Title: Black Dynamite
Director: Scott Sanders
Potential nominations: Male lead (Michael Jai White), breakthrough (White).
Notes: Michael Jai White has been kicking- sometimes literally- around Hollywood for most of the past two decades, working steadily but never quite finding a signature role. So he cannily took a page from the Matt Damon playbook and penned his own star vehicle with this, a frequently hilarious winking homage to the blaxploitation genre. Note that I didn’t call it a “spoof,” a word that implies barn-door broad riffs on movies that the makers don’t seem to care about a whole lot (as if making the likes of Date Movie makes you better than the directors of the real movies you’re parodying). Don’t get me wrong- Black Dynamite is winking at the conventions of blaxploitation movies, but it’s also clearly from an affectionate place, as evidenced by how many details White and Sanders capture. For example, I love the use of music here- not only does Dynamite get his own fanfare whenever he springs into action, but there’s even a repeated incidental bit that marks the transitions between scenes. Likewise, Sanders gets the look of blaxploitation movies just right- not just the flared collars and afros, but also the sets (wood-paneled rooms and anonymous alleys) and even the editing (sometimes clumsily cutting off scenes or letting them run a few beats too long).
Unfortunately, there are moments when Sanders goes too far into parody territory, as when he accompanies a funeral scene with a song with overly literal lyrics. But at the same time, even the more over-the-top stuff is pretty spot-on at times, like the way Black Dynamite and his crew puzzle out a convoluted conspiracy using arbitrary information. And that conspiracy is inspired- on one level, it’s basically a dick joke, but at the same time it also makes sense considering the genre. After all, one of the touchstones of blaxploitation was the unabashed sexuality of its protagonists (lest we remind you of the black private dick who’s a sex machine with all the chicks?), in contrast to the servants and neutered “good Negroes” of earlier decades. So if the whitey wants to bring down the black man, what better way than by robbing him of his sexual power?
In a just world, Black Dynamite would make its leading man a star. Even in this comedic context, Black Dynamite is a truly badass mutha, as well as a kind of ultimate blaxploitation hero. Not only is White physically up to the demands of the role (truth be told, his muscle definition is probably too good for the 70s), but he’s got the look and the swagger down cold. Moreover, he manages to duplicate the maverick spirit of the blaxploitation heroes of yesteryear, capable of leading a group of men to accomplish his goals, but mostly preferring to work alone so that nobody slows him down. Having written the screenplay, White knows just how funny the material is, but he never winks at it, even when it’s at its most absurd (and it does get mighty absurd by the finale). Black Dynamite shows not merely that White is a talented action hero- which we already kinda knew- but that he’s an inspired comedian as well. Personally, I’d love to see Black Dynamite become a franchise- Black Dynamite Goes Undercover, Black Dynamite Goes to Africa and the like. Just as long as they remember to pay homage to the epic fight scene in Bucktown, I’ll be down.
Rating (out of 10): 7.
Title: Night and Day
Director: Hong Sang-soo
Potential nominations: Screenplay.
Notes: Generally, when a filmmaker decides to lens a movie in another country, one can expect him to make a film that expresses his point of view about this foreign land, using his outsider’s perspective to find a unique angle that might not be readily available to a native artist. So it seems fairly perverse that Hong has taken the money given him by the Musée d’Orsay (who also funded Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Paris-set Flight of the Red Balloon) and used it to make more or less your basic Hong film. Of course, when a director has built a career on making films that can best be described as variations on a theme (the way Hong, much like Ozu before him, has done), much of the interest comes from scoping out the details that make each movie unique. Most obviously, there’s the setting here- Paris is far more classically-styled than Hong’s usual Korean settings, which can lead regular Hong viewers to experience a disconnect between the director’s archetypal characters and the old-world settings they’ve suddenly found themselves in. More specifically, it’s pretty hilarious how Hong seemingly goes out of his way to avoid having his hero encounter anyone who doesn’t speak Korean- aside from a surreal opening scene in which he encounters a Frenchman outside the airport who warns him to “be careful,” Night and Day doesn’t contain a single major character who isn’t Korean. Another difference I found interesting was that his male protagonist was less of a flat-out dumbass than usual- perhaps the Frenchman’s warning turned him into an overly cautious lump, capable of doing little besides lying in bed, wandering around the city, calling his wife every once in a while, and half-heartedly pursuing younger Korean students. As a result, Hong’s use of intertitles to delineate specific dates (a Rohmeresque touch) becomes hilarious, seeing as how little changes from day to day.
The other side of the coin is that, for those who consider themselves Hong fans, it can be just as rewarding to see how each film is of a piece with the rest of his work. One of the more interesting aspects of his work has always been his self-critical streak, as he scathingly portrays most artists as being idiots and charlatans, not to mention quick to use their artists’ credentials as leverage to get women into bed, and that’s the case here as well, with the added touches that (a) our hero can’t even bring himself to pick up a paint brush, and (b) the object of his affections is an art student whose portfolio turns out to be plagiarized. Then, of course, there are the twin Hong obsessions with drinking and sex, both of which are surprisingly muted here (for Hong, anyway- there’s no nudity to speak of, and the drunken bullshitting is kept to a minimum compared to most of his work). I suppose my big complaints are twofold- that the film really doesn’t contain a classic Hong bit (e.g. the diagram scene from Woman on the Beach), and that nothing about the movie justifies a running time of just under 2 ½ hours. Still, Night and Day is exactly the Hong film that Hong followers would expect from him, and that’s fine by me. In other words, meet the new Hong/ same as the old Hong.
Rating: 7.
Title: Home
Director: Ursula Meier
Potential nominations: Film, director, male lead (OIivier Gourmet), female lead (Isabelle Huppert), screenplay, ensemble, cinematography (Agnes Godard), body of work (Godard, Gourmet).
Notes: Ever since I stopped writing for The Screengrab, I’ve tried to avoid getting too much information about movies whenever possible. And while it can be tricky to go into a movie cold in our information-saturated age, it’s not impossible to do so, especially for less mainstream releases like this one. Home is exactly the sort of film that benefits from a viewer knowing as little as possible (because of this, I’ll tread lightly, but people who are interested in watching this in future would be advised to heed the rating below and skip the content up to that point). Watching the opening scenes, one could be forgiven for thinking that Meier has made a film about a post-apocalyptic world, or even some unstuck-in-time backwoods. But no- Home is set in the present, albeit in a family largely removed from the world. Yes, the husband leaves for work every morning, and the two youngest children leave for school, but we almost never see the family members very far from their house, and indeed the mother and eldest daughter never leave the property at all. Yet strangely enough, the family doesn’t come across as a bunch of antisocial shut-ins. To Meier’s credit, she does such a good job at establishing their perspective on the world that they come across simply as a family who has become more or less self-sufficient, capable of entertaining and supporting each other without any outside help.
Of course, when one is largely removed from the world at large for long enough, it’s easy to lose one’s bearing socially. Each member of the family has a certain level of craziness, although this may not be apparent with each of them at first glance. It’s only when the abandoned highway outside their house is opened again (seemingly overnight) that these issues become clear. When it first opens up, they treat it as a curiosity, listening to the traffic station on the radio for news and so on. However, it quickly takes a toll on the family. First it’s the daily routines- the husband has to park his car on the other side of the highway since he can’t drive across, the wife can no longer hang her clothes in the sun, and the garden is littered with garbage and suffocated with CO2. Moreover, the sudden intrusion causes the family itself to suffer, as each family member’s particular psychosis is exacerbated by the difficulty of the situation (the exception is the eldest daughter, who continues her daily sunbathing routine as yet another in her seemingly endless arsenal of defiant gestures).
In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, Home’s plot developments in the final reel or so would come off as contrived, or as overly leaden symbolism. However, Meier doesn’t step wrongly, with the film giving off a vibe similar to that of Haneke’s The Seventh Continent, though Meier’s film is less of a screed. For one thing, Meier never makes a statement the noise that drives her family inside, much less the consumerism that Haneke so blatantly condemns. But the film wouldn’t work had the family dynamic not rang true, and thanks to her cast it does. Naturally, any film headlined by Huppert and Gourmet would be distinguished by its acting, but the younger cast members- Adelaide Leroux (from Bruno Dumont’s Flandres), and newcomers Madeleine Budd and Kacey Mottet Klein- are just as good, and just as integral to the success of the film. For me, Home is one of the more surprising discoveries of the 2009 movie year, and marks Meier as a director to watch.
Rating: 8.
Title: Big Fan
Director: Robert Siegel
Potential nominations: Male lead (Patton Oswalt), breakthrough (Siegel, Oswalt).
Title: Ricky
Director: Francois Ozon
Potential nominations: None
Notes: On the surface, it seems like these two movies- one about an obsessed NY Giants fan, the other about a very special baby- would have next to nothing in common. Yet what interested me about both Siegel’s and Ozon’s films was how they came off as interesting short stories, forgoing ambitious plotting and sprawling ensembles in favor of character details (Big Fan) and anecdotal storytelling (Ricky). The level to which the films succeed is largely due to these very storytelling limitations.
Of the two films, Big Fan is the less ambitious, and as it happens the one that’s better at accomplishing what it sets out to do. It tells the story of Paul (Patton Oswalt), a thirtysomething who has next to nothing going for him. He has a dead-end job as a parking attendant, he still lives with his mother, and his siblings’ relative success only underlines how little he’s made for himself. All he has going for him is his love for the Giants- sure, he can only afford to sit in the Giants Stadium parking lot with his best pal watching TV on game day, but in his mind he’s still where the action is, and he’s got a smidge of celebrity for his impassioned rants on a local late night sports-talk program, despite their occasional interruptions from his annoyed mother. Like The Wrestler, which Siegel also wrote, Big Fan is about a man who will sacrifice everything for the sport he loves, and the painful, stupid, destructive ends he’ll go to prove his love for it. His directing debut is undistinguished stylistically, but it has a good feel for his run-down Staten Island setting, and is blessed by a strong performance from erstwhile stand-up genius Patton Oswalt, who doesn’t so much surprise his fans (myself included) by the depth of his performance as finally get an opportunity to demonstrate a level of acting talent he hadn’t had a chance to show before. Big Fan is very funny in spots, but in its way, it’s also one of the saddest movies of 2009.
Compared to Big Fan’s down-to-Earth portrayal of city life, Ricky tells an entirely different sort of urban tale, this one a fable about a most peculiar baby. However, for much of its first half, Ozon focuses not on the child himself but on his family and the life into which he is born. In these early scenes, Ozon does a fine job of establishing a life for these people, who work hard but aren’t unhappy, and even have room in their lives for joy. But the film gets considerably odder in its second half, when (SPOILERSPOILERSPOILER) little Ricky sprouts wings and gradually learns to fly. The flying-baby plot is the sort of thing that tends to be better suited to the page than in cinema, where a magical idea such as this one must be made literal (though the film’s effects are charmingly lo-fi). But more specifically, Ozon just doesn’t have the knack for magic realism that’s necessary to pull these scenes off. Ozon has injected the fantastical into his work before, but by and large he’s simply too much of a fatalist and a prankster to make the sort of bold leaps necessary to sell a tale such as this one. Yet Ricky isn’t without its charms, not the least of which is its oddly blinkered storytelling style. Even more than most films that feel like short stories, Ricky’s scope is limited to the events contained therein. Once Ricky is born (and even before that, really), he becomes the focus of everything in the story- sort of like a real baby, come to think. For some, this narrowness will be frustrating, but I found it to be in keeping with many of the best true short stories, and it goes a long way toward making the film such a fascinating curiosity. I came to Ricky having loved Ozon’s 8 Women and Under the Sand, while despairing that he hasn’t really made anything that good since then. And though Ricky has done nothing to dissuade me from this opinion- and frankly, the dude could stand to slow down his filmmaking pace- I’m glad to see him at least trying something new.
Rating: 6 (Big Fan), 6 (Ricky).
Title: Still Walking
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Potential nominations: Film, director, screenplay, ensemble.
Notes: Much like last year’s Rachel Getting Married and A Christmas Tale, Kore-eda’s film chronicles in depth a family gathering in which the death of a beloved sibling hangs over the proceedings, and like the recent Summer Hours it deals with the subject of how a family deals with a loved one’s memory. But even more than these films, Still Walking takes as its primary subject the psychic space the deceased occupies within the family, years or even decades after his death. One of the major differences is the age of the departed family- Demme and Desplechin’s deceased siblings were young children, and Assayas’ was an elderly woman whose life was more or less fully lived, but the son in Still Walking was taken from his family as a young man, full of promise but also beginning to make a name for himself as an adult.
It’s this difference that sets up the film’s primary theme, the need to reconcile our own memories of our departed loved ones by constructing our own narratives about them. In the eyes of his parents, Junpei was their great hope- a doctor like his father, and heir to his practice, and in the first years of a marriage. His death (saving a child from drowning) is of a piece with the rest. In many other films, there would be some great revelation showing that Junpei wasn’t the saint his parents make him out to be, but that’s not important to Kore-eda. Instead, Still Walking is about how their perception of Junpei has colored the rest of their lives. The father’s relationship with his surviving son Ryota is practically nonexistent, so overwhelming is his feeling that Junpei was more worthy than his younger brother. Of course, some of this resentment is no doubt fueled by the film being set on the anniversary of Junpei’s death. Yet even in smaller moments, the parents’ natural preference for Junpei is clear, as when the mother fondly recalls something Junpei did as a child only for someone to say that it was actually Ryota who did it.
In this sense, the film’s key sequence comes with the visit of the young man, now grown up, whose life Junpei was saving when he was killed. The young man is, quite frankly, a mess (overweight, slovenly, neurotic) and even though he does his best to express his grief and promises to devote his life to the man who rescued him, the meeting is incredibly awkward. Later, the mother confesses that this is by design, since he’s only alive because Junpei is dead, so why not remind him of this? Is this petty, and even sort of unhealthy for the mother? Of course it is. Yet after years of carefully constructing memories of Junpei that paint him as a hero and a martyr, and then making this revisionist narrative of her son a cornerstone of her life, how could a sweaty twentysomething possibly measure up?
Kore-eda has always had a fascination with the ways in which people deal with death, and his best films have allowed him to approach the subject with a warm yet complex humanism that avoids moroseness without giving short shrift to the issues in play. In Still Walking, Kore-eda doesn’t sidestep the more damaging aspects of his characters’ compulsion to venerate Junpei so much as paint this tendency as an inevitability. In fact, he integrates it so subtly into the framework of the film that I almost managed to misread the film’s final minutes as a submission to sentimentality. But when we see Ryota’s family paying their respects at his parents’ graves and Ryota telling his kids some of the stories his mother used to tell him, isn’t he doing the same thing he once took her to task for doing? Still Walking is Kore-eda’s best and most complex film since his masterpiece After Life, and confirms him once again as one of the world’s finest directors.
Rating: 8.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Muriels Sprint 2010- Part the Second
Title: The House of the Devil
Director: Ti West
Potential nominations: Female lead (Jocelin Donahue), Breakthrough (director Ti West), Best use of Tom Noonan
Notes: One of my biggest pet peeves as a moviegoer is when a movie pulls me out of the point of view it has carefully built for most of its running time. Most movies out there have a fairly omnipotent perspective, so there’s nothing to switch, but when a director makes the effort to make a character’s perspective more or less our own, it’s sort of disappointing when he decides to jump out of this POV without having a damn good reason to do so. For an extreme example of this, consider a purely theoretical version of A Clockwork Orange in which we see Alex’s parents at their day jobs, hard at work to be able to afford the lifestyle for which Alex shows such disdain. I posit that these scenes wouldn’t work, precisely because the key to Clockwork is that we’re with Alex every step of the way, and to turn his parents into pathetic breadwinners whose son doesn’t appreciate the work they do would undermine the strange and darkly comic tone that Kubrick went to such effort to achieve.
Such perspective-oriented hiccups are especially damaging to horror movies like The House of the Devil, in which the effect comes from experiencing the horror through the protagonists’ eyes. But although West has made a fairly sturdy thriller, he tips his hand at a key moment in the film in a way that pulled me right out of the story (you’ll know what I mean when you see it). That’s not to say that shifting perspective is automatically bad- when West cuts away from heroine Jocelin Donahue to the eventually fate of best friend Greta Gerwig, it’s done to establish the threat that Donahue is up against. But I can’t for the life of me imagine why West felt the need to show us what was behind the mysterious door. It removes the mystery- and therefore, much of the anticipation- from the film’s final reel, all for the sake of a fairly cheap shock tactic.
This lapse in judgment would be forgivable if the movie could rebound from it, but it never quite does. Much of the problem is that West is far better at setup than he is at payoff, as evidenced by the half-assed way the film’s climactic burst of violence plays out. However, for roughly an hour House of the Devil is surprisingly sure-handed. West shows a sure hand with atmosphere and tone, and is wise enough to take his time to really creep out his protagonist before the really bad stuff goes down. I especially liked the scene in which Donahue pops on her Walkman (this is set in the 80s, by the way) and dances around the house to the Fixx- an extended bit that wouldn’t pass muster with a less confident filmmaker.
