Eugene weekly., February 21, 2013, Page 13, Image 13

TOP 10
BY MOLLY TEMPLETON
1. Holy Motors
4. Lawless
Holy Motors’s opening features the fi lm’s director, a movie theater and an audience
that stares back at us. Surreal, mystifying, intimate and brazen, Holy Motors tucks con-
cerns into peculiar vignettes; you have to tease out its meaning, or your version of its
meaning, piece by piece. Is it a twisted story of a man’s life, being different characters at
different times? Is it just a showpiece for Denis Lavant, the fi lm’s impossible chameleon
of a star? Is it mostly concerned with the wear and tear of art and performance? Holy
Motors is a world unto itself; it reads as if the contents of director Leos Carax’s head
poured onto the screen. Nothing surprised me more, or felt more true and whole, than this
disjointed, dense, oddly personal fi lm.
The director of The Proposition with an unbelievably talented cast — Jessica Chas-
tain, a surprising Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Jason Clarke and Gary Oldman — what,
exactly, kept Lawless from the success it deserved? A beautifully acted period piece about
Prohibition, family and the ever-blurry line between authority and morality, Lawless was
marketed as if it were a late-summer diversion, a shoot-out with moonshine. But anyone
who’s seen a Hillcoat fi lm knows to expect something very different. Hardy speaks in
grunts; Chastain’s character remains a mystery, but a vital one; the brutality is ugly and
plain. This year was full of fi lms that considered the violence in America’s past and pres-
ent; this movie more than deserves to be discussed in the same breath as the rest of them.
5. Django Unchained
2. Zero Dark Thirty
While I wasn’t particularly intrigued by the notion of a movie about the hunt for Osa-
ma bin Laden, I cared a lot about what Kathryn Bigelow was going to do after The Hurt
Locker. Zero Dark Thirty revisits similar territory to her Oscar-winning fi lm, and not
just in that it’s about the Middle East: Jessica Chastain’s Maya is as driven, intense and
obsessed with her work as was Jeremy Renner’s William James. William’s necessity was
right in front of him; Maya’s is nebulous, variable. It’s her intuition, her need to follow
things through that propels this fi lm, shrinking a manhunt into its tedious, ugly pieces, and
fi nding no heroes among those who carry it out.
Django is all over the map: funny, brutal, giddy, vicious, satisfying, horrifying. Director
Quentin Tarantino draws specifi c lines around his subjects: violence against the mostly mo-
ronic white men (loopy, scary Leonardo DiCaprio is the worst) is cartoonish, with spurting
gouts of blood; violence against black bodies is brutal and believable, almost too much so.
That’s part of the point — you’re supposed to feel queasy and foul, and hate these racists
as much as Django (the excellent Jamie Foxx) does. But you’re not off the hook for do-
ing so. Django is the hero of this semi-Western, but not the embodiment of Tarantino’s
thesis: That’s Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz), the dentist-turned-bounty hunter who says he
hates slavery but has no qualms about turning it to his advantage. Watch Schultz as he and
Django, on a quest to free Django’s wife, near their destination. As Foxx’s face tightens, as
he reaches for his gun more often, Schultz begins to quail. He’s set this train in motion, but
fear creeps in as he realizes that helping Django means giving up some of his power. Rox-
ane Gay said it best: “Django Unchained isn’t about a black man reclaiming his freedom.
It’s about a white man working through his own racial demons and white guilt.”
6. Safety Not Guaranteed
3. Amour
No one expected Michael Haneke to make a movie about love — not after Caché
and Funny Games, or even the stark, darkly beautiful The White Ribbon. And Amour is
about love, yes, but it’s as disconcerting an experience as we’ve come to expect from the
German director: unsentimental, diffi cult, solitary and true. You may watch this fi lm with
someone, but you’re alone as you sit and consider how you relate to the characters. What
choices would you make if your options seemed so few?
I would like every smart, thoughtful, imperfect romantic comedy to star Aubrey Plaza
— so dry, so stoically uncertain — and Mark Duplass, who had one hell of a year. Director
Colin Trevorrow and writer Derek Connolly let you wonder about Kenneth (Duplass), a
grocery store clerk who puts an ad in the paper looking for a time-traveling companion.
Is he unhinged? Does he think he’s serious? Plaza, as the magazine intern who tags along
with her self-obsessed boss to investigate, takes Kenneth seriously and doesn’t; she’s
always right up close and simultaneously a step back, analyzing and doubting as she gets
involved. Next to all the year’s big-ticket issue fi lms, Safety is comfortable, personal and
smart.
eugeneweekly.com • February 21. 2013
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