Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

dir. Michael Winterbottom

"I'm Tristram Shandy, the main character in the story, the leading role," says Steve Coogan in wig and makeup and 18th-century togs, strolling through the garden on the set of a movie. He is the star of the movie we're watching, and he's also the star of the movie we're watching him make. The movie we're watching him make (are you lost?) is an adaptation of Tristram Shandy, the novel that Laurence Sterne published in nine volumes between 1759 and 1767, which students of English literature have been turning upside down and staring at with crossed eyes for more than 200 years, and that only an idiot (or someone who didn't understand the novel) would try to adapt into a straight-ahead movie. It's not a straight-ahead book. It is a book about a man named Tristram Shandy who's trying to write a book about his life, although not exactly, because the book you read is the book he's writing. That is, when he's not doodling. Long before Faulkner or Vonnegut or Eggers or Foer dropped drawings and charts into their books, Sterne interrupted himself with stars, sequences of squiggly lines, and squares filled entirely with black. The book is, as Coogan explains in this movie, "a postmodern classic written before there was any modern to be post about."

It isn't five minutes into the movie before a boy is screaming. He is peeing through an open window when the pane of glass suddenly dislodges, falls, and circumcises him. Waaaaah-aaaaah!, howls the young Tristram. Waaaaah-aaaaah! Waaaaah-aaaaah! He screams bloody fucking murder. Waaaaah-aaaaah! But Coogan isn't having it. This child actor isn't doing it right, he says. The child actor disagrees. He thinks he's doing the scene just right. Coogan asks for a different child actor. The child actor continues to practice his screaming. Do you see how this is brilliant? It's a scene in a movie about making a scene for a movie (as the book is about writing a book); it puts the older Tristram in conversation with his younger self (which is a theme of the book); it's self-mocking (actors talking to actors about what actors do can never be taken seriously); but it's also, within all these frames, about the bloody-fucking-murderous pain of getting your dick chopped up (which would hurt—like childbirth, or being wounded at war, or being passed over in love, all forms of real pain that are addressed later on).

This movie, like Sterne's book, is hilarious. The plastic and fabric womb Coogan has to be lowered into (much is made of the birthing process in the book) is perfect. The rhythm is slick ("I am getting ahead of myself, I am not yet born," Coogan suddenly says, then there is a slight pause, then the camera slides somewhere else in time). The cast is excellent—and then it gets better. Halfway through, the producers decide they need someone famous to be in this movie, someone American, so they write Widow Wadman back into the script and hire Gillian Anderson to play her. Which inspires massive anxiety, since the cast and crew is full of X-Files fans. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

Eight Below

dir. Frank Marshall

Eight Below is an action-adventure movie, but the action is sparse and the adventure consists mainly of animal starvation. The sled dogs who star in the film are pretty (horrible watercolor portraits of the team appear as the credits roll), but they don't have facial expressions and they certainly never talk. It's not hard to figure out why Disney thought this astringent formula would go down like warm milk. If a continent can be said to have fluctuating approval ratings, then Antarctica is at the height of its popularity. Even conservatives now admit that global warming is real—a concession that throws the ecosystem into the flattering light reserved for fragile, dying things. More importantly for Disney's purposes, the international hit March of the Penguins focused attention on the noble challenge of survival in hostile conditions. (Not for nothing does Eight Below include a spliced-in shot of slippery Emperor adolescents—they made the preview audience squeal in unison.)

The great thing about an action movie set in Antarctica is that very little happens there, and it's pointless to try to pretend otherwise. In Eight Below, there is a stirring sequence involving a well-trained husky named Maya who saves the life of an idiot scientist, but otherwise there's no action to speak of at the National Science Foundation research station. The residents deal hands of solitaire, collect rocks, play chess, and sleep. Then there's a storm and everyone has to evacuate. Head musher Gerry, played by Paul Walker ("Handsome! So handsome!"), must leave his beloved pups behind.