Like many genre filmmakers who’ve emerged in the post-Tarantino generation, West clearly grew up watching junky horror movies on video, and it’s hard not to admire his attention to detail even down to the font of the opening credits. But House of the Devil isn’t self-referential kitsch. West certainly loves horror movies, but he also respects the genre in a way that demands that he take it seriously. He may lack the judiciousness of a horror savant like Bryan Bertino (director of last year’s nerve-jangling The Strangers), but when House of the Devil is on, it cooks. And that final scene is, in its strange way, sort of perfect.
Rating (out of 10): 6.
Title: 35 Shots of Rum
Director: Claire Denis
Potential nominations: Best Film, director, male lead (Alex Descas), cinematography (Agnes Godard), music (Tindersticks et al), cinematic moment (“Night Shift”).
Notes: Having seen damn near everything that Denis has made, I nonetheless feel like my critical facilities are inadequate to capture what really makes a film like 35 Shots of Rum work. It’s not that 35 Shots is an especially complicated film- to the contrary, really. Yet it’s this very simplicity that makes it such a challenge for would-be critics like myself. Part of the problem is the nature of criticism itself, with so much of it still rooted in traditions of the literary and visual arts. But while most movies can be reviewed (and fairly satisfactorily so) through these traditional means, much of Denis’ work tends to confound old-guard techniques and theories. Like her fellow Level IV favorite Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul, Denis’ most characteristic work is not about shuffling through a narrative, but about creating a vibe much like a favorite song or a place you like to visit. And as you might imagine, there really aren’t words to repackage that for the reader. Oh sure, I could do the usual “blah blah Africans in France blah blah father-daughter relationship blah blah Ozu blah blah ooh purty.” But that’s a description, not a review, and that’s not how I roll. So I’ll just say this- if you already love Denis, you’re already on board. If you already hate Denis, this movie won’t change that. And if you’ve never seen a Denis film, this could be a pretty good gateway drug. As for me, I was hooked from the beginning. To these eyes, 35 Shots of Rum is a definitive hangout movie- the kind of movie I look forward to revisiting from time to time just to relax with these characters and in their world.
Rating: 8.
Title: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
Director: Terry Gilliam.
Potential nominations: Supporting male (Tom Waits).
Title: Broken Embraces
Director: Pedro Almodovar.
Potential nominations: Music (Alberto Iglesias).
Notes on both films: Both The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Broken Embraces are the works of veteran filmmakers who are working squarely within their cinematic comfort zones, so it sort of makes sense to consider them together, despite not having much in common from a superficial stylistic standpoint.
In many ways, Parnassus feels like a textbook Gilliam film, with all the filmmaker’s gifts and flaws located in plain view. For one thing, it seems like he was even less in control of the film he was making than usual, which of course is saying something. This comes through most clearly in the performances, coupled with Gilliam’s increasing disregard for maintaining a consistent level or pitch of performance from his cast. This works out well for performers who are comfortable with onscreen riffing (little wonder Tom Waits gives the best performance here), but it hangs others out to dry- in the case of this film, the title character has almost nothing to do, and Christopher Plummer too often recedes into the background while those around him shtick it up. With Parnassus, Gilliam uses his actors predominantly as camera objects, particularly Lily Cole, who has an almost extra-terrestrial sort of girlishness that Gilliam utilizes to good effect.
But no actor in Gilliam’s film gets the same level of camera love as Almodovar gives to his longtime muse and Broken Embraces leading lady, Penelope Cruz. Ever since their collaboration began a decade or so ago, Almodovar has never missed a chance to make Cruz look her best (which is pretty darn good, after all), and this impulse comes to the forefront here, not least in a scene in which we see Cruz being made up and bewigged like the stars of yore- a Marilyn wig here, Sophia Loren eye makeup there, and so forth. Broken Embraces is above all a film made to illustrate Godard’s quote that states, “cinema is the history of boys photographing girls.” Accordingly, the majority of the story’s male characters- the controlling sugar daddy, his gay voyeur son, and above all her director/lover- carry on relationships with her in part through the camera lens.
It’s a solid germ for a movie, but alas, Almodovar’s tendency towards overloading his stories drags down Embraces. In addition to Cruz and the three men in her life, it’s also about the director, years later, coming to grips with his lost love, and about his relationship with his ever-dutiful assistant and her son, and about Almodovar’s love for the cinema itself. It’s hard for me to hate on a movie that’s so clearly steeped in cinephilia (Pedro throws out references to everything from Peeping Tom to Belle de Jour), but it all becomes suffocating after a while. That the film-within-a-film is a virtual remake of Almodovar’s own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown doesn’t help matters, hearkening back to a time in which the director’s imagination was just as feverish, but to a more outrageous end (this is what makes Talk to Her Pedro’s best in a walk, since it lends the outré stuff real soul and emotional weight). By the time Pedro decided to resolve damn near every possible plot strand in the final reel, I was too busy paying attention to the self-reflexiveness to care. What does it say that I would rather have seen the proposed vampire movie than this one?
Of course, in its freewheeling way Parnassus is just as overstuffed as Broken Embraces is, and I suppose my preference for Gilliam’s film over Almodovar’s has something to with my taste in their filmmaking styles. However, I also think that while Embraces mostly finds its maker re-jiggering his personal obsessions rather than treading new ground, Parnassus is a film from a director incapable of treading water. For better or worse, Gilliam can’t make a lazy film, and given free rein here he sometimes flails about, but at other times creates some truly wondrous images. The Imaginarium sequences are especially vivid, and perhaps the closest he’s come to finding a big-screen equivalent to his classic Pythonimation bits. You could levy a lot of criticisms at The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, but let it not be said that Gilliam is coasting.
Rating: 6 (Parnassus), 5 (Embraces).
Title: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
Director: Werner Herzog.
Potential nominations: Film, director, male lead (Michael Shannon), screenplay, body of work (Herzog [w/Bad Lieutenant: POCNO], Willem Dafoe [w/Antichrist and Fantastic Mr. Fox), music (Ernst Reijseger).
Notes: One thing I find off-putting about most movies about mental illness is that there tends to be a fairly comprehensible method at the heart of the madness. This isn’t the case with My Son, etc., which most cinephiles know primarily as that other film Herzog brought to Toronto this year. And that’s kind of a shame, since while it’s not as flamboyant as Bad Lieutenant: POCNO, it’s a unique and fascinating film in its own right. But back to the psychological aspects of the film- or lack thereof. Throughout his career, Herzog has been drawn to various forms of madness in his work, from the violent obsessiveness of Aguirre, to the bone-deep damage suffered by the heroes of Stroszek and Kaspar Hauser, to the antisocial behavior of Grizzly Man’s Timmy Treadwell. But with few exceptions, Herzog has been less interested in psychoanalyzing his protagonists than in exploring the effect their illnesses have both on others and on themselves, and empathizing with them as he does with all the world’s oddities. So it is with Brad (Michael Shannon), a part-time actor and full-time mama’s boy who at the beginning of the film is discovered to have run his mother through with a sword. In the past few years, Shannon has become one of my favorite character actors, due primarily to his talent for playing unhinged characters. But his knack for insanity transcends his creepy mien- it’s almost as though he’s able to shift his mental gears into those of his characters, so that when Brad dances to his own psychological rhythm, it never feels like he’s simply “acting crazy.” And Herzog, for his part, puts Brad’s mind at center stage, marveling at his strange trains of thought without shying away from how dangerous they are for everyone around, not least himself.
Rating: 8.
Title: Bronson
Director: Nicholas Winding Refn.
Potential nominations: Male lead (Tom Hardy), breakthrough (Hardy).
Notes: It’s one thing to say that an actor runs away with a film, yet another to say that an actor more or less IS the movie. The difference between the two is demonstrated by Bronson, in which the film’s leading character thoroughly dominates the proceedings to the point where there’s almost nothing else to the movie. Aside from a few memorable directorial flourishes- notably a party in a mental hospital- the movie lives and dies by Hardy’s performance. Thank goodness, then, that the actor is up to the task. An actor I was previously familiar with solely as the wussy protagonist from Star Trek: Nemesis, Hardy is a revelation here, with an eternally puffed-out chest and a tonsorial style that makes him look like Col. Blimp’s scary grandson. Hardy is actor enough to sell his subtler moments, but the meat of the performance comes when he’s over-the-top. This makes perfect sense, since the film’s central idea is that Charles Bronson (not his real name, duh) lived his life as a kind of performance art, with a commitment to be the most violent and notorious prisoner in the service of Her Majesty (30 years in solitary confinement don’t lie). Refn illustrates this both in suitably grotty prison scenes and in a framing device that shows Bronson onstage, telling his story to an audience that hangs on his every word. Ultimately, Bronson may be shallow, but it announces Hardy as a talent to watch.
Rating: 6.
Title: Passing Strange
Director: Spike Lee.
Potential nominations: Film, director, ensemble performance, music (Stew and Heidi Rodewald).
Notes: It would be easy to dismiss Passing Strange as a filmed performance piece, with Lee capturing Stew’s Tony-winning musical on HD for posterity. But to do so would be to overlook how exciting and imaginative this is as a film, with its whip-crack editing, precise framing, and close-ups of the performers that are so tight that one can almost feel the sweat pouring off the actors’ bodies. It seems all the more miraculous an achievement to consider that (a) everything was filmed during live shows with paying audiences, and (b) the editing makes it feel like it was shot during one continuous performance. Of course, it must have been discussed at some point to turn this into a more conventional adaptation, with location shooting and the like, and with Stew’s music playing under the action rather than having him onstage with the actors. But then, I don’t think it would work nearly so well- the story needs Stew there to comment on the action and even confront his teenaged alter ego, and the use of the same actors to play the surrogate “family members” the hero collects wherever he goes would surely have been lost in a (now thankfully purely hypothetical) big-budget adaptation.
Strangely enough, for a director who made his name on being a maverick (long before John McCain made the label fashionable), most of Spike Lee’s best recent films have been collaborative efforts. But then, perhaps it’s not so strange- Lee’s original efforts have become increasingly digressive and polemical in the past decade, but he tends to collaborate with people he trusts, and these collaborations force him to find ways to inject his sensibility into the mix without allowing it to overwhelm the material. For the most part, it’s working- sure, there’s the occasional misguided Miracle at St. Anna in the mix, but most of his collaborations are spot-on, and Passing Strange is no exception. No doubt part of this was a personal connection to the material, dealing as it does with growing up in the African-American middle class, the youthful urge to seek the “real” in art, and other issues of race and skin color. However, I also think that Lee, having attended Passing Strange on opening night, was simply overcome with joy, and he wanted to convey this joy on film by sharing it with moviegoing audiences. And in that aspect, he succeeds magnificently, creating as good a piece of pure pop entertainment as any this year.
Rating: 9.
Director: Ti West
Potential nominations: Female lead (Jocelin Donahue), Breakthrough (director Ti West), Best use of Tom Noonan
Notes: One of my biggest pet peeves as a moviegoer is when a movie pulls me out of the point of view it has carefully built for most of its running time. Most movies out there have a fairly omnipotent perspective, so there’s nothing to switch, but when a director makes the effort to make a character’s perspective more or less our own, it’s sort of disappointing when he decides to jump out of this POV without having a damn good reason to do so. For an extreme example of this, consider a purely theoretical version of A Clockwork Orange in which we see Alex’s parents at their day jobs, hard at work to be able to afford the lifestyle for which Alex shows such disdain. I posit that these scenes wouldn’t work, precisely because the key to Clockwork is that we’re with Alex every step of the way, and to turn his parents into pathetic breadwinners whose son doesn’t appreciate the work they do would undermine the strange and darkly comic tone that Kubrick went to such effort to achieve.
Such perspective-oriented hiccups are especially damaging to horror movies like The House of the Devil, in which the effect comes from experiencing the horror through the protagonists’ eyes. But although West has made a fairly sturdy thriller, he tips his hand at a key moment in the film in a way that pulled me right out of the story (you’ll know what I mean when you see it). That’s not to say that shifting perspective is automatically bad- when West cuts away from heroine Jocelin Donahue to the eventually fate of best friend Greta Gerwig, it’s done to establish the threat that Donahue is up against. But I can’t for the life of me imagine why West felt the need to show us what was behind the mysterious door. It removes the mystery- and therefore, much of the anticipation- from the film’s final reel, all for the sake of a fairly cheap shock tactic.
This lapse in judgment would be forgivable if the movie could rebound from it, but it never quite does. Much of the problem is that West is far better at setup than he is at payoff, as evidenced by the half-assed way the film’s climactic burst of violence plays out. However, for roughly an hour House of the Devil is surprisingly sure-handed. West shows a sure hand with atmosphere and tone, and is wise enough to take his time to really creep out his protagonist before the really bad stuff goes down. I especially liked the scene in which Donahue pops on her Walkman (this is set in the 80s, by the way) and dances around the house to the Fixx- an extended bit that wouldn’t pass muster with a less confident filmmaker.
Like many genre filmmakers who’ve emerged in the post-Tarantino generation, West clearly grew up watching junky horror movies on video, and it’s hard not to admire his attention to detail even down to the font of the opening credits. But House of the Devil isn’t self-referential kitsch. West certainly loves horror movies, but he also respects the genre in a way that demands that he take it seriously. He may lack the judiciousness of a horror savant like Bryan Bertino (director of last year’s nerve-jangling The Strangers), but when House of the Devil is on, it cooks. And that final scene is, in its strange way, sort of perfect.
Rating (out of 10): 6.
Title: 35 Shots of Rum
Director: Claire Denis
Potential nominations: Best Film, director, male lead (Alex Descas), cinematography (Agnes Godard), music (Tindersticks et al), cinematic moment (“Night Shift”).
Notes: Having seen damn near everything that Denis has made, I nonetheless feel like my critical facilities are inadequate to capture what really makes a film like 35 Shots of Rum work. It’s not that 35 Shots is an especially complicated film- to the contrary, really. Yet it’s this very simplicity that makes it such a challenge for would-be critics like myself. Part of the problem is the nature of criticism itself, with so much of it still rooted in traditions of the literary and visual arts. But while most movies can be reviewed (and fairly satisfactorily so) through these traditional means, much of Denis’ work tends to confound old-guard techniques and theories. Like her fellow Level IV favorite Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul, Denis’ most characteristic work is not about shuffling through a narrative, but about creating a vibe much like a favorite song or a place you like to visit. And as you might imagine, there really aren’t words to repackage that for the reader. Oh sure, I could do the usual “blah blah Africans in France blah blah father-daughter relationship blah blah Ozu blah blah ooh purty.” But that’s a description, not a review, and that’s not how I roll. So I’ll just say this- if you already love Denis, you’re already on board. If you already hate Denis, this movie won’t change that. And if you’ve never seen a Denis film, this could be a pretty good gateway drug. As for me, I was hooked from the beginning. To these eyes, 35 Shots of Rum is a definitive hangout movie- the kind of movie I look forward to revisiting from time to time just to relax with these characters and in their world.
Rating: 8.
Title: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.
Director: Terry Gilliam.
Potential nominations: Supporting male (Tom Waits).
Title: Broken Embraces
Director: Pedro Almodovar.
Potential nominations: Music (Alberto Iglesias).
Notes on both films: Both The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus and Broken Embraces are the works of veteran filmmakers who are working squarely within their cinematic comfort zones, so it sort of makes sense to consider them together, despite not having much in common from a superficial stylistic standpoint.
In many ways, Parnassus feels like a textbook Gilliam film, with all the filmmaker’s gifts and flaws located in plain view. For one thing, it seems like he was even less in control of the film he was making than usual, which of course is saying something. This comes through most clearly in the performances, coupled with Gilliam’s increasing disregard for maintaining a consistent level or pitch of performance from his cast. This works out well for performers who are comfortable with onscreen riffing (little wonder Tom Waits gives the best performance here), but it hangs others out to dry- in the case of this film, the title character has almost nothing to do, and Christopher Plummer too often recedes into the background while those around him shtick it up. With Parnassus, Gilliam uses his actors predominantly as camera objects, particularly Lily Cole, who has an almost extra-terrestrial sort of girlishness that Gilliam utilizes to good effect.
But no actor in Gilliam’s film gets the same level of camera love as Almodovar gives to his longtime muse and Broken Embraces leading lady, Penelope Cruz. Ever since their collaboration began a decade or so ago, Almodovar has never missed a chance to make Cruz look her best (which is pretty darn good, after all), and this impulse comes to the forefront here, not least in a scene in which we see Cruz being made up and bewigged like the stars of yore- a Marilyn wig here, Sophia Loren eye makeup there, and so forth. Broken Embraces is above all a film made to illustrate Godard’s quote that states, “cinema is the history of boys photographing girls.” Accordingly, the majority of the story’s male characters- the controlling sugar daddy, his gay voyeur son, and above all her director/lover- carry on relationships with her in part through the camera lens.
