I count at least ten Oscar nominations between the enormous cast of this film, which was assembled pretty much for the sole reason of marketing that they were able to assemble such a cast. Among its distinguished actors is Sally Field, Kevin Kline, Robert Downey Jr., Cathy Moriarty, Elisabeth Shue, Whoopi Goldberg, Teri Hatcher, Garry Marshall and Kathy Najimy. If there isn't somebody in there who floats your boat then you are beyond help. I apologize.
The film of a thousand stars is about a soap opera called "The Sun Also Sets", where America's sweetheart Celeste Talbert (Field, who could never have been young enough or pretty enough to be anybody's sweetheart) finds herself old and used up. Still, her writer and confidant, Rose (Goldberg), writes her into chapter after chapter, despite the connivances of rival actress Montana Moorehead (Moriarty, doing her typical, dragged-out villain (pun intended)) and her would be lover and producer, David (Downey Jr.).
Things go topsy-turvy when Celeste's old flame (Kline) and her niece (Shue) reenter her life, causing a meltdown that doesn't seem to end. Field spends approximately 110 minutes of this 97 minute film crying and yelling at people, dressed in ridiculous outfits. As Celeste's niece says on set, "This place is crawling with subplots."
Indeed, this becomes a "real life" soap opera, as one crazy plot after another emerge, some funny, some incredibly tiresome. This is a mixed bag of a film, with a lot of jokes that fall flat, some which are drawn out to exhaustion and some which are laugh-out-loud hilarious. My particular favorite is Celeste's addiction to going to the mall and pretending to be humbled when people recognize her and ask for her autograph.
By far the funniest thing about the film is watching the filming of "The Sun Also Sets". Acting well is hard for good actors, but delivering a poor performance intentionally while still making the audience believe they are a good actor is very difficult. It's pretty damn funny.
There isn't much more to say about this film. Everyone acts his part ably, and marginally overcomes the script which didn't quite reach the cleverness of its ideas. It's brisk, and good-natured which is probably all it was striving for in the first place. It assembled the actors and I suppose that was half the battle and half the victory right there.
2.5/4
Monday, January 28, 2013
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Trois couleurs: Bleu (1993)
Juliette Binoche delivers a raw, emotionally exhausting performance in "Blue", the first of the Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy, which explores modern (or shall we say contemporary) life in France. It is an angry, harsh look at grief, and celebrates skillful acting by its leading lady.
Binoche plays Julie, who survives a tragic car accident which kills her five-year-old daughter and her husband. After failing to take her own life, Julie embarks on a mission to sponge away the memory of her family and her past, in order to come to terms with her survivor's guilt. Her path leads her into contact with a variety of characters with whom she learns to love again and make peace with what happened.
The film is absolutely grounded in Binoche who elevates an otherwise meandering and somewhat preachy film to the status of art. Her approach in the character is someone who is wounded but a fighter, and a person who refuses the help of others. In her pain she is aggressive but confused about her more violent tendencies. It is her silence which shows us the depths of her acting powers, as we learn so much about her emotional arc through her stillness and her eyes.
Her journey, we determine early on, will be completed through music. Julie's late husband was a world-renown composer, whose final, unfinished work was being written for the unification of Europe. Although it does not come until the very end of the film, it is understood from the beginning that she will have to complete the music herself. There is a hint that she wrote his music for him in life as well. Julie's story is guided by this music, a beautiful piece from Zbigniew Preisner, which fills the emptiness while we watch her in silence.
Apart from Binoche I found myself a bit let down by a plot that went nowhere filled with characters who purposes were unclear. She meets a boy who heard her husband's final words, a stripper who lives in the apartment beneath her, her dying mother, and the mistress of her late husband. The latter is the only character who seemed to shape her character enough for me to find the reasoning for its inclusion. The others seemed to be there for no other purpose than to give a more well-rounded depiction of France and to fill out a plot that is almost entirely dominated by one character.
I found the film to be full of metaphors and symbolism. Rife, rather. It became a bit of a chore trying to tease out the meaning in peculiar situations and characters which seemed to me fill the space for no other reason than to be "artsy". It succeeded at being "artsy" in a beautiful and not tiresome way, but only due to Binoche's unconventional choices and full commitment.
I have two final questions about this film, though they are two parts of the same whole. I first wonder why Kieslowski decided that he wanted to begin his series with such a somber film, dwelling in death. Does this mean that the series itself will be reborn, as Julie was? I then wondered why he chose to use this story as a representation of Blue. In the French flag blue is the symbol of liberty, at least in its most modern sense, post-Revolution, but I am unsure in what way this film symbolizes liberty, or if it was meant to at all. Is she free to be her own person now? Is knowledge the ultimate form of liberty? Is the tricolor simply a clever way to market Kieslowski's trilogy? I suppose I will have to watch the other two films and find out.
3/4
Binoche plays Julie, who survives a tragic car accident which kills her five-year-old daughter and her husband. After failing to take her own life, Julie embarks on a mission to sponge away the memory of her family and her past, in order to come to terms with her survivor's guilt. Her path leads her into contact with a variety of characters with whom she learns to love again and make peace with what happened.
The film is absolutely grounded in Binoche who elevates an otherwise meandering and somewhat preachy film to the status of art. Her approach in the character is someone who is wounded but a fighter, and a person who refuses the help of others. In her pain she is aggressive but confused about her more violent tendencies. It is her silence which shows us the depths of her acting powers, as we learn so much about her emotional arc through her stillness and her eyes.
Her journey, we determine early on, will be completed through music. Julie's late husband was a world-renown composer, whose final, unfinished work was being written for the unification of Europe. Although it does not come until the very end of the film, it is understood from the beginning that she will have to complete the music herself. There is a hint that she wrote his music for him in life as well. Julie's story is guided by this music, a beautiful piece from Zbigniew Preisner, which fills the emptiness while we watch her in silence.
Apart from Binoche I found myself a bit let down by a plot that went nowhere filled with characters who purposes were unclear. She meets a boy who heard her husband's final words, a stripper who lives in the apartment beneath her, her dying mother, and the mistress of her late husband. The latter is the only character who seemed to shape her character enough for me to find the reasoning for its inclusion. The others seemed to be there for no other purpose than to give a more well-rounded depiction of France and to fill out a plot that is almost entirely dominated by one character.
I found the film to be full of metaphors and symbolism. Rife, rather. It became a bit of a chore trying to tease out the meaning in peculiar situations and characters which seemed to me fill the space for no other reason than to be "artsy". It succeeded at being "artsy" in a beautiful and not tiresome way, but only due to Binoche's unconventional choices and full commitment.
I have two final questions about this film, though they are two parts of the same whole. I first wonder why Kieslowski decided that he wanted to begin his series with such a somber film, dwelling in death. Does this mean that the series itself will be reborn, as Julie was? I then wondered why he chose to use this story as a representation of Blue. In the French flag blue is the symbol of liberty, at least in its most modern sense, post-Revolution, but I am unsure in what way this film symbolizes liberty, or if it was meant to at all. Is she free to be her own person now? Is knowledge the ultimate form of liberty? Is the tricolor simply a clever way to market Kieslowski's trilogy? I suppose I will have to watch the other two films and find out.
3/4
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
May in the Summer (2013)
This film was finished just two weeks before its premier at the Sundance, something which generally causes a bit of shifting in the seats in the audience. We have seen films completed at last minute before and it is usually obvious. Fortunately, all that was obvious about this film was that they cut the deadline so close because so much care went into its making. This was by far my favorite film of the festival and a real triumph for its creator, writer/director/star Cherien Dabis.
Dabis leads a fantastic group of actors playing May, a recently engaged novelist who returns to her home country of Jordan to be married to her fiance, Ziad. She is reacquainted with her sisters Yasmine and Dahlia, and her conservative Catholic mother Nadine (Hiam Abbass). Her mother disapproves of the marriage due to Ziad being Moslem, but that is only the beginning of the story as May is unsure whether she wants to go through with the marriage anyway.
Right off the bat we are presented with several issues of religion, nationality and what it matrimony means to us in post-modern, leisure driven world. It is compounded by the fact that May and her sisters are half-Jordanian, half-American, with their father (Bill Pullman) being an American diplomat, divorced from their mother and with a new Indian wife. Dabis is half-American as well, and this is her somewhat biographical look at what it means to be considered American primarily, when we as Americans would consider her to be Middle Eastern.
On top of this, each of her sisters as well as her mother and her father's mistress all have issues of their own. These range from infidelity to parental estrangement to sexual identity. And greater in scope is the recurring reminder that amidst the conflict of Westernization of Jordan, with its American-style nightclubs and resorts contrasted with what May describes as a rise in "ninjas" (women in burqas), there is the peppering of a political dimension where the film reminds us that a mine-studded Red Sea is the only thing keeping many Palestinians out of Jordan.
There are quite obviously a lot of plots and subplots, arguably too many, but never once did I feel overwhelmed by the content. From my description it also makes the film sound like a heavy handed drama which I am happy to say it is not. At times it is very dramatic and I wouldn't blame anyone for crying. Some of the topics faced are extremely taught with emotion, but at the onset I fully expected this to be a soppy chick-flick about three sisters who have some problems to overcome, but with their girl power make it through all right.
It does begin that way and throughout the film remains very funny and very charming. As the layers begin to add up, however, it becomes clear how rich and complex and heartfelt a film this actually is. Dabis spent years writing the screenplay which is fraught with so many interesting ideas and funny lines and situations. But there is heart behind it, largely in part because so much of it is her own story and the story of her family.
Despite being a great writer Dabis is gorgeous and a gifted actress, commanding the screen with steady eyes and a mature heart. I did not learn the name of the actress, but the woman playing her sister Dahlia was also a standout as a rude, crude, larger than life spirit.
I don't expect that many critics will like this film. I imagine they will probably think it a bit trite and directionless, not veering either dramatic or comedic enough and not intellectually stimulating enough to encompass all that it does. Pooh pooh on them, I say. I sat with an audience of 500 and there was an electric energy watching this film. People were glued to the screen and absolutely absorbed in what they were watching. There was enormous applause for the three leads when they came on to the stage afterwards, and coming from a bunch of snobs like myself I think that says something. I don't think a film like this is trying to please a bunch of leftist intellectuals. This is a movie that was written from a deep place where Dabis keeps her love and that reached out and touched the audience. If there is one film that you watch from the festival this year, make sure it is this one.
4/4
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear (2012)
Documentaries, in my not so humble opinion, are made to manipulate the facts at hand in order to make a statement and convince an audience of something. They are almost never didactic, but on occasion there comes a piece in which a person picks up a camera, points and shoots. I am not going to say that this little piece from Georgia is completely impartial and fully didactic--after all, what goes unsaid is as important as what is--but it does come startlingly close to leaving the filmmaker at the door and just showing the subject matter.
The premise is simple but wonderfully clever: a director goes to Georgia (the country, not the state), hangs posters around a little town saying that she is auditioning people between the ages of 15-25 for a film about the youth of the area. The teens and young adults come in to audition and instead are subtly coerced into telling the camera about the lives, their hopes and wishes, the pain that they have suffered, and in this way the audience gets tiny glimpses of a backward place that is off the grid to most people.
In total there were probably something like a dozen stories covering people from the age of 13 to one man in his late-50s. Director Tinatin Gurchiani has done a wonderfully thorough job of finding and editing stories from all walks of life of people in the area, and capturing a variety of topics. We have clips ranging from a marriage of a very young girl, to a man trying to rekindle the passion between his imprisoned brother and his one-time love affair, a young lad describing his experience in war as a child, to a new mother to an online-gambling addict.
Through all of these there are four which we spend an extra length of time exploring, brought out of the auditioning room and into the fields and valleys of a land which looks as though it is stuck three hundred years in the past:
One I have mentioned, the brother transporting letters from his convict sibling to his lover which I found to be the least interesting of the stories, though we do get some insight into the conservatism of the Georgian youth. There is also the story of the 13-year-old boy, who frets in his house with his family after his father goes to the city to have an operation. Then there is the life of the 25-year-old mayor of a town of 150, in which the average age is 70. Finally we have a heart breaking look at a young girl who seeks her mother who abandoned her as a child.
