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After finishing Let The Great World Spin it felt only appropriate to watch Man on Wire, the Oscar-winning documentary about Philippe Petit and his crew pulling off “the artistic crime of the century.” Director James Marsh treats it as such, presenting Petit’s feat as a heist and his helpers as accomplices. The film is like Ocean’s 11 remade as a documentary but with way less money at stake.

The day leading up to the walk (which took place the morning of August 7, 1974) is recreated with time stamps for dramatic effect: the South Tower crew arriving via van at 3:58 p.m. with an invented work order; the North Tower crew entering at 4:25 p.m. with fake IDs and an architect’s tube containing a bow and arrow instead of blueprints; the rooftop preparations beginning at 11:08 p.m. after Petit had been hiding under a tarp for hours to evade security guards on patrol. As characters enter the narrative, Marsh introduces them by first name, often emerging from shadow and with a musical flourish; the effect is to remind the viewer that while Petit alone made the walk, it took a village to pull it off.

While the film is a seamless blend of interviews, reenactments and actual footage of Petit training, the famous walk itself is presented only in stills, which does nothing to limit its power. One picture of Petit in midair shows him beaming; an assistant says of the moment, “I saw his face changing. He was very intense and all of a sudden there was something like a relief in him. And from that time I thought, ‘That’s it. He’s secure.’” Secure enough that Petit danced, ran, saluted, even laid down on the wire. When police arrived on the roof, he provoked them by walking to the edge of the building before turning around to perform some more.

Back on the ground, the question spectators and reporters yell at Petit as police escort him away is, “Why did you do it?” The question exacerbates Petit. “Why? Why? That was a very American, finger-snapping question,” he says. “I did something magnificent and mysterious, and I got a practical, ‘Why?’ And the beauty of it is that I didn’t have any why.”

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If you missed it, Petit pulled off the most acrobatic Oscar acceptance speech of all time last February. Enjoy.

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Everyone who’s anyone as an esteemed cultural critic is slapping together a “Best of the Decade” retrospective, be it magazines (Paste, Entertainment Weekly, New York), newspapers (The Guardian, The Onion), or The Mecum Family. We will attempt no such exhaustive glimpse back in this space — we’re busy enough contemplating the Best of 2009.

However, we invite you to be as exhaustive as you like. What movie, book, CD or TV show defined the aughts for you? When you think back on the 2000s, which piece of art endures?

If The Mecums didn’t put Gosford Park on their Top Ten list, we wonder: What did they put?

Other thoughts scroll through our mind at night. Like:

What album touched the depths of Emily Huie’s soul in the past ten years?

Which film renewed Scott Guldin’s faith in humanity after his tragic pre-millennial dirigible accident?

What TV show — besides “The Gilmore Girls” — did Andrew Cashmere turn to after “Becker” was cancelled in 2004?

And what book — besides It’s Hard Out Here For a Shrimp — did Mike Allen pick up for inspiration when his roller derby career went south after his 2001 career-ending injury?

Of course, you are also welcome to write about, say, the Best Worst Things of the past ten years. Like: The Best Bad Movies of the 2000s. (The A.V. Club ranks Wicker Man #2 on its list.) Or: The Best NBA Players to Root Against. Or: The Best Evil Company Spokespeople.

Invent your own categories.

Be creative.

And comment now!

Fantastic Mr. Fox, flanked by loyal Opossum and demolitions expert Beaver.

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What else are we thankful for this Thanksgiving? Well, for starters, the superb Fantastic Mr. Fox. As children, neither of us read this particular Roald Dahl book, and we didn’t know what we were getting into except that it was directed by one of our favorites, Wes Anderson.

Fantastic Mr. Fox was filmed using stop-motion animation and wasn’t short on chapter titles, one of Anderson’s highly stylized tricks, to mark different scenes. The voices (George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, among others) and dialogue are pitch-perfect. Of course Bill Murray would play a badger, of course Michael Gambon was the skinny, slightly-crazed and drunk corporate villain, and of course Owen Wilson was the Whackbat coach. (What’s Whackbat? See the film to find out; we promise it’s cooler than quidditch.)

