I've Had It With Hollywood

This Is Not A Film

2012-02-29T13:54:00.000-05:00

This shrewdly subversive film by Jafar Panahi, an Iranian filmmaker who has been sentenced by the Iranian governmentto six years in jail, and has been banned from directing, writing screenplays, traveling abroad or talking to the media for twenty years, is a cunning little gem of courage and defiance. Apparently, it was spirited out of Iran in a flash drive hidden in a cake, and shown at Cannes last year. I saw it at the New York Film Festival. It is now showing at Film Forum. It is a great film.
In the film, Panahi is under house arrest, unable to work, so he decides to shoot his own reenactment of a movie the regime has forbidden him to make. The movie is about a young girl who gets accepted to study art in the university, but her religious family prevents her from doing so by locking her up in the house; a pretty straightforward metaphor for the cultural repression in Iran today.
Panahi creates the location by delineating it on his living room carpet with masking tape. He describes the action. He talks about how he would shoot it. But he doesn't touch the camera. His son turns it on for him before he leaves in the morning, and he has a documentary filmmaker friend helping him, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, credited as co-director. This poor young man has since been also convicted of espionage, presumably because he worked for the BBC.
Panahi is making his film without making his film. Panahi is alone in the apartment except for a huge pet iguana that slithers around on the bookcases and sofas and enhances the aura of surreality of his newly Kafkian life. Sometimes he talks to his wife on the phone. He steps out into his balcony, talks to people on the phone, gets a delivered lunch, intimates about the mass demonstrations that were happening in Iran at the time. Sometimes he talks to his lawyer on the phone, who tells him his case is very hard to overturn. It is obvious he is not helping his own cause by defying the regime's orders.
When you read about Panahi's circumstances, you imagine This Is Not A Film as some kind of heroic manifesto against artistic repression but This is Not A Film surprises by being a modest but cunning portrait of quiet defiance, with a streak of absurdist humor. Panahi is just a director, not a hero, and all he wants to do is direct. He refrains from agitating. He just stubbornly insists on being who he is. His protest is to continue doing what he was meant to do and to show the irrationality of his oppressors.
Even though it appears to happen over the course of one day and it lasts only 75 minutes, This is Not A Film was actually shot over ten days. It is not a spontaneous, haphazard work. It is carefully thought out and composed. This is as substantial a film and certainly a better film than any mindless $200 million extravaganza. There is something of the surrealism of Magritte in this humble piece of filmmaking. Panahi's professional life has been truncated, which he refuses to accept; he does exactly what he was told not to do, by not exactly doing it. The production resources may be minimal, but the intelligence and the depth of Panahi's concept are brilliant.
At the end of his day, which increases in defiance as it goes along, Panahi accompanies the building's super on his rounds as he picks up the garbage. All he is doing is going into the elevator, and his conversation with the super is, like the rest of the movie, a telling glimpse into Iranian society, a sophisticated country that has been abducted by stone age fundamentalists, cowards who arrest artists.
As self effacing as he is, as modest a project as this film seems to be, Panahi's act of defiance is tremendously courageous. He is well aware that some friends may suffer simply by associating with him. His collaborator understands he might be digging his own professional grave. It takes great bravery to defy your captors.
In my encounters so far with Iranian cinema I have always been struck by its cunning intelligence, a bracing matter of factness, a lack of sentimentality and a fantastic sense of humor, always suffused with great empathy and wisdom. To us in the West, Iran is a very unlikely country to have a world class cinema. But it does, despite or maybe perhaps because it has to continually fight against the stupidity of tyranny. The great Iranian filmmakers are a self-effacing bunch. Their movies are small and economical but their scope is rich. They are subversive not only politically, but also in the very essence of what constitutes a movie. They make masterpieces with very little and they show it is possible to make great films without spending millions or selling your soul to mass idiocy. So it is with this powerful film.

Oscars Postmortem 2012

2012-02-27T10:57:00.000-05:00

As always, such an anticlimax. But, the consensus in my tiny Oscar watchfest was "they were not that terrible". Given that these are the Oscars, this is like getting an A-.
First, the dresses. Undisputed best look of the night, Rooney Mara. Best dressed, she was the only one who looked like a bona fide movie star. Second place goes to a brave and elegant Gwyneth Paltrow for pulling off a spectacular white dress. The rest was a parade of high-end schmattes, as far as I'm concerned. Put them all together in a rack and you'd think you were at a formal gown sale at Bolton's. It's a bad day for glamour when Penelope Cruz looks matronly. Where is Tilda Swinton when we need her?
I like Billy Crystal, but the shtick is not getting old, it's getting prehistoric. "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: that's how my relatives are watching this show". Me and the alte cackers who comprise the Academy are suckers for borscht belt humor. The rest of the world, probably not so much.
Am I crazy, or were there not enough stars? (Never enough stars). At least they had the decency not to bother with the Taylor Lautners and Ryan Reynoldses of the world. But I sorely missed me some Fassbender, some Mortensen, some Gosling, some Swinton, some Theron, some hormone blasting eye candy. Alas.
I am still at a loss trying to understand what the hell was that commercial for Cirque Du Soleil in the middle of the proceedings. Although we are progressing as far as stopping audience abuse with musical numbers, apparently the producers cannot bear to part with random cheesiness altogether. Who are we getting next year, Siegfried and Roy?
Obit time was long and corny, and is it me or they always use that song? There were some bad omissions: Raul Ruiz, Pedro Armendáriz Jr, Michael Gough, Michael Sarrazin, ArthurLaurents, Harry Morgan, Nicol Williamson. Instead, there was some marketing research guy in there.
Apropos of which, I thought the focus group bit by the fabulous Best in Show troupe was very funny. Focus groups are exactly like that. This was documentary in its realism. But if Hollywood thinks focus groups are so satanically moronic, as they are, why do they keep using them? Self-serving crap.
Was I moved by stars talking about how they love movies? No, because they didn't say anything specific. And who cares what Adam Sandler's influences are? Anybody who opens a montage with a scene from Forrest Gump deserves a special circle of hell designed exclusively for them, with that scene looped at nauseam for infinity.
Emma Stone was charming. Ben Stiller should be disinvited posthaste (what was that skin color?), and as far as I'm concerned Will Ferrell and Zack G. can do no wrong. And last year's winners talking personally to the acting nominees is borderline offensive. It's like rabbis giving eulogies at funerals of dead people they never met. Horrifying. The rest is a blur.
Now, as far as the prizes: I was flummoxed by the techie love shown to Hugo, and thought it was mostly consolation prizes to Scorsese, until I read in Deadline Hollywood Daily that Hugo, which cost over $200 million to make, (and for some incomprehensible reason this obscenity is being rewarded) employed almost every tech guy in town and they all voted for it. Which explains. Because although it uses 3D and HD and ADHD, I found the look of the movie garish and applied with a heavy hand, sort of like a Parisian strumpet with a bad case of rouge. Which brings me to the one upset of the night that made me scream in horror. I was not rooting for cinematographer Emannuel Lubezki because he's a Mexican Jewish homie, but because his work in The Tree of Life is truly awesome and ravishing. Plus, he has been nominated 5 times and never won. I really thought he had it in the bag. It went to Robert Richardson's ugly, if super complex, work in Hugo. Aargh.
I had problems with many of the nominations to begin with. I would have gladly exchanged Kevin Spacey in Margin Call and Viggo Mortensen as Freud for Christopher Plummer and Nick Nolte. I would have loved to see Ryan Gosling for Ides of March or Michael Fassbender for Shame instead of Dujardin or Clooney. I would have loved to see Kristin Wiig or Charlize Theron instead of Glenn Close (who looked like the leprechaun in the Lucky Charms cereal box) or Viola Davis (yes, I've said it. I'm tired of her virtuoso weeping).
And except for The Artist and The Tree of Life, I don't think any of the other 10 movies deserved a best of the year award. Do Moneyball and War Horse (which I haven't seen) deserve to be there, but not Bridesmaids? With bad choices to begin with, it's hard to get worked up about this.
The only awards I really cared about were that justice be made for A Separation, and for Meryl Streep, who everybody loves to hate because they cannot conceive she is as impossibly magnificent as she is. That was the one standing ovation that had actual merit in the entire show. She is the Grande Dame of American Acting if not of All Acting Ever, so back off, haters. She also does fake humility to a t.
As we have complained before, for the Oscars to have some sort of suspense, the ceremony needs to happen at the beginning of awards season and not at the end, when the outcome is almost uniformly a foregone conclusion. Let the voters not be swayed by the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs and the Golden Chickens. Let them do their homework. This would make them more exciting.
And BTW, next year, fix the sound problems. Geez.

Foreign Policy and The Oscars

2012-02-21T09:30:00.000-05:00

Few categories are more infuriating than the Best Foreign Film category in the Oscars. The films are submitted by their countries (a bureaucratic choice), so many times there are ridiculous omissions in the category. Sometimes great movies happen to make it to the list, only to be voted down by either feel-good movies, foreign movies that are Hollywood wannabes, or Holocaust movies.
The Holocaust movie/documentary winner has become like a bad recurring joke. I've no doubt that some of them are worthy films, but I think this is a case in which the good intentions of an insular industry end up creating animosity. Most people just roll their eyes every time yet another documentary or foreign film on the subject wins, particularly when the competing subjects are other equally egregious human injustices, whose loss seems guaranteed at the mere inclusion of a Holocaust themed competitor. There is Holocaust fatigue. And worse, the very disturbing fact that among some non-Jews this is seen as some sort of irrational, obnoxious Jewish obsession with the topic.
This year, there is a true contender in the Foreign Film category that is almost the sure bet to win the statuette. Iran's official entry, A Separation, is, in my view, the best movie of the year. But it cannot compete in that category, so it has been nominated, not only for foreign film but surprisingly for best original screenplay as well. Truly deserved on both counts.
Its win could be a fait accompli if it weren't for two movies that may prove tough contenders. Poland's In Darkness, about, guess what, the Holocaust, and an Israeli movie called Footnote, which won best screenplay at Cannes last year.
Indeed, Footnote boasts a great screenplay, but its execution is deeply flawed. In Darkness is a good, but uneven movie. And it's about the Holocaust. About the other contenders I know little and I don't expect the members of the Academy to know much more (a movie from Belgium, and a movie from Canada). The only one that truly made a splash internationally, and with good reason, is A Separation.
The problem is that it is from Iran, a country that seems to be our current foreign policy bogeyman. This may put the voters in a conundrum. Do they want to reward a movie sent by a regime they probably hate? If they are smart, I think they should. The right thing is to award it the prize on its outstanding artistic merit. At the same time, this would also be a very meaningful symbolic statement. It would extend a hand to the people of Iran, who are brilliantly, humanely represented in the movie, amidst the worrisome cacophony of bellicose intentions among certain hawks in the US and Israel. And this could perhaps even elegantly flip the anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda of Iran. But if instead of giving the award to A Separation, it goes to In Darkness (massive roll of the eyes) or to Footnote, Iran and all the Jew haters can go back to saying that the Jews run everything anyway, etc. If Belgium or Canada win, it's a cop out and nobody cares.
This is the most important prize of the evening, people. The smart thing to do is to vote for A Separation. It is, after all the much superior film.
On the surface, A Separation does not seem like an overtly political film. But it is a very shrewd film which depicts a society that is deeply divided along class lines (The educated, more secular middle class, and the poor and pious), who, thanks to their particular kind of regime, are incapable of coming to terms with one another. The movie shows how a simple decision by an unhappy wife who wants to leave the country and a husband who cannot, snowballs into a drama that involves almost all segments of Iranian society. It is not a particularly rosy picture of life in Tehran, but it feels true.