It’s a solid germ for a movie, but alas, Almodovar’s tendency towards overloading his stories drags down Embraces. In addition to Cruz and the three men in her life, it’s also about the director, years later, coming to grips with his lost love, and about his relationship with his ever-dutiful assistant and her son, and about Almodovar’s love for the cinema itself. It’s hard for me to hate on a movie that’s so clearly steeped in cinephilia (Pedro throws out references to everything from Peeping Tom to Belle de Jour), but it all becomes suffocating after a while. That the film-within-a-film is a virtual remake of Almodovar’s own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown doesn’t help matters, hearkening back to a time in which the director’s imagination was just as feverish, but to a more outrageous end (this is what makes Talk to Her Pedro’s best in a walk, since it lends the outré stuff real soul and emotional weight). By the time Pedro decided to resolve damn near every possible plot strand in the final reel, I was too busy paying attention to the self-reflexiveness to care. What does it say that I would rather have seen the proposed vampire movie than this one?
Of course, in its freewheeling way Parnassus is just as overstuffed as Broken Embraces is, and I suppose my preference for Gilliam’s film over Almodovar’s has something to with my taste in their filmmaking styles. However, I also think that while Embraces mostly finds its maker re-jiggering his personal obsessions rather than treading new ground, Parnassus is a film from a director incapable of treading water. For better or worse, Gilliam can’t make a lazy film, and given free rein here he sometimes flails about, but at other times creates some truly wondrous images. The Imaginarium sequences are especially vivid, and perhaps the closest he’s come to finding a big-screen equivalent to his classic Pythonimation bits. You could levy a lot of criticisms at The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, but let it not be said that Gilliam is coasting.
Rating: 6 (Parnassus), 5 (Embraces).
Title: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
Director: Werner Herzog.
Potential nominations: Film, director, male lead (Michael Shannon), screenplay, body of work (Herzog [w/Bad Lieutenant: POCNO], Willem Dafoe [w/Antichrist and Fantastic Mr. Fox), music (Ernst Reijseger).
Notes: One thing I find off-putting about most movies about mental illness is that there tends to be a fairly comprehensible method at the heart of the madness. This isn’t the case with My Son, etc., which most cinephiles know primarily as that other film Herzog brought to Toronto this year. And that’s kind of a shame, since while it’s not as flamboyant as Bad Lieutenant: POCNO, it’s a unique and fascinating film in its own right. But back to the psychological aspects of the film- or lack thereof. Throughout his career, Herzog has been drawn to various forms of madness in his work, from the violent obsessiveness of Aguirre, to the bone-deep damage suffered by the heroes of Stroszek and Kaspar Hauser, to the antisocial behavior of Grizzly Man’s Timmy Treadwell. But with few exceptions, Herzog has been less interested in psychoanalyzing his protagonists than in exploring the effect their illnesses have both on others and on themselves, and empathizing with them as he does with all the world’s oddities. So it is with Brad (Michael Shannon), a part-time actor and full-time mama’s boy who at the beginning of the film is discovered to have run his mother through with a sword. In the past few years, Shannon has become one of my favorite character actors, due primarily to his talent for playing unhinged characters. But his knack for insanity transcends his creepy mien- it’s almost as though he’s able to shift his mental gears into those of his characters, so that when Brad dances to his own psychological rhythm, it never feels like he’s simply “acting crazy.” And Herzog, for his part, puts Brad’s mind at center stage, marveling at his strange trains of thought without shying away from how dangerous they are for everyone around, not least himself.
Rating: 8.
Title: Bronson
Director: Nicholas Winding Refn.
Potential nominations: Male lead (Tom Hardy), breakthrough (Hardy).
Notes: It’s one thing to say that an actor runs away with a film, yet another to say that an actor more or less IS the movie. The difference between the two is demonstrated by Bronson, in which the film’s leading character thoroughly dominates the proceedings to the point where there’s almost nothing else to the movie. Aside from a few memorable directorial flourishes- notably a party in a mental hospital- the movie lives and dies by Hardy’s performance. Thank goodness, then, that the actor is up to the task. An actor I was previously familiar with solely as the wussy protagonist from Star Trek: Nemesis, Hardy is a revelation here, with an eternally puffed-out chest and a tonsorial style that makes him look like Col. Blimp’s scary grandson. Hardy is actor enough to sell his subtler moments, but the meat of the performance comes when he’s over-the-top. This makes perfect sense, since the film’s central idea is that Charles Bronson (not his real name, duh) lived his life as a kind of performance art, with a commitment to be the most violent and notorious prisoner in the service of Her Majesty (30 years in solitary confinement don’t lie). Refn illustrates this both in suitably grotty prison scenes and in a framing device that shows Bronson onstage, telling his story to an audience that hangs on his every word. Ultimately, Bronson may be shallow, but it announces Hardy as a talent to watch.
Rating: 6.
Title: Passing Strange
Director: Spike Lee.
Potential nominations: Film, director, ensemble performance, music (Stew and Heidi Rodewald).
Notes: It would be easy to dismiss Passing Strange as a filmed performance piece, with Lee capturing Stew’s Tony-winning musical on HD for posterity. But to do so would be to overlook how exciting and imaginative this is as a film, with its whip-crack editing, precise framing, and close-ups of the performers that are so tight that one can almost feel the sweat pouring off the actors’ bodies. It seems all the more miraculous an achievement to consider that (a) everything was filmed during live shows with paying audiences, and (b) the editing makes it feel like it was shot during one continuous performance. Of course, it must have been discussed at some point to turn this into a more conventional adaptation, with location shooting and the like, and with Stew’s music playing under the action rather than having him onstage with the actors. But then, I don’t think it would work nearly so well- the story needs Stew there to comment on the action and even confront his teenaged alter ego, and the use of the same actors to play the surrogate “family members” the hero collects wherever he goes would surely have been lost in a (now thankfully purely hypothetical) big-budget adaptation.
Strangely enough, for a director who made his name on being a maverick (long before John McCain made the label fashionable), most of Spike Lee’s best recent films have been collaborative efforts. But then, perhaps it’s not so strange- Lee’s original efforts have become increasingly digressive and polemical in the past decade, but he tends to collaborate with people he trusts, and these collaborations force him to find ways to inject his sensibility into the mix without allowing it to overwhelm the material. For the most part, it’s working- sure, there’s the occasional misguided Miracle at St. Anna in the mix, but most of his collaborations are spot-on, and Passing Strange is no exception. No doubt part of this was a personal connection to the material, dealing as it does with growing up in the African-American middle class, the youthful urge to seek the “real” in art, and other issues of race and skin color. However, I also think that Lee, having attended Passing Strange on opening night, was simply overcome with joy, and he wanted to convey this joy on film by sharing it with moviegoing audiences. And in that aspect, he succeeds magnificently, creating as good a piece of pure pop entertainment as any this year.
Rating: 9.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Muriels Sprint 2010- Part the First
For four years now, the lead-up to the Muriel Awards has caused me to look back at the films I watched in the past year. And with this looking back has come the invariable assessment of the movies I haven’t yet seen. Because of this, it has become an annual tradition for me to view as many eligible releases as possible throughout the month of January so as to leave as few stones unturned as possible before filling out my ballot. I’ve taken to calling it “The Muriels Sprint”- a full-on, month-long cinematic cram session.
And since I’m all about keeping you folks in the loop (the title of a movie I’ve already seen that probably won’t be watched again during the Muriels Sprint), I’ll be posting some thoughts on every Muriel-eligible movie I see over the next month. Nothing fancy, mind you- just a few sentences worth of review, along with a list of categories in which the movie could potentially contend. And since I’m going to be fairly busy with everything else in my life on top of the movies themselves, I reserve the right not to finish any movie that isn’t doing it for me. Generally, I’ll give it an hour before shutting it off, but this isn’t by any means a hard and fast rule, as you’ll see below.
Now, without further Apu…
Title: Up in the Air
Director: Jason Reitman
Potential nominations: Male Lead (George Clooney), Female Supporting (Anna Kendrick).
Notes: Since his debut four years ago with Thank You For Smoking, Jason Reitman has become Hollywood’s reigning king of “pretty good” movies, which are sturdily made and boast some fine acting, but don’t really make a very deep dent in my memory. Up in the Air is par for the course for him, although of the three he’s done it’s probably the best. Clooney gives a fine star turn as a guy who treasures his solitary, forever-on-the-go lifestyle, while Kendrick is predictably awesome as the young tyro he takes under his wing. Some timely plot points about our current economic conundrum have given some reviewers the impression that this is a Movie of Our Time, but it’s best enjoyed as a classy, star-driven character study. Demerits for a script that’s often distractingly on-the-nose, as well as a somewhat misguided revelation involving a fellow traveler played by Vera Farmiga (who’s also good here). Still, hard to hate a movie that contains a scene as good as the one between Clooney and J.K. Simmons. If this dominates the Oscars, you won’t hear me complain.
Rating (out of 10): 6.
Title: Humpday
Director: Lynn Shelton
Potential nominations: Best Film, Director (Shelton), Male Supporting (Joshua Leonard), Screenplay.
Notes: If nothing else, Humpday is fascinating in the way it affords audience members a glimpse at male bonding rituals as seen through the eyes of a woman. Had this been made by a male filmmaker, Ben and Andrew’s antics would no doubt have been portrayed as charmingly dunderheaded, a la Step Brothers. But because Shelton is under no obligation to defend the male gender, she portrays her quasi-heroes as the machismo-driven idiots they clearly are, unwilling to back down from the asinine challenge they’ve set for themselves. But in coming up with their particular challenge- namely, to film themselves having gay sex with each other (they’re both straight, by the way) for a local art-porn festival- Shelton is also to be commended for tackling some fruitful thematic territory. Not only does she hold up to scorn the male-infantilization culture that has become more prevalent in the last decade or so, but she also tackles the balls-before-brains “No Fear” undercurrent of this culture, while sending it careening smack-dab into the barely-buried homophobia that still afflicts many men (and women) today. Plus it’s really funny. Of course, your mileage may vary depending on how much of Ben and Andrew you can tolerate. But what can I say- I laughed.
Rating: 8.
Title: Adventureland
Director: Greg Mottola
Potential nominations: Male Supporting (Martin Starr), Ensemble Performance.
Notes: Comparisons with Dazed and Confused are a little excessive, but Adventureland is a little charmer all the same. Perhaps the best thing about the film is how lived-in its eighties-era setting is. Mottola never calls too much attention to the period in the that kitschy “I Love the 80s” way of most Hollywood movies set during the Members Only decade, but allows them to become a natural element of the story, as when the midway employees depair of having to listen to the Musik Express play “Rock Me Amadeus” for the 20th time that day. Likewise, I dug how the movie didn’t demonize its potentially villainous characters- even the married handyman (played by Ryan Reynolds) who’s having an affair with Kristen Stewart isn’t a flat-out bad guy (plus I love how his bit about jamming with Lou Reed pays off). Unfortunately, Mottola can’t resist throwing in some forced slapstick, such as the guy who repeatedly socks our hero (Jesse Eisenberg) in the balls, or the barn-door-broad characterizations of Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader. Still, when the movie concentrates on the realities of working a soul-sucking summer job, and the fun one can have with it when the boss isn’t looking, it’s pretty great. And Martin Starr is awesome, obviously.
Rating: 7.
Title: Thirst
Director: Chan-wook Park
Potential nominations: none.
Notes: With each passing movie, it becomes harder for me to push past Park’s ugly worldview. In Oldboy, the filmmaking was so kinetic that one barely had time to think about the subtext, but one of the biggest problems I had with Thirst was that the direction was so slack that I could hardly think of anything else. It’s not enough that the female lead be engaged to a man she can’t stand, but Park shows her as being groomed for the part from childhood, and dominated by her goonish fiancé and abusive mother-in-law-to-be. In addition, the dichotomy between protagonist Song Kang-ho’s good and evil sides (he’s a priest and healer, but he’s also a vampire who’s carrying on an affair with the betrothed heroine) is interesting up to a point, but Park really doesn’t do anything interesting with these opposing forces in his life. I wasn’t really digging it from the get-go, and I finally gave up about an hour or so in, during a hallucination in which the vampire priest humps away at his lover and the smiling body of one of his victims appears sandwiched between them. Man, classy AND subtle- Thirst has it all!
Rating: Not applicable.
Title: Anvil! The Story of Anvil
Director: Sacha Gervasi
Potential nominations: none.
Notes: I have no doubt that first-time director Gervasi (longtime Anvil fan, one-time Anvil follower) was completely sincere in his desire to give the band he loves a documentary tribute. However, it’s sort of amazing how comfortably Anvil! fits the template that was laid down by This Is Spinal Tap a quarter-century ago. Of course, many of Anvil’s woes are similar to those faced by any number of bands who’ve gone on the road. But in scenes such as the one in which Anvil gets lost in the way to a gig (one band member’s girlfriend is the band’s manager, no less!), it undeniably feels like life imitating hilarious, hilarious art. Heck, it’s entirely possible that Gervasi’s goal was to invite the comparison (e.g. the scene in which Lips and Robb Reiner- the guy’s real name!- discuss their first song a la David and Nigel talking up “All the Way Home”), in order to show how sad the Spinal Tap arc is when applied to real life. But at the same time, it feels like Spinal Tap did all the groundwork for this, and all Gervasi had to do was to fill in the template with documentary footage. By the time the group performs at a heavy metal festival attended by literally hundreds of fans, I was half-awaiting the scene in which Anvil performs as the bottom half of a double with a puppet show. Not saying it’s fair, but I just couldn’t let go of the comparison. Maybe if I liked heavy metal more, or if the movie didn’t look like total ass, it might have been easier for me. Alas, it never quite happened. Still, diverting enough.
Rating: 5 out of 10.
Title: Avatar
Director: James Cameron
Potential nominations: Director, Screenplay (ha ha, just kidding).
Notes: In this blockbuster-driven age, movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars have become fairly commonplace. However, it’s rare to see one that so unmistakably displays its creator’s fingerprints. This is most obvious in the film’s somewhat conflicted portrayal of the military-industrial complex, a hallmark of the majority of Cameron’s films. On the one hand, Cameron has always been drawn to state of the art technology and weaponry- the bigger, the better. Yet this enthusiasm has always been tempered by a mistrust of gung-ho militarism run amok, most apparent here in Stephen Lang’s Marine officer, who’s just aching for a reason to mow down the forest-dwelling Na’vi in the name of deep-space Manifest Destiny.
Part of this comes from an undeniable love for the idea of Pure Science, here embodied by Sigourney Weaver and her team of scientists, whose quest to understand the Na’vi has led them to a devil’s bargain with both the Marines and a sniveling corporate scientist played by Giovanni Ribisi. Yet despite Cameron’s disdain for both of these mindsets (Marine and corporate), he can’t keep his impulses toward largesse in check, which leads to lingering shots of futuristic aircraft and cyborg-esque suits, both of which are used almost exclusively by the film’s baddies. But this seeming contradiction, troubling though it might be, only makes the film as a whole more fascinating, as Cameron is working through these conflicting urges with this story in a messy, compelling way, as compared to the rah-rah patriotic fetishism of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies.
As for the Na’vi themselves, they’re somewhat more simplistic, a group of forest-dwelling hunter/warriors inspired by Native Americans except, y’know, 12 feet tall and blue. And Cameron’s narrative debts to Dances With Wolves are already well-documented. Still, what the film lacks in narrative inspiration, it makes up for in pop spectacle. While it’s certainly true that the effects in Avatar aren’t as jaw-dropping as they might have been to an audience from a decade or so ago, they’re nonetheless leaps ahead of anything the big screen has seen. Much of the film is stunning on the pure eye-candy level, especially the shots of the Na’vi’s forest at night time (parts of which seem to be inspired by Jim Henson’s underappreciated TV special Song of the Cloud Forest). Whatever Avatar’s faults may be, visual wonderment is not one of them.
Rating: 7 out of 10.
And since I’m all about keeping you folks in the loop (the title of a movie I’ve already seen that probably won’t be watched again during the Muriels Sprint), I’ll be posting some thoughts on every Muriel-eligible movie I see over the next month. Nothing fancy, mind you- just a few sentences worth of review, along with a list of categories in which the movie could potentially contend. And since I’m going to be fairly busy with everything else in my life on top of the movies themselves, I reserve the right not to finish any movie that isn’t doing it for me. Generally, I’ll give it an hour before shutting it off, but this isn’t by any means a hard and fast rule, as you’ll see below.
Now, without further Apu…
Title: Up in the Air
Director: Jason Reitman
Potential nominations: Male Lead (George Clooney), Female Supporting (Anna Kendrick).