The film is visually stunning and the music catchy, but like Anderson’s other films, Fox sticks with the viewer because of individual moments. It’s hard not to tear up when Mrs. Fox tells her husband that she’s pregnant; it’s difficult not to laugh when Ash (Schwartzman) tells his crush that she’s a “disloyal” lab partner for flirting with Ash’s cousin Kristofferson in chemistry class; and it’s nearly impossible not to be struck (with awe? inspiration? the beauty of the wild world?) by the sublime moment near the end of the film when Mr. Fox and a wolf sharing a long distance fist salute.

Other perks? A Jarvis Cocker song; Mr. Fox’s versatility with Latin names; the rampant but child-friendly cussing; and Willem Dafoe’s character, a menacing rat, whose body and speech habits invoke Jesus from The Big Lebowski.

Those of you who are Wes Anderson devotees will note the striking similarities between Mr. Fox and Royal Tenenbaum (not to mention Danny Ocean), and likewise with Ash and Chas Tenenbaum. Of course, every Wes Anderson film bears some relation to one another, which in our book is only a good thing.

The less said about this, the better.

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Twilight may not have been a good movie, but it was at least a fun one. You know, the kind you could watch four times in ten days.

New Moon is not only a bad movie, it is one you will probably not wish to see ever again. Unless you enjoy painfully long, talky scenes of teenage angst and cheesy CGI werewolves. Each of the three stars, Bella (Kristen Stewart), Edward (Robert Pattinson) and Jacob (Taylor Lautner, whose muscular physique and sexual charisma both resemble a rock), are stuck doing the same thing over and over again. Bella is either sullen or conflicted. Edward is either conflicted or taking downers before every scene. Jacob is either taking his shirt off or thinking about ways to take his shirt off. Put these three sad sacks in a love triangle involving motorcycle repair, attempted suicide and border disputes, then throw in disembodied wisps of Edward scolding Bella every time she wants to do something dangerous (like, say, hop on a bike with a strange man 20 or 30 years her senior … c’mon, Edward, let her live a little!), not to mention some criminally repressed vampire types called Volturi, and you’ve got a real stinker of a movie.

As for the soundtrack: Pretty good. The Lykke Li and Thom Yorke tracks are the high points, although in the movie Yorke’s song ( “Hearing Damage”) has the misfortune of being the backdrop for an interminably long werewolf-vampire chase scene that appears to be stuck on repeat.

Manohla Dargis asks the essential Nic Cage question: Is there a method to his madness?

She observes,

What makes Mr. Cage such an unusual screen presence and an even more atypical movie star is that he’s habitually very good and very bad from movie to movie, and sometimes scene to scene in a single film.

But Voreblog readers knew this a long time ago.

Speaking of Nic Cage, you may have heard that he’s had some financial difficulties recently. Unlike the rest of us, his are the result of outbidding Leonardo DiCaprio for a $276,000 dinosaur skull.

Way to go, Nic!

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(h/t Mark Hoobler on the Dargis review)

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You get so used to Hollywood screwing up (by dumbing down) adaptations of kids books that it’s difficult to know what to say when you watch a movie like Where the Wild Things Are. The worst thing that can be said about it is that it’s not really a movie for eight-year-olds. Seeing as we’re not eight-year-olds, we’re fine with this. The best thing that can be said is that it gets childhood almost exactly right. Credit for this goes not just to director Spike Jonze and co-writer Dave Eggers, but most of all to young Max Records, who as Max captures all the wonderment, loneliness, imagination and terror of growing up. There’s a scene when he and Carol (voiced perfectly by James Gandolfini) race up to a cliff overlooking the sea. Another Wild Thing runs up behind them and bumps into Max, nearly knocking him over the ledge. There’s a split second when it appears Max might fall, and you feel the danger of this strange world of imagination, no matter how imaginary it may be. That’s the tightrope walk of growing up that the movie captures beautifully. Aside from the second half dragging a bit, the movie was a pleasure to watch. Our favorite characters may have been KW’s friends Bob and Terry. We won’t give anything away, but let’s just say they tell pretty good jokes.