I remember my shock when The Secret In Their Eyes, a Hollywoodish Argentinian potboiler took the prize from the magnificent French film A Prophet, in a year where both were competing against Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon. The winner was a perfectly entertaining movie, but A Prophet and The White Ribbon are masterpieces, too gloomy and realistic for the feel good schmaltz of the Academy.
A Separation is a masterpiece. Vote smart.

An Old Fart Game

2012-02-20T19:05:00.000-05:00

Well, now we know why the Oscars are so irrelevant, so bland, so boring, so conventional. Because the Academy is comprised almost exclusively of white alte cackers.
The LA Times culled the numbers in shocking infographics.
The numbers are appalling:

94% white
77% male
2% black
Less than 2% Latino
14% people under 50
Median age is 62

The absence of women is appalling, the dearth of Blacks and Latinos is appalling, the dearth of young working talent is appalling. But while the dearth of people of color is somehow less surprising, I find the lack of women across most important categories (writer, director, producer, executive, cinematographer) absolutely dispiriting. How can we expect the Academy to have more minorities if they don't even have women! It is very disappointing that an industry that makes so much money and has so much cultural influence throughout the world is so disgracefully behind the times.
That is why they vote for aberrations intended to make it look like the Academy is progressive, making matters even worse, because movies like Slumdog Millionaire and The Help are condescending heaps of false piety.
Bizarrely, not everybody who is nominated is automatically invited to become a member, which would make the most sense to me, unless the Academy aims to belong in the fossil wing of the Museum of Natural History.
To make matters worse, some important members have the nerve to disdain these findings. From a comment on Deadline Hollywood Daily:

From the article…”I don’t see any reason why the academy should represent the entire American population. That’s what the People’s Choice Awards are for,” said Pierson, who still serves on the board of governors. “We represent the professional filmmakers, and if that doesn’t reflect the general population, so be it.”
I completely agree. This is a group representing an industry. Who cares if it’s diverse?

Indeed, the Academy doesn't have to mirror US demographics to a T, but what arrogance. This window into the make-up of the Academy simply reflects the reality of Hollywood as a whole. I find it very unfair and very sad, and quite alarming that instead of being jolted by it, they are defensive. This is the typical response of members of a boys' club.
Now, the Academy is an invitation only club and they can have the rules they want. Or maybe not. But if they want to be relevant, and they want more ratings, and they actually want the Oscars to stand for something meaningful, it would behoove them to diversify. Bringing in James Franco and Anne Hathaway is bad cosmetic surgery, and obviously didn't work. Have a younger, newer, more diverse membership with more adventurous tastes and a wider frame of reference. This may give comedies and independent films a better chance, which may bring a wider audience. In the end, even though the Oscars have always been nothing but a brazen PR stunt, it is in the interest of Hollywood to make people feel passion for movies. This is not going to happen if they keep creaking while the rest of the world zips ahead.

I'm already disenchanted with many of the nominees, the glaring omissions and the sinking feeling it's going to be particularly gnarly his year. Billy Crystal? He's funny, but we might as well hoof it to a crumbling hotel in the Catskills and call it a day.
I am going to shoot my TV if A Separation doesn't win best foreign picture, and the politics here are complicated, in a field that has both a Holocaust movie and an Israeli movie, neither of which shines a candle to the Iranian film. (I'm writing a separate post on this complex issue).
If The Help wins, I might have to shoot innocent bystanders.

In Darkness

2012-02-18T10:00:00.000-05:00

It took me a couple of days to be able to write about this movie by Agnieszka Holland, which, as many Holocaust movies tend to be, is nominated for a foreign picture Oscar. I still think A Separation is the undisputed winner, but you know how it is with Holocaust movies and Oscar voters. And this one is not bad. At least, it goes through great lengths to be honest: Poles are portrayed as the Church-encouraged Antisemites they mostly were, and Jews are not the saintly, passive victims they tend to be. Some are selfish and hysterical, others are duplicitous, others are civilized, but in these circumstances they all are reduced to bare bones human nature. Nazis are portrayed as what they were, sadistic monsters, abetted by criminal propaganda and safety in numbers.
This harrowing movie is based on the real story of a group of Polish Jews who were hidden in the sewers of Lvov by Leopold Socha, a Polish thief who knew the sewers like the back of his hand. At first he does it for the money only. One of the Jews is wealthy and gives him 500 zlotys a day to keep them safe in the sewers and bring them food. But Socha, the wonderful Robert Wieckiewicz, finds he has in him an unexplained human impulse to help these people, namely compassion or sheer human decency, even as his Ukrainian friend is offering, through the auspices of the Nazis, the same amount of money to rat out hiding Jews. He could have ratted the Jews out and be a hero to the Nazis, saving himself a whole lot of trouble. But he didn't and he reluctantly saved the lives of these Jews, including two children, one of whom wrote a memoir.
As she seems to remember it, or as Holland would have it, there was a lot of extramarital sex going on in the ghetto and the sewers. If you are suffering from scurvy and are living in a rat and shit infested sewer, I wonder how much libido you have. I can see sex as a representation of the will to live, but once would have made the point more powerfully.
I think Holland wanted to make a Holocaust movie that showed more of the personal impact, and in this she succeeds. The suffering is horrible and individualized: instead of your garden variety anonymous Jews being led to slaughter, we get individual characters having a really hard time because of who they are, and not only because they are starving. Mr. Socha also has to deal with risk and suspicion, and he also repeats tired chestnuts about Jews being greedy, etc. It's not black and white.
Holland is a very lucid, competent director, who gets great performances from all her actors, especially the two children, and the movie is extremely well made, with excellent cinematography by Jolanta Dylewska, and particularly strong editing. It's solid but too long. Just as it has some powerful scenes, as when the Jews emerge from the darkness in the middle of a sunny day, almost blinded, to the surprise of their Polish countrymen, here and there it goes into cheesy territory, like a ridiculous scene of a naked woman in the sewer bathing herself with rain water. After 14 months in there she has no reason to look like a pinup.
In his review of this film, A.O. Scott, who has written about the Holocaust "genre" before, complains that this is a feel good movie. Through three fourths of the film, in my view, it is definitely not. It is hard to sit through. It's tough minded, complicated and realistic. To the point that I wonder what compels audiences to voluntarily seek out the punishment of Holocaust movies, if not morbid curiosity, or a need for excruciating catharsis. At the end, after all Holland puts the audience through, you think there better be a happy ending, and there is one. The Jews were saved.
But in the postscript, where we learn the facts of the story through titles, life gets to break our heart. Socha finds a premature death and the titles explain that people in his town thought that this was God's punishment for saving the Jews. Plus ça change.
Socha and his wife are among the 6000 Polish citizens recognized as Righteous Among The Nations by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel.

The Woman In Black

2012-02-05T18:29:00.000-05:00

A lovely, surprisingly effective and intelligent ghost movie starring Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter to you), Ciaran Hinds and the formidable Janet McTeer. This is a scary movie about unendurable grief. Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a young widower lawyer who is sent by his firm somewhere to the marshy north of England to settle some defunct lady's estate. When he gets there, the villagers won't help him and horrible things start happening to children. Radcliffe is affecting in an almost silent performance as the young man.
Most scary movies have flimsy premises and are lazily written, rarely bothering with character. This film is an exception, with a solid screenplay, adapted from a novel, that sets and pays everything off beautifully. Director James Watkins relies a lot on slamming doors and pounding sound effects, but he does make you jump many times. He also sustains tension and suspense chillingly and, rare for the genre, has tremendous empathy for his characters. The Victorian atmosphere feels authentic, misty and cold, with scary looking windup toys, sinister dolls, and the terrible sight of innocent children destroying themselves. It's such a pleasure to watch a horror movie that looks beautiful, and not shot in cheap, apoplectic video, for a change. Watkins is stylish, restrained and wonderful with shocking apparitions. He also has a bit of a sense of humor.
The plot has a couple of excellent unexpected twists, and one of the reasons it works is because we are invested in the character, who for once, is not an idiot, but a susceptible young man in mourning, with a young child himself and therefore open to the apparitions of ghosts. I wish there was more of an intimation that perhaps all of these ghastly scares are happening only in his mind (this movie is very reminiscent both of The Innocents and The Others), and that he had more of an inner conflict, because once he becomes unafraid of the ghosts, we become a little less afraid ourselves. The story could go further and raise the stakes much higher, but it opts for more emotional grounding than just scares. Still, this is a mature, poignant film that truly sympathizes with unendurable grief, grief so monstrous that it wishes the worst kind of harm in those fortunate enough not to harbor it. More importantly, The Woman In Black delivers plenty of scares, which is all that matters in this kind of films, most of them extremely well earned (the audience kept tittering and laughing from sheer nerves), yet with a very touching aura of unfathomable sadness.

Oscars: Award Bathos

2012-02-04T10:40:00.003-05:00

Baños de pureza is a phrase in Spanish that means "baths of purity" and is used to denote someone who likes to slather themselves in holiness. Methinks that this is what tends to happen at the Oscars, where the nominations run the gamut from tokenism and holier than thou sentiments, to the pedestrian, predictable and conventional. I never thought that I'd agree with critic Peter Travers from Rolling Stone, but in his fun tirade against the ghastly Oscar choices this year, the guy has a point. This year's awards, as always, smack of humorless, pious self-congratulation, which explains many of the glaring omissions as well as the inexplicable inclusions.
A movie that was widely panned by critics, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, can only be in there because it is about 9/11 and has Tom Hanks in it, like a trusted brand of tissues. Apparently, it is the worst kind of sentimental pandering, the kind of movie that everybody hates but the Academy. Yet Bridesmaids, a hugely successful movie, both artistically and commercially, gets a consolation prize for best screenplay, because God forbid they pick a comedy for best movie or best actress of the year for Kristin Wiig. But then they complain that the ratings are falling and only old, demented farts like me watch their annual train wreck of anticipated boredom. This explains the omission of Michael Fassbender's and Carey Mulligan's searing performances in Shame, because the movie is about SEX and God forbid there is the slightest intimation they would stoop to watch such a film. They, who have no qualms about massive body counts in PG-13 movies, God forbid they look at a tit or a dick. This explains why dark independent movies like Take Shelter, or Martha Marcy May Marlene are ignored. And a solid political movie like The Ides of March, which depicts the filth of politics inside two Democrat campaigns, and is just about evil, not about Good and Evil, as they like it, gets only a screenplay nod, because it portrays flawed, messy people, not heroes bathed in the light of their own halos. For that we have The Help, a terrible movie, but one that guarantees Hollywood a nice pat in their own back, even if it is covered in the kind of schmaltz that is really bad for you. The kind of dreck that pretends that without white people, black people could not have freed themselves from slavery. The Descendants is the typical movie the Academy likes. It is solid and non-threatening; doesn't offend anybody, takes place in Hawaii. Then there is War Horse, which I haven't seen, (a weepie about a horse in the war is not what drives me to the theater), and Hugo, by Martin Scorsese, which is again, well-intentioned about cinema, but not very good. Midnight in Paris is a prestige nod and the best Woody Allen has done in years of mediocre work, but is it a best film of the year? No. I bet Moneyball is a perfectly good movie, but it is about "Triumph", and has Brad Pitt in it. I suspect it is there because no one wanted to make it, and Pitt fought for it until he got his way. Hence, a best actor nod for him as well: atonement. At least they had the good sense to recognize The Artist and The Tree of Life, which are truly magnificent. This was a particularly bad year in this category.
This explains why Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Demián Bichir got nominated. Mind you, they all are great, and bring depth and humanity to thin, idealized roles, but they are there so that Hollywood can atone with these two Black women and one Latino, all playing the noble-person-of-color, for all the hundreds of other non-white actors who either are completely absent from their movies or they mostly play the gardener or the maid, the drug dealer or the pimp, or in the best of cases, a noble second banana. With these prizes, the Academy thinks they've paid their dues for multiculti inclusion.
This halo pandering comes from a multi-billion dollar industry that is craven and morally corrupt, but that likes to wish that the lofty moral sentiments of these movies will rub off on them while they crush every other film industry with their might and they flood screens all over the world with mindnumbing crap. This is an industry that is angry at Obama, and threatening to withhold donations to his campaign because he did not support SOPA or PIPA, two strongarming bills intended to protect the billions it makes, freedom of speech be damned.
Could also be that their taste is crap. That they are old and hopelessly behind the times, and they simply love bad, tepid movies that make them feel good about themselves. This is why atrocities of cheap, false sentiment like Slumdog Millionaire, Life is Beautiful, The Blind Side, and maybe this year The Help, are categorized as best movie of the year.
Here is the list of all the Oscar nominees for best movie since 1927. Have fun.