Notes: Since his debut four years ago with Thank You For Smoking, Jason Reitman has become Hollywood’s reigning king of “pretty good” movies, which are sturdily made and boast some fine acting, but don’t really make a very deep dent in my memory. Up in the Air is par for the course for him, although of the three he’s done it’s probably the best. Clooney gives a fine star turn as a guy who treasures his solitary, forever-on-the-go lifestyle, while Kendrick is predictably awesome as the young tyro he takes under his wing. Some timely plot points about our current economic conundrum have given some reviewers the impression that this is a Movie of Our Time, but it’s best enjoyed as a classy, star-driven character study. Demerits for a script that’s often distractingly on-the-nose, as well as a somewhat misguided revelation involving a fellow traveler played by Vera Farmiga (who’s also good here). Still, hard to hate a movie that contains a scene as good as the one between Clooney and J.K. Simmons. If this dominates the Oscars, you won’t hear me complain.
Rating (out of 10): 6.
Title: Humpday
Director: Lynn Shelton
Potential nominations: Best Film, Director (Shelton), Male Supporting (Joshua Leonard), Screenplay.
Notes: If nothing else, Humpday is fascinating in the way it affords audience members a glimpse at male bonding rituals as seen through the eyes of a woman. Had this been made by a male filmmaker, Ben and Andrew’s antics would no doubt have been portrayed as charmingly dunderheaded, a la Step Brothers. But because Shelton is under no obligation to defend the male gender, she portrays her quasi-heroes as the machismo-driven idiots they clearly are, unwilling to back down from the asinine challenge they’ve set for themselves. But in coming up with their particular challenge- namely, to film themselves having gay sex with each other (they’re both straight, by the way) for a local art-porn festival- Shelton is also to be commended for tackling some fruitful thematic territory. Not only does she hold up to scorn the male-infantilization culture that has become more prevalent in the last decade or so, but she also tackles the balls-before-brains “No Fear” undercurrent of this culture, while sending it careening smack-dab into the barely-buried homophobia that still afflicts many men (and women) today. Plus it’s really funny. Of course, your mileage may vary depending on how much of Ben and Andrew you can tolerate. But what can I say- I laughed.
Rating: 8.
Title: Adventureland
Director: Greg Mottola
Potential nominations: Male Supporting (Martin Starr), Ensemble Performance.
Notes: Comparisons with Dazed and Confused are a little excessive, but Adventureland is a little charmer all the same. Perhaps the best thing about the film is how lived-in its eighties-era setting is. Mottola never calls too much attention to the period in the that kitschy “I Love the 80s” way of most Hollywood movies set during the Members Only decade, but allows them to become a natural element of the story, as when the midway employees depair of having to listen to the Musik Express play “Rock Me Amadeus” for the 20th time that day. Likewise, I dug how the movie didn’t demonize its potentially villainous characters- even the married handyman (played by Ryan Reynolds) who’s having an affair with Kristen Stewart isn’t a flat-out bad guy (plus I love how his bit about jamming with Lou Reed pays off). Unfortunately, Mottola can’t resist throwing in some forced slapstick, such as the guy who repeatedly socks our hero (Jesse Eisenberg) in the balls, or the barn-door-broad characterizations of Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader. Still, when the movie concentrates on the realities of working a soul-sucking summer job, and the fun one can have with it when the boss isn’t looking, it’s pretty great. And Martin Starr is awesome, obviously.
Rating: 7.
Title: Thirst
Director: Chan-wook Park
Potential nominations: none.
Notes: With each passing movie, it becomes harder for me to push past Park’s ugly worldview. In Oldboy, the filmmaking was so kinetic that one barely had time to think about the subtext, but one of the biggest problems I had with Thirst was that the direction was so slack that I could hardly think of anything else. It’s not enough that the female lead be engaged to a man she can’t stand, but Park shows her as being groomed for the part from childhood, and dominated by her goonish fiancé and abusive mother-in-law-to-be. In addition, the dichotomy between protagonist Song Kang-ho’s good and evil sides (he’s a priest and healer, but he’s also a vampire who’s carrying on an affair with the betrothed heroine) is interesting up to a point, but Park really doesn’t do anything interesting with these opposing forces in his life. I wasn’t really digging it from the get-go, and I finally gave up about an hour or so in, during a hallucination in which the vampire priest humps away at his lover and the smiling body of one of his victims appears sandwiched between them. Man, classy AND subtle- Thirst has it all!
Rating: Not applicable.
Title: Anvil! The Story of Anvil
Director: Sacha Gervasi
Potential nominations: none.
Notes: I have no doubt that first-time director Gervasi (longtime Anvil fan, one-time Anvil follower) was completely sincere in his desire to give the band he loves a documentary tribute. However, it’s sort of amazing how comfortably Anvil! fits the template that was laid down by This Is Spinal Tap a quarter-century ago. Of course, many of Anvil’s woes are similar to those faced by any number of bands who’ve gone on the road. But in scenes such as the one in which Anvil gets lost in the way to a gig (one band member’s girlfriend is the band’s manager, no less!), it undeniably feels like life imitating hilarious, hilarious art. Heck, it’s entirely possible that Gervasi’s goal was to invite the comparison (e.g. the scene in which Lips and Robb Reiner- the guy’s real name!- discuss their first song a la David and Nigel talking up “All the Way Home”), in order to show how sad the Spinal Tap arc is when applied to real life. But at the same time, it feels like Spinal Tap did all the groundwork for this, and all Gervasi had to do was to fill in the template with documentary footage. By the time the group performs at a heavy metal festival attended by literally hundreds of fans, I was half-awaiting the scene in which Anvil performs as the bottom half of a double with a puppet show. Not saying it’s fair, but I just couldn’t let go of the comparison. Maybe if I liked heavy metal more, or if the movie didn’t look like total ass, it might have been easier for me. Alas, it never quite happened. Still, diverting enough.
Rating: 5 out of 10.
Title: Avatar
Director: James Cameron
Potential nominations: Director, Screenplay (ha ha, just kidding).
Notes: In this blockbuster-driven age, movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars have become fairly commonplace. However, it’s rare to see one that so unmistakably displays its creator’s fingerprints. This is most obvious in the film’s somewhat conflicted portrayal of the military-industrial complex, a hallmark of the majority of Cameron’s films. On the one hand, Cameron has always been drawn to state of the art technology and weaponry- the bigger, the better. Yet this enthusiasm has always been tempered by a mistrust of gung-ho militarism run amok, most apparent here in Stephen Lang’s Marine officer, who’s just aching for a reason to mow down the forest-dwelling Na’vi in the name of deep-space Manifest Destiny.
Part of this comes from an undeniable love for the idea of Pure Science, here embodied by Sigourney Weaver and her team of scientists, whose quest to understand the Na’vi has led them to a devil’s bargain with both the Marines and a sniveling corporate scientist played by Giovanni Ribisi. Yet despite Cameron’s disdain for both of these mindsets (Marine and corporate), he can’t keep his impulses toward largesse in check, which leads to lingering shots of futuristic aircraft and cyborg-esque suits, both of which are used almost exclusively by the film’s baddies. But this seeming contradiction, troubling though it might be, only makes the film as a whole more fascinating, as Cameron is working through these conflicting urges with this story in a messy, compelling way, as compared to the rah-rah patriotic fetishism of Michael Bay’s Transformers movies.
As for the Na’vi themselves, they’re somewhat more simplistic, a group of forest-dwelling hunter/warriors inspired by Native Americans except, y’know, 12 feet tall and blue. And Cameron’s narrative debts to Dances With Wolves are already well-documented. Still, what the film lacks in narrative inspiration, it makes up for in pop spectacle. While it’s certainly true that the effects in Avatar aren’t as jaw-dropping as they might have been to an audience from a decade or so ago, they’re nonetheless leaps ahead of anything the big screen has seen. Much of the film is stunning on the pure eye-candy level, especially the shots of the Na’vi’s forest at night time (parts of which seem to be inspired by Jim Henson’s underappreciated TV special Song of the Cloud Forest). Whatever Avatar’s faults may be, visual wonderment is not one of them.
Rating: 7 out of 10.
Friday, January 01, 2010
Beg, borrow, and... okay, maybe not steal...
Most of you will recall that a few weeks ago I voiced my feelings about my need to be selective when playing catch-up with movies during Muriels voting season. But while I won’t even attempt to match the volume of movies I have in years past, I nonetheless have a number of glaring holes in my viewing for 2009, at least some of which I should probably patch up prior to filling out my ballot.
Naturally, there are a handful of movies that I’ll be able to catch on the big screen before the ballot is due at the end of January, some of which are currently occupying theatres nationwide. Chief of among these is Avatar, which even if it doesn’t pose a serious threat to my Muriels favorites, is the kind of pop-culture phenomenon which I really ought to see just to keep abreast of what the kids are up to nowadays (a la Titanic). Likewise, Up in the Air could be a contender- Jason Reitman is a fairly solid director, Clooney’s a reliable indicator of quality in movies that don’t involve goats, and it’ll be nice to see Anna Kendrick get a good role again. And if I get the chance to see The Road and even Precious (a movie I’ve more or less resigned myself to watching sooner or later), so be it.
Of course, the local distributors don’t simply stop opening movies in Columbus once the first of the year arrives. From now until the end of January, certain titles of interest will filter into local cinemas, beginning with the January 8 release of Bronson at the newly-revamped* Gateway Film Center. January 22 brings a pair of Best Actor contenders (on top of Bronson’s allegedly revelatory Tom Hardy) to the Drexel: Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, and Colin Firth in A Single Man. And even if the critics haven’t been kind, as a long-standing fan of Peter Jackson I feel compelled to check out The Lovely Bones when it drops here mid-month.
But as any non-pro critic and awards voter can attest, a great deal of awards-season catching-up is done not in theatres but on DVD. I’ve kicked my Netflix membership up a few notches for the occasion, in the hopes of squeezing in some interesting “smaller” titles that skipped local venues. Of particular interest are a pair of movies featuring comedians in somewhat darker roles- Patton Oswalt in the blue-collar football-obsessive tale Big Fan, and Robin Williams in Bobcat Goldthwait’s allegedly acerbic comedy World’s Greatest Dad. Likewise, Spike Lee’s Passing Strange may be little more than a filmed stage production, but with Lee’s name attached that’s enough for me. However, I’m also looking forward to catching up with a handful of titles that I somehow overlooked in local release. The one that sticks out for me is Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, which has been riding a crest of great buzz since Sundance. Also of interest: Greg Mottola’s 80s-era comedy Adventureland, Sam Rockwell in Moon, and the crowd-pleasing heavy metal doc with the incredibly redundant name, Anvil!: The Story of Anvil.
But unfortunately, some of the most egregious holes in my viewing have yet to get a DVD release. Because of this, I’m trying to chase down screeners of them in time for them to make the ballot. Of the titles that I still need to see, these are my top 10:
1. 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis) – this one particularly hurts, since it played a few days at the Wex in October, but the only screening I could have possibly made coincided with the local beggar’s night. And I couldn’t in good conscience miss out on spending time with my son for Halloween. Do I regret this decision? Heck no. I guess it’s just annoying that I live in a city that tries to act like a teeming metropolis, but can only manage two nights for a critically feted new release from one of world cinema’s most celebrated filmmakers. I mean, I love the Wexner Center, but some of those limited engagements can be difficult for those of us with lives to catch. Anyway, I see that this is coming to the Gateway sometime in the future, but no firm date is set on the site, and I really don’t want to take a chance on not seeing this prior to voting.
2. Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda) – Kore-eda’s a favorite of mine, and I’ve heard great things about this, the only movie in the Movie Nerd Top 10 of 2009 which I have yet to see. I noticed that this is streaming on Netflix, but I’m not sure my crappy computer is up to the task.
3. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke) – I mean, come on. Besides, even if it does suck, chances are that the black and white cinematography should be gorgeous.
4. Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo) – Honger goes to Paris. Based on that pitch alone, it sounds like it’s right up my alley.
5. Afterschool (Antonio Campos) – D’Angelo has been raving about this one since NYFF last year, and I’m sort of sick of being out of the loop.
6. Black Dynamite (Scott Sanders) – This one played locally as well, but I have a pretty good excuse for missing this one, since it had a whole four showings, all of them at 11 PM. Still, felt bad missing what was supposedly an awesome blaxploitation homage.
7. Home (Ursula Meier) – Because no awards ballot of mine is complete without at least one nomination for Isabelle Huppert.
8-10. Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar), My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Terry Gilliam) – Three reliable directors. Mixed buzz on their latest works, but I’m curious all the same.
Honorable mention: Bright Star (Jane Campion), La Danse: Paris Opera Ballet (Frederick Wiseman), House of the Devil (Ti West), Mammoth (Lukas Moodysson), Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu), Red Cliff (John Woo), Ricky (François Ozon), Storm (Hans-Christian Schmid), Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa).
So how will I manage to see these? This, friends, is where you come in. If you know of somewhere I might procure a screener of any of the above titles, let me know in the comments section or shoot me an e-Mail. Really, any help you can give will be greatly appreciated, and I’d be happy to reimburse you for shipping. Besides, the Muriels get more interesting when the voters see more diverse movies. And as much as I dig The Hurt Locker, it’s time to give another movie a chance to win, don’t you think?
* The Gateway (which began its life as a Drexel before becoming a Landmark) recently acquired new management, and one of the first acts of the new regime was to strike a deal with the Film/Video department at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The deal basically entails that the Wex will program two of the Gateway’s screens per week with arthouse fare. This is, of course, good news for those of us who have been decrying the often-paltry selection of non-Hollywood fare in Central Ohio, as well of those of us who love the Wex but can’t always make it on Friday and Saturday nights. This new arrangement should prove ideal both for titles that would otherwise skip Columbus (e.g. The Girlfriend Experience, Julia, most of the above list), plus movies that prove to be audience favorites in their limited Wex runs. Also, being able to get the Members’ discount for Gateway screenings will be awesome.
Naturally, there are a handful of movies that I’ll be able to catch on the big screen before the ballot is due at the end of January, some of which are currently occupying theatres nationwide. Chief of among these is Avatar, which even if it doesn’t pose a serious threat to my Muriels favorites, is the kind of pop-culture phenomenon which I really ought to see just to keep abreast of what the kids are up to nowadays (a la Titanic). Likewise, Up in the Air could be a contender- Jason Reitman is a fairly solid director, Clooney’s a reliable indicator of quality in movies that don’t involve goats, and it’ll be nice to see Anna Kendrick get a good role again. And if I get the chance to see The Road and even Precious (a movie I’ve more or less resigned myself to watching sooner or later), so be it.
Of course, the local distributors don’t simply stop opening movies in Columbus once the first of the year arrives. From now until the end of January, certain titles of interest will filter into local cinemas, beginning with the January 8 release of Bronson at the newly-revamped* Gateway Film Center. January 22 brings a pair of Best Actor contenders (on top of Bronson’s allegedly revelatory Tom Hardy) to the Drexel: Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, and Colin Firth in A Single Man. And even if the critics haven’t been kind, as a long-standing fan of Peter Jackson I feel compelled to check out The Lovely Bones when it drops here mid-month.
But as any non-pro critic and awards voter can attest, a great deal of awards-season catching-up is done not in theatres but on DVD. I’ve kicked my Netflix membership up a few notches for the occasion, in the hopes of squeezing in some interesting “smaller” titles that skipped local venues. Of particular interest are a pair of movies featuring comedians in somewhat darker roles- Patton Oswalt in the blue-collar football-obsessive tale Big Fan, and Robin Williams in Bobcat Goldthwait’s allegedly acerbic comedy World’s Greatest Dad. Likewise, Spike Lee’s Passing Strange may be little more than a filmed stage production, but with Lee’s name attached that’s enough for me. However, I’m also looking forward to catching up with a handful of titles that I somehow overlooked in local release. The one that sticks out for me is Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, which has been riding a crest of great buzz since Sundance. Also of interest: Greg Mottola’s 80s-era comedy Adventureland, Sam Rockwell in Moon, and the crowd-pleasing heavy metal doc with the incredibly redundant name, Anvil!: The Story of Anvil.
But unfortunately, some of the most egregious holes in my viewing have yet to get a DVD release. Because of this, I’m trying to chase down screeners of them in time for them to make the ballot. Of the titles that I still need to see, these are my top 10:
1. 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis) – this one particularly hurts, since it played a few days at the Wex in October, but the only screening I could have possibly made coincided with the local beggar’s night. And I couldn’t in good conscience miss out on spending time with my son for Halloween. Do I regret this decision? Heck no. I guess it’s just annoying that I live in a city that tries to act like a teeming metropolis, but can only manage two nights for a critically feted new release from one of world cinema’s most celebrated filmmakers. I mean, I love the Wexner Center, but some of those limited engagements can be difficult for those of us with lives to catch. Anyway, I see that this is coming to the Gateway sometime in the future, but no firm date is set on the site, and I really don’t want to take a chance on not seeing this prior to voting.
2. Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda) – Kore-eda’s a favorite of mine, and I’ve heard great things about this, the only movie in the Movie Nerd Top 10 of 2009 which I have yet to see. I noticed that this is streaming on Netflix, but I’m not sure my crappy computer is up to the task.
3. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke) – I mean, come on. Besides, even if it does suck, chances are that the black and white cinematography should be gorgeous.
4. Night and Day (Hong Sang-soo) – Honger goes to Paris. Based on that pitch alone, it sounds like it’s right up my alley.
5. Afterschool (Antonio Campos) – D’Angelo has been raving about this one since NYFF last year, and I’m sort of sick of being out of the loop.
6. Black Dynamite (Scott Sanders) – This one played locally as well, but I have a pretty good excuse for missing this one, since it had a whole four showings, all of them at 11 PM. Still, felt bad missing what was supposedly an awesome blaxploitation homage.
7. Home (Ursula Meier) – Because no awards ballot of mine is complete without at least one nomination for Isabelle Huppert.
8-10. Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodovar), My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog), The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (Terry Gilliam) – Three reliable directors. Mixed buzz on their latest works, but I’m curious all the same.
Honorable mention: Bright Star (Jane Campion), La Danse: Paris Opera Ballet (Frederick Wiseman), House of the Devil (Ti West), Mammoth (Lukas Moodysson), Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu), Red Cliff (John Woo), Ricky (François Ozon), Storm (Hans-Christian Schmid), Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa).
So how will I manage to see these? This, friends, is where you come in. If you know of somewhere I might procure a screener of any of the above titles, let me know in the comments section or shoot me an e-Mail. Really, any help you can give will be greatly appreciated, and I’d be happy to reimburse you for shipping. Besides, the Muriels get more interesting when the voters see more diverse movies. And as much as I dig The Hurt Locker, it’s time to give another movie a chance to win, don’t you think?
* The Gateway (which began its life as a Drexel before becoming a Landmark) recently acquired new management, and one of the first acts of the new regime was to strike a deal with the Film/Video department at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The deal basically entails that the Wex will program two of the Gateway’s screens per week with arthouse fare. This is, of course, good news for those of us who have been decrying the often-paltry selection of non-Hollywood fare in Central Ohio, as well of those of us who love the Wex but can’t always make it on Friday and Saturday nights. This new arrangement should prove ideal both for titles that would otherwise skip Columbus (e.g. The Girlfriend Experience, Julia, most of the above list), plus movies that prove to be audience favorites in their limited Wex runs. Also, being able to get the Members’ discount for Gateway screenings will be awesome.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Bad Orson
"In many ways, Lt. Terence McDonagh represents the ultimate Cage performance, full of unorthodox acting choices that work beautifully. Cage goes over the top all right, but it never feels like he’s simply hamming it up for the hell of it. Everything works in the context of the character, from his repeated dialogue quirks (dig his disbelieving chuckle whenever he mentions the henchman “G”) to the character’s outlandish behavior. It would be sort of unbearable if Cage appeared to be breaking a sweat, but he inhabits the character so fully that he seems completely in control even in the character's craziest moments."
Click here for the full review.
Click here for the full review.
"It’s become something of an awards-season cliché that actors are bound to get plenty of hype for playing famous people. Frankly, I’ve gotten a little tired of it- yeah, I suppose it’s neat to see, for example, Jaime Foxx playing Ray Charles, but once the initial charge wears off, the idea of one celebrity playing another feels like a thespian parlor trick designed to grab the attention of Oscar voters. However, Christian McKay’s justifiably feted turn as the late Mr. Welles is an exception- a full-blooded creation that transcends the requisite mimicry. McKay’s work is spellbinding, and his Welles is the rare interpretation of a historical figure that would be just as compelling a character had he not existed in real life."
Click here for the full review.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Tidings for Muriels Season
With awards season fast approaching, it’s now time to begin what has become an annual tradition for me- Muriels cramming. Having a limited amount of free time at my disposal throughout the year, I tend to find that there’s a decent-sized list of movies remaining come December that I feel compelled to watch before filling out my Muriels ballot. But while in the past I’ve felt a certain duty to take in anything that seems to be remotely in contention for awards, this year I’m getting a little weary of the process.
I suppose this feeling began last Friday, when I watched one of this year’s prime bits of Oscar bait, Lone Scherfig’s An Education. Here is a movie that has all the right ingredients to be a major awards-season player- a star-making turn from Carey Mulligan, a classy (mostly English!) supporting cast, and handsome production values, in the service of an adaptation of an acclaimed memoir, thereby carrying the attendant “based on a true story” cachet. It’s all so perfect- perfectly produced, perfectly performed, perfectly dull. There’s nothing in An Education to jolt the stereotypical arthouse crowd out of their collective comfort zone, but also nothing to make it memorable aside from Mulligan. If An Education makes a star of its leading lady, I certainly won’t complain, but one luminous performer doesn’t a worthy movie make. Compare it to a hard-edged movie like this year’s Julia, which features Tilda Swinton’s career-best work, and you see the difference between a film that uses its star turn as a crutch and one that actually makes it the foundation upon which everything else is built.
In years past, the idea that I would be with skipping a potentially “important” awards contender would have been surprising to me. But then, I had more time to watch movies back in the day. Nowadays, my movie-watching time has decreased significantly, so I have to make the most of it. So rather than sitting through anything that might have even the slightest chance of contending for my end-of-year honors, I’m forced to get more selective. With this in mind, I’ve come up with some rules of thumb I intend to observe this Muriels season, in the hope they’ll help me sift through the dross:
1. If I don’t think I’ll like something, I probably won’t.
In every cinephile, there exists a certain amount of hope that the movies we see will surprise us. But realistically speaking, this doesn’t happen very often. I’ve seen plenty of movies in my time, and this has shown me where my tastes lie as a moviegoer. Consequently, I’ve learned to trust my instincts when choosing what I’ll see. If I want to see something, I’ll find a reason to see it. If I don’t, I most likely won’t. And if I’m not sure, I’ll wait for the reviews. Of course, this method isn’t foolproof, but it works as well as any other I’ve found.
With the proliferation of movie blogs both professional and amateur, the amount of criticism (both positive and negative) can be overwhelming. Thus, trusting my own tastes has allowed me to eliminate the critical noise while making my decisions. The best recent example I can think of is the new movie Precious. By all accounts, this is one of this year’s Oscar juggernauts. But I’m just not interested. When I first read about it in this year’s Sundance coverage, it didn’t sound especially promising, and in spite of everything I’ve heard since then, it just doesn’t seem like my kind of thing.
As a fan of Charles Burnett and Spike Lee, I can assure you that I’ve never shied away from onscreen depictions of the lower-class African-American milieu. No, my lack of interest in Precious stems from my longstanding aversion to victimization stories. As doormats go, the title character in Precious is a doozy- poor, grossly obese, illiterate, raped (and impregnated) by her now-absent father, and perpetually abused by her mother. Factor in a mentally-handicapped baby and a terminal illness (what, no cute puppy?) and you’ve got a movie that practically dares you not to pity its protagonist and be uplifted by her eventual victories. Problem is, by encouraging pity from the audience rather than active sympathy, movies like this tend to reduce their pathetic protagonists into Others, comforting viewers with the idea that, hey, at least they don’t have it that bad. Or as Band Aid so memorably put it in that incredibly patronizing holiday mainstay “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” “be glad it’s them instead of you.”
Honestly, I hope I’m wrong about Precious. If nothing else, the film’s fans are legion- hundreds of mainstream critics are falling over themselves with praise, and it’s become this fall’s Little Indie That Could, with major players like Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry in its corner. However, I’ve spoken with a number of people I trust who have seen Precious, and nothing they’ve told me so far has changed my initial mind about the film. Additionally, in a certain movie nerd poll (in which I’m a voter), Precious is currently ranked at a meager #104 among this year’s releases, well below such acclaimed titles as Monsters vs. Aliens, I Love You, Man, and Crank 2: High Voltage (that movie is awesome, by the way). I hate to get all J. Ro on my readers, but until someone can give me a compelling reason why I owe it to myself to see Precious, I think I’ll just give it a pass. At least, until it cleans up at the Oscars. Speaking of which…
2. Just because a movie is designed to win a raft of Oscars, that doesn’t make it good.
I’ve been following the Academy Awards for well over a decade, and if I’ve learned anything from this experience, it’s that not all Oscar contenders are created equal. Some movies that capture the fancy of the AMPAS voting body are legitimately great films, whether they’re works of epic filmmaking ambition or wonderfully crafted entertainments. But others are seemingly deemed Oscar-worthy less for their quality than by virtue of their ability to hit the voters’ sweet spots. When people talk about “Oscar-bait,” they’re referring to the latter. And over the past few decades, no one has been more skillful at making Oscar-bait than the Weinstein brothers.
At the peak of the Miramax empire in the late nineties, Harvey Weinstein (and to a lesser extent, his brother Bob) perfected the technique for crafting ready-made Academy attention-grabbers. Start with an acclaimed literary property or a red-hot script, pack it full of Serious Actors (no lightweight movie stars will do), and hand it off to a trusty in-house director like John Madden or Lasse Hallstrom. Then make sure the production values are impeccable, and once production’s over, sell theproduct film as aggressively as possible. This proved to be extremely successful, with Miramax garnering Oscars for a sweeping epic (The English Patient), a frothy period rom-com (Shakespeare in Love), and a hyperkinetic musical (Chicago).
Ever since they parted ways with Miramax four years ago, the Weinstein brothers have had some trouble finding their old groove. But this fall’s Nine has all the earmarks of a classic Harvey Special. There are no fewer than six (SIX!) Oscar-winning actors in the cast, and the direction is by Chicago’s Rob Marshall, who has brought back most of his Oscar-winning below-the-line team. In other words, after his baity The Reader got beaten by Slumdog Millionaire last year, Harvey’s leaving nothing to chance.
Sorry, but I’m not buying. For one thing, I’m a little sick of the prestige-ification of the musical genre in recent years. Musicals have their roots in light entertainment, but in their attempts to create the next Chicago, studios have turned a genre once categorized by light-footed entertainments into bloated, plodding affairs that are puffed up with self-importance and art-directed to death. Frankly, I could do without the stunt casting of big-name stars in these movies, as if the fact that Richard Gere and Helena Bonham Carter aren’t full-time singers somehow excuses subpar crooning (I say this as a fan of Sweeney Todd, by the way). And while I’m certainly not averse to serious musicals, it’s one thing for a musical to tackle heavy material, and quite another for one to feel heavy due to its sheer relentlessness.
But what I resent even more is how calculated Nine feels, from its conception on down. While I’ve learned to distinguish good Oscar movies from bad ones, there’s still a significant percentage of moviegoers who still equates Oscar success with quality. But a gifted cast and an impeccable technical pedigree isn’t enough to make for a movie that’s worth watching. It’s not that Rob Marshall is a bad director- he’s a moderately-talented company man who pulls off Harvey’s goals with a minimum of fuss- but there’s no vision there. In fact, I dare say that the only vision dancing in the heads of Marshall and the Weinsteins involves a mantelpiece full of little golden statues.
3. I simply can’t see everything.
One of the first lessons that I learned in Microeconomics was the concept of utility- the idea that, given a limited amount of money, time, or other resources, the logical person will choose the option that brings him the greatest relative pleasure or gain. To apply this idea to moviewatching, if I only have time to see a handful of movies per week, I’ll most likely go with the ones I think I’ll enjoy the most. Of course, there are other factors in my decision, including the location where it’s playing and how long it’s running. But generally, I’d say the idea of utility is applicable to my moviegoing habits.
Living in Columbus is something of a double-edged sword when it comes to my viewing choices. On the one hand, I have something of a limited slate from which to choose- limited releases make it here weeks if not months after they bow in NYC, if at all, and there are weeks where there’s next to nothing that interests me. On the other hand, I rarely find myself in a position where I’m unable to see every theatrical release I want to see. Generally, I’m able to catch up with every local release that strikes my fancy.
The exception to this rule is at the end of the year. Suddenly, after withholding them for most of the year, the Hollywood studios dump the majority of their alleged heavy hitters in November and December, all in an attempt to snag some Oscar glory (truth be told, I see that game plan backfiring this year, when voters find themselves with ten Best Picture slots to fill, but that’s neither here nor there). For someone in my position- having a life, in short- I only have time to see two or three movies per week at most, and if the number of movies that I’m curious about is greater than the number I have time to see, something has to fall by the wayside. Whereas I might have had time for these movies earlier in the year, by the time December rolls around, something, as they say, has gotta give.
Naturally, there will always be directors whose films I make a priority to see. I’ll always line up for new releases by Rivette, Malick, the Dardenne brothers, P.T. Anderson, Von Trier, DePalma, Desplechin, and the guys at Pixar, to name a few. But while I have an undeniable sentimental attachment to these directors, I also recognize that they’re good bets, and even if they don’t hit a home run every time they’re at the plate, their batting averages are pretty darn high . Among high-profile films coming out later this month, I’m pumped for the Werner Herzog/Nicolas Cage Bad Lieutenant sequel/spinoff/thingamajig, because duh. Also, I’ll certainly make time for Avatar and The Lovely Bones, since for all their flaws, James Cameron and Peter Jackson are two of the only big-ticket filmmakers in Hollywood who consistently imbue their big-budget productions with real vision and grandeur.
Clint Eastwood? Not so much. Although I’ve loved some of Eastwood’s films- Unforgiven especially- I wouldn’t consider myself to be an unconditional fan by any means. His films tend to have a workmanlike quality, and the good ones succeed primarily because they tell good stories. Simply put, the story for Invictus doesn’t really grab me. Those who’ve followed the blog for any length of time know that I’m not especially keen on the biopic genre, but of all the contemporary figures whose lives demand the biopic treatment, Mandela has to be near the top. So you’ve got a story about Nelson Mandela, complete with the casting of Morgan Freeman as Mandela (the great man’s choice, might I add!), and the best you can do is to put him in an underdog sports saga? Are you frickin’ kidding me?
Not even the presence of Freeman and Damon, two of Hollywood’s finest actors, makes me all that curious to see this. For my money, Freeman has too many Dreamcatchers and Bruce Almightys on his résumé to be a sure thing, and Damon is much more interesting when he’s playing screwballs than heroes (as in this year’s The Informant!). And I’m a little weary of Eastwood’s elder-statesman phase, with every story he tells getting bogged down with shadows and foreboding. Just once, I’d like to see Clint cut loose again behind the camera, make something just for entertainment’s sake (another Space Cowboys, perhaps?). It might not get any Oscar nominations, but it should at least be fun.
A few days ago, I received an e-Mail from a prospective Muriels voter, asking me whether he needed to worry about seeing all of the big awards-season releases before filling out his ballot. I told him that wasn’t necessary, and I suppose that this post is my way of telling the rest of you as well. To me, the Muriels have always been about recognizing the achievements from the past year that inflame our passion about cinema. And I’ve always found that nothing dampers my cinematic passion more than watching a movie out of duty rather than legitimate desire or curiosity. The Muriels have never attempted to be the Oscars, or even to follow them. If our tastes are different, well, that’s what makes life interesting, isn’t it?
I suppose this feeling began last Friday, when I watched one of this year’s prime bits of Oscar bait, Lone Scherfig’s An Education. Here is a movie that has all the right ingredients to be a major awards-season player- a star-making turn from Carey Mulligan, a classy (mostly English!) supporting cast, and handsome production values, in the service of an adaptation of an acclaimed memoir, thereby carrying the attendant “based on a true story” cachet. It’s all so perfect- perfectly produced, perfectly performed, perfectly dull. There’s nothing in An Education to jolt the stereotypical arthouse crowd out of their collective comfort zone, but also nothing to make it memorable aside from Mulligan. If An Education makes a star of its leading lady, I certainly won’t complain, but one luminous performer doesn’t a worthy movie make. Compare it to a hard-edged movie like this year’s Julia, which features Tilda Swinton’s career-best work, and you see the difference between a film that uses its star turn as a crutch and one that actually makes it the foundation upon which everything else is built.
In years past, the idea that I would be with skipping a potentially “important” awards contender would have been surprising to me. But then, I had more time to watch movies back in the day. Nowadays, my movie-watching time has decreased significantly, so I have to make the most of it. So rather than sitting through anything that might have even the slightest chance of contending for my end-of-year honors, I’m forced to get more selective. With this in mind, I’ve come up with some rules of thumb I intend to observe this Muriels season, in the hope they’ll help me sift through the dross:
1. If I don’t think I’ll like something, I probably won’t.
In every cinephile, there exists a certain amount of hope that the movies we see will surprise us. But realistically speaking, this doesn’t happen very often. I’ve seen plenty of movies in my time, and this has shown me where my tastes lie as a moviegoer. Consequently, I’ve learned to trust my instincts when choosing what I’ll see. If I want to see something, I’ll find a reason to see it. If I don’t, I most likely won’t. And if I’m not sure, I’ll wait for the reviews. Of course, this method isn’t foolproof, but it works as well as any other I’ve found.
