has gone missing. Rachel (Emily Mortimer) returns, inexplicably and without a scratch. As storm clouds converge on the island, Teddy becomes increasingly paranoid; its jagged shores are littorally inescapable. The authorities have ignored his; they’ve taken his gun, withheld paperwork, and worst of all, the whole shebang seems to be under the sway of a former Nazi (Max von Sydow). Another Rachel appears (a razor-sharp Patricia Clarkson); the House Un-American Activities Committee’s name is dropped (it’s the McCarthy era—1954); and Teddy suffers from migraines and oracular dreams: visions of his wife (Michelle Williams)—who was supposedly burnt to a crisp by an arsonist who happens to be committed on the island—alternate with the suffering children of Dachau, which Teddy helped liberate as a G.I.

This is a Gothic storm of a movie, and it’s awash with melodramatic touches and nods to old films noir. Yes, the Bernard Herrmannian horns honk at you like traffic in Midtown Manhattan; and, yes, the investigators wear fedoras; and Teddy’s subordinate calls him “Boss”; and the shrinks speak in slippery platitudes while wearing tweeds; and the inmates jump out of dark corners and give you the willies. But all these touches add to the dense, painterly texture of the film. According to A.O. Scott, Scorsese “forces you to study the threads on the rug he is preparing … to pull out from under you.” I didn’t feel “forced,” but found the rug perfectly sewn; each thread can be stitched back together. (It’s a rare pleasure to have thrillers like this exercise one’s mental needle.) Salon compares Shutter Island to a film by David Lynch—but Lynch’s meanings don’t conform to a logical structure; this can be reconstructed in a manner that is absolutely, pellucidly, meticulously sane. Is it a work of depth and subtlety? Not really. But does that mean that Scorsese is, as David Edelstein asserts, “farther from reality than his hero is”? Formal perfection is always a little supernatural. At any rate, I prefer this maniacal professionalism—Scrosese’s 40-year endeavor to blend opera with genre filmmaking—to that of A Serious Man, which was a snub to anyone who tried to parse the Coens’ threads.

In a film this dense and dynamic, consistency can be both miraculous and conservative. When Scott—whose evaluation is uncharacteristically tsk-tsk-tsky—calls Shutter Island “airless,” I can understand why: There isn’t much breathing room. He and Edelstein, critics whom I admire, fall into rubrics a.) and c.). I can only offer, without risk of being called a spoilsport, part of why I’m still sympathetic to b.). Scorsese is no stranger to madness; his work has always been deliriant, and his oeuvre is spiked with psychopaths. Taxi Driver is one of the best character studies ever financed by Hollywood, and one of the most vertiginous downward spirals. But while you’re watching it, you know that cabbie is a little bit loopy. Watching Shutter Island, you may start to wonder about yourself. The third-act revelation may not be entirely original, but I was so caught up in the cobwebs of rationalization that it had the bite of a spider. (Perhaps some willful gullibility is required for the venom to take effect.) Shutter Island doesn’t connect to societal upheaval the way Taxi Driver and Mean Streets did; or celebrity culture the way The King of Comedy did; or the Patriot Act the way The Departed did. But it might prompt you to examine your own susceptibility to delusion; it might induce you to think like a madman.

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Bad—who, at 57, leaves his belt unbuckled and putters between gigs at bowling alleys in a ’78 Suburban—is about as “authentic” as they come. He’s a little testy about being outmoded by superstars like Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell)—a former protégé—but Bad’s temper isn’t akin to his stage name. His anger at leaving four ex-wives and a son behind, and his obstinance about making a comeback—which would be a Sweet deal—boomerang at him in unlimited refills of bourbon and unending cartons of smokes. Everybody’s good to Bad but Bad. There’s only one real surprise in the plot—and it’s farfetched enough that it doesn’t feel quite earned—but the plot isn’t what critics and award-bearers have set their sights on.