Anthony Lane of The New Yorker is my (Ben) favorite film critic (though Jerry Grit finds him too fizzy and prefers the magazine’s other reviewer, the workmanlike David Denby, while Mark Hoobler would contend A.O. Scott is a better judge of cinema than both). I have read hundreds of Lane’s reviews, the bulk of them from his superb collection, Nobody’s Perfect. While all movie tastes differ, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve taken serious issue with Lane’s consideration and judgment. (Foreshadowing: This will happen in the fourth graf of this post.) Like fellow New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg is on politics and James Fallows on media, or how Randall Jarrell was on poetry, Lane has the persuasive ability to convince you of the rightness of his judgment. He has an abundance of a great critic’s indispensable virtue: fairness. (Not coincidentally, my least favorite critics — Walter Kirn, Dale Peck, Christopher Hitchens, to say nothing of political commentators – strike me as the most unfair.)

Lane’s recent review of Brüno might seem an exception. Erin and I had both been weighing whether or not to see it. We are “Da Ali G Show” fans and thoroughly enjoyed Borat (me probably a bit more than Erin), and we’ve already incorporated a new voreslang from the Brüno trailer ( “Zat’s such a Samantha thing to zay”). Lane eviscerates the film, saying

I’m afraid that “Brüno” feels hopelessly complicit in the prejudices that it presumes to deride. You can’t honestly defend your principled lampooning of homophobia when nine out of every ten images that you project onscreen comply with the most threadbare cartoons of gay behavior. A schoolboy who watches a pirated DVD of this film will look at the prancing Austrian and find more, not fewer, reasons to beat up the kid on the playground who doesn’t like girls. There is, on the evidence of this movie, no such thing as gay love; there is only gay sex, a superheated substitute for love, with its own code of vulcanized calisthenics whose aim is not so much to sate the participants as to embarrass onlookers from the straight—and therefore straitlaced—society beyond.

We both read the review independently of one another and both arrived at the same conclusion: We will never see Brüno. It’s not that we wouldn’t be amused at parts (as reliable critics Erik Brueggemann and my brother Dan attest we would) or that we consider ourselves squeamish (although we don’t jump at the opportunity to watch a talking penis). It’s that, with Lane’s review irreversibly embedded in our heads, we could not be convinced that any other verdict would be more appropriate than his own. A brutal review, yes, but to our minds not an unfair one.

Is this closed-mindedness? Shouldn’t we at least arrive at our own conclusion? There are arguments for that. But given the price of a movie ticket today, it’s an argument we’re not going to have.

This brings us to Lane’s take on The Half-Blood Prince, reviewed here yesterday. Simply put, it was unfair. Lane woke up on the wrong side of the bed or was bullied by director David Yates in junior high or something. He reads the film’s style as “dour and heavy,” which I could chalk up to an honest disagreement in mood. But when he writes that the

bruised, lead-and-sepia tone that [Yates] uses to tint the entire landscape of the movie [is] not only … lowering to behold; it also scrubs away any remembrance that this saga of gifted kids was once a bit of a jape. Why is it that, from Gotham City to Hogwarts, the official word has gone out that anything dark and edgy is a de-facto guarantee of weight and impact? Just what is so serious about horny adolescents cooking potions?

For one, the film is funny. We’ve expressed our fondness for Jim Broadbent’s performance, and Michael Gambon wrings some dry humor from Dumbledore (as does the marvelous Evanna Lynch as Luna Lovegood). Secondly, the series becomes increasingly dark and serious as it progresses, though it never choked off the pleasure of Rowling’s magical universe. The films, especially the last two, have done the same. If anything, they still play it too safe: in the book when Harry forces Dumbledore to drink from the cup, Dumbledore screams, “I want to die! I want to die!” and later, “KILL ME!” That would have been a truly unnerving scene to recreate on film, which settles for a reluctant Dumbledore drinking the cup and then appearing to be in need of a very long nap.