Hugo

2012-02-02T11:06:00.001-05:00

Wrong man for the job. Had this movie been directed by Steven Spielberg, it would have been much more fun, mischievous and magical. As directed by Martin Scorsese, even though its intentions are lovely, Hugo is a drag. It certainly does not deserve to be a contender for best film of the year. The Artist, which is a similar homage to the dawn of film, is a much superior movie in every respect. Martin Scorsese is out of his element telling a story for children, and no amount of camera pyrotechnics can add lightness and grace to this leaden affair. There are a lot of swooping computer graphics-enhanced camera moves, but they add no real excitement. Everything looks fake. The cinematography by Robert Richardson is garish. The music by Howard Shore is predictable and cliched. The story of Hugo Cabret, an orphan who winds the clocks of the Gare Montparnasse and discovers the forgotten film genius Georges Mélies (Ben Kingsley, excellent) is very dark, but neither Scorsese or screenwriter John Logan seem to know how to deal with an audience of children. Either Logan thinks children are dim and need to be hit over the head with basic, repetitive dialogue and endlessly telegraphed plot points that surprise nobody, or he was phoning it in. The kids (Asa Butterfield as Hugo, and Chloe Grace Moretz as his friend Isabelle) work very hard to act but they are not charming, through no fault of their own. 3D does not contribute anything of value, except perhaps remind us that it shares the Mélies spirit for experimentation.
In a movie that lasts more than two hours, there were only two instances where I was not bored to tears, my heart sinking with disappointment. Any time that Sacha Baron Cohen appears as the evil station inspector who likes to send kids to the orphanage, simply because he is fun to watch. And once Scorsese gets around to tell the story of George Mélies, which is when the movie finally blossoms. Scorsese's love of movies is heartfelt and evident in his moving homage to this great artist, a former magician who after being a prolific filmmaker and the first inventor of visual effects in silent film, ended up tragically impoverished and forgotten. Scorsese shares his love of movies by including footage of two of the first movies ever made, the Lumiere brothers' Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory and Train Arriving at a Station (1895), of one of the first fictional narrative movies made in the US, The Great Train Robbery (1903), and of Mélies' magnificent A Trip to The Moon (1902). There is a bit with Harold Lloyd famously hanging from a clock, just like Hugo does in the movie, some snippets of Chaplin and Buster Keaton. These old movies are still as potent and beautiful and modern and timely as the day they were printed. The story of Meliés is a good reason to see this movie, the only time it truly comes alive with a lovely, elegiac sense of awe. Scorsese is right to to share his passion with audiences that simply do not appreciate enough the astonishing wonder that is film. I suggest you get the DVD and skip to those parts, which are truly beautiful and moving.

On DVD: The Ides Of March

2012-01-29T10:50:00.002-05:00

Good, dirty fun. George Clooney is a much better director than Clint Eastwood, but he gets no respect. I don't get it. He makes small, intelligent films with complicated characters. What's not to like? The Ides Of March is a zippy, nasty little movie about the queasy filth that is politics; well directed, elegant and with a splendid cast. Why doesn't Clooney get the love, I don't know. He has the good sense of hiring Paul Giamatti, Marisa Tomei, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Jeffrey Wright, a stellar cast, all excellent. And he is not even the main character. He plays a Democratic presidential candidate named Mike Morris, but the main role belongs to Morris' strategic advisor, Stephen Meyers, played by Ryan Gosling.
Gosling is very good. He starts out as a brilliant strategist who also happens to believe in his candidate, until his heart is broken by disillusionment and betrayal, of his own doing. He makes the grave mistake of listening to the siren's call of Paul Giamatti, who is the campaign manager of Morris' adversary. Nobody in this movie is pure. Everybody makes mistakes and craves either sex, money or power. But in campaign politics mistakes of a human nature are costly because everything is a front. It's all about appearances. Everything appears to be immaculate, but everything is tainted in some way or another. In order to win, people resort to bad tactics. Integrity is impossible.
Yes, the plot points strain credulity. For those of us who would not touch politics with a ten foot pole it's hard to believe that victories are achieved through extorsion; that Ida Horowitz, a journalist for the NY Times (Tomei, encased in boxy coats, glasses and Uggs, and still sexy), would threaten to run a damaging piece in exchange for information. That a Senator from North Carolina (Jeffrey Wright) would demand to be Secretary of State in exchange for his crucial endorsement, that a simple little meeting of Gosling's with Giamatti would make the entire house of cards collapse, and more fatally, that an intern (Evan Rachel Wood, better than usual) would find a tragic end over the appearance of impropriety. But somehow, these excesses are forgivable because the movie zips along, the cast is fantastic, including Clooney, who'd be my real president in a heartbeat, and because Gosling's dilemma is very compelling. The movie works because it holds steadfast to its own theory: that politics are dirty and ruthless. It does not change its mind and decides to appease anybody's moral conscience or make the audience feel good. Stephen Meyers is an antihero who ends up getting what he wants, by losing everything that is important and not at all in the way he wanted it. Gosling convincingly transforms himself from an enthusiastic believer to a bitter, cynical man bent on revenge. A smart, brittle film. Very enjoyable.

The Iron Lady

2012-01-28T12:06:00.000-05:00

There is a scene towards the beginning of this misconceived borefest that encapsulates the monster of acting that is Meryl Streep. There is no other reason to watch this muddled film. Streep is a freak. We all know she can do voices and mimic accents like an android, but in this scene, as Margaret Thatcher in old age, she is losing her memory and is confused, but proud, but bewildered, trying to remember; a dozen different feelings passing through her terrified eyes. Her face may be under layers of latex (the make-up deserves an Oscar), and she may mimic old age to perfection, but for a vibrant woman like her to express so truthfully what happens in the mind in the fog of old age, it is killer, killer stuff. And we have not even seen her at the height of her powers. Streep provides a technique fest: a different voice when she was younger, a lowered voice when she became leader of the Conservative Party, a perfect accent, the walk, the mannerisms. But she is a monster because within the meticulousness and fierceness of her preparation, she nails the moments of human truth. She nails every scene. No one should complain if she wins every award in the book. She deserves them all. Too bad she is so extraordinary in such a bad movie.
1. I am beyond exhausted with the overarching flashback convention in biopics, when we see the character in old age reminisce here and there about their most memorable moments, as if they were chocolate chips sinking in cookie batter. This plot device drains the story of tension and it muddles the arc of the character, which in this case is even more discombobulated because there seems to be no real backbone to the story. Why couldn't Thatcher's story be told chronologically, from a grocer's daughter to the longest serving Prime Minister of Britain, to doddering old age? At least we'd be excited by the conflicts she had to overcome, by the momentum of looking forward to what's going to happen, not to what already did.
So boring, I want to scream.
2. Harvey Weinstein. There a scene in this movie that is exactly like a scene in his last movie, The King's Speech. Do we really need to see a montage of Thatcher undergoing coaching, changing her hair into her famed blond helmet, as if she were an American Idol contestant? In this school of filmmaking even someone as formidable, fierce and polarizing as Margaret Thatcher gets the audience-pleasing Weinstein shtick. If you have Meryl Streep on board, it's enough to trust her humanizing capabilities and use her to paint a truly interesting portrait of a major political personality. No need to encase her in sugar. But no. There's this syrupy schmaltz about her fantasizing talking to her husband Dennis (Jim Broadbent), who's been dead forever. This unbecoming attempt to humanize her makes this movie into pap.
3. Hamhandedness. How many scenes must there be of men snickering behind Maggie's back? Her story is not well served by a commonplace attempt to make it into a narrative of feminist triumph. Lots of women hated Thatcher with a passion. There is no need to turn her into a feminist hero. The woman herself, her achievements and mistakes are enough. Feminism becomes a tired cliché; it defeats the purpose.
4. As my friend the Media Mogul bitterly complained, have a point of view! Hate her and her policies, admire her, have an opinion about her turbulent tenure. Screenwriter Abi Morgan has written cloying pap which is completely inappropriate for Thatcher, an unsparingly unsentimental woman.