Enter Jeff Bridges, who makes Bad look good. If Bridges isn’t as flamboyant as other actors of his generation (Pacino, Streep, De Niro, Hoffman, et al), it’s because he doesn’t enter his characters through their pores; he holds them tight, snuggles them—he’s a protective, sentimental actor in the best sense. And his innate combination of skill, generosity, gentleness, and humor is intensely ingratiating. (I’d love to see him as play villain—to see if his likability can be subverted.) Sentimentality can be physically demanding. Bad looks like a bristly yeti, but what country singer of his mold hasn’t grown a little mold? Bridges suggests a man who’s given in to the fungus. Poetry punches through fungus, and Bridges’s emotional range is poetic.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays the small-time reporter who helps Bad see the light at the end of the bottle; she’s the one who finally scrapes the grime off Bad’s Chia head. The journalist says that she blushes easily because her capillaries are close to the skin. Everything this woman feels is close to her skin, and the movie overemphasizes her vulnerability. (In one scene, she breaks down after Bad composes lyrics on her bed. She feels unworthy of his talent, and mawkishly assumes that he’ll forget her.) And yet, Gyllenhaal’s eccentricity—her movements are sinuous, like a love-struck stoner’s—suggests that layers of complexity have been battered inward. Her effervescent performance gets at something that the movie itself doesn’t quite.

But, within its limited framework, Crazy Heart is a competent, likable film. There’s some zing to the dialogue, and—since T-Bone Burnett served as Bad’s lyricist—an air of authenticity about the score. (Bad’s repertoire indeed reminds me of music I’ve heard before—even Bridges’s sonorous voice.) Cooper doesn’t get as much out of the Southwestern landscapes as I might have liked; the bounteous mesas authorize natives like Bad to indulge in their freedom to self-destruct. But there’s at least one shot that’s been burned into my hippocampus: Bad, sharp and recumbent in the foreground, with the chintzy Christmas lights of a dive forming a blurry constellation behind him. It seems to capture the romance in the rundown, the fleeting perks of the peripatetic barfly. (Bad’s touring life is both Up in the Air in economy class and a domestication of The Wrestler.) Contrast this shot with one of Robert Duvall—as Bad’s loudmouth bartender/cheerleader/buddy—spouting off life-goes-on lyrics in a rowboat, as the camera pulls back, bestowing meaning from above. [Yawns.] But even if Cooper’s circulatory-system lunacy is hardly in evidence, he has a knack for bringing out the heart murmurs of others.

The Wolfman isn’t woefully incompetent or wake-up-drooling awful. I felt a tad impatient, yet never quite bored; Joe Johnston directs at a silver bullet’s pace. The lack of imagination, however, drowsed rather than roused me. This movie makes Daybreakers seem as innovative as Citizen Kane. I wasn’t expecting Young Frankenstein—or even Shaun of the Dead. But is Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula too much to ask for?

Until 40ish minutes had crawled by, I wondered if I was being engorged by a glossy fashion magazine; pages’ worth of glittering eyeballs and dishy male forms—slowed down so that the movement of each tendon was perceptible—lapped at me like an unwelcome tongue. Lest one prematurely exclaims “homophobe!,” allow me to qualify: What palled on me was not the movie’s blatant homoeroticism, but its sexualization of everything. If everything’s sexy, then nothing is. Jim and George shared something that transcends what a humorless nun might call “base desires” as she whacks a hiney with a ruler; this is evident in the dialogue, and through much of the later part of the picture. But when the pigtailed girl next door and a hound that resembles a pet that the couple once owned are given the same erotic charge that the shirtless members of a college tennis team get, the professor’s devotion to true-love-forever seems reduced to a hard-on for anything that crosses his path.