In all that we see there is not much to find redeeming about the place we see. From their stories there were two ideas that stuck out to me: There was a scene captured in the story of the mayor in which one alcoholic man chops down a dead tree. He muses to himself, "what good is a dead tree?" The second came from a startlingly articulate young female writer, tattooed and angry with the world. She pontificates that if she had a machine which could make anything disappear she would erase herself.
These thoughts struck me as being poignant to what the audience was watching on the screen. This is a hopeless place where people are born, they live their subsistence lifestyle or if they are lucky go to school and get a trade job, and they die. It is a tired place and a useless place. I think that the director in presenting her homeland wanted to offer something more than that, but I feel that all she succeeded in doing was depressing the audience by showing the futility of their lives. It is a tired place, and a dying place. Their communal spirit and their love of the family cannot hide the very realness that maybe that machine would have too much to erase in the case of that nation.
3/4
The premise is simple but wonderfully clever: a director goes to Georgia (the country, not the state), hangs posters around a little town saying that she is auditioning people between the ages of 15-25 for a film about the youth of the area. The teens and young adults come in to audition and instead are subtly coerced into telling the camera about the lives, their hopes and wishes, the pain that they have suffered, and in this way the audience gets tiny glimpses of a backward place that is off the grid to most people.
In total there were probably something like a dozen stories covering people from the age of 13 to one man in his late-50s. Director Tinatin Gurchiani has done a wonderfully thorough job of finding and editing stories from all walks of life of people in the area, and capturing a variety of topics. We have clips ranging from a marriage of a very young girl, to a man trying to rekindle the passion between his imprisoned brother and his one-time love affair, a young lad describing his experience in war as a child, to a new mother to an online-gambling addict.
Through all of these there are four which we spend an extra length of time exploring, brought out of the auditioning room and into the fields and valleys of a land which looks as though it is stuck three hundred years in the past:
One I have mentioned, the brother transporting letters from his convict sibling to his lover which I found to be the least interesting of the stories, though we do get some insight into the conservatism of the Georgian youth. There is also the story of the 13-year-old boy, who frets in his house with his family after his father goes to the city to have an operation. Then there is the life of the 25-year-old mayor of a town of 150, in which the average age is 70. Finally we have a heart breaking look at a young girl who seeks her mother who abandoned her as a child.
In all that we see there is not much to find redeeming about the place we see. From their stories there were two ideas that stuck out to me: There was a scene captured in the story of the mayor in which one alcoholic man chops down a dead tree. He muses to himself, "what good is a dead tree?" The second came from a startlingly articulate young female writer, tattooed and angry with the world. She pontificates that if she had a machine which could make anything disappear she would erase herself.
These thoughts struck me as being poignant to what the audience was watching on the screen. This is a hopeless place where people are born, they live their subsistence lifestyle or if they are lucky go to school and get a trade job, and they die. It is a tired place and a useless place. I think that the director in presenting her homeland wanted to offer something more than that, but I feel that all she succeeded in doing was depressing the audience by showing the futility of their lives. It is a tired place, and a dying place. Their communal spirit and their love of the family cannot hide the very realness that maybe that machine would have too much to erase in the case of that nation.
3/4
Fat Shaker (2013)
Director Mohammad Shirvani walked up to the stage before the beginning of the film and, speaking through an interpreter told us to watch this film as though it were one long masturbation. He stressed it must be a male masturbation, because American and Iranian males all do it in the same way. He also told us we could walk out of the theater whenever we wished. Everyone in the audience seemed a bit confused, but he's a funny man and we accepted what he said.
This is avant-garde filmmaking at its most peculiar and I will say that I was not terribly overwhelmed, though I was never bored for an instant. Describing its plot is a difficult thing to do for it was rambling and rather aimless, but that seemed to be the entire point of the film, not that I necessarily agree with the approach. However, we were reminded before the movie began that this film was entered in the "New Frontier" category of the Sundance, and therefore the rules of film construction were expected to be rewritten or completely disregarded. He certainly took some liberties and I'm sure he caught the eyes of several people watching.
We are introduced to a father and a son, and some sort of woman whose significance is ambiguous. The father is a hulking, shapeless, morbidly obese mountain of a man, who waddles and wheezes across the screen, his eyes half-closed and his smell practically emanating through the screen. This first-time actor was obviously chosen for is ability to be fat, and the vilest creature they could capture on screen. His talents in that respect are abounding.
His son is a gorgeous young man, chosen for his youth and modelesque beauty. But the boy is deaf and suffering under the hand of his cruel and overbearing father. He tries to meet girls or to escape and is each time pulled back to the sameness of his home by his hair. It is a repetitive occurrence that he is smothered and kept from life, unable to communicate with anyone but the "Iranian Monster".
He is a tolerant boy, who tends to his father in a strange ritual of sucking the fat out of his back with glass cups, and bleeding him with leaches. The strange woman is both would-be guardian and slave of the family, who wants to help the boy but is perpetually asleep. There are a great many components to this film which lead it down a bizarre route to nowhere. There is little development in the characters or the plot and some things seem to contradict themselves.
I have to admit that I did not understand this film one bit until after the screening was over and we had a Q&A with Shirvani. After he talked to us for some time it became clear that this was a metaphor for the state of Iran and the conflict between what he called the "real Iran" and the bloated, dying Iran that we Americans see on the television. Through his eyes we see an ineffectualness of how the people are suppressed and how the state itself is collapsing in on itself, crushed under its own weight.
Shirvani said to watch this film as a masturbation, but that implies an orgasm which I couldn't find. In a sense, the boy does assert some agency towards the end, but it was too subtle to be considered a climax. I was disappointed that his film didn't make a louder statement. The woman, it turns out, represents liberty, but she stood idly by and helped only when it was convenient for her. I think this film failed in the end because I needed to have it explained for me. This filmmaker from Tehran was trying to make a loud, political statement, but only managed to confuse me with impossible visual metaphors. Shirvani is obviously a disgruntled activist with a message to impart, but with no real call to arms and a muddled narrative it was difficult to know what to make of it. He is a clever man with startling ideas as a director, but if he wants people to think about his message he needs to tone down the surrealist qualities to his work.
2/4
This is avant-garde filmmaking at its most peculiar and I will say that I was not terribly overwhelmed, though I was never bored for an instant. Describing its plot is a difficult thing to do for it was rambling and rather aimless, but that seemed to be the entire point of the film, not that I necessarily agree with the approach. However, we were reminded before the movie began that this film was entered in the "New Frontier" category of the Sundance, and therefore the rules of film construction were expected to be rewritten or completely disregarded. He certainly took some liberties and I'm sure he caught the eyes of several people watching.
We are introduced to a father and a son, and some sort of woman whose significance is ambiguous. The father is a hulking, shapeless, morbidly obese mountain of a man, who waddles and wheezes across the screen, his eyes half-closed and his smell practically emanating through the screen. This first-time actor was obviously chosen for is ability to be fat, and the vilest creature they could capture on screen. His talents in that respect are abounding.
His son is a gorgeous young man, chosen for his youth and modelesque beauty. But the boy is deaf and suffering under the hand of his cruel and overbearing father. He tries to meet girls or to escape and is each time pulled back to the sameness of his home by his hair. It is a repetitive occurrence that he is smothered and kept from life, unable to communicate with anyone but the "Iranian Monster".
He is a tolerant boy, who tends to his father in a strange ritual of sucking the fat out of his back with glass cups, and bleeding him with leaches. The strange woman is both would-be guardian and slave of the family, who wants to help the boy but is perpetually asleep. There are a great many components to this film which lead it down a bizarre route to nowhere. There is little development in the characters or the plot and some things seem to contradict themselves.
I have to admit that I did not understand this film one bit until after the screening was over and we had a Q&A with Shirvani. After he talked to us for some time it became clear that this was a metaphor for the state of Iran and the conflict between what he called the "real Iran" and the bloated, dying Iran that we Americans see on the television. Through his eyes we see an ineffectualness of how the people are suppressed and how the state itself is collapsing in on itself, crushed under its own weight.
Shirvani said to watch this film as a masturbation, but that implies an orgasm which I couldn't find. In a sense, the boy does assert some agency towards the end, but it was too subtle to be considered a climax. I was disappointed that his film didn't make a louder statement. The woman, it turns out, represents liberty, but she stood idly by and helped only when it was convenient for her. I think this film failed in the end because I needed to have it explained for me. This filmmaker from Tehran was trying to make a loud, political statement, but only managed to confuse me with impossible visual metaphors. Shirvani is obviously a disgruntled activist with a message to impart, but with no real call to arms and a muddled narrative it was difficult to know what to make of it. He is a clever man with startling ideas as a director, but if he wants people to think about his message he needs to tone down the surrealist qualities to his work.
2/4
What They Don't Talk About When They Talk About Love (2013)
I am very proud to say that is the first film from Indonesia to be accepted into the Sundance Film Festival and that I was there to enjoy its world premiere. I am going to state now, as I know that every other critic who will watch this is going to write the same, that this film places a new meaning to the trite phrase "love is blind". I think this is an exceptionally charming film about the pangs of young love, set in the most unlikely of places: a school for the blind in Jakarta.
Mouly Surya (pronounced "Molly", she tells us) has given us a fictional glimpse into a very real world, in order to help break down some of the stigmas that we hold against the visually impaired. I was reminded as I watched her movie of a day when I came across a blind-deaf man crossing the road with his dog and an aide. I stared at him and spent the rest of the day thinking about his life and the world that he experience. Everyone knows Hellen Keller and that is a sad story, but to be brought face to face with their world was something a bit disconcerting to me.
What "What They Don't Talk About" deals with is the story of two pairs of young lovers, kids probably no more than fifteen, who live their lives as ordinarily as they can. They go to school, they smoke cigarettes and get into trouble, they put on makeup and listen to trashy radio programs, they have sex. We watch them do these things, finding ways to overcome the obvious obstacles of not being able to see, and I hate myself for realizing that I, like everyone in the theater, pitied them even though we were meant to see them as "normal". They are not normal, and although we feel proud of ourselves for watching this film and pretending to sympathize with them, it is impossible to see them as normal teenagers. Everything they do must be a challenge that needs overcoming, and we feel that much prouder for them when they share that first kiss because of this.
The two love stories are tender and emotional, and I loved them both very much. The first is about a girl who is not entirely blind, but can only see with the help of what look like opera glasses fixed onto regular bifocals. We see what she sees, a blurry image of a young boy in sunglasses, not terrible handsome but perfect in her eyes. Theirs is a happy story and a funny one, as she must overcome the competition of girl who always shares her cake with Sunglasses Boy. Her weapon is a bottle of perfume called Fantasy.
The second is a far more complex and very moving story about a beautiful young blind girl who is sought after by a deaf boy named Edo. He is a chain-smoking rebel who wears his British punk shirts and has his ears pierced. I don't want to spoil how they are able to create a relationship with one another, but it is almost impossibly romantic and certainly brought out the pubescent girl in me. I think the film as a whole would have been much stronger had they cut the first story, or at least made it a subplot, keeping this one as the main narrative. It was far more richly layered with more developed characters.
The film goes through some peculiar shifts in tone by the beginning of the last third of the movie, including a fantastical sequence in which we get to see the lives of these people were they not impaired. It seems to make an odd statement that these kids were that much better for not being normal, as the complications in their lives made the results that much more important. I don't necessarily agree with this, but it wasn't heavy-handed enough to be irritating.
As a final thought I want to mention something that I found both interesting and infuriating, though it has little to do with the film itself. At the end of the film, Surya answered some questions about the process that she took in making this film. It was inspired by a family member of hers who is impaired and goes to a school for the deaf and blind. There were some unusual additions to her movie, including a scene where the deaf students put on a play in sign language, an idea she got from a YouTube video. She also talked about her use of long, uninterrupted shots, which she said was inspired by her love of Stanley Kubrick. Once I left the theater I went on a shuttle taking me back home, and I unwillingly overheard the conversation of some people behind me who had just finished the movie. They trashed her film--destroyed it. What made me angry was that their complaints about the film were not based on what they saw, but on Surya's reasoning for why she did the things she did. They were angry that she seemed to arbitrarily include scenes like the play or the fantastical sequence or that she chose her filming method because she admired the work of another filmmaker.