A Better Life

2012-01-26T16:22:00.000-05:00

This movie may be the first film to truly broach the subject of immigration in the US as it currently stands, on a cruel impasse of hypocrisy, blatant scapegoating and political inaction.
Directed by Chris Weitz, and starring Demián Bichir, who got an Oscar nomination for his work, it summarizes the enormous and heartrending complexity of the immigration issue through the story of Carlos Galindo, an undocumented gardener in LA.
Galindo is the single father of a teenage son, Luis (well played by José Julián), who was born in the US and is already an entitled American brat; not connected to his roots or sympathetic to newcomers who stand on a street corner begging for a day job, just like his dad when he arrived.
Like many well-intentioned message films, A Better Life is not very original, and does not have a sense of humor. It does show what it must be like to live on the outside looking in, like a zero that no one notices unless they want their hedges trimmed. But for its short running time (hour and a half), it is slow going. Weitz's rhythm is leaden, the writing feels by the numbers, and despite the golden cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe, the cool homie soundtrack and the unobtrusive, elegant score by Alexandre Desplat, the movie seems a bit like an after-school special. The main problem is that Carlos Galindo is a saint, and saintly characters are not very interesting. Bichir works very hard to give Carlos a rounded character. He is a very decent man, but he seems to have no unruly passions, no edges. He lets the kid give him too much lip. He has no time for women. He is cautious, hardworking, and wants to be as much under the radar as possible. He lacks ambition because he is afraid that the migra will come and take away his life. I could imagine all those nasty people who are always screaming "send them back" rolling their eyes at the sight of this angel without wings.
But to judge from the very authentic locations in the film, Carlos lives outside of his own vibrant immigrant society by choice. It is clear that East and South Central LA are lively alternate Latino republics where a lot of people, legal and not, have perfectly rounded lives that include Mexican rodeos and nightclubs. This guy simply chooses not to partake in the fun. Most of the time, he is a bit of a bore.
The plot starts humming when Carlos is enticed by his boss to buy a truck from him so he can have his own business, but he demurs because as an illegal alien, he can't get a driver's licence. After much soul searching and much effort, he buys the truck. And of course he loses it.
I kept waiting for the moment that got Bichir's acting noticed. Bichir has two incredible moments, one when he reacts at the humiliation proffered by a punk in jail; and a speech to his son in which his feelings are so raw and ring so true, you want to smack him upside the head with an Oscar, cause he deserves it.
Only towards the end the movie accrues intensity as we get to see the inhumanity of the mass deportations, the untenable system that brazenly exploits and then penalizes these immigrants. I'm glad Bichir is getting all this attention (he's been utterly cool, dedicating his performance to all the undocumented immigrants), because everybody else in America is hell bent on sweeping this urgent problem under the carpet, or worse, providing idiotic solutions like building walls and deporting 400,000 people a year. The final scene is sure to give massive heart attacks to the Joe Arpaios of America. Send the illegals back, and they will sneak back in, until their services are not wanted anymore.
This doesn't make A Better Life a great movie, but it can serve as a great polemic in high schools and Washington think tanks. To be a better movie, it needs less sanctimony and a director with a bit more punch.

Oscars: The Good News And The Bad News

2012-01-24T12:40:00.001-05:00

Good news is, The Tree of Life made it to the Best Picture, and so did Terrence Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. Also The Artist, which is the best movie this year except for A Separation. I'm rooting for it.
The Descendants is a perfectly decent movie, but for some reason I liked it much more as I watched it than afterwards. Afterwards, it became a little meh. The Artist should win this year, but it's a toss up because these people vote with their ass most of the time. They are entirely capable of giving it to The Help.
Bad news is that a movie that most critics hated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, inexplicably made the list. There is nothing more unpalatable to me that having Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks in the same movie. I can watch them both separately no problem, but together it's overkill. Bridesmaids is the much better choice. The Help utterly sucks. But the Academy members are a bunch of sentimental old farts who want the movie business to be bathed in corn and good intentions. Midnight in Paris is the best stuff Woody Allen has done in years, but I don't think it merits a best movie nomination. Hugo is simply not good enough to be in this list, despite its good intentions.

Good news is, A Separation, from Iran, the year's best movie, also got an original screenplay nod. This is the movie that absolutely needs to win Best Foreign Film. And if it wins original screenplay too, for which it got a surprising and well deserved nomination, all the better. I'm very happy the academy did not nominate The Skin I Live In from Almodóvar (he's his own country now), because it sucks.
Bad news is that Footnote, an annoying, overproduced Israeli movie, made the nominations too. Lars Von Trier's Melancholia should be here. Alas, he is now persona non grata. Miss Bala from Mexico stood a chance. But this category never really represents the best of foreign cinema, except in the case of A Separation, which is truly a spectacular film.

Good news is Demián Bichir made to the best actor noms (token Hispanic, maybe?). I have not seen the movie but I hear he is great. He's always been a good actor. Terrible, unbelievable bad news is that Michael Fassbender, who gave the performance of the year in Shame, was not nominated. Somebody read these people the riot act. I would substitute him for Gary Oldman, who barely appears in his own film (sorry, Cathy!). I think this one is between Dujardin and Clooney. And if so, let it be Dujardin.

Good News is that Kenneth Branagh got his nod for playing Laurence Olivier in My Week With Marilyn. Good for Nick Nolte and Jonah Hill. Bad, incomprehensible news is that Viggo Mortensen did not get a nod for his believable, awesome Sigmund Freud in A Dangerous Method. Or Kevin Spacey in Margin Call. This category was rich with fine performances this year, and yet the Academy votes are most predictable. Where is Eddie Redmayne for My Week With Marilyn, Corey Stoller for his Hemingway in Midnight in Paris? Albert Brooks for Drive? Or Robert Forster for The Descendants? Boring.

Good news is they are all good. Good for Rooney Mara, good for Glenn Close, Aunt Meryl, etc. Bad news is that Elizabeth Olsen from Martha Marcy May Marlene should have been nominated, and Carey Mulligan as well for her work on Shame. Also, terrible, terrible slight not to nominate the outstanding Kristin Wiig of Bridesmaids. She deserves to be here. This one is between Meryl Streep and Viola Davis.

Good news is Melissa McCarthy is in for Bridesmaids, and the rest of the category is solid. Bad news is Vanessa Redgrave, who gives the supporting performance of the year in Coriolanus, is not here (unless she counts for next year). Sissy Spacek was dead on perfect on The Help. Where is she? I'm not hazarding a bet, but Octavia Spencer is a possibility.

Good news is this is a good and worthy group. As far as I'm concerned, the two worthiest contenders are Hazanavicius and Malick, and if either one wins, I'll be ecstatic, edging towards Hazanavicius. Bad news is I'm down on Woody Allen, whose movie is very uneven. Asghar Farhadi, director of A Separation should be here as well.

Good news is go, Emmanuel Lubezki, as far as I'm concerned, absolute front runner for his astounding work in The Tree of Life. Bad news is Manuel Alberto Claro who did the cinematography for Melancholia should be here. I also loved the work of Sean Bobbitt in Shame.

Adapted screenplay I have no good news to report. I have only seen The Descendants and TTSS, and that screenplay seemed to me to be quite problematic. I'm hoping Coriolanus qualifies for next year, because it is one of the best adaptations of Shakespeare to the screen. Why is Jane Eyre not here? That was a solid adaptation. Carnage the film was so much better than Carnage the play. But Polanski is poison.
On Original Screenplay there is plenty of good news: YAY! Annie Mumolo and Kristin Wiig! Bridesmaids got a very well deserved nod, and so, surprisingly for a foreign film, did A Separation. The Artist is brilliant. Bad news is I think Margin Call is a terrible screenplay and Midnight in Paris could be better. Sean Durkin's script for Martha Marcy May Marlene was better than either one of them.

The good news is there are only 2 nominated songs! I will be happy when there are zero. Of course rooting for Brett McKenzie and his lovely Muppet song, because the bad news is the Rio one sucks. As for the score, the good news is The Artist should win because it is the score of a movie without words and it is incredibly well done. The bad news is that I hated Alberto Iglesias' score for TTSS. Wrong choice of composer, the music sounded exactly like his last three Almodóvar movies. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross should be here for their effective work for David Fincher.
Let the griping about the Oscars begin!

My Last 2 Cents on the Golden Globes

2012-01-16T13:47:00.000-05:00

There are tables. There is booze. There is schmoozing. So why does the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which apparently is comprised in its entirety by four Transylvanian munchkins, insist on making the Golden Globes as pompous and boring as the Oscars, but with tables, booze, and schmoozing?
The only thing that shouldn't change is that there are no song and dance numbers.
Ricky Gervais, who was completely defanged last night, is not enough to be "edgy". I mean, Rupert H. Murdoch was there and there was complete silence from Gervais on the subject. Instead, he went for a Kardashian. What a loser.
You have to come up with a more streamlined ceremony, less inept and irrelevant presenters (Adam Levine, who the fuck cares?), more Gervais, and much, much more camera panning through the tables to see who is picking their nose, getting soused or is as bored as the audience at home (I saw several). Forget the treacly, overly solemn special awards. You are not anointing them for popehood, you are giving an actor a trophy. And for the life of you, hire better writers for the presenters, or better yet, let them improv! They should be able to do this in their sleep (not).
And if you are going to be raunchy, then don't do it on NBC. The bleeps were the length of a Cecil B. de Mille movie. Do it without bleeping, or do it elsewhere.

Live Kvetching the GG's: The Ordeal.

2012-01-15T22:54:00.000-05:00

Fantastic opening by Gervais, making fun of the GG's. And Eddie Murphy.
List of Rules: Do not mention Jodie Foster's Beaver.
Star of Coriolanus, Gerard Butler? What about my BF Voldemort?
Best Supporting actor for Film Drama:
Kenneth Branagh, Albert Brooks. Jonah Hill, Viggo (no last name required), Christopher Plummer. GO VIGGO!
Goes to Plummer, the safe and boring choice. He's good in that insufferable movie.
Sweet acceptance speech trying to honor everybody but himself.
Best Actress in a TV series Comedy or Musical:
Laura Dern, Zooey Deschanel, Tina Fey, Laura Linney, Amy Poehler.
WINS: Laura Dern! A most excellent choice. I hear her show is great.
The ridiculous Miss Golden Globe to Andie McDowell's completely uninteresting spawn gets hijacked by a malfunctioning teleprompter. That poor girl must be furious...
TV movie:
Cinema Verite, Downton Abbey, The Hour, Mildred Pierce, Too Big To Fail. The expected winner: D.A. I've only seen one episode and it looks just like Upstairs Downstairs to me, no? Still, anything with Maggie Smith in it, I'm there. And Elizabeth McGovern has always rocked.
Actress for this category: Romola Garai, Diane Lane, Elizabeth McGovern, Emily Watson, Kate Winslet, cradlerobber and expected winner, wins. Great actress and terrible speech giver. But she learned her lesson from last time and is now doing her homework.
Jeremy Irons, who Mr. Ex Enchilada claims is fast becoming Boris Karloff, is my first original British boyfriend and will be forever. Just listen to that voice.
Thank God Gervais is back. Because the presenters are bo-ring.
TV Actor Drama, Buscemi, Cranston, Grammer, Irons, Lewis:
Kelsey Grammer? WTF? Anybody in that category is a more exciting choice.
Best TV Series Drama -- I don't give a fuck really, cause I don't have cable. But it's probably Homeland. I knew it. I take it back about Danes' dress. Spectacular from the back.
Best Music Score Movie - The Artist (my fave), W.E, Dragon Tattoo, Hugo,
The Artist! Excellent score. "I'm sorry I'm French!"
Madonna won for song. And she's telling the whole megillah, she's always terrible. A person incapable of not seeming totally self-involved at all times.
Idris Elba for best actor on something on TV or other. Good.
Actress in a Comedy
Jodie Foster, Carnage; Charlize Theron, Young Adult, Kristen Wiig (getting big whoops) Michelle Williams. Kate Winslet, Carnage.
Michelle Williams, the expected choice. Wiig would have been awesome! Super nice speech.
Peter Dinklage wins for Game of Thrones. Way cool.
This is taking forever. I'm bored.
Animated film: Tintin, Arthur Christmas, Cars 2, Puss'n Boots, Rango. Tintin wins. Spielberg. Expected.
Nicole Kidman is wearing a long bathing suit.
Screenplay for a Movie (go Artist!) Woody Allen! Midnight in Paris. Oh well!
The Bill Macy's are so awesome.
Jessica Lange thanking the writers: yay!
Best moment of the night so far is the look of bored sufferance the older guy seating next to Madonna just gave her. Exactly.
Foreign film: A Separation! Good call. Best film of the year. It's from Iran. Go see it.
From now, I'm kvetching on twitter because I'm bored, already.