One might assume that the first-time director, Tom Ford—the quondam couturier—is interested less in capturing George’s emotions than he is accolades for artiness. But the direction of A Single Man isn’t flashy—or trashy—the way that it was for, say, Inglourious Basterds. When George makes his suicidal intentions apparent to the audience by cleaning both his pistol and safe-deposit box, the purple haze begins to clear. And when he decides to spend his last night drinking gin and tonics, puffing pink cigarettes, and grooving to Bossa nova with his old chum Charley (Julianne Moore), the movie hits its stride. She’s been waiting—to no avail—for her “poof” to switch teams; they fooled around when he was a free agent. Moore gives a wonderful slinky quality to this “available woman” who drinks too much alcohol and gets drunk on regret—another noxious solution. She brings out something in Firth that nobody else in the cast does: a spiky, peakish irony that usually lies dormant beneath his rigid, academic mask. She asks what his plans are for the weekend; he says it’s going to be quiet.

Firth gives a good, restrained performance; but, sometimes, the Moore, the merrier. In several of his scenes without her, such as those of him on campus, he too easily embodies that ennobling cliché of the rock-hard prig with a soft and gooey core. If it doesn’t belittle his pain, a sense of proportion can be appropriate. So, when straight-faced George labors to pinpoint the most Feng Shui way to blow his brains out, and gets anal about which way his corpse should be discovered, one can relax—things really aren’t as bathetic as George thinks.

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As members of the Army’s Casualty Notification Service, SSgt. Montgomery (Ben Foster) and his superior, Sgt. Stone (Woody Harrelson), embody the movie’s thesis that impersonality is impossible. One cannot kill another in combat and write it off as a business expense, just as one cannot convey sympathy to the survivors of the fallen by way of a stony mien and a one-size-fits-all script. The Secretary of the Army’s brusque condolences are to compassion what C-Rations are to Mama’s cherry pie. Stone, who served in Desert Storm but saw no action, has retreated into the tough-guy cynicism of a misfired life; Montgomery, whose horrors are fresher and more acute, refuses to keep up the pretense of equanimity for long. When Olivia (Samantha Morton), whose husband has perished in Iraq, is seen drying a man’s shirt on her clothesline, Stone assumes this now-single mother has been unfaithful; Montgomery makes the effort to determine otherwise. Refreshingly, his contravention of protocol doesn’t threaten his commission. This movie is concerned with the psychological price—and the ethical.

Foster’s solider has a code of ethics in shambles; a fire’s burning him inside-out, and he’s restrained from airing his anxieties for fear of shooting flames. His ex-girlfriend (Jena Malone, appropriately tender in her few scenes) can’t handle his stress; she’s left him for someone who looks like he could have been one of Seth Rogen’s friends in Pineapple Express—not exactly a “catch.” Foster’s wiry body and careworn, gravely voice create a level of dissonance. There’s a Jack Nicholsonian edge to his diction, even though Harrelson’s playing the equivalent of the Nicholson role in The Last Detail—in which two Navy lifers drag a petty thief (Randy Quaid!) to his unduly long prison sentence, but abandon their plans of ditching the boy and blowing his per diem on themselves, and show him a good time instead. Harrelson is the Nicholson figure because he’s the morbid comic relief—the crazy uncle who takes you to get your first lap dance, but drinks himself to sleep, and passes out in a puddle of tears. Stone has actually abandoned the bottle for a twist of lemon into a mug of hot water. But Harrelson still shows us the thirst: After the sergeant squeezes out the juice, he tears the pulp off the rind with a wolfish gnash.

Morton is harder to pin down; her Olivia is almost ethereal. Like the others, she seems to have put a cork on her inner turmoil, but that’s left her washed out and foggy. Her dulcet voice is distant, ambiguous; when Montgomery flirts with her, the scene is eerily laggard. What they share isn’t love, exactly. Morton is only three years Foster’s senior, and yet, between the mom-pants and the hot-mess hairdo, she seems prematurely aged; Olivia is so shell-shocked—vicariously, through her late husband—that she’s become diffuse. It’s a fascinating, left-field portrayal of the modern war wife: a fecund counterpoint to Natalie Portman’s would-be widow in Brothers. Morton’s uncanny refusal to play a broad-spirited beauty jibes with Montgomery’s being rejected by such a beauty; perhaps the notion is trite, but this dejected vet may crave something more than skin-deep—something without a physical property for him to immolate.