With the proliferation of movie blogs both professional and amateur, the amount of criticism (both positive and negative) can be overwhelming. Thus, trusting my own tastes has allowed me to eliminate the critical noise while making my decisions. The best recent example I can think of is the new movie Precious. By all accounts, this is one of this year’s Oscar juggernauts. But I’m just not interested. When I first read about it in this year’s Sundance coverage, it didn’t sound especially promising, and in spite of everything I’ve heard since then, it just doesn’t seem like my kind of thing.
As a fan of Charles Burnett and Spike Lee, I can assure you that I’ve never shied away from onscreen depictions of the lower-class African-American milieu. No, my lack of interest in Precious stems from my longstanding aversion to victimization stories. As doormats go, the title character in Precious is a doozy- poor, grossly obese, illiterate, raped (and impregnated) by her now-absent father, and perpetually abused by her mother. Factor in a mentally-handicapped baby and a terminal illness (what, no cute puppy?) and you’ve got a movie that practically dares you not to pity its protagonist and be uplifted by her eventual victories. Problem is, by encouraging pity from the audience rather than active sympathy, movies like this tend to reduce their pathetic protagonists into Others, comforting viewers with the idea that, hey, at least they don’t have it that bad. Or as Band Aid so memorably put it in that incredibly patronizing holiday mainstay “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” “be glad it’s them instead of you.”
Honestly, I hope I’m wrong about Precious. If nothing else, the film’s fans are legion- hundreds of mainstream critics are falling over themselves with praise, and it’s become this fall’s Little Indie That Could, with major players like Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry in its corner. However, I’ve spoken with a number of people I trust who have seen Precious, and nothing they’ve told me so far has changed my initial mind about the film. Additionally, in a certain movie nerd poll (in which I’m a voter), Precious is currently ranked at a meager #104 among this year’s releases, well below such acclaimed titles as Monsters vs. Aliens, I Love You, Man, and Crank 2: High Voltage (that movie is awesome, by the way). I hate to get all J. Ro on my readers, but until someone can give me a compelling reason why I owe it to myself to see Precious, I think I’ll just give it a pass. At least, until it cleans up at the Oscars. Speaking of which…
2. Just because a movie is designed to win a raft of Oscars, that doesn’t make it good.
I’ve been following the Academy Awards for well over a decade, and if I’ve learned anything from this experience, it’s that not all Oscar contenders are created equal. Some movies that capture the fancy of the AMPAS voting body are legitimately great films, whether they’re works of epic filmmaking ambition or wonderfully crafted entertainments. But others are seemingly deemed Oscar-worthy less for their quality than by virtue of their ability to hit the voters’ sweet spots. When people talk about “Oscar-bait,” they’re referring to the latter. And over the past few decades, no one has been more skillful at making Oscar-bait than the Weinstein brothers.
At the peak of the Miramax empire in the late nineties, Harvey Weinstein (and to a lesser extent, his brother Bob) perfected the technique for crafting ready-made Academy attention-grabbers. Start with an acclaimed literary property or a red-hot script, pack it full of Serious Actors (no lightweight movie stars will do), and hand it off to a trusty in-house director like John Madden or Lasse Hallstrom. Then make sure the production values are impeccable, and once production’s over, sell the
Ever since they parted ways with Miramax four years ago, the Weinstein brothers have had some trouble finding their old groove. But this fall’s Nine has all the earmarks of a classic Harvey Special. There are no fewer than six (SIX!) Oscar-winning actors in the cast, and the direction is by Chicago’s Rob Marshall, who has brought back most of his Oscar-winning below-the-line team. In other words, after his baity The Reader got beaten by Slumdog Millionaire last year, Harvey’s leaving nothing to chance.
Sorry, but I’m not buying. For one thing, I’m a little sick of the prestige-ification of the musical genre in recent years. Musicals have their roots in light entertainment, but in their attempts to create the next Chicago, studios have turned a genre once categorized by light-footed entertainments into bloated, plodding affairs that are puffed up with self-importance and art-directed to death. Frankly, I could do without the stunt casting of big-name stars in these movies, as if the fact that Richard Gere and Helena Bonham Carter aren’t full-time singers somehow excuses subpar crooning (I say this as a fan of Sweeney Todd, by the way). And while I’m certainly not averse to serious musicals, it’s one thing for a musical to tackle heavy material, and quite another for one to feel heavy due to its sheer relentlessness.
But what I resent even more is how calculated Nine feels, from its conception on down. While I’ve learned to distinguish good Oscar movies from bad ones, there’s still a significant percentage of moviegoers who still equates Oscar success with quality. But a gifted cast and an impeccable technical pedigree isn’t enough to make for a movie that’s worth watching. It’s not that Rob Marshall is a bad director- he’s a moderately-talented company man who pulls off Harvey’s goals with a minimum of fuss- but there’s no vision there. In fact, I dare say that the only vision dancing in the heads of Marshall and the Weinsteins involves a mantelpiece full of little golden statues.
3. I simply can’t see everything.
One of the first lessons that I learned in Microeconomics was the concept of utility- the idea that, given a limited amount of money, time, or other resources, the logical person will choose the option that brings him the greatest relative pleasure or gain. To apply this idea to moviewatching, if I only have time to see a handful of movies per week, I’ll most likely go with the ones I think I’ll enjoy the most. Of course, there are other factors in my decision, including the location where it’s playing and how long it’s running. But generally, I’d say the idea of utility is applicable to my moviegoing habits.
Living in Columbus is something of a double-edged sword when it comes to my viewing choices. On the one hand, I have something of a limited slate from which to choose- limited releases make it here weeks if not months after they bow in NYC, if at all, and there are weeks where there’s next to nothing that interests me. On the other hand, I rarely find myself in a position where I’m unable to see every theatrical release I want to see. Generally, I’m able to catch up with every local release that strikes my fancy.
The exception to this rule is at the end of the year. Suddenly, after withholding them for most of the year, the Hollywood studios dump the majority of their alleged heavy hitters in November and December, all in an attempt to snag some Oscar glory (truth be told, I see that game plan backfiring this year, when voters find themselves with ten Best Picture slots to fill, but that’s neither here nor there). For someone in my position- having a life, in short- I only have time to see two or three movies per week at most, and if the number of movies that I’m curious about is greater than the number I have time to see, something has to fall by the wayside. Whereas I might have had time for these movies earlier in the year, by the time December rolls around, something, as they say, has gotta give.
Naturally, there will always be directors whose films I make a priority to see. I’ll always line up for new releases by Rivette, Malick, the Dardenne brothers, P.T. Anderson, Von Trier, DePalma, Desplechin, and the guys at Pixar, to name a few. But while I have an undeniable sentimental attachment to these directors, I also recognize that they’re good bets, and even if they don’t hit a home run every time they’re at the plate, their batting averages are pretty darn high . Among high-profile films coming out later this month, I’m pumped for the Werner Herzog/Nicolas Cage Bad Lieutenant sequel/spinoff/thingamajig, because duh. Also, I’ll certainly make time for Avatar and The Lovely Bones, since for all their flaws, James Cameron and Peter Jackson are two of the only big-ticket filmmakers in Hollywood who consistently imbue their big-budget productions with real vision and grandeur.
Clint Eastwood? Not so much. Although I’ve loved some of Eastwood’s films- Unforgiven especially- I wouldn’t consider myself to be an unconditional fan by any means. His films tend to have a workmanlike quality, and the good ones succeed primarily because they tell good stories. Simply put, the story for Invictus doesn’t really grab me. Those who’ve followed the blog for any length of time know that I’m not especially keen on the biopic genre, but of all the contemporary figures whose lives demand the biopic treatment, Mandela has to be near the top. So you’ve got a story about Nelson Mandela, complete with the casting of Morgan Freeman as Mandela (the great man’s choice, might I add!), and the best you can do is to put him in an underdog sports saga? Are you frickin’ kidding me?
Not even the presence of Freeman and Damon, two of Hollywood’s finest actors, makes me all that curious to see this. For my money, Freeman has too many Dreamcatchers and Bruce Almightys on his résumé to be a sure thing, and Damon is much more interesting when he’s playing screwballs than heroes (as in this year’s The Informant!). And I’m a little weary of Eastwood’s elder-statesman phase, with every story he tells getting bogged down with shadows and foreboding. Just once, I’d like to see Clint cut loose again behind the camera, make something just for entertainment’s sake (another Space Cowboys, perhaps?). It might not get any Oscar nominations, but it should at least be fun.
A few days ago, I received an e-Mail from a prospective Muriels voter, asking me whether he needed to worry about seeing all of the big awards-season releases before filling out his ballot. I told him that wasn’t necessary, and I suppose that this post is my way of telling the rest of you as well. To me, the Muriels have always been about recognizing the achievements from the past year that inflame our passion about cinema. And I’ve always found that nothing dampers my cinematic passion more than watching a movie out of duty rather than legitimate desire or curiosity. The Muriels have never attempted to be the Oscars, or even to follow them. If our tastes are different, well, that’s what makes life interesting, isn’t it?
Monday, December 07, 2009
"A crying woman is a scheming woman."
One of the challenges of reviewing a movie as visceral as Antichrist is that it’s difficult to see past the initial impact to the headier stuff on display. I saw Antichrist for the first time on Friday night, and since then I’ve been turning it over in my head, trying to puzzle out what Von Trier is doing with the film. However, my more immediate reaction to it was closer to stunned silence at the sheer force of the filmmaking and the often-shocking imagery. Make no mistake- Antichrist hits, and hits hard.
Click here for the complete review.
Click here for the complete review.
Friday, December 04, 2009
Accounting for Myself
Ever since Nerve dropped Screengrab like the proverbial bad habit this past May, I’ve struggled to continue my once-impressive output. Part of the reason for that is financial- I was getting paid for it before, and now that I’m working strictly pro bono it becomes that much harder to write for free than it was in the past. Consequently, it’s simply easier to occupy my time with other pursuits. As you know, I moved in with Angela and the Offspring this summer, and it’s been everything I’d hoped for. Not always easy, of course, but I’m certainly not having second thoughts about the decision.
In addition to the new demands of live-in boyfriend-hood and quasi-fatherhood, I’ve also been busy with some other pursuits. In January, I started taking college courses part-time, in the evenings and on weekends. I earned my B.A. back in 2001, but I have yet to do anything in my major field of study (Humanities, so duh), and now that I’ve got more financial responsibilities on my plate than I had before, I figured that it was time to go back to school to study something I can actually make a little money doing. So I’m studying Accounting, with the goal of becoming a CPA.
I hinted at this decision back in February when I resigned my post as head honcho of the Muriels- though I’m staying on in a consigliere-esque role- but I’ve kept mum on the details until now since I didn’t want to mention it until I was sure that I could actually handle it. It was a struggle at first, but I’ve been working hard and have gotten good grades to show for it, and it looks like I’ll be seeing this thing through to the end.
Since returning to school, I always hoped that I might be able to find time to keep the blog going as I once did, but seeing as how I’ve written only a handful of reviews since Screengrab folded, it looks like that isn’t going to happen. But in the interest of giving my fans some thoughts on the movies I’ve been seeing, I recently settled upon a solution- micro-reviews. That’s right- all of the 2009 releases I’ve seen will be compacted, processed, and packaged into an easily digestible ten-word format for your reading pleasure and critical enlightenment. In some cases, I’d like to think I captured the essence of these movies- or my feelings about them, anyway- with haiku-like precision. However, in others I couldn’t resist the urge to get a little silly.
Anyway, hope you enjoy. In a handful of instances, I've linked to longer piecesI've written about the films, or work by others that dovetails nicely with my own opinions. See if you can find them all!
In kinda-sorta-alphabetical order:
17 Again (Steers)- Remember, kids- follow your dreams, or you’ll become Matthew Perry. [5]
24 City (Jia)- Sorry, Jia fanboys. He doesn’t excite me. Maybe next time… [6]
500 Days of Summer (Webb)- Half insightful relationship tale, half cutesy bullshit. Good enough for me. [6]
Adoration (Egoyan)- Second-tier Egoyan, but in his classic style. I’m down. [6]
Angels and Demons (Howard)- Outpaces Da Vinci by embracing its ridiculousness. Still not great. [5]
Away We Go (Mendes)- Genuine emotion can’t overcome condescending script. Schneider almost saves it. [5]
The Beaches of Agnes (Varda)- A doodle, but by now I’d say she’s entitled. [6]
The Brothers Bloom (Johnson)- RJ’s ear for patois impeccable in Lesteresque romp with soul. [8]
Brüno (Charles)- Sometimes funny, occasionally probing, but man, the gag’s wearing thin. [5]
Capitalism: A Love Story (Moore)- See Brüno mini-review, only even more so. [5]
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (Lord/Miller)- Hilarious with a chance of charming. Animated Mr. T FTW. [7]
Coraline (Selick)- Selick finds his way again. Dark stop-motion eye candy. [7]
Crank 2: High Voltage (Neveldine/Taylor)- “Statham makes England look ****ing awesome” ~ ZMF. In this, anyway. [7]
Disney’s A Christmas Carol (Zemeckis)- Zemeckis’ best motion-capture epic thusfar. Decidedly not for kids. [7]
District 9 (Blomkamp)- Imperfect, but miles better than a Halo movie would’ve been. [6]
Drag Me to Hell (Raimi)- Will stop at nothing to entertain you. I wholeheartedly approve. [7]
Duplicity (Gilroy)- Trouble in Paradise for cynical times. Stellar turns all around. [8]
Extract (Judge)- Kind of a lazy, downmarket SERIOUS MAN. Lacks flavor (sorry). [4]
Fados (Saura)- One to let wash over you. Click for review. [7]
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Anderson)- Just what you’d expect, but in the best sense. Hotbox! [9]
Funny People (Apatow)- Inconsistent, sometimes insightful. Still not taken with Serious Adam Sandler. Click for review. [5]
G-Force (Yeatman)- Muriel, Victoria & Charlotte could whup these CGI cavies’ asses. [4]
The Girlfriend Experience (Soderbergh) I’d hate to meet this dude in a dark alley. [6]
Gomorrah (Garrone)- Well-made, but eventually I just stopped giving a shit. [6]
Goodbye Solo (Bahrani)- Low-key friendship story mostly avoids cliché. Red West supercool. [7]
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates)- Mostly setup, thus kinda unsatisfying. #7 shows real potential though. [5]
The Headless Woman (Martel)- Fascinating enigma warrants second view, along with other Martel films. [7]
Hotel for Dogs (Freudenthal)- Clumsy, almost painfully square, but sunny and awfully good-natured. Click for review. [5]
Hunger (McQueen)- Less artsy stunt that I’d feared. Double-feature with Papillon. [7]
The Hurt Locker (Bigelow)- Only Beckham stuff holds this back from being a 10. [9]
In the Loop (Iannucci)- Deliciously salty as a big bag of pretzels. Cast awesome. [7]
The Informant! (Soderbergh)- “Man, I’d be invisible if it wasn’t for that thing.” [7]
Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino)- Watch first to marvel, then to relish. “It’s a bingo!!” [9]
Inkheart (Softley)- Decent family adventure, full of eminent thesps clearly enjoying themselves. [5]
Julia (Zonca)- Muriel FYC: Tilda Swinton. “Are ya shot?” Brilliant stuff. [8]
Land of the Lost (Silberling)- Obviously crap, but it’s so gleefully silly I hardly cared. [6]
The Limits of Control (Jarmusch)- Artsy slog, or poker-faced self-parody? Jarmusch ain’t telling. [6]
Lorna’s Silence (Dardenne bros.)- Dardennes: best bet in world cinema? They’re surely up there. Click for review. [9]
Monsters vs. Aliens (Letterman/Vernon)- Harmless, fairly amusing. Will inevitably see this a million times. [5]
Observe and Report (Hill)- Misanthropy curdles into sheer ugliness. Good thing it’s really funny. [7]
Paranormal Activity (Peli)- No Blair Witch, but effective LoFi horror all the same. [6]
Ponyo (Miyazaki)- Gorgeous, younger-skewing than most Miyazaki. Shame about the song. [7]
Public Enemies (Mann)- Solid, but please, Michael Mann- go back to film already. [6]
Revanche (Spielmann)- Trades action thrills for laser-like focus. Chop that log! [7]
A Serious Man (Coen bros.)- Compelling pieces, frustrating whole. Listless doormat protagonist. Coen naysayers right? [5]
Star Trek (Abrams)- My eyes are still reeling from the bright white bridge. Click for review. [6]
Sugar (Fleck/Boden)- More on its mind than baseball, usually to its benefit. [6]
Summer Hours (Assayas)- What he said re: Toy Story 2. Weep for furniture. [8]
Taking Woodstock (Lee)- Staunton’s arc made me want to punch something. Otherwiseforgettable forgotten. [4]
Tetro (Coppola)- Operatic emotions, gorgeous style smooth over Freudian narrative. More, please. [8]
Three Monkeys (Ceylan)- All this ugliness gets stifling. NBC, you can do better. [5]
Tony Manero (Larrain)- Galling study of human train wreck, with Pinochet-era implications. [6]
Treeless Mountain (Kim)- Decent story of childhood hardship takes off in final third. [6]
Tulpan (Dvortsevoy)- Ethnographically awesome, otherwise pretty okay. So that’s a yurt. [6]
The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Weitz)- Beats Twilight, that’s for sure. At least Weitz can direct. [5]
Two Lovers (Gray)- White Nights storyline still works. Come back, awesome actor Joaquin. [8]
Tyson (Toback)- Less enlightening than Toback seems to think it is. Pity. [5]
Up (Docter)- Still the filet of 2009. Cried at beginning, fer chrissakes. Click for review. [10]
Watchmen (Snyder)- “Meh” isn’t the emotion a Watchmen movie should warrant. Click for review. [5]
Whatever Works (Allen)- Allen/David pairing somehow not awesome. Wait- late Woody. Nevermind. [5]
Where the Wild Things Are (Jonze)- Bracing anarchy gives way to emo fuzzies. What gives, Spike? [6]
You, the Living (Andersson)- A Songs coda, but why complain? Andersson’s images still spectacular. [8]
Zombieland (Flesicher)- Prefab cult hit gets the job done. Guest cameo kills. [6]
Also, I’ll be maintaining a running tally of all the 2009 releases I’ve seen. The link can be found in the sidebar. On this page you’ll also see a list of movies which, for whatever reason, I haven’t managed to see yet. Some of them are still in theatres, others on DVD, and still others haven’t found their way to Central Ohio just yet. If you can hook me up with some of the harder-to-find titles, I’d be eternally grateful, so feel free to drop me a line.