Firstly, some of the comments these people made reflected that they were not intellectually capable enough to understand what it was that they were watching. If the case were different they would have been able to appreciate that some of the choices the director made were used to give a fuller picture of the kids' lives. Secondly, these people are ignorant to the creative process. Inspiration is not something that you can always divine from the air; it occasionally needs that spark, and if that spark comes from a YouTube video, who are we to judge? Film making is about taking something that creates an emotional reaction within us, and sharing that with the rest of the world through our own lens. Surya obviously thought that a play told in sign language was unusual and interesting and wanted her audience to take away the same thoughts and feelings that she did when watching it online. I for one am glad that she did, for I don't know if that little sliver of the world would have made it into my life otherwise.
There is one thing lacking in this world, and that is inspiration. A world becomes stagnant if it isn't inspired to change, so we shouldn't try to tear it down, no matter where it comes from. Embrace our filmmakers and their inspirations, for that is how we get tiny glimpses into our big, big earth. I have never seen the inside of school for the blind, let alone in Indonesia, but her inspiration made me happy with my life and the world I get to see and experience every day.
3.5/4
Mouly Surya (pronounced "Molly", she tells us) has given us a fictional glimpse into a very real world, in order to help break down some of the stigmas that we hold against the visually impaired. I was reminded as I watched her movie of a day when I came across a blind-deaf man crossing the road with his dog and an aide. I stared at him and spent the rest of the day thinking about his life and the world that he experience. Everyone knows Hellen Keller and that is a sad story, but to be brought face to face with their world was something a bit disconcerting to me.
What "What They Don't Talk About" deals with is the story of two pairs of young lovers, kids probably no more than fifteen, who live their lives as ordinarily as they can. They go to school, they smoke cigarettes and get into trouble, they put on makeup and listen to trashy radio programs, they have sex. We watch them do these things, finding ways to overcome the obvious obstacles of not being able to see, and I hate myself for realizing that I, like everyone in the theater, pitied them even though we were meant to see them as "normal". They are not normal, and although we feel proud of ourselves for watching this film and pretending to sympathize with them, it is impossible to see them as normal teenagers. Everything they do must be a challenge that needs overcoming, and we feel that much prouder for them when they share that first kiss because of this.
The two love stories are tender and emotional, and I loved them both very much. The first is about a girl who is not entirely blind, but can only see with the help of what look like opera glasses fixed onto regular bifocals. We see what she sees, a blurry image of a young boy in sunglasses, not terrible handsome but perfect in her eyes. Theirs is a happy story and a funny one, as she must overcome the competition of girl who always shares her cake with Sunglasses Boy. Her weapon is a bottle of perfume called Fantasy.
The second is a far more complex and very moving story about a beautiful young blind girl who is sought after by a deaf boy named Edo. He is a chain-smoking rebel who wears his British punk shirts and has his ears pierced. I don't want to spoil how they are able to create a relationship with one another, but it is almost impossibly romantic and certainly brought out the pubescent girl in me. I think the film as a whole would have been much stronger had they cut the first story, or at least made it a subplot, keeping this one as the main narrative. It was far more richly layered with more developed characters.
The film goes through some peculiar shifts in tone by the beginning of the last third of the movie, including a fantastical sequence in which we get to see the lives of these people were they not impaired. It seems to make an odd statement that these kids were that much better for not being normal, as the complications in their lives made the results that much more important. I don't necessarily agree with this, but it wasn't heavy-handed enough to be irritating.
As a final thought I want to mention something that I found both interesting and infuriating, though it has little to do with the film itself. At the end of the film, Surya answered some questions about the process that she took in making this film. It was inspired by a family member of hers who is impaired and goes to a school for the deaf and blind. There were some unusual additions to her movie, including a scene where the deaf students put on a play in sign language, an idea she got from a YouTube video. She also talked about her use of long, uninterrupted shots, which she said was inspired by her love of Stanley Kubrick. Once I left the theater I went on a shuttle taking me back home, and I unwillingly overheard the conversation of some people behind me who had just finished the movie. They trashed her film--destroyed it. What made me angry was that their complaints about the film were not based on what they saw, but on Surya's reasoning for why she did the things she did. They were angry that she seemed to arbitrarily include scenes like the play or the fantastical sequence or that she chose her filming method because she admired the work of another filmmaker.
Firstly, some of the comments these people made reflected that they were not intellectually capable enough to understand what it was that they were watching. If the case were different they would have been able to appreciate that some of the choices the director made were used to give a fuller picture of the kids' lives. Secondly, these people are ignorant to the creative process. Inspiration is not something that you can always divine from the air; it occasionally needs that spark, and if that spark comes from a YouTube video, who are we to judge? Film making is about taking something that creates an emotional reaction within us, and sharing that with the rest of the world through our own lens. Surya obviously thought that a play told in sign language was unusual and interesting and wanted her audience to take away the same thoughts and feelings that she did when watching it online. I for one am glad that she did, for I don't know if that little sliver of the world would have made it into my life otherwise.
There is one thing lacking in this world, and that is inspiration. A world becomes stagnant if it isn't inspired to change, so we shouldn't try to tear it down, no matter where it comes from. Embrace our filmmakers and their inspirations, for that is how we get tiny glimpses into our big, big earth. I have never seen the inside of school for the blind, let alone in Indonesia, but her inspiration made me happy with my life and the world I get to see and experience every day.
3.5/4
Monday, January 21, 2013
Halley (2012)
Directed by: Sebastian Hofmann
Written by: Julio Chavezmontes, Sebastian Hofmann
Starring: Alberto Trujillo, Luly Trueba
Rated: R
Calling this a "zombie" movie would be far too disrespectful for what the film attempted to do and what it achieved. Certainly, this is a film about the undead, but perhaps we should simply leave it at that. A zombie flick connotates a certain lack of substance, whereas I believe the term "undead" wants to imply that life was once there. It hints more at a state in between two worlds where a person wanders lost. This film is not about a monster, it is about a man who is medically dead.
This is a strange, grotesque and very human film about a man with an illness. It is not until about half way into the film that we understand that he was never alive to begin with. For a large portion of the film he seemed simply to be a man struggling with a disease that appeared to be eating his body away.
Alberto Trujillo gives a wonderfully sad performance as Alberto, a security guard at a 24-hour gym who exists simply trying to keep his body intact. At its premier, a man in the audience complained to director Sebastian Hofmann that his movie spent far too long in act 1, establishing the character, and that this was a punishment to the audience. Indeed, it did spend a very long time giving a full picture of the day to day life--to use the word liberally--but I believe it was fully necessary. Alberto seems like a man you could pass on the street and never look twice at. There is a scene in which he collapses from his illness and people do just that, they ignore him. His day consists of cleaning his decomposing body, polishing his silver, watching terrible Mexican television and occasionally working. It is a pointless existence, and this monotony must be felt fully before the audience begins to understand what it is he is fighting for and struggling with.
What I gleaned from this film is that the real sickness is loneliness. This man has nobody in his world except the manager of this gym, a beautiful woman whose relationship with him is rather ambiguous. He seems to want to live only to hang on to what little encounters he can still have, what little pleasures are still available to him. It is a zombie flick unlike any that I have ever seen in that it tries to explore with as much sympathy as it can muster the place that someone like him could have in the world. I don't believe that it was his decaying body that he should have been worried about, but rather that his body decaying might have been a blessing.
For much of this movie I did not like what I was watching. It was almost unbearably gruesome in many respects: fingernails being pulled out, chunks of flesh peeling away with a shirt, gore being pushed down a bathtub drain with his foot, and one surprise at the end which I will leave you to enjoy. I assumed that this was a sadistic little movie which took pleasure in making the audience uncomfortable. But towards the end I realized that it was all necessary. These are the trials we can imagine of a man in this situation. He would be caught in a living hell, and every self-applied stitch is one more reminder that his time on earth is pointless.
It is a sparse, incredibly dark film from Mexico, featuring some outstanding makeup work and a fully committed performance from Trujillo. There is little dialogue, but he says everything he needs to and so much more with his body language more than anything else. I expect that it was a physically demanding role to play, but he tackled it fully, and with an obviously close bond to his director created a disturbing piece on what it means to be human, and what it means to be alive.
3/4
Mother of George (2013)
During the first few scenes "Mother of George" is an exciting, visually arresting piece of international drama. It seems to be an infrequent and rather mesmerizing look at the life of one Nigerian immigrant trying to lead a proper marriage in a Manhattan jungle. As it continues, however, director Andrew Dosunmu's tricks wear out their welcome and finally become nagging relatives making life a chore.
This is a small story about a woman named Adenike (Danai Gurira) who is caught between the world's of tradition and her homeland, and the life she now leads in New York. Under the pressure of her family and the small but vibrant community of Nigerian-Americans who surround and fill her life, she becomes desperate to have a child. Maintaining the bloodline is more than the sheer egotism of modern America, it is essential to the family's happiness. The options presented to her--from Western medicine to...less acceptable methods--are played out as we watch a battle of wills from a supremely unusual subculture within our nation.
When I began watching this film I found myself very excited. It opened on what I can only assume to be a traditional Nigerian-style wedding, in which Adenike is finally going to bring respect to her generation of her family. The costumes and music are bright and exotic; it seemed a piece of filmmaking in which I could leave feeling a bit more cultured and a bit smug with myself. The film seemed reptilian, as though it had scales and expanded with a fleshy aliveness.
Towards the end of the film I found myself fighting desperately not to fall asleep, and I would have done so were it not the world premiere of the film and had I not been seated two rows in front of the director and cast. I discovered that after one became acquainted with Dosunmu's visual style it became a tedious task repeat himself over and over, sacrificing substance for style. His script was thin and poorly written, though somehow dialogue always seems better when in a different language (he should have kept it all in a local dialect). Once the drama of the film is learned, and it certainly takes its time in revealing the conflict, there is little left but to watch Adenike sluggishly try and resolve the issues.
I dismissed some of the mediocre acting at first, attributing some of the clumsiness to the actors' discomfort with performing in english. It was at the end of the film when several of the actors spoke to the audience that I realized that all of the main characters but one were American, or had lived in the United States for most of their lives; english was their primary language. It was not necessarily the actors' fault that they delivered poor performances, it was the director's fault for keeping them second.
Dosunmu undoubtedly has a keen eye for creating breathtaking mixtures of sight and sound. He knows color, shape, texture, and how to play with an audience's emotions via music. There were a great many scenes which held self-contained moments of unabashed beauty, stylized to perfection. He has a great eye for both symmetry and asymmetry and his knack for changing the focus of the film from the main character or object to something unrelated in the foreground was interesting, but ultimately pointless. I spent so much time wondering the significance of every altered shot and came up with nothing. I attribute that, once again, to the lack of substance in his story. Just because someone wants to make a movie does not mean that someone should be able to pick up a camera, point and shoot arbitrarily. That's the role of the photographer, an artist I don't much appreciate.
When every single scene seemed to be manipulated in some way, when Dosunmu stuck his fingers very noticeably in every shot, it began to be rather exhausting. Art for the sake of art is masturbatory, and nobody wants to see an artist jack off in front of them. A film is not simply about one person, whether it be writer, director, actor, whatever. It is a collaborative experience, and when one key figure of the movie making process decides to step up and make the project all about himself the entire film fails, simply because it should rely so heavily on the collective. Dosunmu ought to take some notes before his next Sundance experience.
1.5/4
This is a small story about a woman named Adenike (Danai Gurira) who is caught between the world's of tradition and her homeland, and the life she now leads in New York. Under the pressure of her family and the small but vibrant community of Nigerian-Americans who surround and fill her life, she becomes desperate to have a child. Maintaining the bloodline is more than the sheer egotism of modern America, it is essential to the family's happiness. The options presented to her--from Western medicine to...less acceptable methods--are played out as we watch a battle of wills from a supremely unusual subculture within our nation.
When I began watching this film I found myself very excited. It opened on what I can only assume to be a traditional Nigerian-style wedding, in which Adenike is finally going to bring respect to her generation of her family. The costumes and music are bright and exotic; it seemed a piece of filmmaking in which I could leave feeling a bit more cultured and a bit smug with myself. The film seemed reptilian, as though it had scales and expanded with a fleshy aliveness.