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This isn’t to say that film noir is a Teflon genre; it’s been a popular pomo-tivator for artists in the last few decades, partly because of the movies’ idiosyncratic gaudiness. Filmmakers understandably like to toy with canted angles and chiaroscuro, with light filtering in from louvers, and the silvery wisps of smoke that hover in it. All this can be show-offish, yes, but it’s also shorthand for how yummy those dark corners of civilization can be. (The problem arises when filmmakers overwork the fancy-pants effects to compensate for their creative shortcomings—when, after the smog disappears, and the coughing fit abates, one sees that there was nothing behind the fumes.) Crucially, though, noirs’ nocturnal underworlds betray outdated notions of justice and evil. Modern filmmakers who’ve co-opted the noir style—such as the Coen brothers, David Lynch, and, to an extent, Martin Scorsese—can dig the ostentation while still having it inform their descants.

Like most factory-film genres, noirs 1.0 were often normative. Bad things happened to bad people in most Hollywood releases; but, in noirs alone—following in the ’30s gangster movies’ wake—the bad people were the protagonists. (I’m speaking less about detective features than I am thrillers like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, which, like Broken Embraces, concerned infidelity.) By contrast, the lawmen and pioneers of Westerns were poster children for good-ol’ American Progress. Until circa Vietnam, the notion that our frontier forebears were anything but tough-willed and pure at heart was considered unsalable in the mass-media marketplace. However, the dregs dredged up by noirs (which were set in the present day) were everymen who’d given in to temptation. By the standards of 1940s and ’50s censorship, those were justified grounds for finger wagging; but, to audiences, such indiscretions were probably a welcome relief from their usual doses of Hollywood virtue. Some noirs winked at the audience from behind their censorial cages: If Bogart and Bacall’s double entendres in The Big Sleep were literalized, their dirty talk might make sexters squeamish. But all noirs were products of repression—censorial and societal.

Francisco Franco prehistory aside, Almodóvar’s blue-skied Madrid seems as repressive as a topless beach. The only agent of repression in Broken Embraces is, true to form, the rich cuckolded husband (José Luis Gómez). He knew all along that he wouldn’t be able to maintain his grip on lovely Lena (Penélope Cruz—performing well, though lacking the vivacity she had in Vicky Cristina Barcelona), particularly when she signed up to make her acting début in a film by pickup artist Mateo (Lluís Homar), alias: Harry Caine.

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Unfortunately, one must squint to see this nifty premise through the cascading blood. Daybreakers’ fangs haven’t penetrated very far into the box office’s neck, and one can see why: It’s nibbling with baby teeth. This isn’t to say that I think it deserves failure. But it disappoints me that the German-born, Australia-based Spierig Brothers—Michael and Peter, who wrote and directed—seem to undermine their own intelligence. Released by Lionsgate, Daybreakers is in that dusky region between commercial bloodsuckers like Twilight; indie gadflies like Shadow of the Vampire or Cold Souls; ghoulish giggle-fests like Sorority Row or From Dusk Till Dawn; and Rob Zombie’s psychopathic orgies. Ethan Hawke is not a big enough name to fill a multiplex marquee, nor does he square with Michael Meyers. The Spierigs have opted for choppy scenes and shock cuts that people with heart conditions should be cautioned of; they also seem to have robbed a few blood banks in order to play platelet paintball at regular intervals. But nothing quite gels. The techniques seem derivative and beneath the subject.

Early on, when Edward’s lab coat appears in his rear-view mirror sans his face or hands, I sensed that the filmmakers were giving the generic conventions a playful poke. But the Spierigs—after setting up their world—don’t poke; they shove. When Dafoe’s hokey yokel ribs the audience with Southern circumlocutions, one almost cries out, “Bad touch!” A sense of relief set in when I realized how jocosely Dafoe plays the hackneyed role, but the whole comic weight of the movie is on his shoulders, and the Spierigs have lobbed him with a 10-ton sack of corn. While he’s stuck shucking, Hawke glowers like a low-energy, yuppie-haired Tom Cruise, and Edward’s should’ve-been love interest—played by Claudia Karvan—ossifies in the corner, stuck being the token chick. A pallid New Zealander named Michael Dorman plays Edward’s brother in the Army. It’s a sympathetic performance that elevates itself above the grindhouse; but, under duress, Dorman’s American accent regresses to a Christopher Walken impersonation.