Live Kvetching the Golden Globes 2012: THE DRESSES

2012-01-15T20:00:00.001-05:00

7 pm: I don't have cable so watching red carpet on NBC. That's the way I roll.
First out of the gate, Clooney, looking yummy as always. He's not my favorite for best actor, but I like him, I like his politics, I like his movies as a director and you can sue me if you want.
Laura Linney, hate the blue dress. Looks like half an origami lesson.
Cool, NBC has no sound! More evidence we are officially living in a Third World country.
Fixed it. Ricky Gervais wearing a great tuxedo the color of dried blood, which he better spill tonight, given all the hype around him.
Viola Davis: lovely dress, lovely color. Not my favorite for the award (enough with the cryin' already). I want someone to give her a villainess role, for a change.
The Jolie-Pitts. Awesome dress by her. She got pretty cause she got a ridiculous nomination for her movie, which I haven't seen, but which sounds like a barrel of laughs, like collective punishment for our foreign policy sins. Brad looking like the preternatural surfer boy he always looks like. Hair a bit greasy, in my view.
Julianna Margulies looks like a giant grape Jolly Rancher candy, not necessarily a bad thing.
Charlize Theron looking like a cloud of cotton candy, with a big bad pink bow, so that nobody confuses her with the bitch on wheels she plays on Young Adult. She is really good, BTW.
Zooey Deschanel wearing a nice Prada dress and the hair of Connie Stevens circa 1970. Bad application of hair extensions.
Laura Dern looks fabulous in a green sequined dress. Love that lady. Fearless actress.
Michelle Williams, meh dress. Violet leopard spots, but at least she's not wearing those boring beiges she usually likes. She's good as Marilyn, but I insist Jessica Chastain would have been better casting.
Steve Buscemi! A man no one can hate. J'adore him forever. Still lives in Bklyn. Rock on!
I don't live blog about anyone but huge stars and reputable actors, but Nicole Ritchie just said: "My hair is by Suave Professionals" How tacky is that? ...And I wiped my ass with Charmin?
Elton John and his shaggy rug. Scary. But the boyfriend "furnishes" the cute.
Fabulous green and black sequin and feathers dress on Evan Rachel Wood, a young hammette.
Aw, Octavia Spencer, absolutely lovely. I'm rooting for her. Loved her in that awful movie.
I'm finding it hard to describe Salma Hayek's sequined dress. But it looks like something out of a Las Vegas gambling machine. Her boobs are really distracting.
Madonna's boobs are going to sue her for strangulation. Why is Esther wearing a huge cross? Not very kabbalistic.
Claire Danes has big features, nes't pas? No bra, hence tiny nipple blinking through her unfriendly Calvin Klein dress.
Why do comediennes have the worst taste in dresses? Amy Poehler is wearing what looks like a sequined t shirt. Everytime Tina Fey shows up at one of these things, I tremble.
Diane Lane and Josh Brolin. Lookin' good. He turned out to be a great actor, even with that dad.
Mila Kunis' face looks inordinately round for some reason. Starved as a ballerina she looked stunning.
Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart un peu de creepiness right there from him.
Di Craprio may win. He's good in a terrible film. Acted well despite the worst make up job ever. No arm candy tonite. Where's Tobey?
La Portman and Il Millepied. She nabbed him and I will never forgive her for that.
You may not know who Stephen Mangan is, but I saw him in The Norman Conquests on Broadway and he blew me away. Fantastic actor, currently second banana to Matt LeBlanc. Fame is strange.
Tina Fey, dress not too horrifying this time. Oops. They panned down. I take it back. Mermaid dresses are not my cup of tea. Worse if they have feathers on the bottom.
Emma Stone, she's so cute. The eye makeup threatens to run off and get back to Elvira, though.
OMG! An ad for SCIENTOLOGY! So far this is the most exciting part of the red carpet. Particularly since there is a scene with a prominently displayed Israeli flag. WTF? Creepy cult on prime time!
Glenn Close: Nice black velvet dress. Armani Prive. Totally elegant.
Reese Witherspoon should make better movies because she is good and adorable. Looking very pretty and grown up in a fabulous red dress.
Bryan Cranston looks like a wrinkled version of Ewan McGregor, which is not at all a bad thing.
Oooo Helen Mirren, she's having great work done to her face.
Sofia Vergara. She's hot, no? Despite the mermaid dress. I vote for retiring this tendency to the back of the closet.
Okay, this serious award ceremony is starting.
Tata.

Margaret

2012-01-14T20:18:00.002-05:00

There is a lot of great material in this movie about Lisa Cohen, an Upper West Side teenager (Anna Paquin) who is partly responsible for a horrific bus accident. Margaret is a tough coming of age story in which Lisa, an entitled, over-articulate brat, learns her life lessons the hard way. The screenplay, by writer-director and playwright Kenneth Lonergan, has the intensity of good play. This is not your typical Sunday flick at the multiplex. It's the stuff of great theater: the complexity of moral behavior, the distance between people who are supposed to be close, the discrepancy between morality and legality, the cathartic power of drama. Plus arguments about 9/11, Israel and the Palestinians, and Shakespeare thrown in for good measure.
It's a very ambitious film.
On paper, morality is easy. Everyone knows exactly what to do in case it is required; but in reality, it is too stiff and unyielding for the infinite messiness of life. Lisa's painful passage from her self-aggrandizing adolescence to adulthood, in which she learns that things are not black and white, that there are compromises and decisions to be made, and that no one escapes unsullied, is the best theme in the movie. What is truly moral may not necessarily mean the best outcome. What is truly moral is to seek and accept the truth, and so Lisa discovers that life, to put it mildly, is tough.
The question is, why is this film so unruly? A story about how messy life is does not necessarily have to be a mess. Margaret has an expansive plot with a rich cast of characters. A lot of pleasure is to be gained from the generous inclusion of all the scenes Lonergan can't bring himself to part with, particularly since one gets to watch great actors like Allison Janney, J. Smith-Cameron. Jeannie Berlin, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Jean Reno and Matt Damon. But his lack of restraint eventually bogs down the movie. I kept wishing a ruthless editor would pare it down to the bone.
The audience is willing to suspend disbelief in Mark Ruffalo as a New York City bus driver who wears a cowboy hat on the job, which happens to be the kind of hat that Lisa is searching for, simply because the accident this provokes presents such a terrible moral dilemma. Who is to blame? And what is gained or lost by being truthful? To complicate matters, Lisa is a bit of a monster. She is snide and histrionic, a blatant manipulator, sexy and confused, needy and aloof, talks horribly to her mother (the great J. Smith-Cameron) is too intelligent for her own good; totally clueless, yet dead certain about her own righteousness. In short, a teenager.
Paquin does a heroic job juggling all that crazy, but she ends up giving you a headache, which could have been avoided with less scenes of her in hysterical teenage mode. She has the audience's automatic sympathy from the start (she's like a female Hamlet). So it is dispiriting when, over two hours later, she has thoroughly worn out her welcome. I have a feeling that Paquin, who is not a teenager, was trying too hard to pass for one. She has their number down to the last grating mannerism, but she fails to achieve a subtle balance between Lisa's abrasiveness and her grace. The directing and editing don't help her.
I suspect Lonergan wanted the movie to feel as big and expansive as life, but as Margaret meandered from scene to scene, I kept thinking that it would make a better play, because the limitations of the stage would force him to pare down the scenes. As good as they are, many of the too talky for a movie, stagy scenes slow down the momentum that leads to Margaret's ultimately moving catharsis.
It is worth comparing Margaret to the extraordinary Iranian film A Separation, which also deals, in a much more disciplined and polished style, with how a single human decision can tear into the fates of many people. A Separation is a masterpiece; Margaret is a diamond in the rough.

On DVD: The Future

2012-01-14T16:28:00.001-05:00

I remember reading sundry reviews about this second movie by professional hipster Miranda July, all of them emphatically caveating how you had to endure a lot of twee, mumbling, pointless hipster anomie to finally come to some arty epiphany about the nature of time. Well, Marcel Proust this isn't. I tried, readers, to sit through this thing with an open mind, in the hopes that the epiphany would change my mind about Miranda July, only to stare in disbelief at the interminable sight of two fully competent adults (July and Hamish Linklater) deliberately behaving like childish retards.
The plot: These two live together, each fixated by his laptop. Their cat is very sick so they decide that when it dies, they will go their separate ways because the relationship is not working any more. They quit their jobs and pursue the most deliberately annoying version of carpe diem ever known to man. He volunteers for some kind of environmental organization where he accosts people by wearing a vest and holding a clipboard, and she has an affair with some guy who is, OMG, a normal. This they do by figuring out over the phone if they are actually staring at the same cloud. Of course, they have never spoken to one another before.
This is as much as I could take. If this is what it takes to receive an epiphany, I'd rather live in eternal darkness.
This new kind of pretentiousness, sprung from the precious heart of American hipsterism, makes me pine for the kind that at least has the guts to be pretentious, like Godard's or Jodorowsky's. Because at least those guys are having FUN. They have a blast throwing their intellectual superiority around. They know they know better. But this entitled, milquetoasty, whispery dreck will not even own up to it, hiding instead behind talking cats, cute haircuts that could only possibly belong on Shirley Temple, and people who are so arty, they are incapable of articulating one sentence without breaking into spastic dance moves or staring wide eyed at their own quirks. They are so very hip that each word of of their mouths feels like it's going through an occluded birth canal. In this world, articulation and wit, charm and intelligence, and most importantly BALLS, or ovaries, if you insist on being politically correct, are out of fashion.
But Miranda July is not alone. This is some sort of aesthetic movement, and it raises some nagging questions: Is the idea behind the hipster/mumblecore aesthetic to present a precious, sensitive America to the world? An America so pure and misunderstood it breeds wallflowers and nerds instead of G.I. Joes? Do these people think that those who resent America and its power will be swayed by this ridiculous pretense of righteous innocence?

