Holiday Films for Atypical Tastes

Film companies usually release their best films (or the films they consider most likely to get award nominations) during this time of the year, so it's surprising that there are relatively few really good movies playing right now. Still, if you're looking for a night out, I've recently seen three films (all playing in town) that I can recommend: Up in the Air, The Road, and Red Cliff. But be warned, none of these are traditional holiday feel good fare.

Up in the Air, the new film by Jason Reitman, director of Juno and Thank You for Smoking, is the best of the bunch with George Clooney playing Ryan Bingham, a professional corporate downsizer who's hired by companies to fire their employees. While this idea has the potential to be a first rate downer or a tear-jerker, it is neither. It's a funny, witty, complex film that looks at the value of connections between people - what we want, what we're willing to reveal, and the choices we make to protect ourselves. The scenes involving the layoffs are handled respectfully and never for laughs, giving us insight into the emotional armor that Bingham has built up over the years. All said, it's a very funny, moving film with one of Clooney's most emotionally charged performances.

On the surface, The Road, drawn from Cormac MacCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is one grim tale, but beneath this struggle of a father and his young son to survive a holocaust that destroyed all animals, plants, and most humans, is a beautiful look at the love between a father and his son. Viggo Mortensen gives an intense performance as "the man" trying to prepare his son for the world and teach him right from wrong in an environment riddled with cannibals, cold, hunger, and violence. And as can happen, it's the son that ends up teaching the father. The film asks us to consider the very nature of humanity and manages to find it in an unbelievable bleak environment.

Red Cliff, John Woo's film about the Battle of Red Cliffs (208 A.D.) toward the end of China’s Han Dynasty, is highest grossing film ever in China and some other Asian countries. The most expensive Asian-financed film ever made, Red Cliff  is a visual tour-de-force, featuring a cast of thousands, court intrigue, sweeping battle scenes, slo-mo fight scenes, and a detailed look at battlefield tactics and strategy. Beautiful in its scope and execution, particularly in the climatic naval battle, the movie is an old-style epic with new style CGI effects—two warriors battle, in part for the love of a woman, leaving thousands dead in their wake. The 148-minute version that's playing in the U.S. now was edited down by Woo from his original 2-part, 5 hour film released in China.