Oozing with greasy, self-aware smoothness, Neill successfully toys with his James Masonry. He also provides me with a good segue. Bromley’s teenage daughter (played aptly by Isabel Lucas) is a still-human runaway who’s resisted conversion. Her pusillanimous pa has a minion bite her, and after she transforms, she tries to imbibe her own blood—to poison herself. Bromley attempts to intervene, but she foists her bleeding wrist on him, daring him to drink. And, for a moment, eerie intimations of an Electra complex wriggle out, and provide the movie with the morbid sexuality that has given vampires their cultural longevity. Like it or not, their myth has endured in part because they make necrophilia a seamy, train-wreck turn-on. (Frankenstein’s monster isn’t as kinky—though, depending on whose body parts he’s assembled from, he has potential.) Victorian mores are famously at the core of Dracula, but so is the encoded allure of sexual deviance. Stephenie Meyer, author of the Twilight books, merely continues the parochial hypocrisy—hanging smutty pin-ups on teenie-boppers’ walls, and then promising the kids a prize if they keep their hands idle. Daybreakers isn’t that hoity-toity; but it pumps blood everwhich way except one—down the channel that forks before hitting porno theaters and art houses.

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Christopher Plummer, playing the immortal Dr. P., is at the center of the director’s three-ring circus. Looking like a rag-and-bone Father Time, he trucks around London in a mobile theater, footlights and all. At show time, the doctor (made up like a swami) meditates—in a (typically, alcohol-induced) stupor—while his 15-going-on-16 daughter Valentina (Lily Cole) and a teen-tramp straggler they’ve adopted, Anton (Andrew Garfield), incite on-lookers to hop onstage and push through the shiny plastic flaps of their mirror—the titular “imaginarium.” And in there is where the head scratching starts. It is apparently an entry into the doctor’s imagination; but it’s also a manifestation of the visitor’s. Alrighty. But let’s shove on.

The troupe, which its diminutive driver (Verne Troyer) describes as being “on the margins of society,” rescues another straggler: Tony (the late Heath Ledger), a smooth-talking amnesiac with some sort of connection to children’s charities and the Russian mob. And then, of course, there’s the devil (Tom Waits—who’s as suitable to play Satan as Morgan Freeman is God), who got the doctor—a montane monk-cum-slakeless gambler—into this mess. He granted Parnassus immortality on the condition that if the doc had a daughter, the devil would inherit her on her 16th birthday. To ensure that Valentina doesn’t celebrate her super-sweet 16 in Hell, Parnassus shakes on another wager: If he can collect five souls faster than the devil can, he can save the girl.

It goes without saying that Ledger’s untimely death in 2008 hampered this production; but the actor had completed all the “real-world” shoots beforehand, so needed only to be replaced in the imaginarium sequences. Resourcefully, Gilliam and company recruited some of Ledger’s friends (Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Colin Farrell)  to take his place in a world in which men can change their face. (You can tell how this giddy dreamworld has affected me. I might need to consult a doctor other than Parnassus.) Gilliam is free to fiddle with the physics of his fantasy scenes, but he ought to throw us a bone in “reality.” Ledger’s swan-song performance is energetic and full of slippery delight; but Tony’s motivations are so obscure that it doesn’t amount to much of a role. From the 92+% of the movie that I managed to see, I was unable to discern whether Tony was actually amnesic, or just pretending, and for how long. I wasn’t sure what the significance of his flute was, or what relationship, if any, he had to the devil. Were any of his motives in helping the troupe unselfish, and if they were self-serving, then how?

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