Towards the end of the film I found myself fighting desperately not to fall asleep, and I would have done so were it not the world premiere of the film and had I not been seated two rows in front of the director and cast. I discovered that after one became acquainted with Dosunmu's visual style it became a tedious task repeat himself over and over, sacrificing substance for style. His script was thin and poorly written, though somehow dialogue always seems better when in a different language (he should have kept it all in a local dialect). Once the drama of the film is learned, and it certainly takes its time in revealing the conflict, there is little left but to watch Adenike sluggishly try and resolve the issues.
I dismissed some of the mediocre acting at first, attributing some of the clumsiness to the actors' discomfort with performing in english. It was at the end of the film when several of the actors spoke to the audience that I realized that all of the main characters but one were American, or had lived in the United States for most of their lives; english was their primary language. It was not necessarily the actors' fault that they delivered poor performances, it was the director's fault for keeping them second.
Dosunmu undoubtedly has a keen eye for creating breathtaking mixtures of sight and sound. He knows color, shape, texture, and how to play with an audience's emotions via music. There were a great many scenes which held self-contained moments of unabashed beauty, stylized to perfection. He has a great eye for both symmetry and asymmetry and his knack for changing the focus of the film from the main character or object to something unrelated in the foreground was interesting, but ultimately pointless. I spent so much time wondering the significance of every altered shot and came up with nothing. I attribute that, once again, to the lack of substance in his story. Just because someone wants to make a movie does not mean that someone should be able to pick up a camera, point and shoot arbitrarily. That's the role of the photographer, an artist I don't much appreciate.
When every single scene seemed to be manipulated in some way, when Dosunmu stuck his fingers very noticeably in every shot, it began to be rather exhausting. Art for the sake of art is masturbatory, and nobody wants to see an artist jack off in front of them. A film is not simply about one person, whether it be writer, director, actor, whatever. It is a collaborative experience, and when one key figure of the movie making process decides to step up and make the project all about himself the entire film fails, simply because it should rely so heavily on the collective. Dosunmu ought to take some notes before his next Sundance experience.
1.5/4
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
House of Boys (2009)
The title makes the film sound like a porno, and the cover of the movie doesn't help its case. To be perfectly honest there were points in the movie where I sort of wished I was indeed watching porn, for the relationships between characters in them would probably have been more developed, the story more inventive and the whole watching experience more enjoyable.
"House of Boys" begins as a fairly typical gay rom-com and winds up being an AIDS opus told in three acts. As I sat watching the story unfold I pondered the question of whether another gay rom-com or AIDS opus was needed in the world? This seemed an especially important question because the film is crippled with every gay movie cliche in the handbook. I answered my question very early on in the movie which left me a long while to find evidence for my argument.
Layke Anderson stars as Frank, a beautiful, shallow, slutty, young British fairy who travels to Amsterdam with his friends for a lark. After weeks of partying, he is left stranded there and decides to work and live at a gay strip club/brothel for funds. Our hero is a man who lives from hookup to hookup, who finds nothing better to do with his life than roll and dance and whose eyes are dazzled by the gay cabaret, the House of Boys. As a gay man, I immediately found this an offensive character and I found it extremely disrespectful that director/writer Jean-Claude Schlim glorifies the sexually depraved underworld where it seems every gay resides. Homosexual boys have very few role models and the public at large has a narrow view of what a gay man is, and this film does nothing to push against the stereotypes. But moving on...
The impossibly limber Frank is hired and asked to share a room with Jake (Benn Northover), the straight boy who we know will end up being with Frank once he learns to stop being afraid and love himself. Stories about homosexuals seem completely preoccupied with the act of coming out, as well as obsessed with the fantasy of obtaining the straight guy. As it happens, Benn Northover is not straight. I do not have any proof of this, other than the fact that my gaydar says he is a raging queen and does a piss poor job of disguising it. Schlim might have have thought that giving him ripped jeans, a bad haircut, and a gruff, ambiguous accent would cover up the actor's limp wrists, but Northover seems such an incompetent actor anyway that no number of parlor tricks could mask it.
Frank loves Jake at first sight. Rather he lusts him at first sight, though for the life of me I can't figure out why he would do either, considering Jake is very uninteresting and not very attractive, but that's just me. With no real reason at all Frank becomes enamored with Hot Straighty, and eventually Hot Straighty comes to his senses and realizes he liked Frank all along. It might have been sweet if there were any reason for them to love each other or if they hadn't found love in a brothel, but there you have it. In the end we decide it must be love because Jake gets AIDS--by the way I should have mentioned it takes place from 1984-86, when the disease is new and extremely frightening--and only a person who really loved him would take care of the dying Jake the way that Frank does.
It is strange how much I liked the third act about the disease, considering how much I hated the first two about the slutty boys being slutty. It is almost a completely different style of film, going from more of a campy glam to near melodrama, but the shift between the two styles is so jarring that I am surprised I was able to get passed it and focus on the death. Perhaps I subconsciously really wanted one or both of them to die. That's a grim thought.
What I think I disliked so intensely about the first two-thirds of this movie was that it seemed to present homosexuals as nothing more than giggling sex-machines. It is far too often that a gay man is shown in a club, and not near enough in a book store, or an art gallery, or Home Depot or any other place where there isn't one muscled, manicured man looking to get into the pants of another muscled, manicured man. This film is highly eroticized, with a gratuitous amount of sex and an almost uncomfortable amount of glorified male nudity. At times I wished that they would commit to giving a full-fledged sex scene, genitals flapping, so I could quit trying to take it seriously as a dramedy and simply watch some porn.
The answer to my question is that the year is now 2013. This film came out in 2009. After twenty some odd years AIDS is no longer frightening to the public or a prominent disease in the media, unlike breast cancer or bird flu. It has simply been played to death. And although that is an awful argument to make--the film tells us that some two million people die each year from it--another AIDS tragedy isn't necessary. We have had "Philadelphia", hell, we have had "Rent". It is time for filmmakers to stop dealing with gay men as stereotypes and understand that they are simply men who would prefer to sleep with other men. Clubs are unnecessary, sleazy sex is unnecessary, drag is unnecessary, just show us for who we are. Make a lead character homosexual incidentally.
I fully understand that we only barely have started casting black actors in ordinary roles simply because the fill the part the best, and judging from this it is going to be a considerable amount of time before this is the case with gay characters. But that does not negate that this film made me angry at its generic and ugly portrayal of gay men. You may have noticed I have barely talked about directing style or acting or anything about how well-made the film is, for that is how much I disliked the premise of the script. In the end, how good a movie it is is irrelevant simply because the film shouldn't have been made in the first place.
1/4
"House of Boys" begins as a fairly typical gay rom-com and winds up being an AIDS opus told in three acts. As I sat watching the story unfold I pondered the question of whether another gay rom-com or AIDS opus was needed in the world? This seemed an especially important question because the film is crippled with every gay movie cliche in the handbook. I answered my question very early on in the movie which left me a long while to find evidence for my argument.
Layke Anderson stars as Frank, a beautiful, shallow, slutty, young British fairy who travels to Amsterdam with his friends for a lark. After weeks of partying, he is left stranded there and decides to work and live at a gay strip club/brothel for funds. Our hero is a man who lives from hookup to hookup, who finds nothing better to do with his life than roll and dance and whose eyes are dazzled by the gay cabaret, the House of Boys. As a gay man, I immediately found this an offensive character and I found it extremely disrespectful that director/writer Jean-Claude Schlim glorifies the sexually depraved underworld where it seems every gay resides. Homosexual boys have very few role models and the public at large has a narrow view of what a gay man is, and this film does nothing to push against the stereotypes. But moving on...
The impossibly limber Frank is hired and asked to share a room with Jake (Benn Northover), the straight boy who we know will end up being with Frank once he learns to stop being afraid and love himself. Stories about homosexuals seem completely preoccupied with the act of coming out, as well as obsessed with the fantasy of obtaining the straight guy. As it happens, Benn Northover is not straight. I do not have any proof of this, other than the fact that my gaydar says he is a raging queen and does a piss poor job of disguising it. Schlim might have have thought that giving him ripped jeans, a bad haircut, and a gruff, ambiguous accent would cover up the actor's limp wrists, but Northover seems such an incompetent actor anyway that no number of parlor tricks could mask it.
Frank loves Jake at first sight. Rather he lusts him at first sight, though for the life of me I can't figure out why he would do either, considering Jake is very uninteresting and not very attractive, but that's just me. With no real reason at all Frank becomes enamored with Hot Straighty, and eventually Hot Straighty comes to his senses and realizes he liked Frank all along. It might have been sweet if there were any reason for them to love each other or if they hadn't found love in a brothel, but there you have it. In the end we decide it must be love because Jake gets AIDS--by the way I should have mentioned it takes place from 1984-86, when the disease is new and extremely frightening--and only a person who really loved him would take care of the dying Jake the way that Frank does.
It is strange how much I liked the third act about the disease, considering how much I hated the first two about the slutty boys being slutty. It is almost a completely different style of film, going from more of a campy glam to near melodrama, but the shift between the two styles is so jarring that I am surprised I was able to get passed it and focus on the death. Perhaps I subconsciously really wanted one or both of them to die. That's a grim thought.
What I think I disliked so intensely about the first two-thirds of this movie was that it seemed to present homosexuals as nothing more than giggling sex-machines. It is far too often that a gay man is shown in a club, and not near enough in a book store, or an art gallery, or Home Depot or any other place where there isn't one muscled, manicured man looking to get into the pants of another muscled, manicured man. This film is highly eroticized, with a gratuitous amount of sex and an almost uncomfortable amount of glorified male nudity. At times I wished that they would commit to giving a full-fledged sex scene, genitals flapping, so I could quit trying to take it seriously as a dramedy and simply watch some porn.
The answer to my question is that the year is now 2013. This film came out in 2009. After twenty some odd years AIDS is no longer frightening to the public or a prominent disease in the media, unlike breast cancer or bird flu. It has simply been played to death. And although that is an awful argument to make--the film tells us that some two million people die each year from it--another AIDS tragedy isn't necessary. We have had "Philadelphia", hell, we have had "Rent". It is time for filmmakers to stop dealing with gay men as stereotypes and understand that they are simply men who would prefer to sleep with other men. Clubs are unnecessary, sleazy sex is unnecessary, drag is unnecessary, just show us for who we are. Make a lead character homosexual incidentally.
I fully understand that we only barely have started casting black actors in ordinary roles simply because the fill the part the best, and judging from this it is going to be a considerable amount of time before this is the case with gay characters. But that does not negate that this film made me angry at its generic and ugly portrayal of gay men. You may have noticed I have barely talked about directing style or acting or anything about how well-made the film is, for that is how much I disliked the premise of the script. In the end, how good a movie it is is irrelevant simply because the film shouldn't have been made in the first place.
1/4
Monday, January 14, 2013
A Night at the Roxbury (1998)
Good comedy is a rarity and a beautiful art to master. Freud describes comedy as the observation of the abnormalities of the world around us. In order to understand what makes something funny a person must be keenly aware of what makes our lives "normal". I am not sure why I would make the effort in bringing Freud into a review of "Night at the Roxbury" which almost exhausted me in my attempt to find something humorous in one of the dullest, sorriest attempts of a comedy in my recent memory.
Will Farrell and Chris Kattan star in this (barely) feature-length movie, adapted from their Saturday Night Live Sketch about the Butabi brothers, Steve and Doug. They play a couple of hapless bimbos whose goals in life seem to consist of starting up their own night club as well as gaining entrance into the nightlife hot spot, the Roxbury. It doesn't say how old they are, but I would place them somewhere in their twenties. They spend their evenings club-hopping, hair-spraying, pick up-lining, and synchronized head-bouncing, all in effort to dance their idiotic dances with impossibly busty women. Their was an odd incestuous, homoeroticism between them that probably was owed to them sharing a room even though they live in a huge house in L.A., as well as them fixing each others' hair while clad only in speedos or wrapped in tiny, tiger print towels. At any rate, their relation is peculiar, and not ha-ha odd.
Together they create almost a quarter of a character, and with the rest of their cast almost make up half of one. Their world seems to be filled with people as one-dimensional and uninteresting as themselves, though they all seem to walk about with an air of superiority, bullying the two brothers who seem to be too lifeless to notice an insult when it hits them.