Oh, and by the way- Famous Last Words kicks off again in January. So stick around a while, will ya?
In addition to the new demands of live-in boyfriend-hood and quasi-fatherhood, I’ve also been busy with some other pursuits. In January, I started taking college courses part-time, in the evenings and on weekends. I earned my B.A. back in 2001, but I have yet to do anything in my major field of study (Humanities, so duh), and now that I’ve got more financial responsibilities on my plate than I had before, I figured that it was time to go back to school to study something I can actually make a little money doing. So I’m studying Accounting, with the goal of becoming a CPA.
I hinted at this decision back in February when I resigned my post as head honcho of the Muriels- though I’m staying on in a consigliere-esque role- but I’ve kept mum on the details until now since I didn’t want to mention it until I was sure that I could actually handle it. It was a struggle at first, but I’ve been working hard and have gotten good grades to show for it, and it looks like I’ll be seeing this thing through to the end.
Since returning to school, I always hoped that I might be able to find time to keep the blog going as I once did, but seeing as how I’ve written only a handful of reviews since Screengrab folded, it looks like that isn’t going to happen. But in the interest of giving my fans some thoughts on the movies I’ve been seeing, I recently settled upon a solution- micro-reviews. That’s right- all of the 2009 releases I’ve seen will be compacted, processed, and packaged into an easily digestible ten-word format for your reading pleasure and critical enlightenment. In some cases, I’d like to think I captured the essence of these movies- or my feelings about them, anyway- with haiku-like precision. However, in others I couldn’t resist the urge to get a little silly.
Anyway, hope you enjoy. In a handful of instances, I've linked to longer piecesI've written about the films, or work by others that dovetails nicely with my own opinions. See if you can find them all!
In kinda-sorta-alphabetical order:
17 Again (Steers)- Remember, kids- follow your dreams, or you’ll become Matthew Perry. [5]
24 City (Jia)- Sorry, Jia fanboys. He doesn’t excite me. Maybe next time… [6]
500 Days of Summer (Webb)- Half insightful relationship tale, half cutesy bullshit. Good enough for me. [6]
Adoration (Egoyan)- Second-tier Egoyan, but in his classic style. I’m down. [6]
Angels and Demons (Howard)- Outpaces Da Vinci by embracing its ridiculousness. Still not great. [5]
Away We Go (Mendes)- Genuine emotion can’t overcome condescending script. Schneider almost saves it. [5]
The Beaches of Agnes (Varda)- A doodle, but by now I’d say she’s entitled. [6]
The Brothers Bloom (Johnson)- RJ’s ear for patois impeccable in Lesteresque romp with soul. [8]
Brüno (Charles)- Sometimes funny, occasionally probing, but man, the gag’s wearing thin. [5]
Capitalism: A Love Story (Moore)- See Brüno mini-review, only even more so. [5]
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (Lord/Miller)- Hilarious with a chance of charming. Animated Mr. T FTW. [7]
Coraline (Selick)- Selick finds his way again. Dark stop-motion eye candy. [7]
Crank 2: High Voltage (Neveldine/Taylor)- “Statham makes England look ****ing awesome” ~ ZMF. In this, anyway. [7]
Disney’s A Christmas Carol (Zemeckis)- Zemeckis’ best motion-capture epic thusfar. Decidedly not for kids. [7]
District 9 (Blomkamp)- Imperfect, but miles better than a Halo movie would’ve been. [6]
Drag Me to Hell (Raimi)- Will stop at nothing to entertain you. I wholeheartedly approve. [7]
Duplicity (Gilroy)- Trouble in Paradise for cynical times. Stellar turns all around. [8]
Extract (Judge)- Kind of a lazy, downmarket SERIOUS MAN. Lacks flavor (sorry). [4]
Fados (Saura)- One to let wash over you. Click for review. [7]
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Anderson)- Just what you’d expect, but in the best sense. Hotbox! [9]
Funny People (Apatow)- Inconsistent, sometimes insightful. Still not taken with Serious Adam Sandler. Click for review. [5]
G-Force (Yeatman)- Muriel, Victoria & Charlotte could whup these CGI cavies’ asses. [4]
The Girlfriend Experience (Soderbergh) I’d hate to meet this dude in a dark alley. [6]
Gomorrah (Garrone)- Well-made, but eventually I just stopped giving a shit. [6]
Goodbye Solo (Bahrani)- Low-key friendship story mostly avoids cliché. Red West supercool. [7]
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates)- Mostly setup, thus kinda unsatisfying. #7 shows real potential though. [5]
The Headless Woman (Martel)- Fascinating enigma warrants second view, along with other Martel films. [7]
Hotel for Dogs (Freudenthal)- Clumsy, almost painfully square, but sunny and awfully good-natured. Click for review. [5]
Hunger (McQueen)- Less artsy stunt that I’d feared. Double-feature with Papillon. [7]
The Hurt Locker (Bigelow)- Only Beckham stuff holds this back from being a 10. [9]
In the Loop (Iannucci)- Deliciously salty as a big bag of pretzels. Cast awesome. [7]
The Informant! (Soderbergh)- “Man, I’d be invisible if it wasn’t for that thing.” [7]
Inglourious Basterds (Tarantino)- Watch first to marvel, then to relish. “It’s a bingo!!” [9]
Inkheart (Softley)- Decent family adventure, full of eminent thesps clearly enjoying themselves. [5]
Julia (Zonca)- Muriel FYC: Tilda Swinton. “Are ya shot?” Brilliant stuff. [8]
Land of the Lost (Silberling)- Obviously crap, but it’s so gleefully silly I hardly cared. [6]
The Limits of Control (Jarmusch)- Artsy slog, or poker-faced self-parody? Jarmusch ain’t telling. [6]
Lorna’s Silence (Dardenne bros.)- Dardennes: best bet in world cinema? They’re surely up there. Click for review. [9]
Monsters vs. Aliens (Letterman/Vernon)- Harmless, fairly amusing. Will inevitably see this a million times. [5]
Observe and Report (Hill)- Misanthropy curdles into sheer ugliness. Good thing it’s really funny. [7]
Paranormal Activity (Peli)- No Blair Witch, but effective LoFi horror all the same. [6]
Ponyo (Miyazaki)- Gorgeous, younger-skewing than most Miyazaki. Shame about the song. [7]
Public Enemies (Mann)- Solid, but please, Michael Mann- go back to film already. [6]
Revanche (Spielmann)- Trades action thrills for laser-like focus. Chop that log! [7]
A Serious Man (Coen bros.)- Compelling pieces, frustrating whole. Listless doormat protagonist. Coen naysayers right? [5]
Star Trek (Abrams)- My eyes are still reeling from the bright white bridge. Click for review. [6]
Sugar (Fleck/Boden)- More on its mind than baseball, usually to its benefit. [6]
Summer Hours (Assayas)- What he said re: Toy Story 2. Weep for furniture. [8]
Taking Woodstock (Lee)- Staunton’s arc made me want to punch something. Otherwise
Tetro (Coppola)- Operatic emotions, gorgeous style smooth over Freudian narrative. More, please. [8]
Three Monkeys (Ceylan)- All this ugliness gets stifling. NBC, you can do better. [5]
Tony Manero (Larrain)- Galling study of human train wreck, with Pinochet-era implications. [6]
Treeless Mountain (Kim)- Decent story of childhood hardship takes off in final third. [6]
Tulpan (Dvortsevoy)- Ethnographically awesome, otherwise pretty okay. So that’s a yurt. [6]
The Twilight Saga: New Moon (Weitz)- Beats Twilight, that’s for sure. At least Weitz can direct. [5]
Two Lovers (Gray)- White Nights storyline still works. Come back, awesome actor Joaquin. [8]
Tyson (Toback)- Less enlightening than Toback seems to think it is. Pity. [5]
Up (Docter)- Still the filet of 2009. Cried at beginning, fer chrissakes. Click for review. [10]
Watchmen (Snyder)- “Meh” isn’t the emotion a Watchmen movie should warrant. Click for review. [5]
Whatever Works (Allen)- Allen/David pairing somehow not awesome. Wait- late Woody. Nevermind. [5]
Where the Wild Things Are (Jonze)- Bracing anarchy gives way to emo fuzzies. What gives, Spike? [6]
You, the Living (Andersson)- A Songs coda, but why complain? Andersson’s images still spectacular. [8]
Zombieland (Flesicher)- Prefab cult hit gets the job done. Guest cameo kills. [6]
Also, I’ll be maintaining a running tally of all the 2009 releases I’ve seen. The link can be found in the sidebar. On this page you’ll also see a list of movies which, for whatever reason, I haven’t managed to see yet. Some of them are still in theatres, others on DVD, and still others haven’t found their way to Central Ohio just yet. If you can hook me up with some of the harder-to-find titles, I’d be eternally grateful, so feel free to drop me a line.
Oh, and by the way- Famous Last Words kicks off again in January. So stick around a while, will ya?
Monday, November 23, 2009
The only new Thanksgiving recipe you'll need this year
With Thanksgiving coming up, it’s easy to get excited for all of the traditional foods of the season. Naturally, everyone is anticipating the old favorites- dressing, gravy, (s)mashed potatoes, Tofurkey, and the like. But let’s not overlook that classic creation, everyone’s favorite gun-metal grey veggie-centric delicacy, green bean casserole. Of course, not everyone has been so blessed to have grown up on this savory treat. If that’s the case, you’re in luck. I hereby bequeath to you, my loyal readership, the world’s greatest recipe for Green Bean Casserole.
Paul’s Impossibly Easy Green Bean Casserole
Ingredients:
2 16 oz cans green beans, drained
2 16 oz cans cream of mushroom soup, not drained
1 can French-fried onions, also not drained
1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Eat one can of green beans as quickly as possible.
3. Eat one can of mushroom soup as quickly as possible.
4. Repeat steps 1 and 2.
5. Vomit contents of stomach into 9-by-12 casserole dish. Induce vomiting, if necessary, only by physical means, either by having a family member or friend administer the Heimlich maneuver or performing it on yourself using the back of a chair. Remember, catch as much as you can in casserole dish to avoid cleanup issues afterwards.
6. Sprinkle onions on top of beans-soup-stomach acid mixture.
7. Place casserole into oven until rancid odor permeates the house and overwhelms the appetizing smells of your other Thanksgiving fare. Remove from oven and serve to gullible guests.
As you can probably guess, I don’t care much for green bean casserole, or it will henceforth be referred to by me, “bean barf.” Of course, I realize that it’s one of those love/hate foods, and I know plenty of otherwise sensible people (including the lovely Angela) who are fans of the stuff. But I find it pretty disgusting, even when it’s made using more conventional methods than the ones I employ above.
Part of it is that the combination of tasty veggies and cream soup seems a fairly unholy alliance. If I’m in the mood for green beans, I want them as unadorned as possible, with some butter and occasionally a few slivers of almond. What I don’t want is for them to be drowning in a heavy cream soup, particularly not if said soup turns the beans from a vibrant green to a grey the color of volcanic ash. I suppose it doesn’t help that I discovered about ten years back that I’m allergic to mushrooms. But then again, my allergy does free me from the burden of having to ever eat bean barf, even out of politeness. The younger me, whose parents thankfully never made the stuff but who often found himself having to “take just a little bit” out of courtesy when visiting others, would be green- or grey, as the case may be- with envy.
So Happy Thanksgiving, everybody, and enjoy your bean barf. Or, if you’re like me, don’t.
Paul’s Impossibly Easy Green Bean Casserole
Ingredients:
2 16 oz cans green beans, drained
2 16 oz cans cream of mushroom soup, not drained
1 can French-fried onions, also not drained
1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Eat one can of green beans as quickly as possible.
3. Eat one can of mushroom soup as quickly as possible.
4. Repeat steps 1 and 2.
5. Vomit contents of stomach into 9-by-12 casserole dish. Induce vomiting, if necessary, only by physical means, either by having a family member or friend administer the Heimlich maneuver or performing it on yourself using the back of a chair. Remember, catch as much as you can in casserole dish to avoid cleanup issues afterwards.
6. Sprinkle onions on top of beans-soup-stomach acid mixture.
7. Place casserole into oven until rancid odor permeates the house and overwhelms the appetizing smells of your other Thanksgiving fare. Remove from oven and serve to gullible guests.
As you can probably guess, I don’t care much for green bean casserole, or it will henceforth be referred to by me, “bean barf.” Of course, I realize that it’s one of those love/hate foods, and I know plenty of otherwise sensible people (including the lovely Angela) who are fans of the stuff. But I find it pretty disgusting, even when it’s made using more conventional methods than the ones I employ above.
Part of it is that the combination of tasty veggies and cream soup seems a fairly unholy alliance. If I’m in the mood for green beans, I want them as unadorned as possible, with some butter and occasionally a few slivers of almond. What I don’t want is for them to be drowning in a heavy cream soup, particularly not if said soup turns the beans from a vibrant green to a grey the color of volcanic ash. I suppose it doesn’t help that I discovered about ten years back that I’m allergic to mushrooms. But then again, my allergy does free me from the burden of having to ever eat bean barf, even out of politeness. The younger me, whose parents thankfully never made the stuff but who often found himself having to “take just a little bit” out of courtesy when visiting others, would be green- or grey, as the case may be- with envy.
So Happy Thanksgiving, everybody, and enjoy your bean barf. Or, if you’re like me, don’t.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Woohoo! New content!
I've been about half a dozen kinds of swamped lately, so I haven't been able to update the blog with new content. That's one of the reasons I've been re-posting the old Movie Moment columns here- the other being that they're difficult to find unless you explicity sniff around the web for them for a good amount of time. I'm sure most of you are enjoying a trip in the ol' Wayback Machine, but at the same time I'm guessing you're craving something brand-spankin'. And so, submitted for your approval, a freshly-penned review of one of my newly-anointed favorite films of 2008, 2009, or whatever year it belongs to, the Dardenne Brothers' The Silence of Lorna, or if you prefer, Lorna's Silence. Hope you like it.
Sometimes, even the greatest of artists can become the victims of sky-high expectations. Take the Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, whose latest film Lorna's Silence, despite almost universally positive reviews, has been given a curiously muted reception. “Ho-hum,” many critics seem to be saying. “Another hardscrabble, socially-conscious bit of cinema vérité from the Dardennes.” That’s a shame, really- sure, it’s interesting to see when talented filmmakers tackle many different genres and styles (it’s why Soderbergh is fun to watch even when he’s spinning his wheels). But with the Dardennes working at such a consistently high level, it’s churlish to complain that they just keep on cranking out another great Dardenne brothers movie every three years or so instead. Truth be told, it sounds a little like bitching that Dickens never wrote a book about giant killer robots- pointless and borderline absurd.
Click here for the full review.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The Movie Moment Redux: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974, Joseph Sargent)
(Originally posted on 12 October 2007 at The Screengrab. Reprinted by permission.)