Lane’s final jibe is to imply that Half-Blood Prince devolves into sub-Tolkien borrowing. He’s right to see parallels (the dead Aragog, the Gollum-like Inferi) but wrong to conclude Potter’s universe is inferior by comparison. It is different, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as films, were superior in skill and cohesion. There were also only three of them, helmed by one (superlative) director, Peter Jackson. Both series should be viewed on their own terms.

What Lord of the Rings and the last four Harry Potter films share is that we’ll happily cozy up to them on some future rainy afternoon when we need comfort food from the DVD library. As for my tiff with Mr. Lane, I suspect we’ll soon put it behind us. I once again yield the floor to his superior judgment.

They’ve come a long way, baby.

The last director before David Yates to get back-to-back films in the Harry Potter franchise was the franchise’s first — and worst — director, Chris Columbus. Columbus was responsible for the drearily unimaginative Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets, both of which reduced J.K. Rowling’s world to what an adult imagined a pre-teen audience would want. The real magic of Rowling’s books is that her charms transcend age and demographics. Why a studio thought the director of Home Alone 2 and Stepmom could pull off a similar magic trick is beyond us. (We extend our apologies to those of you who are Percy Jackson fans.)

It took Alfonso Cuarón in Prisoner of Azkaban to liberate the films from their slavish devotion to the books. His Hogwarts was dark and moody. The characters became more shaded and emotionally complex. The special effects weren’t deployed simply to draw attention to themselves. Mike Newell then took the baton and did an admirable job with Goblet of Fire despite the fact it ended tragically with the death of R-Patz (Cedric Diggory).

Yates took over with Order of the Phoenix, and you could argue that he has benefited from a trio of young actors who have matured quite impressively over the course of six films. That would be true. It would also be true that the series itself made a jump between books two and three, from wonderfully captivating children’s literature to literature, period, and that it would only be natural for the films to follow suit. Point taken. (You may stop reading now, Mrs. Columbus.)

But no matter. With his two entries in the series, Yates has given Harry Potter a jolt of menace and darkness equal to the text. He’s also given a little zing to the numerous romantic subplots, capturing teenage lust as chastely envisioned by Rowling herself. ( “Snogging” just doesn’t have a dirty ring to it.) Ron’s efforts to prevent Harry and Ginny from falling for each other were among the film’s more amusing touches, as was Ron under the influence of a love potion.

The most amusement in the film comes from Jim Broadbent, whose portrayal of Horace Slughorn may be even better than what Rowling drew up. Broadbent’s eyes enlarge and shrink in direct proportion to one another, never on the same page. In honor of his performance we’d like the Academy to create an Oscar for Facial Gestures. (He’s especially funny to watch when he’s on the periphery of a scene.) We couldn’t decide which description fit him best: a British version of an older, more rumpled Bill Murray, or National Lampoon’s Cousin Eddie once he gets really senile.

The cave scene where Harry and Dumbledore find the horcrux was perfectly imagined. If you read the book — and even if you didn’t — you knew exactly what was coming when Harry reached down to cup the water from the lake, and still we jumped. Both of us also caught in Draco Malfoy the disturbing hint of a lonely outcast about to retaliate in violence against his school. He’s on the verge of becoming the Eric Harris/Dylan Klebold of Hogwarts.

Neither of us have read the book in a couple years, so we weren’t distracted by deviations or omissions from the text with one exception: We could’ve done without the final scene in the tower where Harry, Ron and Hermione provide exposition and gaze hopefully toward film seven (or, more appropriately, films seven and eight). Where — and here’s your spoiler alert notice if you’re not one of the dozen people left on the planet who doesn’t know how it all ends — was Dumbledore’s funeral? Where was Harry telling Ginny they could not be together because of the task ahead of him? That scene in the book was enough to plant real doubt in our minds about whether Harry or Ginny might die in the final chapter. We were invested in Harry’s heart; in the film, he not only doesn’t have this conversation with Ginny, he has it with Hermione, who we presume must be center stage (with Ron sitting quietly in the background) because our three stars need face time as a phoenix soars past and into the sunset on a false note of hollow uplift. The emotional weight of Harry learning that Snape is the half-blood prince also felt like a missed opportunity. Harry’s flirtation with and interest in the dark arts provided the dramatic tension of the book. In the film, it’s an afterthought.