After gaining entrance into the Roxbury following an accidental encounter with their hero, Richard Grieco (played by himself), they are able to gain entrance, an experience giving Steve "hottie overload!" There they are singled out by two suspiciously pretty women who think the Butabi brothers are a part of the entourage of club owner Benny Zadir (Chazz Palminteri). The movie makes the argument that sex equals love (though I think that offering that this film "argues" anything would be giving it too much credit) after the guys assume that these two women are their girlfriends after sleeping with them.
Other stuff happens which is none too interesting: head bouncing, a fallout between Steve and Doug, head bouncing, a wedding, more head bouncing, I forget the rest--I think I chose to forget the rest.
I sat in my seat waiting for some semblance of a joke to appear, only to be let down in a grueling 85 minutes of Farrell and Kattan flapping their arms about and doing bad impersonations of Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", though I'm not sure that this was their intention. Good comics doing bad comedy--infuriatingly bad comedy--is far worse than bad comics doing bad comedy for the obvious reason that they should know better.
Even if their were moments that were just shy of being funny it would have been an insult to laugh at them. I'm not sure if they even desired to make people laugh or if they just assumed that the people who watched the movie would laugh simply because they knew their sketch. It would have been insulting, not to them, but every comic who sits down and puts in some sort of effort into their work, successful or not. This film made me angry more than anything else because I know that when it was released into theaters there was an audience who paid their $8.00 to laugh, and all they were given was lifeless drivel full of unfunny inside jokes, and gags done and redone to the same laughless effect. Farrell and Kattan still got their money, but in no way did they earn it.
This movie simply defeated me.
0/4
*Note: I almost gave this 0.5/4 simply because of a bit role by Jennifer Coolidge. She has maybe three lines and a minute of screen time, but I can't help but love her. I'm really at a loss why.
Will Farrell and Chris Kattan star in this (barely) feature-length movie, adapted from their Saturday Night Live Sketch about the Butabi brothers, Steve and Doug. They play a couple of hapless bimbos whose goals in life seem to consist of starting up their own night club as well as gaining entrance into the nightlife hot spot, the Roxbury. It doesn't say how old they are, but I would place them somewhere in their twenties. They spend their evenings club-hopping, hair-spraying, pick up-lining, and synchronized head-bouncing, all in effort to dance their idiotic dances with impossibly busty women. Their was an odd incestuous, homoeroticism between them that probably was owed to them sharing a room even though they live in a huge house in L.A., as well as them fixing each others' hair while clad only in speedos or wrapped in tiny, tiger print towels. At any rate, their relation is peculiar, and not ha-ha odd.
Together they create almost a quarter of a character, and with the rest of their cast almost make up half of one. Their world seems to be filled with people as one-dimensional and uninteresting as themselves, though they all seem to walk about with an air of superiority, bullying the two brothers who seem to be too lifeless to notice an insult when it hits them.
After gaining entrance into the Roxbury following an accidental encounter with their hero, Richard Grieco (played by himself), they are able to gain entrance, an experience giving Steve "hottie overload!" There they are singled out by two suspiciously pretty women who think the Butabi brothers are a part of the entourage of club owner Benny Zadir (Chazz Palminteri). The movie makes the argument that sex equals love (though I think that offering that this film "argues" anything would be giving it too much credit) after the guys assume that these two women are their girlfriends after sleeping with them.
Other stuff happens which is none too interesting: head bouncing, a fallout between Steve and Doug, head bouncing, a wedding, more head bouncing, I forget the rest--I think I chose to forget the rest.
I sat in my seat waiting for some semblance of a joke to appear, only to be let down in a grueling 85 minutes of Farrell and Kattan flapping their arms about and doing bad impersonations of Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli from "Fast Times at Ridgemont High", though I'm not sure that this was their intention. Good comics doing bad comedy--infuriatingly bad comedy--is far worse than bad comics doing bad comedy for the obvious reason that they should know better.
Even if their were moments that were just shy of being funny it would have been an insult to laugh at them. I'm not sure if they even desired to make people laugh or if they just assumed that the people who watched the movie would laugh simply because they knew their sketch. It would have been insulting, not to them, but every comic who sits down and puts in some sort of effort into their work, successful or not. This film made me angry more than anything else because I know that when it was released into theaters there was an audience who paid their $8.00 to laugh, and all they were given was lifeless drivel full of unfunny inside jokes, and gags done and redone to the same laughless effect. Farrell and Kattan still got their money, but in no way did they earn it.
This movie simply defeated me.
0/4
*Note: I almost gave this 0.5/4 simply because of a bit role by Jennifer Coolidge. She has maybe three lines and a minute of screen time, but I can't help but love her. I'm really at a loss why.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Batman Begins (2005)
The Caped Crusader has held many faces under the mask over the years. From Adam West to Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer to George Clooney, the persona of billionaire Bruce Wayne has gone from cartoon to cartoonish. Christopher Nolan took up the mighty task (though not so illustrious, given its predecessors) of revamping the Dark Knight's image, and in general it is a resounding success.
Gone are the cheap tights and silly villains. Nolan has reached deep into the essence of the Bob Kane comic books and ripped out every bit of foulness in one of the darkest of all superheroes as he unfolds in greater depth the birth of the Batman. Now filling the boots and cape is Christian Bale, who delivers a capable, if somewhat stiff, performance, but it is obviously the best rendition of both Batman and Bruce Wayne.
Nolan takes us to the far reaches of the earth where Bruce has fallen into obscurity. Following the murder of his parents by a local street thug he has set his sights on travelling the world to learn how a criminal thinks. His travels have brought him to Nepal, where he is collected by a man named Ducard (Liam Neeson) and trained as a ninja to join an elite group known as the League of Shadows. Their mission is rid the world of injustice by toppling the major empires of the world. Like Rome, Constantinople and London, Gotham, a city which has "limped" on since the death of Bruce's parents, has reached its peak and now must be toppled
The good Bruce rejects them, but takes his new knowledge as a ninja, his hundreds of millions of dollars and his thirst for revenge and takes them to the streets of Gotham, hoping to strike fear into the hearts of criminals such as Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) who have slowly been rotting the city from within. The crime and corruption prove to be a formidable match for him, as we learn that this will very nearly take the form of a gangster film as well.
Nolan's Gotham takes the goth artistry of Tim Burton's versions to a new level, stripping it of its tween Disney, fantasy element, and leaving only a smokey, industrial wasteland. The movie was shot in Chicago, but they were clever enough to avoid in major landmarks or recognizable buildings, so all we see is a rust and smog-colored metropolis. The director seems to channel the energy of this city and infuses it with his characters. This is a practical Batman film, a utilitarian one, and one that is about as plausible as vigilante/superhero film is ever going to come (well, his series anyway).
The film features a great host of supporting actors, including a very funny Michael Caine as Bruce's butler, Alfred, Gary Oldman as police commissioner Jim Gordon, and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, the technological wizard of Wayne Enterprises who supplies Batman with his equipment. Cillian Murphy plays Dr. Jonathon Crane, a.k.a. the Scarecrow, a psychopathic psychologist who develops a fear-inducing toxin that he plans on unleashing onto the city. He is, in my opinion, one of the scariest villains simply because of his plausibility and Murphy's cool demeanor in his performance.
There is a subplot romance between Bruce and his childhood friend, Rachel Dawes. It's unavoidable in a film like this and so you have to accept it, but for what it is I didn't mind so much. What I did mind, however, was Katie Holmes's version of Rachel, which almost single-handedly brought down the entire cast. Her uppity, demanding and extremely aggressive portrayal was unpleasant enough as it was, but combined with the fact that she is so small and sweet-looking only hurt her being believable as something of a strong woman. Not only would I dislike her as my girlfriend, I would also dislike her being my attorney, which is her job.
Aside from her, this is a whip-smart rendition of a hero we all believed was almost played out. I like this film because Batman is frightening. The little growl that Bale gives him is not, but his fighting style certainly is, appearing and disappearing at will, snatching people into shadows--it's very disconcerting.
Wally Pfister's cinematography is quite good in many respects, especially enhancing what I have just described. Where he lost me was the hand to hand combat sequences, particularly towards the end, where the camera jostled and lurched inches from the action to the point that it was nearly impossible to see who was hitting whom and who was winning. Outside of that, however, he did a wonderful job of capturing an intense new vision of Gotham and the amazing set pieces that went into building it.
Pfister and Nolan certainly helmed a very good new film--not just a good superhero film, but a good movie in general.
3/4
Gone are the cheap tights and silly villains. Nolan has reached deep into the essence of the Bob Kane comic books and ripped out every bit of foulness in one of the darkest of all superheroes as he unfolds in greater depth the birth of the Batman. Now filling the boots and cape is Christian Bale, who delivers a capable, if somewhat stiff, performance, but it is obviously the best rendition of both Batman and Bruce Wayne.
Nolan takes us to the far reaches of the earth where Bruce has fallen into obscurity. Following the murder of his parents by a local street thug he has set his sights on travelling the world to learn how a criminal thinks. His travels have brought him to Nepal, where he is collected by a man named Ducard (Liam Neeson) and trained as a ninja to join an elite group known as the League of Shadows. Their mission is rid the world of injustice by toppling the major empires of the world. Like Rome, Constantinople and London, Gotham, a city which has "limped" on since the death of Bruce's parents, has reached its peak and now must be toppled
The good Bruce rejects them, but takes his new knowledge as a ninja, his hundreds of millions of dollars and his thirst for revenge and takes them to the streets of Gotham, hoping to strike fear into the hearts of criminals such as Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) who have slowly been rotting the city from within. The crime and corruption prove to be a formidable match for him, as we learn that this will very nearly take the form of a gangster film as well.
Nolan's Gotham takes the goth artistry of Tim Burton's versions to a new level, stripping it of its tween Disney, fantasy element, and leaving only a smokey, industrial wasteland. The movie was shot in Chicago, but they were clever enough to avoid in major landmarks or recognizable buildings, so all we see is a rust and smog-colored metropolis. The director seems to channel the energy of this city and infuses it with his characters. This is a practical Batman film, a utilitarian one, and one that is about as plausible as vigilante/superhero film is ever going to come (well, his series anyway).
The film features a great host of supporting actors, including a very funny Michael Caine as Bruce's butler, Alfred, Gary Oldman as police commissioner Jim Gordon, and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, the technological wizard of Wayne Enterprises who supplies Batman with his equipment. Cillian Murphy plays Dr. Jonathon Crane, a.k.a. the Scarecrow, a psychopathic psychologist who develops a fear-inducing toxin that he plans on unleashing onto the city. He is, in my opinion, one of the scariest villains simply because of his plausibility and Murphy's cool demeanor in his performance.
There is a subplot romance between Bruce and his childhood friend, Rachel Dawes. It's unavoidable in a film like this and so you have to accept it, but for what it is I didn't mind so much. What I did mind, however, was Katie Holmes's version of Rachel, which almost single-handedly brought down the entire cast. Her uppity, demanding and extremely aggressive portrayal was unpleasant enough as it was, but combined with the fact that she is so small and sweet-looking only hurt her being believable as something of a strong woman. Not only would I dislike her as my girlfriend, I would also dislike her being my attorney, which is her job.
Aside from her, this is a whip-smart rendition of a hero we all believed was almost played out. I like this film because Batman is frightening. The little growl that Bale gives him is not, but his fighting style certainly is, appearing and disappearing at will, snatching people into shadows--it's very disconcerting.
Wally Pfister's cinematography is quite good in many respects, especially enhancing what I have just described. Where he lost me was the hand to hand combat sequences, particularly towards the end, where the camera jostled and lurched inches from the action to the point that it was nearly impossible to see who was hitting whom and who was winning. Outside of that, however, he did a wonderful job of capturing an intense new vision of Gotham and the amazing set pieces that went into building it.
Pfister and Nolan certainly helmed a very good new film--not just a good superhero film, but a good movie in general.
3/4
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Once there was a Hushpuppy who lived with her daddy in the Bathtub. She was a little girl, but fierce and strong and full of love, who renounced the Dry Side and found beauty in the marshes and swamps. Hushpuppy spoke few words, but she experienced the world with an open heart and open ears, hearing the heartbeats of nature and the whispers of her lost mother. When her world was threatened she did not despair, but flexed her guns, gave a great howl and proved herself to be King of the Bathtub.