The rest of the film is a slow, weirdly enjoyable story of the dogs' feral existence, interspersed with Gerry's tormented efforts to hitch a ride back and save them. The dogs hunt some birds. The dogs settle in for the night. The dogs chase some aurora australis. A dog dies. The dogs scavenge some orca blubber and have a nasty run-in with an animatronic leopard seal. Ice shards sparkle, and the sky is wide, and it's impossible not to get caught up in the camaraderie of the pack. It's Survivor, doggie-style. ANNIE WAGNER

Neil Young: Heart of Gold

dir. Jonathan Demme

Jonathan Demme knows how to shoot concert films. Even people who don't care for the Talking Heads can get something out of the frenetic spectacle of 1984's Stop Making Sense, and aside from Martin Scorsese's affectionate, graceful treatment of the Band in 1978's Last Waltz, few directors can step aside and let the performer lead the viewer's gaze the way Demme does. This unobtrusive approach benefits Neil Young: Heart of Gold, documenting a 2005 performance at Nashville's hallowed Ryman Auditorium—a seemingly celebratory concert that took place in the wake of Young's recovery from surgery for a nearly fatal brain aneurysm. Joined by a sprawling assortment of accompaniments, including a gospel choir, an intermittent string section, vocal contributions from his wife of 20 years, and the angelic Emmylou Harris, Young works his way through songs from Prairie Wind, the understandably downbeat record he made shortly after his diagnosis.

The material makes for a rather sleepy first half as Young ponders mortality, dreams best discarded, and the accumulation of life lessons and inerasable memories. It isn't weak songwriting, but the pacing is so languid and the musicianship so surgically precise that there's zero sense of momentum. Blessedly, this inertia evaporates almost instantaneously when Young pulls out the back catalog and unfurls songs like "I Am a Child" and the titular "Heart of Gold." He also plays the most moving version of "Harvest Moon" I've ever heard. The massive ensemble and clunky backdrops depicting various, um, prairie-related scenes occasionally make you feel as if you're watching A Mighty Wind 2: Now With Better Musicians. But this is a minor equivocation—the film will undoubtedly thrill any fan of Canada's most treasured music export. HANNAH LEVIN

Freedomland

dir. Joe Roth

Richard Price writes Books—big, chewy New Jersey melodramas that combine meticulous plotting with realistically frazzled, just-this-side-of-haywire characterizations. Given the buzz flying off any given page, a jump to the screen would seem preordained. With the notable exception of Philip Kaufman's The Wanderers, however, the film translations of the author's work to date (Bloodbrothers, Clockers) have come off as not just muddled but somehow inert. Even with a slew of talented actors and a screenplay by Price, this adaptation of his 1998 novel Freedomland falls into the same frustrating category. All the mechanisms are in place, but the juice is sorely lacking.

Despite some understandable slimming down of secondary characters and subplots, the core of the novel remains intact: Heart-of-the-projects cop (Samuel L. Jackson) catches the case of a former crackhead (Julianne Moore) whose 4-year-old son goes missing in a botched carjacking. As he begins to explore the nagging discrepancies in her testimony, the simmering tension between the cops and the residents of the projects begins to boil over.

It would take a firm directorial hand to keep pace with Price's griddle-quick plot. Such head-down bullishness, however, seems beyond the grasp of Joe (Christmas with the Kranks) Roth, who proceeds to make a well-intentioned botch of things, mucking up would-be intense dialogue with showy camera tricks and drenching a crucial third-act riot in syrupy slo-mo. Matters are not helped by an atypically bad performance by Moore, whose manic, flopsweaty presence is genuinely tough to watch, but probably not in the way she intended.

I would be remiss, however, not to point out the blistering scene in which social worker Edie Falco delivers a brilliantly rhetorical (and intensely novelistic) interrogation of a potential suspect. In a successful movie, a character bit like this would serve as a devastating linchpin to the drama at large. Here, that hoary old thing about a diamond in the rough applies. ANDREW WRIGHT