And My Nominees For Best Acting Are:

2012-01-09T12:18:00.000-05:00

Best Actor

Michael Fassbender -- Shame
Viggo Mortensen - A Dangerous Method
John C. Reilly - Carnage/Cedar Rapids
Yvan Attal -- Rapt
Eddie Redmayne -- My Week with Marilyn
Jean Dujardin -- The Artist
Ryan Gosling -- The Ides of March

Best Supporting Actor

Kevin Spacey -- Margin Call
Corey Stoller -- Midnight in Paris
Robert Forster - The Descendants
Kenneth Branagh -- My Week With Marilyn
Albert Brooks -- Drive
Brian Cox - Coriolanus

Best Actress

Carey Mulligan -- Shame
Elizabeth Olsen -- Martha Marcy May Marlene
Kirsten Wiig -- Bridesmaids
Meryl Streep -- The Iron Lady
Michelle Williams -- My Week With Marilyn

Best Supporting Actress

Vanessa Redgrave - Coriolanus
Penelope Ann Miller -- The Artist
Sissy Spacek -- The Help
Octavia Spencer -- The Help
Jessica Chastain -- The Help
Sarah Paulson -- Martha Marcy May Marlene

The Devil Inside

2012-01-08T22:05:00.001-05:00

Or The Curse of The Blair Witch Project. Ever since the surprising success of that seminal film, everybody wants to make a cheap horror movie that makes a lot of money. It's a good strategy: you shoot a horror story on a shaky video camera and pretend it's for real. This saves the producers tons of money, but it also helps with the scares and the word of mouth. Paranormal Activity followed a similar model. Things go bump in the night: let's turn on a video camera in the dark and see what happens. It worked. Scared the hell out of millions -- made gazillions at the box office. The Devil Inside attempts to follow the same logic, but it has one fatal flaw: it is perhaps the most egregious example of waste of a really good premise because of utterly terrible writing.
The writers have a good hook: What if during the course of an exorcism the demon transfers to someone else? Awesome idea. Scary as hell. What they have no concept of is drama, structure, or storytelling. What they wrote conspires to undermine the premise from the first second onscreen. Their biggest mistake is to frame the story as an already finished documentary on a case of demonic possession. This bleeds the story from any suspense. Things have already been decided by the main character, Isabella Rossi, (Fernanda Andrade, a pretty zero), before the movie begins.
First scene, we hear a 911 call from a woman announcing a triple murder, with subtitles in case we miss it. Then we hear her say she did it. Then they cut to the police investigation and the videotaping of the crime scene, where they show and tell us what already happened. No one seems to have any reaction to the grisly murders or the religious paraphernalia in the house. Then we see Isabella, who again tells the story of how her mother committed these murders in the course of her own exorcism. Then she says the same thing again to some doctor. It's numbingly boring. Isabella seems to be borderline autistic; she barely registers any cogent thoughts or feelings about her mother. I blame the writers, whose script sounds like it was written on a napkin by cocky but lazy junior high students.
It gets worse. The mother was sent (it is never explained how, or by who) to a mental hospital in Rome. This also happens outside the movie. So Isabella hires a young videographer who seems to suffer from Parkinson's and she DRIVES around in Rome (I thought this was preposterous: an American driving in Rome without the slightest sign of panic). She signs up for an EXORCISM school, that seems to accept, according to Isabella's helpful voiceover, people from all walks of life.
At school, she meets two rogue priests who perform exorcisms without the Church's permission. The two young priests, who have the bearing and the moral authority of two Williamsburg slackers (Max Von Sydow, they're not), actually ask her to come witness an exorcism so she can see if her mom is crazy or possessed. Nobody ever stops her from doing anything. The movie is full of missed opportunities, holes the size of craters, schematic characters with either no conflict or stupid conflicts, and plot threads that are brought up to be forgotten, like for instance, the poor bedeviled mother.
Now, the saddest thing about this movie (besides the fact that it made $34.5 million this weekend) is that buried among the stretches of dead time and inane arguments, there are two or three very good moments. Writer-director William Brent Bell has a wonderful conception of how victims of possession look like, and how they suffer. No green goo and cheesy effects. The possessed are clearly people in torment, and their bodily torture is very realistic and scary. Suzan Crowley, the woman who plays Isabella's mother, is absolutely fantastic in her very thankless role. She is scary, creepy (with the aid of very well done voices), but she manages to be human and convincing and not ridiculously over the top (like say, Keira Knightley in A Dangerous Method). The scene where Isabella sees her mother for the first time in 20 years, as badly written as it is, made the audience stop fidgeting, texting, and talking amongst themselves, and I believe it is entirely because of this actress' incredible performance. A scene where a young woman gets exorcised is a long stretch of agony, but very well done, with the aid of an actress who must be a contortionist. (It's always women who get possessed by demons. Why?) The priests may look like video store clerks but the lack of pomposity and artifice in the exorcisms is effective and refreshing.
The use of video camera effects was a little tiresome, but the use of special effects was judicious and very well applied. The scariest jump in the film is simply a guy who is sitting on a chair and then he's not. Great creepy details, like the eye of Isabella's mother looking at us through the monitor, when she is clearly looking at the ceiling. There is an audacious scene at a baby's baptism that is truly shocking. These things made the audience look back from whatever it was they were doing on the long stretches of pointless stuff not happening.
Credit must also be given to cinematographer Gonzalo Amat (full disclosure: he is a dear friend), who while, too generous by far with the camera's shakiness, he also creates some creepy, interesting images with very cool framing, and milks the lo-fi quality of video to the utmost benefit of the scary scenes.
I would love producers to declare a moratorium on the cheap video look, but to judge from opening weekend box office, we are surely cursed with more of the same for eternity. I hope that when they do the inevitable sequel, they write a better script and apologize to paying audiences for probably one of the worst endings ever to appear on a movie screen.
The Saturday night New York audience I saw the movie with, actually loudly booed the ending. And these were not fans of Ingmar Bergman. People were truly pissed off. I heard a girl say "these writers suck". Perhaps the filmmakers and producers are laughing all the way to the bank, but I would not be surprised if bad word of mouth lowers the numbers next week. On top of shoddy, padded writing, and the lack of a conclusion, an end title urges us to find out "the truth" at some website.
This is getting old.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

2011-12-28T11:00:00.000-05:00

This was my most anticipated film of the movie season. Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Simon McBurney, Mark Strong, Tom Hardy, Ciaran Hinds (I do not much care for the Cumberbatch, sorry): British thespian wet dream central! Plus, it is directed by Tomas Alfredson, who gave us the extraordinary vampire movie Let The Right One In.
I confess: I have never been able to finish John Le Carré's novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (tried twice), I have never read any of his other books and I never saw the adaptations with Alec Guinness. But I can tell you this: I was a little bored. I did not mind the grainy, brackish hues of the cinematography and I loved the cumbersome apparatuses that spies relied on in those days; rotary phones, big ass typewriters in code and enormous recording devices. No cellphones, no email, no internet, no satellites. Spying was a more intimate, dangerous affair. I appreciate Le Carré's doggedly realistic contribution to the genre. James Bond, this ain't. Spying is hard, sometimes bureaucratic, painstaking work; it's not all martinis, bananaphones (as in Maxwell Smart) and chicks, he will have you know. There is something quaint about this nostalgia for the Cold War and the games that the Eastern bloc played with the West. They all seem futile in hindsight, but what do I know.
All that fake seventies hair distracted me. Why is Tom Hardy wearing such a terrible blond wig? Is it because he is a spy on the lam? But something else did not work. As great as Gary Oldman is, his performance is so understated as to feel absent. He seems like a hollow at the center of the movie. Not that he should be Sean Connery, but you don't get from him the piercing intelligence you get just by looking at a photo of Alec Guinness as Smiley.
All that Karla business (Karla is the Russian spymaster), and trying to find who is the Soviet mole among this group of British spies sounds very exciting on paper. But the movie is not as bracing as it could be because most of it is told in flashbacks, which somehow dulls the sense of urgency, and can be a bit confusing. There is a key scene where Smiley recounts his one tete a tete with Karla. It feels central to the film, but all that telling instead of showing makes the film tedious. The movie does get much more exciting towards the end, after all that back and forth, as Smiley gets closer to nailing the mole, even if it is not exactly clear how he got there. This story intimates that something personal is at the root of spying. In the end, it is men or women who burrow into other people's lives, and files. At the center of the mole business is the hint of a homosexual relationship between Colin Firth and Mark Strong (bring it!), and there is an aura of dulled pain suffusing the whole thing. Smiley broods because his wife has left him; Firth and Strong are the love that dare not speak its name, Hardy is desperate to save a woman he loves. Alas, there too much of a fog around them to make them connect with the audience.
I hope Firth doesn't get typecast as the silent suffering gay, since he makes it work as wonderfully here, and with a lot more panache, as he did in A Single Man. He is a splendid actor. John Hurt is the liveliest of the bunch as Control, the head British spy. He is a lot of fun to watch. The rest of the cast is very solid, but none of the characters get enough screen time to make an impression, except for Strong, and Tom Hardy, who appears briefly but nails his part as a spy who has been left in the cold.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

2011-12-26T13:47:00.000-05:00

No director could be more perfect than David Fincher to helm this second film adaptation of the book by Stieg Larsson. I have never read the books, because as is the case with most movies, and most fast food chains, I don't do franchises. But I did see the original Swedish movie. Fincher's version is superior, and not just because it is way more expensive; his temperament makes the material more tolerable, at least for me. I happen to think the source material is awful. I understand that the book is a pageturner, but I find the story truculent, morbid, exploitative, mostly humorless and rather pointless. The idea that beneath such a perfectly well-behaved liberal society like Sweden there lie horrid problems (racism, Nazism, sexism -- every evil politically incorrect ism under the sun) is interesting, but I could not discern in either of the movies the contrast between the nice Scandinavian veneer and the dark depths of depravity. The story just piles on the depravity, leaving no room for irony: stacking it up just lessens the impact and evil becomes banal, vulgar and boring. I imagine that for Swedes the idea of a depraved welfare official is subversive, but the biggest problem I have with this story is precisely this segment. This man rapes and tortures his ward, Lisbeth Salander. In both films the rape and her subsequent revenge are depicted gruesomely, for titillation. I love revenge as much as anyone, but I don't appreciate when a rape is shown with supposed moral disgust, yet in a titillating manner. I don't buy the self-righteousness. I think Larsson is just getting off on the violence. He thinks women are going to find Salander's revenge satisfying. I find everything repulsive.
But now the good news: At least Fincher is such an elegant craftsman, he counters the vulgarity with style. The opening credit sequence (by Blur Studios) is, as always in his films, absolutely stunning. Turns out that Fincher is becoming a great director of actors. The cast is perfect and superb. Everyone is understated, no one is histrionic, not even Christopher Plummer, who's always chewing the scenery (this time he nibbles it politely). It's as if the Arctic cold outside managed to frost everyone's hearts a little bit. Daniel Craig is very good as journalist Mikael Blomkvist. He plays the ingenue and he does it charmingly, gracefully and without a trace of self-consciousness. Rooney Mara is excellent too as Lisbeth Salander. I adored the conceptualization of her character; that is, her look: hair, make up, wardrobe are absolutely brilliant. In the first movie, Noomi Rapace looked like an amped-up version of Joan Jett. Just vulgar. But Fincher and Mara go for a much more waifish, elfin look. She is ghostly translucent and looks like a goth spirit from the netherworld. This works better than a butch woman with distracting biceps and spiky hair. Plus, it's amazing what a pair of bleached eyebrows can do when paired with jet black bangs. This Lisbeth Salander doesn't look good; she looks damaged. Mara's performance is almost silent, all in her gaze and her body language, intense without a hint of hamminess. Inside her tiny, aggressively appointed frame, she harbors vast reserves of suppressed rage. She is totally compelling, and also very brave, with all that aggressive nudity. Another cheer for Fincher: he's probably the only American director to go for it. Yay. I find Hollywood's puritanical avoidance of sex while they are gluttonous for grisly violence very offensive. With Fincher, we get the best of both worlds: his customary grisly tableaux of violence, and nudity. My only wish is that we could see as much of Daniel Craig as we see of Mara. There is always a next time.
The two big villains, Salander's evil guardian (Yorick Van Wageningen, impressive), and Stellan Skarsgard are excellent, relaxed fakers. No mustache twirling here. I was delighted to see the great Steven Berkoff as Christopher Plummer's attorney. Donald Sumpter is great as detective Morell, Joely Richardson is wonderful, everyone is measured and intense and good in this movie.
If only it didn't last almost three hours and was utterly pointless. It is long and meandering (like Zodiac, and Se7en), but one is utterly transfixed by how good it all looks (great work by longtime Fincher cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, less yellow than usual), how like clockwork it all works, by that polished Fincher style that is almost hypnotic in its cool, sharp, detached elegance, in its obsession with investigative detail. The screenplay by Steven Zaillian does the job, although I wonder if there is any way to cut to the chase sooner in this smorgasbord of grotesquerie.
Fincher likes to take his time with procedurals. His pacing is not slow; the plot is long. Still, Fincher stages a short set piece in the subway, where someone tries to steal Salander's bag, (after endless exposition and looking at computer screens) that is totally bracing, beautifully executed, fast, sharp, breathtaking. Also, as he proved with The Social Network, he may be the only guy in the world who can make staring at computers sexy for the audience. The way the images and information appear on the computer screens is beautifully and dynamically presented. This is quite an achievement.
Fincher can also build good moments of tension, two to be precise, and I wished there were more, considering his leisurely stroll in finding the culprit of a crime that happened 40 years ago, that I couldn't care less about. I was entertained by his style, by the fine actors, by everything but the plot.
I used to dislike Fincher's movies because I found them glossy, but hard-hearted and empty. Interestingly, the one movie where he tried his hand at love and feelings, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is his worst failure. He should stick to human nastiness. Ever since The Social Network, I'm warming up to him. He has great control, great craftsmanship, and watching his movies is as richly satisfying an experience as buying some very expensive couture item, or going for a spin in a very expensive, shiny, new sports car (none of which I've ever done). The surfaces are enthralling.