Quvenzhane Wallis stars as the little girl in the Mississippi Delta who lives in horrible poverty with her fiery-tempered father, Wink (Dwight Henry). There is a magic power about this young unknown which swallowed up the movie and made it impossible to watch anything but her. Little children and their innocence are so hard to capture honestly on the screen, but this girl doesn't act, she exists.
It is a film of rare creativity, full of melting ice caps, frightful storms and giant monsters. But even through all of the fireworks there is only Wallis, in her little galoshes eating crawdads, which radiates. There is sunshine in her stoic face which speaks far more than any words she could have spoken, and she steals this film simply because they captured her purity. It is overwhelming.
After a freak storm, the bayou where Hushpuppy, Wink and a dozen others of the hopelessly impoverished live, is drowned in salt water. Their very existence has come into jeopardy. To make matters worse Wink is dying, threatening to leave Hushpuppy all on her own. Mighty aurochs, fearsome beasts from the polar north, charge to her home to eat her up, and with her life in danger Hushpuppy must learn to survive, fight back tears and find her long-lost mother.
This is the type of movie that comes about so infrequently that it startles and angers when it does. I say angers, because it is an encapsulation of what film making is supposed to be about. Their budget was small, their cast has no stars, their premise is conceptual, but they had a vision and they never compromised once. Behn Zeitlin has brought Lucy Alibar's play "Juicy and Delicious" to the screen with vividness and raw beauty, honing in Wallis's enormous natural gifts to create one of the most memorable pieces of art this year. It angered me that I was startled to find a movie with uncompromised vision.
It's a film written in ebonic poetry, full of philosophical teachings of the universe, taught through the eyes of a 6-year-old girl who has never had any formal education, but knows how to light a blowtorch to cook her supper. This is a film that squishes and crawls and growls; it breathes and moves. Even in death it is a celebration of life, of being, of being human, of being loved. It has a majesty which it is perfectly aware of and embraces the scope and power of a little girl's imagination and wonderment.
This is a small moment of happiness to enjoy when the waters begin to rise. Hushpuppy's life is hard--much harder than any child should have to endure--and though she doesn't combat it with a smile, she combats it with spirit. I watched this film and I felt good. I was uplifted. This is the type of film that deserves to be seen because it wants its audience so badly. It wants to spread that spirit and to uplift and show people that a good life can be found without material possessions. The love for your family, and not just your biological family, is all that is important. They are your levee when times get rough. Together, we must simply grit our teeth and shout "I'm the man!"
4/4
Quvenzhane Wallis stars as the little girl in the Mississippi Delta who lives in horrible poverty with her fiery-tempered father, Wink (Dwight Henry). There is a magic power about this young unknown which swallowed up the movie and made it impossible to watch anything but her. Little children and their innocence are so hard to capture honestly on the screen, but this girl doesn't act, she exists.
It is a film of rare creativity, full of melting ice caps, frightful storms and giant monsters. But even through all of the fireworks there is only Wallis, in her little galoshes eating crawdads, which radiates. There is sunshine in her stoic face which speaks far more than any words she could have spoken, and she steals this film simply because they captured her purity. It is overwhelming.
After a freak storm, the bayou where Hushpuppy, Wink and a dozen others of the hopelessly impoverished live, is drowned in salt water. Their very existence has come into jeopardy. To make matters worse Wink is dying, threatening to leave Hushpuppy all on her own. Mighty aurochs, fearsome beasts from the polar north, charge to her home to eat her up, and with her life in danger Hushpuppy must learn to survive, fight back tears and find her long-lost mother.
This is the type of movie that comes about so infrequently that it startles and angers when it does. I say angers, because it is an encapsulation of what film making is supposed to be about. Their budget was small, their cast has no stars, their premise is conceptual, but they had a vision and they never compromised once. Behn Zeitlin has brought Lucy Alibar's play "Juicy and Delicious" to the screen with vividness and raw beauty, honing in Wallis's enormous natural gifts to create one of the most memorable pieces of art this year. It angered me that I was startled to find a movie with uncompromised vision.
It's a film written in ebonic poetry, full of philosophical teachings of the universe, taught through the eyes of a 6-year-old girl who has never had any formal education, but knows how to light a blowtorch to cook her supper. This is a film that squishes and crawls and growls; it breathes and moves. Even in death it is a celebration of life, of being, of being human, of being loved. It has a majesty which it is perfectly aware of and embraces the scope and power of a little girl's imagination and wonderment.
This is a small moment of happiness to enjoy when the waters begin to rise. Hushpuppy's life is hard--much harder than any child should have to endure--and though she doesn't combat it with a smile, she combats it with spirit. I watched this film and I felt good. I was uplifted. This is the type of film that deserves to be seen because it wants its audience so badly. It wants to spread that spirit and to uplift and show people that a good life can be found without material possessions. The love for your family, and not just your biological family, is all that is important. They are your levee when times get rough. Together, we must simply grit our teeth and shout "I'm the man!"
4/4
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Being John Malkovich (1999)
I think that there is a general desire by filmmakers to transport the audience into a different world. That is the novelist's job, and what is a filmmaker but a visual novelist? I certainly look to film as a portal into a world which is not my own, that I may escape from the humdrum world which I am tethered to and simply breathe, or be left breathless, that I may forget my humdrum world. Writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze seem to take this idea literally in one of the most visually inventive films made in the 1990s.
What would you do if you could leave your life of monotonousness and enter the mind of somebody else? And not just anybody--John Malkovich. He certainly wouldn't be the first person on my list of people to be, I'll admit, but a person of prestige, with money, notoriety, and a seeming lack of care is appealing nonetheless. How much would you spend to entirely leave your life for a brief, but wonderful 15 minutes? $200? More importantly, what are the moral an ethical ramifications of such an action?
Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) is not an everyman. Well...I suppose he is an everyman, in that he leads a life going nowhere, with no job, a moderately pretty wife, and seemingly unfulfilled aspirations. He is a puppeteer, however, and puppeteers are not everymen. Puppeteers want something more from a medium which does not lend itself to an adoring audience.
Living with his ever-patient wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), and her lovely chimp, Craig meanders about day to day, putting on provocative, artsy and at time lewd puppet shows, until he is convinced to find a real job. I didn't really want him to, after seeing an incredible opening puppet sequence which was mystifying and intensely beautiful. But he does get a job as a file clerk in a peculiar office building on the 7 1/2 floor, which has tiny ceilings and a slew of bemusing if eccentric characters, including a speech therapist secretary who can't understand what anybody says, a lecherous boss, and the evil Maxine (a terrific Catherine Keener).
It is in this office that Craig falls in love with the icy, cruel and self-absorbed Maxine, and also where he finds a little door leading literally into the mind of John Malkovich (hilariously played by himself). The imagination and visual inventiveness of the conception and execution of this sort of premise is astonishing; it is simply not the type of film that should have been made--let alone seen--and yet it is incredibly well done.
What comes out of such a plot I won't reveal, for that would ruin half the entertainment of a film which is so far out of the box that I'm not even sure there was a box to begin with. It was almost frustrating that I continuously felt I was latching on to what was happening only to be thwarted by another insanely inventive twist. This is the type of film where it's best not to guess what is going to happen, but simply sit back and enjoy the labors of people who had far too much fun doing what they were doing.
The film never gets around to answering some of the tremendous questions it poses for its audience: what kind of responsibility do we have with the power to enter another body? Is it in human nature to sacrifice the liberty of another for our own pleasure? And one that it poses directly to the audience, what is the nature of the self? I don't dwell on this though, simply because it is a marvel of the creative spirit, unleashed unabashedly unto the world, hoping that the audience will be amused, but not tethered by the fear that it won't be. It is funny in its being and doesn't have to try, and it's quite clear that Jonze recognized that in Kaufman's script.
This is a movie to get lost in, to immerse yourself in the perplexities of the human psyche and enjoy the thrill of that dark recess of the mind which wishes it was something else. I can't say much more to describe what goes on in this movie without spoiling suprises. All I can say is that it left my mouth agape throughout, with "What the fuck?" written on my forehead.
3.5/4
What would you do if you could leave your life of monotonousness and enter the mind of somebody else? And not just anybody--John Malkovich. He certainly wouldn't be the first person on my list of people to be, I'll admit, but a person of prestige, with money, notoriety, and a seeming lack of care is appealing nonetheless. How much would you spend to entirely leave your life for a brief, but wonderful 15 minutes? $200? More importantly, what are the moral an ethical ramifications of such an action?
Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) is not an everyman. Well...I suppose he is an everyman, in that he leads a life going nowhere, with no job, a moderately pretty wife, and seemingly unfulfilled aspirations. He is a puppeteer, however, and puppeteers are not everymen. Puppeteers want something more from a medium which does not lend itself to an adoring audience.
Living with his ever-patient wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), and her lovely chimp, Craig meanders about day to day, putting on provocative, artsy and at time lewd puppet shows, until he is convinced to find a real job. I didn't really want him to, after seeing an incredible opening puppet sequence which was mystifying and intensely beautiful. But he does get a job as a file clerk in a peculiar office building on the 7 1/2 floor, which has tiny ceilings and a slew of bemusing if eccentric characters, including a speech therapist secretary who can't understand what anybody says, a lecherous boss, and the evil Maxine (a terrific Catherine Keener).
It is in this office that Craig falls in love with the icy, cruel and self-absorbed Maxine, and also where he finds a little door leading literally into the mind of John Malkovich (hilariously played by himself). The imagination and visual inventiveness of the conception and execution of this sort of premise is astonishing; it is simply not the type of film that should have been made--let alone seen--and yet it is incredibly well done.
What comes out of such a plot I won't reveal, for that would ruin half the entertainment of a film which is so far out of the box that I'm not even sure there was a box to begin with. It was almost frustrating that I continuously felt I was latching on to what was happening only to be thwarted by another insanely inventive twist. This is the type of film where it's best not to guess what is going to happen, but simply sit back and enjoy the labors of people who had far too much fun doing what they were doing.
The film never gets around to answering some of the tremendous questions it poses for its audience: what kind of responsibility do we have with the power to enter another body? Is it in human nature to sacrifice the liberty of another for our own pleasure? And one that it poses directly to the audience, what is the nature of the self? I don't dwell on this though, simply because it is a marvel of the creative spirit, unleashed unabashedly unto the world, hoping that the audience will be amused, but not tethered by the fear that it won't be. It is funny in its being and doesn't have to try, and it's quite clear that Jonze recognized that in Kaufman's script.
This is a movie to get lost in, to immerse yourself in the perplexities of the human psyche and enjoy the thrill of that dark recess of the mind which wishes it was something else. I can't say much more to describe what goes on in this movie without spoiling suprises. All I can say is that it left my mouth agape throughout, with "What the fuck?" written on my forehead.
3.5/4
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Dumbo (1941)
"Dumbo" is considered one of the Disney classics, but although I watched this film many, many times as a child it was never one that I remembered well, unlike "Snow White" or others from that first golden age. Watching it now I completely understand why I only remember it with vague emotional sensations of fear and sadness and why it never appealed to me as a child, though my views of the film have entirely changed for the better.
There is no doubt that this is a masterpiece of animation and inspiration, but unlike most of the films made, this cartoon holds themes that are dark and at times rather disturbing. It is the story of a little elephant named Jumbo Jr., born to a performing circus elephant. Ostracized because of his abnormally large ears he is taunted and teased until his mother goes on a rampage, causing her to be locked in solitary confinement leaving Jumbo--cruelly nicknamed "Dumbo"--to fend for himself. The baby is shunned or mocked until a mouse named Timothy takes him under his guardianship.
It is a stunning film with an almost unbearably upsetting story about a poor baby boy ripped from the arms of his mother who only ever sought to protect and love him. This is a film for all mothers, and I do believe it was made for them before it was for their children.
It is richly painted, obviously a tremendous labor of love, and done in a style that I have never seen done again in a Disney film. Watching it, there seems something off about the pictures; they are too bright, everything seems a bit gilded, characters bounce and shake as though something were keeping them from flying off into space, there seems to be an inordinate lack of straight lines. It is as though they designed the film with the circus very much in the forefront of their minds, all glitz and glamour, but a bit rickety and dangerous. There are few moments of stillness and quiet beauty.
This finally comes to a climax in a drunken, hallucinatory scene about pink elephants, for which "Dumbo" is probably most famous. It is a fantastically creative scene even by its own standards, which are already pretty high. That song is one of many from an Oscar-winning score which is superb. One notable song is "Baby of Mine", in a scene which had better make you cry if you have any heart at all.
