Let the Right One In **1/2

Director: Tomas Alfredson
Cast: Kare Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson
Per Ragnar, Henrik Dahl, Karin Bergquist, Patrik Rydmark

"Are you a vampire?" asks 12 year old Oskar (Hedebrant) to his friend Eli (Leandersson).
"I feed off blood" she answers. Not so much an evasion, this response sets the mood for Tomas Alfredson's unique coming of age story, which happens to include vampires, but isn't a "vampire movie".
Set in 1980's Sweden, the opening scene has Oskar staring out his window, touching his reflection on the glass expecting that someday it's gonna touch him back. His parents have recently separated and he's the target for bullies in his school.
He plays alone in his building's playground where he kills trees while uttering lines from "Deliverance".
One snowy night he meets Eli, who has just moved into his building. She smells weird and only comes out as night, but Oskar still likes her enough to ask her to "go steady".
A creepy valentine to first love if there ever was one, "Let the Right One In" observes the way in which we're drawn up to others by what we have in common with them.
For both Oskar and Eli it's their loneliness that brings them together, Eli is restricted by her species' limitations and by her fear that she will want to have her friends for dinner.
As a love story, the film achieves some absolutely moving moments, especially because the vampire take can be interpreted in a million different ways as a metaphor for acceptance (it's not by coincidence that most of the film you actually wonder if Eli is a boy or a girl, not that it makes much of a difference in the end) and the mature performances by both leads make for an engaging, if abit distrubing experience.
But as a coming of age story, Alfredson debates on whether the nature of the love he seeks within his cahracters is enough salvation for them to fight their inner nature.
Eli expresses at one point that while she needs to kill, Oskar's thirst for revenge is avoidable and somehow unnatural.
But is it? Society has brought us up to solve everything using extremes which usually include violence. Alfredson might've tried to explore the nature of violence in spite of danger, but instead of using this vehicle as a more optimistic opportunity he thrusts both points of view and forces us to choose.
When Oskar finally confronts his bully, are we really supposed to cheer because he threatens to strike back with a pipe? Or are we supposed to believe that it is love which has made him "brave"?
Avoiding vampiric staples like overt sexualization and lust, Alfredson is at his best when he grasps the moment between childhood and adolescence (this tween fantasia does not include Jonathan Lipnicki); using Hoyte Van Hoytema's chilling cinematography, it's always what we can't see what becomes more haunting.
But the director has forgotten that even the undead are hormonal and most of the decisions taken by his characters stay at a more cerebral level and up to the intellectualization of those watching.

Let the National Board of Review In.

This year's winners are:

Best Film: "Slumdog Millionaire"
Best Director: David Fincher, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
Best Actor: Clint Eastwood, "Gran Torino"
Best Actress: Anne Hathaway, "Rachel Getting Married"
Best Supporting Actor: Josh Brolin, "Milk"
Best Supporting Actress: Penélope Cruz, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"
Best Original Screenplay: Nick Schenk, "Gran Torino"
Best Adapted Screenplay: Simon Beaufoy, "Slumdog Millionaire"; Eric Roth, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
Best Animated Feature: "WALL-E"
Best Foreign Language Film: "Mongol"

Thrilled about Penélope and Anne! Not so much about the Clint love fest (both his films...really?), surprised about the snub for the big foreign language films and slightly pleased that they finally stopped the Ledger posthumous slam dunk wishes.
Read the rest of the winners here.

[On how he writes]

"...a goose quill dipped in venom."
- Clifton Webb as Waldon Lydecker in "Laura".

Encounters at the End of the World ***

Director: Werner Herzog

After announcing that he isn't in Antarctica to make another movie about "fluffy penguins", visionary director Werner Herzog goes deep into the mysterious continent to bring together something that is part travelogue, part science film and part philosophical exploration.
The film begins when he arrives to McMurdo Research Station, the largest human settlement in the continent that has become some sort of post-hippie colony where bankers end up as bus drivers and descendants of Aztec royalty work with plumbing; people as many as they're different all come together to discover the beauty that comes with the unknown.
Herzog condemns some of their mundane activites like yoga as "abominable" and seems ecstatic once he leaves the colony and goes into the wild.
There the film is divided into chapters; we meet a group of deep sea divers collecting mono cellular creatures, a linguist expert who now looks after the colony crops, a group of volcanologists looking deep into the heart of the planet and then he does see some penguins (which ironically have the most haunting effect in the entire film), and the reserved man who studies them.
Herzog is obviously working on a different level of thought, which is why the film is uneven as a documentary, he refuses to settle for didactism and offers his own ideosynchratic take on almost everything he observes (think more "Sans Soleil" than "March of the Penguins").
His narration gives the film the edge which sets it apart and makes it even more enjoyable (his questions towards the pinguin expert and the random-ness of his Napoleon Bonaparte reference will erupt giggles and make you ponder on the standards humanity has chosen to measure mental illness), you can feel him smile through the lens when one of the scientists compares seal calls to Pink Floyd music and he seems overjoyed when he wonders on how alien archaelogists will catalogue our planet once we're gone.
The movie is concerned with global warming and the eventual demise of human kind, but Herzog isn't an alarmist, much less a pessimist, and in his loving wanderlust he evokes magic when he makes us conscious of all the things going on in the planet without us knowing.
He points out that now we have lost our original sense of adventure and we do things to be in books, without telling us that he belongs to the first kind the way he embraces everything will almost child like wonder is enough for us to understand what he means.
The documentary covers various elements and because of this sometimes it feels aimless, perhaps it might've worked better as a television serial giving him chance to dig deeper into every particular field, but also this would've removed the final cut from its quirkiness.
Sometimes it feels as if you're watching an old fashioned slide show from one of his vacations, he's having a drink while he recounts his adventures and you're the sedentary kid on his couch,
this also brings the film its biggest foe, because not everyone will want to travel along with him.

The Assassination of the Film Critic by the Coward Establishment.

During the last couple of weeks a lot has been made about the fact that newspapers and print mediums have been firing critics en masse.
Literature reviews are scarce in mainstream newspapers, culture critics have been replaced by uneducated gossip writers and not counting established film writers like Roger Ebert, the idea of film criticism has been reduced to PR clippings that focus on Angelina's latest scandal while promoting her new movie.
It's truly a shame that society has reduced the debate of arts to a cult instead of encouraging it, since talk about art inspires art.
As Nick James reminds us "Never mind that it was a bunch of critics that transformed cinema in the 1950s to create the nouvelle vague, or that another bunch paved the way for Britain's "Angry Young Men" to transform British cinema in the 1960s."
Roger Ebert writes a fantastic, funny piece in his blog and "Sight and Sound" offers a fascinating take by James on how the British are facing this phenomenon. Both articles are a meta reminder that without these people there wouldn't be pieces demanding pieces were being written and what a boring world would that be.

You Gotta Give Them Hope.

"If we learn from history that the struggle goes on, eventually we will win and all the President has to do, or the Governor, is just turn the pages of history a little faster"
- Harvey Milk

To the Woodsman.

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work...I want to achieve it by not dying"
- Woody Allen

With his talent and natural genius you know he has made sure his work will live forever, with his determination and energy (still making a movie per year) you believe it's just quite possible he'll achieve physical immortality as well.
To the Woodsman on his 73rd birthday, may the movie g-ds shine their light on him for decades to come!
Now go out and celebrate by watching one of his films...