Young Adult

2011-12-24T09:29:00.001-05:00

Written by Diablo Cody, and directed by Jason Reitman, the team behind Juno, Young Adult gets brownie points for trying to be a very dark comedy, a willful antithesis to all those fluffy, borderline offensive Katherine Heigl or Kate Hudson movies about women desperate to get married that always end with the woman getting the guy. But Young Adult does not have the frenzied joie de vivre of Bridesmaids, which is also an antidote to that. This is a strangely toned film, mostly held together by the compelling performance of Charlize Theron as Mavis, an alcoholic ghostwriter of young adult novels, who lives in the big city (Minneapolis) and is obsessed with recovering Buddy, her now happily married old flame (Patrick Wilson), who is still stuck in her old town, with a new baby. On paper, everything is there for a great, sarcastic comedy about selfishness and romantic immaturity, and I give credit to all involved for pushing the material to the most uncomfortable lengths; but something doesn't quite jell. For one, the laughter dies in your throat. I guess you need a subtler hand to make it more mischievous while keeping the darkness alive (Billy Wilder's The Apartment, Fargo, or the early films of Alexander Payne come to mind). Sadly, Reitman and Cody are heavy-handed satirists, while the genre requires a light and killer touch. Reitman needs more finesse as a director to make the horrible ironies of the story resonate. And the conventionality of Cody's by-the-number plot turns completely undermines the bracing contrariness of her script.
There is a lot of richness in the idea that a woman who writes for young adults is a young adult herself, and of the worst kind. Mavis is bitter, self-pitying, both needy and cold, a bitch on wheels, arrogant and pretty brazenly horrid. Cody employs the voiceover narration of the teen novel Mavis is ghostwriting to provide an ironic echo to what is happening in her life. This is a very clever device to make Mavis tolerable, since it shows a window to her sad fantasies of love and happiness; yet little sticks in the mind, and none of it deepens the pleasure of watching this movie. In fact, watching this movie is not a pleasurable experience. There are a few genuine laughs, mostly because Theron tears through Mavis with great gusto and insight. But Cody overly punishes Mavis for being the Alpha Bitch. You can totally imagine Mavis being a gorgeous, nasty piece of work in high school. Well, now she is 37, still gorgeous (you'd need pounds of prosthetics to make Theron look bad), and her comeuppance is here. In the end, like many other American movies, Young Adult becomes a pat moral tale. Mavis is going to learn her big lesson and both she and the audience are going to be punished for being such selfish Americans. Boo hoo.
I have no problem with an anti-heroine that makes you cringe, but I do have problems with arbitrary, artificial plot points. And there are several important ones. Mavis arrives in town and gets recognized by Matt, the local cripple (Patton Oswalt, miscast and misdirected, in my view), and they almost instantly develop a buddy relationship. I never understood why Matt was so invested in preventing Mavis from reclaiming Buddy. What's it to him? A simple inkling of motive would have made his goodness understandable. Then there is the problem with small town goodness. Except for Mavis, everybody is an angel. Buddy is a sweet and decent guy, his wife is adorable, and Matt bears little traces of hatred or resentment towards the jocks who left him a cripple, thinking he was gay. So I found Matt and Mavis' relationship unconvincing, and Oswalt too much of a teddy bear to be interesting. If someone with a bit more bite, like Zach Galifianakis, were to play this role, Matt and Mavis could have been a killer duo, and much more fun. But, instead of wallowing joyfully in the destruction someone like Mavis can unleash, Cody goes for the confessional, for punishment and atonement: yawn. The piece de resistance, a scene where Mavis exposes herself for all the town to see is ludicrous and forced. The audience can go with everything that happens until then and right after that, but Mavis' self-inflicted debasement to the entire town is a groaner. She regresses to being the petulant high school bitch of yore, but it is not believable that she, of all people, would unravel like that, even after the requisite several shots of whiskey. Why hit the audience over the head with a frying pan when you could use a light, more devastating, touch? Beats me.
There are some further moments of discomfort with Matt and a wonderful exchange with Matt's smitten sister (she's smitten with Mavis), right after the punishment scene, as well as some well observed moments about what it is to be a writer: Mavis stealing overheard conversations; one minute her face and page are blank with dread, and the next they teem with life and words. Theron is particularly good at conveying her writer's thoughts, and she is the best reason to see this movie. She makes Mavis human. Too bad that Cody and Reitman shoehorned her subversive story into a most conventional plot.

Best And Worst Movies of 2011

2011-12-22T15:39:00.000-05:00

(And everything in between). All and all, this was a pretty great year for movies. Some critics justly included gems like Aurora, Poetry, and Tuesday After Christmas in their lists. You can find these movies in my list of 2010, because I saw them at the NYFF. This list is subject to change, as I'm still to see some movies.
But if I absolutely must furnish a:

10 Best List

A Separation
The Artist
Melancholia
Bridesmaids
The Trip
The Tree Of Life
Shame
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Into The Abyss
Corpo Celeste

Great

Coriolanus
Carnage
Cedar Rapids
Rapt
Presunto Culpable
El Velador
Tabloid
This is Not A Film

Good

The Descendants
Jane Eyre
La Princesse de Montpensier
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
The Muppets
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
The Ides of March

Flawed

Contagion
Margin Call
Le Havre
My Week With Marilyn
Midnight in Paris
A Dangerous Method
Miss Bala
Young Adult
Crazy, Stupid, Love
Margaret

Disappointments

We Need To Talk About Kevin
The Debt
Take Shelter
George Harrison: Living in a Material World
Once Upon A Time in Anatolia
Incendies
Insidious
Hugo

Bad

The Iron Lady
Drive

Horrid

J. Edgar
The Help
The Skin I Live In
Beginners
Miral
Leap Year

Carnage

2011-12-18T10:28:00.000-05:00

Roman Polanski has taken a clever but unimpressive play and made it better.
When I saw Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage on Broadway, I was entertained but underwhelmed. It's a neat but rather facile concept -- the veneer of civilization promptly chips away as two sets of parents discuss a fight between their children. The movie, with a screenplay by Reza and Polanski, uses basically the same material but instead of trying too hard for a meaningful message about the human condition, Polanski turns it into a zippy, exciting, mischievous farce. What seemed vulgar and heavy handed on stage, is elegant here.
In theory, adapting this play into a film sounds like a futile enterprise. Why would you want to spend an entire movie watching four people bicker in one living room? Yet in the hands of this master director, you forget you are in one room most of the time. The movie is precisely, elegantly crafted, the camera is perfectly expressive and the nimble, assured pace is bracing. This little chamber piece is a tour de force and master class in directing, with no self-conscious fireworks. (How I wish Polanski had directed We Need To Talk About Kevin). He can teach a thing or two to directors who let style run rampant. With Polanski, style is content; expressive and unobtrusive at the same time.
Polanski's gifts are not only his assured command of the medium; the mise en scene is fantastic and he is a great director of actors. In this version, the characters are more sharply defined. The material benefits from the camera's closeness to the actors' faces. The actors know this and go to town, doing their job with skill and excellence.
The cast is uniformly splendid, topped by John C. Reilly who is absolutely hilarious and pitch perfect as Michael Longstreet, a guy who behind his sweetness hides a good amount of contempt for his high-strung, politically correct wife Penelope, (Jodie Foster); Christoph Waltz as Alan Cowan, a dry, Blackberry wielding corporate lawyer, and Kate Winslet as his composed wife, Nancy. All four work beautifully as an ensemble. I was amazed by the lovely, unflagging flow of their collective energy. Of the four actors, Foster lacks the subtlety of her colleagues, and she seems a little over the top. Yet she is very compelling. She approaches Penelope with a tight, controlling fury and she is believably, valiantly self-righteous. Winslet can make tulips wither with one look, and her transformation from prim and proper corporate wife to drunken mess is flawless. Waltz is drily reptilian as a lawyer from hell, but he is likable because he is blunt. None of the actors condescend to their characters, which is why they are all so winning. It is also worth noting that for such a small film, Polanski recruited the best of the best: the great production designer Dean Tavoularis and costume designer Milena Canonero, the excellent cinematographer Pavel Edelman, and Alexandre Desplat's music is as elegant as the rest of the film. A tasteful Brooklyn apartment has been created on a set in Paris and the narrow views of Brooklyn from the apartment and shots of Brooklyn Bridge park are done with subtle digital effects, since Polanski cannot set foot in the US.
The only thing that falls a bit flat is the ending, which seems abrupt and inconclusive, but Polanski seems much more in command here than last time around with The Ghost Writer. Carnage is a lot of fun.