Watching it in our PC world, there are interesting aspects to note, including some very blatant racism and animal cruelty, which also distinguishes it from the plethora of other children's films out there. But I think we should watch it, accept those...dark spots on this movie, and simply enjoy a powerfully emotional story of a mother's heartbreak, illustrated by masters of their craft, and done with a care and precision that we no longer have today.
4/4
There is no doubt that this is a masterpiece of animation and inspiration, but unlike most of the films made, this cartoon holds themes that are dark and at times rather disturbing. It is the story of a little elephant named Jumbo Jr., born to a performing circus elephant. Ostracized because of his abnormally large ears he is taunted and teased until his mother goes on a rampage, causing her to be locked in solitary confinement leaving Jumbo--cruelly nicknamed "Dumbo"--to fend for himself. The baby is shunned or mocked until a mouse named Timothy takes him under his guardianship.
It is a stunning film with an almost unbearably upsetting story about a poor baby boy ripped from the arms of his mother who only ever sought to protect and love him. This is a film for all mothers, and I do believe it was made for them before it was for their children.
It is richly painted, obviously a tremendous labor of love, and done in a style that I have never seen done again in a Disney film. Watching it, there seems something off about the pictures; they are too bright, everything seems a bit gilded, characters bounce and shake as though something were keeping them from flying off into space, there seems to be an inordinate lack of straight lines. It is as though they designed the film with the circus very much in the forefront of their minds, all glitz and glamour, but a bit rickety and dangerous. There are few moments of stillness and quiet beauty.
This finally comes to a climax in a drunken, hallucinatory scene about pink elephants, for which "Dumbo" is probably most famous. It is a fantastically creative scene even by its own standards, which are already pretty high. That song is one of many from an Oscar-winning score which is superb. One notable song is "Baby of Mine", in a scene which had better make you cry if you have any heart at all.
Watching it in our PC world, there are interesting aspects to note, including some very blatant racism and animal cruelty, which also distinguishes it from the plethora of other children's films out there. But I think we should watch it, accept those...dark spots on this movie, and simply enjoy a powerfully emotional story of a mother's heartbreak, illustrated by masters of their craft, and done with a care and precision that we no longer have today.
4/4
Monday, January 7, 2013
L'illusionniste - The Illusionist (2010)
Ah! Such a city is Paris, such a woman. In its people there is romance, and in its lights there is magic. But magic is being snuffed out like the many cigarettes stomped into the floor of the stages where M. Tatischeff performs as a magician. As he travels from city to city, playing to theatres filled with nobody, or garden parties filled with apathy, he earns a living big enough for train tickets, board for the night and food for his rabbit. What a life to lead, making enough to keep yourself alive long enough to watch your world die, killed by the wailings of the new rock band, Billy Boy and the Britoons.
What a happy day when the illusionist meets his greatest fan, a young Scottish woman who washes the floors of a dirty little pub where Tatischeff has made himself a celebrity. The girl is Alice, who is only here because she is not all there, and doesn't doubt for a moment that his magic is real. The two embark on an adventure which brings them to Edinburgh, and which will change them both forever.
For all intents and purposes Jacques Tati has not made a film in over forty years, excepting one documentary short. Even at his prime, the man only ever directed four movies, all starring himself as the character M. Hulot. I have seen these movies and he is one of my favorite directors. The reason I watched "The Illusionist" was because he wrote it and I wanted to see what brought someone with such a beautiful vision of life back to the cinema after so long.
Tati is a comic and a brilliant one. In this gorgeously animated film he has written his bumbling, lovable Hulot into the story as the main character, which you will immediately recognize if you have seen his live action features. But this is not the comedy that he could have made, and bless him for it.
Like his old work this is a charming observation of life and the little idiocies by which we live day to day. What has always drawn me to his work is his fascination with everyday men and women, the sexy and the ugly, rich and poor, young and old, fantastic and nondescript. He is the quiet observer who softly points out the absurdities which make life worth living. His movies are a celebration, and I love them.
I learned why he has come back to the cinema and it made quite emotional. Tati has always seemed to fear modernization. He is a romantic at heart which oozes obviously from this little film. He has come back to the cinema after all this time to say that that he sees the death of film making looming in the all too near future. Gone is the magic, replaced by flashing lights and loud noises. I watched Alice and Tatischeff and fell in love with the illusionists eagerness to please and bring a smile, and the girl's innocence and wonderment in the world. Tati wrote a farewell poem to his great love and it moved me deeply.
With smiling wit and looking like a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, this delicate, careful, and loving look at the life of the simple man and his simple art is a quiet sendoff from a great, unappreciated master.
4/4
What a happy day when the illusionist meets his greatest fan, a young Scottish woman who washes the floors of a dirty little pub where Tatischeff has made himself a celebrity. The girl is Alice, who is only here because she is not all there, and doesn't doubt for a moment that his magic is real. The two embark on an adventure which brings them to Edinburgh, and which will change them both forever.
For all intents and purposes Jacques Tati has not made a film in over forty years, excepting one documentary short. Even at his prime, the man only ever directed four movies, all starring himself as the character M. Hulot. I have seen these movies and he is one of my favorite directors. The reason I watched "The Illusionist" was because he wrote it and I wanted to see what brought someone with such a beautiful vision of life back to the cinema after so long.
Tati is a comic and a brilliant one. In this gorgeously animated film he has written his bumbling, lovable Hulot into the story as the main character, which you will immediately recognize if you have seen his live action features. But this is not the comedy that he could have made, and bless him for it.
Like his old work this is a charming observation of life and the little idiocies by which we live day to day. What has always drawn me to his work is his fascination with everyday men and women, the sexy and the ugly, rich and poor, young and old, fantastic and nondescript. He is the quiet observer who softly points out the absurdities which make life worth living. His movies are a celebration, and I love them.
I learned why he has come back to the cinema and it made quite emotional. Tati has always seemed to fear modernization. He is a romantic at heart which oozes obviously from this little film. He has come back to the cinema after all this time to say that that he sees the death of film making looming in the all too near future. Gone is the magic, replaced by flashing lights and loud noises. I watched Alice and Tatischeff and fell in love with the illusionists eagerness to please and bring a smile, and the girl's innocence and wonderment in the world. Tati wrote a farewell poem to his great love and it moved me deeply.
With smiling wit and looking like a Toulouse-Lautrec painting, this delicate, careful, and loving look at the life of the simple man and his simple art is a quiet sendoff from a great, unappreciated master.
4/4
Sunday, January 6, 2013
The Queen of Versailles (2012)
I very rarely watch documentaries; it usually takes quite a bit to catch my eye and have me face reality when what I really want is escapism. When you put the words "queen" and "Versailles" in a title with a picture of blonde bombshell on the cover, however, you've caught my attention. When you tell me it's about the ultra rich and their fall from grace, you've caught me hook, line and sinker.
Meet David Siegel. David Siegel is a septuagenarian billionaire who is the owner, founder, president, CEO or what have you of Westgate Resorts, the largest privately owned time-share company in the world. As he puts it, he is the "Time-share King". He is the kind of man who hob-nobs with Donald Trump and apparently single-handedly got George W. Bush elected president. The fact that his home is in Orlando, FL makes me less doubtful of that claim...
Meet Jaqueline Siegel. Jackie is quite obviously David's trophy wife. She is in her mid-40s, has seven children (plus her white-trash niece, bless her heart), was a model and Miss Florida, and is a licensed engineer. She is a collector, that is she likes to collect large quantities of things, though I would not say her taste is anything but equal to her standing. Jackie tans, Jackie shops, Jackie eats McDonald's in her limo.
In the mid-2000s the Siegel's where making news by building the largest home in the United States, modeled after the palace at Versailles. Their current home was over 20,000 square feet, but they were "bursting at the seems"--all ten of them. Versailles (that's Versailles with a hard "s" at the end, if you live in Florida) was to have 90,000 square feet, cost about $100 million to construct, and was planned to have nearly every amenity you could think of. It really was going to be the palace of the modern age.
And then the sub-prime mortgage collapse of 2008 happened. From what I can surmise this documentary was supposed to be about the construction of Versailles and was probably going to be nothing more than an examination of one disgustingly wealthy family. But I think fate stepped in and had this crew choose to do their film about a family who makes their money from a very unstable market, and one that was devastated by the economic downturn.
Over the course of two years, instead of watching the house go up, we watch it remain stagnant while David and Jackie try to keep their world in place. David calls it his "riches to rags" story. It is a rather unusual experience watching this film. On the one hand it is incredibly gratifying to see the great and mighty, with extravagances beyond my wildest dreams, have to "suffer" (you should see their Christmas tree). Oh, woe is them, who will have to remain in their enormous, if not palatial, house. On the other hand, Jackie is just about the nicest lady in the world, and although her kids and husband are all blood-suckers, I really hated to see her disappointed. She's very funny and just about as warm and hospitable as cherry pie.
We all have the American Dream that one day we will be the rich and famous. Or maybe not. Maybe your dream is simply to raise your children in a home that is simply better than the one you yourself grew up in. In either case, these people achieved that and we resent them for it. I felt embarrassed that enjoyed seeing their nice things taken from them, and at the same time felt rather queasy in hoping their life could also just go back to normal so David wouldn't be so stressed and take it out on his wife and kids.
The film doesn't do much more than bring us into a world we only ever catch glimpses of on the television. Their world doesn't really exist to us. What the documentary inadvertently does, I think, is cause us to reflect on our own wants and desires and place them into perspective on what we need. But then, maybe needs change when your social standing does. Do they really need ten kitchens and a sushi bar? Maybe not, but how on earth could we possibly know?
3/4
Meet David Siegel. David Siegel is a septuagenarian billionaire who is the owner, founder, president, CEO or what have you of Westgate Resorts, the largest privately owned time-share company in the world. As he puts it, he is the "Time-share King". He is the kind of man who hob-nobs with Donald Trump and apparently single-handedly got George W. Bush elected president. The fact that his home is in Orlando, FL makes me less doubtful of that claim...
Meet Jaqueline Siegel. Jackie is quite obviously David's trophy wife. She is in her mid-40s, has seven children (plus her white-trash niece, bless her heart), was a model and Miss Florida, and is a licensed engineer. She is a collector, that is she likes to collect large quantities of things, though I would not say her taste is anything but equal to her standing. Jackie tans, Jackie shops, Jackie eats McDonald's in her limo.
In the mid-2000s the Siegel's where making news by building the largest home in the United States, modeled after the palace at Versailles. Their current home was over 20,000 square feet, but they were "bursting at the seems"--all ten of them. Versailles (that's Versailles with a hard "s" at the end, if you live in Florida) was to have 90,000 square feet, cost about $100 million to construct, and was planned to have nearly every amenity you could think of. It really was going to be the palace of the modern age.
And then the sub-prime mortgage collapse of 2008 happened. From what I can surmise this documentary was supposed to be about the construction of Versailles and was probably going to be nothing more than an examination of one disgustingly wealthy family. But I think fate stepped in and had this crew choose to do their film about a family who makes their money from a very unstable market, and one that was devastated by the economic downturn.
Over the course of two years, instead of watching the house go up, we watch it remain stagnant while David and Jackie try to keep their world in place. David calls it his "riches to rags" story. It is a rather unusual experience watching this film. On the one hand it is incredibly gratifying to see the great and mighty, with extravagances beyond my wildest dreams, have to "suffer" (you should see their Christmas tree). Oh, woe is them, who will have to remain in their enormous, if not palatial, house. On the other hand, Jackie is just about the nicest lady in the world, and although her kids and husband are all blood-suckers, I really hated to see her disappointed. She's very funny and just about as warm and hospitable as cherry pie.
We all have the American Dream that one day we will be the rich and famous. Or maybe not. Maybe your dream is simply to raise your children in a home that is simply better than the one you yourself grew up in. In either case, these people achieved that and we resent them for it. I felt embarrassed that enjoyed seeing their nice things taken from them, and at the same time felt rather queasy in hoping their life could also just go back to normal so David wouldn't be so stressed and take it out on his wife and kids.