These are mere quibbles. The film may be 150 minutes, but it flies by, and it’s a blast. Thank you, David Yates.

Do not date this man’s daughter.

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Based on our admittedly unscientific accounting, Liam Neeson kills roughly 139 people to rescue his daughter from an Albanian gang of human traffickers. If we ever have a girl one day, Ben will aspire to exactly this level of maniacally vengeful fatherhood.

PART II:  MAIN COURSE

Last week, I (Erin) detailed my trip to Green Acres Farm where I picked up my very own locally-bred, hormone-free, humanely-raised chicken (named “Darryl”). After thawing Darryl in our fridge, I prepared to cook what, by Vore standards, qualified as a feast. Usually our “dinner” is a bowl of pasta, a salad, or a slice of stromboli. An accompanying side dish is practically a buffet, so Friday’s meal constituted a miracle. Somewhere, my mother cries silently to herself that she failed to make me a proper woman.

Adios Self-Esteem: Even illustrations have perkier breasts and superior domestic skills!

Before we could please our palate with the succulent breast, thigh and wing of poultry, I had to do the inevitable: Face the chicken. I did not want to face the chicken because raw chicken, especially a whole chicken, is slimy and gross. And decapitated.

On the bottom shelf of the fridge, Darryl was still next to that Yuengling but thankfully the Mexican leftovers had been tossed out. As I placed him in the roasting pan, delicately spreading his legs and wings, I was acutely aware that Darryl was an animal. Since reading Omnivore’s Dilemma, I’ve more or less reconciled my guilt over eating animals, but even still, the nausea set in and I couldn’t help but feel sad when looking at the stump that used to hold a head. Pollan writes that as he got closer to his food (both on an emotional and geographical level), he felt overwhelmingly thankful for it. There was a story behind his meal. It wasn’t faceless or pre-packaged. It was Darryl, who had been sacrificed for our appetite.

Into the oven went Darryl, along with some butter, rosemary and sea salt.  An hour and fifteen minutes later, out came a fragrant, oven-browned bird that looked camera-ready.

Who wants my butter pecan thighs?

I fixed steamed vegetables from my parent’s garden and cheesy-tomato rice (a Vore staple) to go along with the chicken. I felt proud of my meal, which then made me feel embarrassed that normal people have real meals every night of the week. Oh well, guess we’re a different type of normal.

Suck it, Betty Crocker!

The meal did not come without a cost, as in the amount of money we paid for it. Darryl was no cheap chicken. (He was about $3.50 a pound.) But what did we get for that price? Chicken that tasted as fresh as any we’ve ever had the pleasure of eating. Could we afford to eat Darryl on a nightly basis? No. Are we willing to pay more every so often for a gustatory experience of this kind? Based on LocaVoreblog experiment #1, the answer is “absolutely.”

POSTSCRIPT FROM BEN: Darryl was delicious. Erin said I should write that I ate two pounds of him, but I’m certain it was not two pounds. But it was a lot. A delicious lot. This locavore thing is deliciously good!

POSTSCRIPT FROM ERIN: For an absurd and hilarious encounter with Danish film, allow me to recommend The Green Butchers, starring one of my favorites, Mads Mikkelsen, better known as Le Chiffre from Casino Royal. It’s about two Danes who are in the very bad habit of killing people and then selling those people disguised as chicken. Also, Mikkelsen sports a mean male-pattern baldness look.

Ben og Erin Vore sige: Watch De Grønne Slagtere for dit helbred!