Since it was first announced, I've been against the idea of remaking Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and nothing I've heard since its release has changed my opinion. But at a time when even the most revered genre films get remade (e.g. Halloween), why fret about this one, especially when it’s already been remade for television? It’s hard to say. Perhaps it has something to do with the stripped-down style of the film, which never calls attention to itself. Sargent, a Hollywood veteran who worked mostly in television, foregoes flash for detail, portraying the subway hijacking more or less realistically, with an invaluable assist from the New York City Transit Authority.
Then there’s the cast. Today, the only leading roles available in Hollywood for men who look like Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, and Martin Balsam would be in lowbrow comedies with the word "grumpy" in the title. But these actors were perfectly suited to the style of the film, playing not hotshot heroes and villains, but men doing a job primarily for the money. Given the usual visual pyrotechnics of remake director Tony Scott and the leading-man appeal of his star, Denzel Washington, it appears that the only thing left over from the original film is the subway hijacking. If that’s all that’s left, you might as well be remaking Money Train.
And no matter how good the remake is, it would be hard to come up with an ending that works even half as well as the original. After his partners-in-crime have been killed, Balsam’s disgraced ex-subway engineer takes his share of the loot back to his apartment, and Matthau and his fellow transit cops set about finding him by questioning former transit employees in the area. After a few false leads, Matthau and his boss (played by Jerry Stiller) drop in on Balsam, who appears nervous as the transit cops question him. After they look around the apartment, Matthau and Stiller start to leave the apartment, on their way to interview the next possible suspect.
Then Balsam sneezes.
Earlier in the film, when the hijackers called in their demands to the Transit Authority, Balsam could be heard sneezing twice in the background, to which Matthau absentmindedly would always respond "gesundheit." Now that same sneeze, which Matthau thought almost nothing of before, gives away Balsam’s identity.
It’s also just a good bit of suspense, with Balsam (the most sympathetic of the hijackers) worrying that the transit cops will find his money hidden in his oven or see through his alibi. In addition, there’s the way the scene ends the film long before we expect it to. In most films, Matthau would question all of the suspects on his list, go back to the station and hash out his clues. Here, it’s one sneeze and it’s over.
But most of all, it’s that final shot that makes the scene great. Who else could have sold that closeup like Matthau did?
"Gesundheit." Gotcha.
Since it was first announced, I've been against the idea of remaking Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, and nothing I've heard since its release has changed my opinion. But at a time when even the most revered genre films get remade (e.g. Halloween), why fret about this one, especially when it’s already been remade for television? It’s hard to say. Perhaps it has something to do with the stripped-down style of the film, which never calls attention to itself. Sargent, a Hollywood veteran who worked mostly in television, foregoes flash for detail, portraying the subway hijacking more or less realistically, with an invaluable assist from the New York City Transit Authority.
Then there’s the cast. Today, the only leading roles available in Hollywood for men who look like Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, and Martin Balsam would be in lowbrow comedies with the word "grumpy" in the title. But these actors were perfectly suited to the style of the film, playing not hotshot heroes and villains, but men doing a job primarily for the money. Given the usual visual pyrotechnics of remake director Tony Scott and the leading-man appeal of his star, Denzel Washington, it appears that the only thing left over from the original film is the subway hijacking. If that’s all that’s left, you might as well be remaking Money Train.
And no matter how good the remake is, it would be hard to come up with an ending that works even half as well as the original. After his partners-in-crime have been killed, Balsam’s disgraced ex-subway engineer takes his share of the loot back to his apartment, and Matthau and his fellow transit cops set about finding him by questioning former transit employees in the area. After a few false leads, Matthau and his boss (played by Jerry Stiller) drop in on Balsam, who appears nervous as the transit cops question him. After they look around the apartment, Matthau and Stiller start to leave the apartment, on their way to interview the next possible suspect.
Then Balsam sneezes.
Earlier in the film, when the hijackers called in their demands to the Transit Authority, Balsam could be heard sneezing twice in the background, to which Matthau absentmindedly would always respond "gesundheit." Now that same sneeze, which Matthau thought almost nothing of before, gives away Balsam’s identity.
It’s also just a good bit of suspense, with Balsam (the most sympathetic of the hijackers) worrying that the transit cops will find his money hidden in his oven or see through his alibi. In addition, there’s the way the scene ends the film long before we expect it to. In most films, Matthau would question all of the suspects on his list, go back to the station and hash out his clues. Here, it’s one sneeze and it’s over.
But most of all, it’s that final shot that makes the scene great. Who else could have sold that closeup like Matthau did?
"Gesundheit." Gotcha.
Monday, November 16, 2009
The Movie Moment Redux: The Girl Can't Help It (1956, Frank Tashlin)
(Originally posted on 22 February 2007 at The Screengrab. Reprinted by permission.)
Director Frank Tashlin’s background was as an animator at Warner Brothers, and this was reflected in his best work. The principal cast of his film Hollywood or Bust might’ve stepped out of a cartoon -- Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Anita Ekberg (as Bust?) were all outsize personalities, well-suited to Tashlin’s world. So too Jayne Mansfield, who serves as both the eye candy and the emotional center of Tashlin’s classic The Girl Can’t Help It.
In this film, Mansfield plays the mistress of a high-level gangster (played by Edmond O’Brien), who wants to turn her into a singing sensation. He enlists -- no, pressures -- has-been talent agent Tom Ewell into grooming her and making her a star. Ewell is the right man for the job, insists O’Brien, not only due to his previous professional successes, but his professionalism as well. Ever since his last successful singer and the love of his life (Julie London, playing herself) moved on for reasons left unstated, Ewell’s policy has been to keep his hands off the talent. However, there are complications. Not only does Mansfield demonstrate herself both unwilling and unable to pursue a singing career, but she also takes a shine to Ewell herself, and Ewell, despite himself, finds he isn’t immune to her charms either.
After a long night of taking Mansfield to various clubs in order to get the attention of the owners, Ewell returns home to his apartment. Tipsy and lonely, he puts on a record of Julie London singing “Cry Me a River,” and as the song plays he has a vision of her in his apartment, singing to him. He stumbles from room to room, trying to escape her, but Julie just keeps appearing- on the couch, reclining in his bed, in the hallway outside his apartment. Finally, after the song is over, Julie disappears down the stairs and Ewell is alone again.
Fans of classic animation might recognize this as a oft-repeated motif in Warner Brothers cartoons. However, in ‘toon form, scenes like this are played as comedy -- a hungry Bugs might hallucinate various objects around him as carrots, for example. What makes the scene in The Girl Can’t Help It so effective is how straight it’s played. The song that Julie London sings is slow and mournful, and the look on her face is full of longing and regret. Likewise, Ewell is tortured by the vision, but he never goes over the top. When it’s all over, all he can do is hang his head and slump off to bed.
However, the scene gets a happy payoff later in the film. In a bar one night, Ewell sits alone, three sheets to the wind, when the jukebox begins playing “Cry Me a River.” Ewell turns to the barfly who chose the tune and berates him for choosing it, and tries to explain his problem. When he points to the seat next to him, to show the other guy where Julie London is, there’s no one sitting there, and the other man tells him as much. But when Ewell takes a look himself, it’s not Julie sitting there at all, but Jayne Mansfield, her face beaming with a loving smile. As cinematic expressions of getting over an old flame go, this one’s hard to beat.
Director Frank Tashlin’s background was as an animator at Warner Brothers, and this was reflected in his best work. The principal cast of his film Hollywood or Bust might’ve stepped out of a cartoon -- Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Anita Ekberg (as Bust?) were all outsize personalities, well-suited to Tashlin’s world. So too Jayne Mansfield, who serves as both the eye candy and the emotional center of Tashlin’s classic The Girl Can’t Help It.
In this film, Mansfield plays the mistress of a high-level gangster (played by Edmond O’Brien), who wants to turn her into a singing sensation. He enlists -- no, pressures -- has-been talent agent Tom Ewell into grooming her and making her a star. Ewell is the right man for the job, insists O’Brien, not only due to his previous professional successes, but his professionalism as well. Ever since his last successful singer and the love of his life (Julie London, playing herself) moved on for reasons left unstated, Ewell’s policy has been to keep his hands off the talent. However, there are complications. Not only does Mansfield demonstrate herself both unwilling and unable to pursue a singing career, but she also takes a shine to Ewell herself, and Ewell, despite himself, finds he isn’t immune to her charms either.
After a long night of taking Mansfield to various clubs in order to get the attention of the owners, Ewell returns home to his apartment. Tipsy and lonely, he puts on a record of Julie London singing “Cry Me a River,” and as the song plays he has a vision of her in his apartment, singing to him. He stumbles from room to room, trying to escape her, but Julie just keeps appearing- on the couch, reclining in his bed, in the hallway outside his apartment. Finally, after the song is over, Julie disappears down the stairs and Ewell is alone again.
Fans of classic animation might recognize this as a oft-repeated motif in Warner Brothers cartoons. However, in ‘toon form, scenes like this are played as comedy -- a hungry Bugs might hallucinate various objects around him as carrots, for example. What makes the scene in The Girl Can’t Help It so effective is how straight it’s played. The song that Julie London sings is slow and mournful, and the look on her face is full of longing and regret. Likewise, Ewell is tortured by the vision, but he never goes over the top. When it’s all over, all he can do is hang his head and slump off to bed.
However, the scene gets a happy payoff later in the film. In a bar one night, Ewell sits alone, three sheets to the wind, when the jukebox begins playing “Cry Me a River.” Ewell turns to the barfly who chose the tune and berates him for choosing it, and tries to explain his problem. When he points to the seat next to him, to show the other guy where Julie London is, there’s no one sitting there, and the other man tells him as much. But when Ewell takes a look himself, it’s not Julie sitting there at all, but Jayne Mansfield, her face beaming with a loving smile. As cinematic expressions of getting over an old flame go, this one’s hard to beat.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
The Movie Moment Redux: The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978, Ermanno Olmi)
(Originally posted on 1 March 2007 at The Screengrab. Reprinted by permission.)
The Italian Neo-Realist movement began as a reaction to the more lightweight entertainments that usually focused on upper-class protagonists. In contrast, neo-realist directors such as Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica explored the poor and working-class Italy of the day, training their cameras on laborers and prostitutes instead of captains of industry and heiresses. Because of this, neo-realist filmmakers more often than not would forego the casting of name actors, preferring to find non-professionals who could embody the types of characters in the film.
Such was the case with Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978), which was made a quarter century after the heyday of Italian Neo-Realism but nonetheless is very much in the same tradition. The Tree of Wooden Clogs captures life on a farmstead in Lombardy, Italy near the end of the 1800s, and Olmi’s cast is comprised entirely of real-life peasants. The film doesn’t attempt to tell a conventional story so much as intertwine the lives of the people who worked this land, raised their families and fought to survive, and while the cast of non-actors might not have worked for a more straightforward narrative, here it’s the right choice. Olmi directs each of his performers so that they feel perfectly natural and free of affectations.
The film’s most emotionally-involving plot strand involves a shy courtship between two teenagers, Stefano and Maddalena. Despite some initial awkwardness, they end up getting married. What’s fascinating about their wedding day is how modest it is compared to most people are used to in real life, much less Hollywood movies. But so it must have been among most poor people of the time, and everything that seems alien to modern audiences makes sense -- the small, early-morning church wedding, the sack lunches the newlyweds bring for their honeymoon, and so on. Even the honeymoon itself is consistent with the characters’ economic situation, with Stefano and Maddalena taking a barge to Milan to visit her aunt, Sister Maria, in a convent. While it’s only a few hours’ voyage to Milan, it’s entirely possible that this is the furthest either has ever been from home, and in fact Sister Maria states that “it’s been years since I saw my sister,” Maddalena’s mother.
After taking a tour of the convent, which is also an orphanage, they eat with the nuns (who sing them a hymn as they dine) and are taken to a small, Spartan bedroom. “We’ve never had newlyweds here before,” Sister Maria tells them. The next morning as they prepare for the trip home (tellingly, they wear the same clothes they came in), Sister Maria enters their room again, a child in her arms.
“His name is Giovanni Batista. He is 1 year old and in perfect health. Aren’t you, Giovanni Batista? He only needs real parents to make him happy, a real mother and father. He can already be a help to his family because he has an inheritance. He has good clothing and a little money which is passed to our institution twice a year. For a family of poor people, this could sometimes be a true gift of Providence. We must help each other in this world. He can be useful to you, and you can be very helpful to him.”
Maddalena then takes Giovanni in her arms and holds him close to her. In a Hollywood tearjerker this would probably be enough to elicit “awws” and sniffles from the audience. But if and when you watch The Tree of Wooden Clogs, pay attention to how Olmi’s camera focuses on the expression on Giovanni’s face. He doesn’t instantly take to Maddalena, but holds back for a few seconds, as if sizing her up. Finally, almost like he’s decided to accept her as his mother, he leans his head against Maddalena’s and relaxes.
I love this scene because of the way it turns an unexpected development into something lovely and sort of profound. It says a lot -- not just about these newlyweds, but about the culture in which they live -- that they so unconditionally accept Giovanni into their lives. The money promised them by Sister Maria plays a small role in their decision, I’m sure, but I’d say that their religious beliefs and values were a much bigger deciding factor. For many poor people, no matter where they live, faith is something that is very real to them, accepted rather than scrutinized and questioned. So it is with Maddalena and Stefano. On their first night as husband and wife, Sister Maria advises them, “may you always deserve God’s blessing.” In the minds of all concerned, Giovanni is just such a blessing.
The Italian Neo-Realist movement began as a reaction to the more lightweight entertainments that usually focused on upper-class protagonists. In contrast, neo-realist directors such as Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica explored the poor and working-class Italy of the day, training their cameras on laborers and prostitutes instead of captains of industry and heiresses. Because of this, neo-realist filmmakers more often than not would forego the casting of name actors, preferring to find non-professionals who could embody the types of characters in the film.
Such was the case with Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978), which was made a quarter century after the heyday of Italian Neo-Realism but nonetheless is very much in the same tradition. The Tree of Wooden Clogs captures life on a farmstead in Lombardy, Italy near the end of the 1800s, and Olmi’s cast is comprised entirely of real-life peasants. The film doesn’t attempt to tell a conventional story so much as intertwine the lives of the people who worked this land, raised their families and fought to survive, and while the cast of non-actors might not have worked for a more straightforward narrative, here it’s the right choice. Olmi directs each of his performers so that they feel perfectly natural and free of affectations.
The film’s most emotionally-involving plot strand involves a shy courtship between two teenagers, Stefano and Maddalena. Despite some initial awkwardness, they end up getting married. What’s fascinating about their wedding day is how modest it is compared to most people are used to in real life, much less Hollywood movies. But so it must have been among most poor people of the time, and everything that seems alien to modern audiences makes sense -- the small, early-morning church wedding, the sack lunches the newlyweds bring for their honeymoon, and so on. Even the honeymoon itself is consistent with the characters’ economic situation, with Stefano and Maddalena taking a barge to Milan to visit her aunt, Sister Maria, in a convent. While it’s only a few hours’ voyage to Milan, it’s entirely possible that this is the furthest either has ever been from home, and in fact Sister Maria states that “it’s been years since I saw my sister,” Maddalena’s mother.
After taking a tour of the convent, which is also an orphanage, they eat with the nuns (who sing them a hymn as they dine) and are taken to a small, Spartan bedroom. “We’ve never had newlyweds here before,” Sister Maria tells them. The next morning as they prepare for the trip home (tellingly, they wear the same clothes they came in), Sister Maria enters their room again, a child in her arms.
“His name is Giovanni Batista. He is 1 year old and in perfect health. Aren’t you, Giovanni Batista? He only needs real parents to make him happy, a real mother and father. He can already be a help to his family because he has an inheritance. He has good clothing and a little money which is passed to our institution twice a year. For a family of poor people, this could sometimes be a true gift of Providence. We must help each other in this world. He can be useful to you, and you can be very helpful to him.”
Maddalena then takes Giovanni in her arms and holds him close to her. In a Hollywood tearjerker this would probably be enough to elicit “awws” and sniffles from the audience. But if and when you watch The Tree of Wooden Clogs, pay attention to how Olmi’s camera focuses on the expression on Giovanni’s face. He doesn’t instantly take to Maddalena, but holds back for a few seconds, as if sizing her up. Finally, almost like he’s decided to accept her as his mother, he leans his head against Maddalena’s and relaxes.
I love this scene because of the way it turns an unexpected development into something lovely and sort of profound. It says a lot -- not just about these newlyweds, but about the culture in which they live -- that they so unconditionally accept Giovanni into their lives. The money promised them by Sister Maria plays a small role in their decision, I’m sure, but I’d say that their religious beliefs and values were a much bigger deciding factor. For many poor people, no matter where they live, faith is something that is very real to them, accepted rather than scrutinized and questioned. So it is with Maddalena and Stefano. On their first night as husband and wife, Sister Maria advises them, “may you always deserve God’s blessing.” In the minds of all concerned, Giovanni is just such a blessing.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