The film doesn't do much more than bring us into a world we only ever catch glimpses of on the television. Their world doesn't really exist to us. What the documentary inadvertently does, I think, is cause us to reflect on our own wants and desires and place them into perspective on what we need. But then, maybe needs change when your social standing does. Do they really need ten kitchens and a sushi bar? Maybe not, but how on earth could we possibly know?
3/4
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
Negativity is toxic, we are told. It is a poison. If we don't fight back with vicious teeth and vicious claws and force a silver lining to appear around a cloud, then that negativity will consume us. David O. Russell's brilliantly scripted, brilliantly directed, brilliantly acted film walks an extremely fine line, guiding its audience to important moments of comedy in a heartbreaking story. It is an unusual movie because it fights desperately to placed into the category of either comedy or drama, and succeeds at not being placed in either. It walks its tightrope with perfect balance, thanks to Russell's gentle guidance.
Pat has mental health issues. He was an undiagnosed bipolar for most of his life, with explosive outbursts like his OCD father. Returning home from eight months in an institution for nearly beating a man to death, Pat has a new outlook on life and is ready to seize the day. Excelsior! He starts to read and to exercise; a restraining order is no match for him. Of course he is not all well--he throws a book through a window and blames Mr. Hemingway for making the world a worse place to live with his sad endings--but only seeing the negative aspects of his very troubled life would get him nowhere.
He is unemployed, living back with his overbearing parents, and seems to be perpetually surrounded by crazy people. But Pat tries to remain focused. Rekindling his relationship with his wife is the only thing that matters to him. His plans become complicated when he meets Tiffany, a recent widow who has, as Pat so euphemistically puts is, social problems. She and Pat aren't too different, and a very curious friendship begins to emerge between the two of them.
This film was a joy and a pleasure to watch, not least because it is fronted by two actors giving Oscar-worthy performances. Bradley Cooper plays Pat, and although I would never have looked twice at him walking down the street (he being the star of "The Hangover" films, which you couldn't pay me to watch), he is completely absorbing in his role. The things Pat does are outlandish and scary, but we can't hate him. He wants so much to find love and to have a good life that we can only ever want the best for him. Cooper's character is rather rough, but he plays him with charm, with humor, with deep, deep sadness, and never once does he question his choices. It is an honest performance, enhanced by Cooper's interactions with other great actors.
Jennifer Lawrence (who has never looked more beautiful) plays Tiffany, whose obsessive tendencies, her lack of social awareness, and her fondness for black clothing immediately sends off warning bells. Tiffany matches Pat with craziness--sometimes competitively--in much the same way that Lawrence matches Cooper's acting. I have been a huge fan of hers for years, and this just goes to prove that she is one of the most talented actresses under 30.
Adding to the complexity of their characters is a wonderful supporting cast including Robert De Niro, who plays Pat's father, who dangerously gambles on the Philadelphia Eagles, consumed by superstition. De Niro fortunately does not play a caricature of himself, but gives an upsetting performance of a troubled man. Jacki Weaver, Julia Stiles and a small but wonderful appearance by Chris Tucker round out some terrific acting.
The thing that most impressed me about this film was its lack of convention. There are moments in this movie which are almost too shattering to watch, yet are inflected with lines that are laugh-out-loud funny. I was constantly in flux between emotions which I can only assume was Russell's intention. Give us a miserable man living his miserable life, and have us find that silver lining for him. Force us to look for positivity when none ought to be there. He is a clever man who has made a great little movie with an ending you won't soon forget.
4/4
Pat has mental health issues. He was an undiagnosed bipolar for most of his life, with explosive outbursts like his OCD father. Returning home from eight months in an institution for nearly beating a man to death, Pat has a new outlook on life and is ready to seize the day. Excelsior! He starts to read and to exercise; a restraining order is no match for him. Of course he is not all well--he throws a book through a window and blames Mr. Hemingway for making the world a worse place to live with his sad endings--but only seeing the negative aspects of his very troubled life would get him nowhere.
He is unemployed, living back with his overbearing parents, and seems to be perpetually surrounded by crazy people. But Pat tries to remain focused. Rekindling his relationship with his wife is the only thing that matters to him. His plans become complicated when he meets Tiffany, a recent widow who has, as Pat so euphemistically puts is, social problems. She and Pat aren't too different, and a very curious friendship begins to emerge between the two of them.
This film was a joy and a pleasure to watch, not least because it is fronted by two actors giving Oscar-worthy performances. Bradley Cooper plays Pat, and although I would never have looked twice at him walking down the street (he being the star of "The Hangover" films, which you couldn't pay me to watch), he is completely absorbing in his role. The things Pat does are outlandish and scary, but we can't hate him. He wants so much to find love and to have a good life that we can only ever want the best for him. Cooper's character is rather rough, but he plays him with charm, with humor, with deep, deep sadness, and never once does he question his choices. It is an honest performance, enhanced by Cooper's interactions with other great actors.
Jennifer Lawrence (who has never looked more beautiful) plays Tiffany, whose obsessive tendencies, her lack of social awareness, and her fondness for black clothing immediately sends off warning bells. Tiffany matches Pat with craziness--sometimes competitively--in much the same way that Lawrence matches Cooper's acting. I have been a huge fan of hers for years, and this just goes to prove that she is one of the most talented actresses under 30.
Adding to the complexity of their characters is a wonderful supporting cast including Robert De Niro, who plays Pat's father, who dangerously gambles on the Philadelphia Eagles, consumed by superstition. De Niro fortunately does not play a caricature of himself, but gives an upsetting performance of a troubled man. Jacki Weaver, Julia Stiles and a small but wonderful appearance by Chris Tucker round out some terrific acting.
The thing that most impressed me about this film was its lack of convention. There are moments in this movie which are almost too shattering to watch, yet are inflected with lines that are laugh-out-loud funny. I was constantly in flux between emotions which I can only assume was Russell's intention. Give us a miserable man living his miserable life, and have us find that silver lining for him. Force us to look for positivity when none ought to be there. He is a clever man who has made a great little movie with an ending you won't soon forget.
4/4
Friday, January 4, 2013
Something's Gotta Give (2003)
On a very rare occasion there comes a romantic comedy that transcends convention and cliche and works at creating something truly inspired. This is not such an occasion. Writer/director Nancy Meyers' phony and self-congratulatory script and her film school-level direction are only tolerated because by some force of good or evil she was able to secure the powers of Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton.
An opening sequence of beautiful women prowling the city streets with a hip-hop soundtrack thumping the count of their footfalls indicates to us that this is a film about a player who is going to learn some lessons about how he should treat women when he finally meets the love of his life. My early guess was correct, but this player is in his mid-60's, and there's the twist, ladies and gentlemen. The film must be spunky and original because it's about a silver fox.
Jack Nicholson is Harry Sanborn, the producer of a major hip-hop label and a man with a taste for the younger ladies. We know him to be a smarmy man because he wears Ray Bans, smokes cigars, drives a convertible and uses a cellphone. Old people don't use cellphones, apparently. His latest girlfriend--who looks as though she is newly out of braces--brings Harry to her summer home for a weekend of frolicking, though this is cut short a very inconvenient heart attack.
Not allowed to travel and not willing to stay in a hospital, Harry is left in the care of his girlfriend's mother, Erica (Keaton), put up in the summer home until he recovers. But wait a minute! Erica is high strung, demanding, easily flustered and not at all open to the idea of changing her well worn routine. Surely, having Harry live with her will bring nothing but hilarious hijinks, right? And so it does. Gag.
Somewhere amidst the picnic made memorable by a thunderstorm, a pancake party in pajamas, and kiss on a snow covered bridge in Paris, we are supposed to learn lessons about the nature of love. Love is blind, ageless, opposites attract, et cetera, so on and so forth.This isn't a particularly funny film and all of the humor was so contrived that I couldn't laugh even if I intellectually knew it to be humorous. Meyers worked so hard to fashion a "kooky" script that she bludgeoned all of the humor right out of it.
Thank God for Nicholson and especially for Keaton. Jack gives an atypical Nicholson performance which is more subdued with an easy, natural charm to it that made him likable in spite of his Ray Bans. Keaton shines brightly doing her part the way that only she could do. It's funny that some forty years later you can still traces of Annie Hall in what she does. The two actors elevate clumsy writing and make up for Meyers's lack of skills with their own considerable abilities. It's so nice to see two consummate professions just have fun with one another every once in a while. Keanu Reeves also has a nice role as the third point on a very strange love triangle which emerges.
I think the reason I disliked the film as much as I did was that it made me feel as though I was stupid. This is an easy film; it offers nothing revelatory at all whatsoever, and yet Meyers felt it necessary to explain to the audience what was going on as it was happening. Love scenes aren't love scenes if you have to dictate what it is you like about someone else, as if affirming your statement of love. There is no need to describe a character within the lines when the audience can just look and see for themselves--especially when you're both writer and director.
To bring my argument to a close I will leave you with one final point. The character of Erica is a playwright. After a long bout of writer's block she decides to write the story of her and Harry's romance, using the inevitable breakup as her emotional fuel. In the play she writes scenes that we have witnessed already and uses lines that we have already heard. In essence, she only changes the names. When she finishes writing the play, Reeves's character says to her that it's the best thing that Erica has ever done. He tells her it's funny, it's smart, it's emotional. How dare Meyer's write about herself in that way? For shame, I say (especially when her story is neither funny nor smart).
1.5/4
An opening sequence of beautiful women prowling the city streets with a hip-hop soundtrack thumping the count of their footfalls indicates to us that this is a film about a player who is going to learn some lessons about how he should treat women when he finally meets the love of his life. My early guess was correct, but this player is in his mid-60's, and there's the twist, ladies and gentlemen. The film must be spunky and original because it's about a silver fox.
Jack Nicholson is Harry Sanborn, the producer of a major hip-hop label and a man with a taste for the younger ladies. We know him to be a smarmy man because he wears Ray Bans, smokes cigars, drives a convertible and uses a cellphone. Old people don't use cellphones, apparently. His latest girlfriend--who looks as though she is newly out of braces--brings Harry to her summer home for a weekend of frolicking, though this is cut short a very inconvenient heart attack.
Not allowed to travel and not willing to stay in a hospital, Harry is left in the care of his girlfriend's mother, Erica (Keaton), put up in the summer home until he recovers. But wait a minute! Erica is high strung, demanding, easily flustered and not at all open to the idea of changing her well worn routine. Surely, having Harry live with her will bring nothing but hilarious hijinks, right? And so it does. Gag.
Somewhere amidst the picnic made memorable by a thunderstorm, a pancake party in pajamas, and kiss on a snow covered bridge in Paris, we are supposed to learn lessons about the nature of love. Love is blind, ageless, opposites attract, et cetera, so on and so forth.This isn't a particularly funny film and all of the humor was so contrived that I couldn't laugh even if I intellectually knew it to be humorous. Meyers worked so hard to fashion a "kooky" script that she bludgeoned all of the humor right out of it.
Thank God for Nicholson and especially for Keaton. Jack gives an atypical Nicholson performance which is more subdued with an easy, natural charm to it that made him likable in spite of his Ray Bans. Keaton shines brightly doing her part the way that only she could do. It's funny that some forty years later you can still traces of Annie Hall in what she does. The two actors elevate clumsy writing and make up for Meyers's lack of skills with their own considerable abilities. It's so nice to see two consummate professions just have fun with one another every once in a while. Keanu Reeves also has a nice role as the third point on a very strange love triangle which emerges.
I think the reason I disliked the film as much as I did was that it made me feel as though I was stupid. This is an easy film; it offers nothing revelatory at all whatsoever, and yet Meyers felt it necessary to explain to the audience what was going on as it was happening. Love scenes aren't love scenes if you have to dictate what it is you like about someone else, as if affirming your statement of love. There is no need to describe a character within the lines when the audience can just look and see for themselves--especially when you're both writer and director.
To bring my argument to a close I will leave you with one final point. The character of Erica is a playwright. After a long bout of writer's block she decides to write the story of her and Harry's romance, using the inevitable breakup as her emotional fuel. In the play she writes scenes that we have witnessed already and uses lines that we have already heard. In essence, she only changes the names. When she finishes writing the play, Reeves's character says to her that it's the best thing that Erica has ever done. He tells her it's funny, it's smart, it's emotional. How dare Meyer's write about herself in that way? For shame, I say (especially when her story is neither funny nor smart).
1.5/4
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