We Need To Talk About Kevin

2011-12-15T01:06:00.000-05:00

Mothers are supposed to be endless repositories of unconditional love and patience, but what if they have a hellish child? The premise of a failed relationship between a mother and her newborn baby is very interesting and never before seen, that I know of, in film. Can you think of any other movie about a resentful mother with a very bad kid? What can a mother do when confronted with having to love a succubus who hates her back? According to writer-director Lynne Ramsay, nothing, which is the main reason why this movie is a mess.
Be it far from me to cast aspersions on the great Tilda Swinton, who is as good as she can be in such a wrongheaded movie. It is not her fault that she is miscast as Eva, the mom of the Kevin in question. Swinton has such intelligent charisma and such a powerful personality that it is hard to believe she would be such a passive masochist, particularly in the hands of a rotten toddler. She's not easy to believe as a suburban American mom either. In this film she is an incomprehensible doormat, and doormats, even when played by La Swinton, are a lost cause to the audience.
With a more linear structure, this could have been a disturbing horror movie about a demonic child. Had it been a cheesy horror movie, or something in the vein of Stephen King, it would have been more interesting. Artsy-fartsy as it is, it just doesn't make much sense. In the first part, we see Eva living like a ghost, having flashbacks of a better life and of horrifying events caused by Kevin (Ezra Miller). Ramsay jerks the audience around for a good while until she finally decides to clarify what happened. Even though the movie exerts a visceral pull, especially in its second half, Ramsay's treatment of the topic is so pretentious and elliptical, that little works.
The story takes place somewhere in upstate New York, in what looks like a European's cliched idea of the American suburbs, complete with a supermarket scene with fake cans of tomato soup. In the aftermath of some truly hellish misbehavior by teenage Kevin, Eva, ostracized by the community, finds work at a crummy little travel agency too pathetic to feasibly exist. Although we see that in her former life she enjoyed a big house and fancy clothes, we never understand exactly what it is that her husband Franklin (John C. Reilly) and her do to lead such an economically robust life, especially since they seem to be eternal hippies.
Missing in this movie about a mother is what is most important to parenting, which is common sense. Scene after scene of a satanic toddler, who then becomes a little boy, who then becomes Ezra Miller, being utterly evil, and there is not one timeout, not one screaming match, not one comeback from a frustrated parent. It never occurs to anyone to send this seriously deviant kid to a child psychologist. The sole time Eva loses it, the boy ends with a broken arm, but even then it looks like he deliberately hurt himself to torture her. Franklin is too naive and unbelieving about Eva's complaints about the kid. The kid, of course, is cherubic when dad is around, yet even when he witnesses some horrendous lip on him, Franklin just shrugs it off as boys will be boys. The casting of Reilly, who is excellent at playing easy-going men-boys, is rather hamhanded. On the other hand, you cannot cast Ezra Miller and be deliberately oblivious to his astonishing otherworldly beauty, which could either be a source of his always getting away with murder, or is not believable at all (aren't all those crazy kids with murderous fantasies usually gangly nerds?) The movie ignores this as it does most of reality. Hence we wait for two hours for Eva to put the kid in his place, but she never fights back. She doesn't even fight back when as a teen, Kevin really harms his sister. This was the last straw for me.
Ramsay doesn't want to spoil her arty movie with the coarse banalities of daily parental drama, so the way characters react in this movie has absolutely nothing to do with reality. There is no outside world to speak of. No teachers, no PTA meetings, no counseling experts. Eva is alone in her belief that this child is out to get her. Again, if this movie was in the hands of someone with creepiness in their mind, this could be bone-chilling. Is Eva imagining the child's malevolence? But Ramsay is more interested in showing the aftermath of destruction in Eva's psyche. She is his mother, but it's hard to understand why she sticks by him. She doesn't even like him. Ramsay punctuates Eva's depression with a very annoying country and pop music soundtrack that further removes the story from real life. Style gets in the way. Still, as flawed as it is, this film manages to create significant disquiet. In a culture that always finds justifications for the worst human behaviors, usually along the lines of an abusive childhood in the past, this movie turns this explanation on its head. It's the kid who abuses the loving parents, without apparent reason. Kevin is just evil to the core. What would you do with a kid like him?

Coriolanus

2011-12-07T10:33:00.001-05:00

The first scenes are a bit of a shock as we watch a CNN-like news update about war between Rome and the Volscian nation. I thought for a second that this Ralph Fiennes directed movie (his first as a director) was going to be one of those unfortunate Shakespeare updates that try too hard to win over a modern audience. But as the movie conjures up this barbaric world of war, shot in ugly parts of Romania, it becomes clear that Fiennes and his wonderful adapter John Logan conceived this strange Shakespeare tragedy as a very powerful antiwar movie. What makes men go to war? What are the consequences of the notions of honor and heroism? Who is fit to rule a country? Isn't war primitive? It is not a civilizing force.
Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, whom Fiennes met when he worked in The Hurt Locker, uses a frantic hand held camera to capture the messiness of war. The fight scenes are chaotic, the colors are murky and washed out, and the entire aesthetic is brutal. This is not glorified combat. There is none of the stiff, symmetrical pageantry one sees in other films of Shakespeare. Coriolanus is not one of Shakespeare's most compelling plays, but Fiennes' update is visceral, thrilling and extremely poignant; it happens to be one of the best adaptations of Shakespeare to the screen. Screenwriter John Logan uses modern newscasts to dispense with all the boring messengers that declaim expository info, and this smart device helps make Coriolanus' tragic flaws even more dramatic. Fiennes plays the title character, Marcus Caius, a renowned soldier whose brutal exploits make him a natural leader of Rome. Problem is, he refuses to pander to the populace, who perceive him as authoritarian, arrogant and aloof (he is). It is a one-note performance of sheer imperious stubbornness. He is a principled but inflexible man, so unwilling to give in to the ass-kissing that is necessary in a democracy, that he rather banish himself away from his family and his country, than court the people's favor. He is borderline insane. I felt that the character could have used a soft spot somewhere, but I'm always impressed with Fiennes' disinterest in being likeable or pandering to the audience. He was surprisingly charming in the Q&A at the screening I saw, but he always plays his characters with utter disregard to his own vanity.
Coriolanus is more than an antiwar pamphlet. There are some interesting notions about authority and democracy in this movie. The "people" come across as rather unsavory and obnoxious activists, who are nevertheless easily swayed by media and political manipulation by two wily tribunes (James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson) who conspire to manipulate the masses against Coriolanus, with the curious consequence that you end up rooting for the autocrat. One must remember that in Shakespeare's day Roman democracy must have seemed bizarre, but him being the most modern writer who ever lived, he somehow foresees this tension on who is to have power and how easily it is to manipulate the masses.
There is one absolutely extraordinary performance in this movie, and that is Vanessa Redgrave's as Volumnia, Coriolanus' mother. It's a great character: a mother who wants her son to go to battle. She steals this movie in a way that I haven't seen an actor do in a long time. Her scenes with Fiennes are the best Shakespearean and the best screen acting you will ever see. She brought tears to my eyes a couple of times with her fierce conviction. Brian Cox, playing a trusty family advisor, a garrulous but clever politician, is also excellent.
Logan and Fiennes interpret this play fittingly to our day and age. One cannot help but think about Bushie and his Mission Accomplished, about the lies we were told about nucular weapons in Iraq, and though the film comes with a bit of delay, (since the media is not showing us anything anymore that might outrage us) as long as there are soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq, it will be a potent reminder of why we are still waging these destructive wars to this day.

My Week With Marilyn

2011-11-24T14:49:00.001-05:00

I have a fear of biopics because they tend to be stiff and cheesy and too reverent towards their subjects. The opening scenes of My Week With Marilyn promise a classic Harvey Weinstein, Oscar-hungry project, all very prim and proper but not very interesting, but if you stick around, it gets more poignant as it goes along.
You have to have ovaries of titanium to step into the shoes of such an icon, and Michelle Williams acquits herself quite well. At first one must get past the physical differences (Jessica Chastain, who does a Monroeish turn in The Help, would have also been excellent casting). Williams can look very pretty, and she has that mix of wispiness and will that make her a good choice for the role; but even with some extra padding in the rump, she does not cut the gorgeous, voluptuous figure that Marilyn cut in her day. Her face is not as perfect, but what she lacks in the flesh, she makes up in spirit. As the movie progresses, we get a glimpse into this rare, unhappy creature. The voice is breathy, almost labored, and the charm and the pain are there, as well as some sullen unreachable quality by which she denies the world her luminous presence. Marilyn is fickle, flirty, manipulative, charming, either innocent or playing innocent -- sometimes all in the space of five seconds. She must have been quite smart, to play dumb so well.
The story is sweet and sad. It is based on a memoir by Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), a young man who leaves his family's august manor to "join the circus" of the movies. He gets a job as a gofer at Laurence Olivier's production company. Olivier (Kenneth Branagh, his heir apparent, chomping at the bit) decides to cast Monroe as his love interest in a comedy. In reality, The Prince and The Showgirl was the first movie by Monroe's production company. She is the biggest star in the planet. He is so famous an actor that a brand of cigarettes bears his name, and he is married to Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O'Hara, That Hamilton Woman and Blanche Dubois). As actors go, these two were living legends at the time, and must have been huge to Marilyn's eyes. As Colin says to her later in the film, Olivier is an actor who wants to be a movie star, and she is a movie star who wants to be a serious actress: it won't work. Compounded by the fact that the most famous woman in the cosmos was pathologically insecure and suffered from stage fright, among other demons, the shoot did not go well. Marilyn arrives in London with third husband, Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott, trying to sound very Brooklyn) and acting coach Paula Strasberg (Zoe Wanamaker) in tow, and everything goes wrong. Marilyn is always late, she flubs lines, Strasberg whispers in her ear, and worst of all, she feels Olivier hates her. Marilyn relies too much on the Strasberg method by which she has to plumb all kinds of emotional depths in order to say one line, which drives Olivier crazy. I loved seeing the chaos she created by always being late, utterly inconsiderate to the cast and crew, including Dame Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench, aka God), a giant of the British stage who was nevertheless enormously kind to Marilyn. Monroe was famously unprofessional. Directors forgave her time and again because her charisma was truly spectacular. She oozed desire. Her painful contradictions seemed to come out from every pore of her flawless skin, which made her an incredible movie star.
The movie is told from the point of view of Colin. Besotted with Marilyn, he somehow gains her confidence and ends up being the appeaser between her and Olivier. They develop some sort of a friendship and Marilyn decides that he is the only person from the studio she can trust. Now, when was the last time you saw a male ingenue on screen? Redmayne is excellent as the wide eyed but smart and sophisticated kid who gets his heart broken by the biggest sexpot on the planet. It is a smart and lovely performance, and except for a couple of moments in which he actually bats his eyelashes, rooted in true feeling. Redmayne and Williams have great chemistry together, and he makes his love for her utterly believable. You can clearly see how he goes from eager neophyte to the manly man who is there to protect her. And you can see his heart breaking, which is no small acting feat. I hope it is not an unsung performance: a man in love is such a rare part for a male actor.
Colin, who is the third assistant director on set, ends up having more power over Marilyn than Olivier. Olivier, a pragmatist, lets it happen as long as Colin can make her show up on time and functioning. Marilyn, of course, wields the ultimate power because she knows she is the only indispensable cog in the wheel. She wields her power with her physique, and by being an emotional wreck. She hints at her horrid childhood, and her complicated relationships with men, but the movie smartly leaves her bottomless misery a mystery. She is solely obsessed with her own shortcomings, willfully oblivious to the chaos she causes on the set. There is a wonderful moment where, after having being herself (if such a thing was possible) alone with Colin, she has to turn on the wattage for an impromptu audience of admirers at Windsor Castle, and she becomes Marilyn for them, mimicking her own sexy mannerisms. It's hard to fathom how impossible it was to be her: she never left the girl from the foster homes behind, even if she reached the pinnacle of access. Adored by everyone, she never felt anybody truly loved her.

J. Edgar

2011-11-13T11:49:00.001-05:00

This movie confirms what I have always maintained. That Clint Eastwood is a hack whose reputation as a good director I find inexplicable. J. Edgar Hoover is surely a great historical (and hysterical) character: a complicated prick, and the only man in the history of the United States to have remained in power for almost fifty years. However, this biopic, ponderously written by Dustin Lance Black (Milk) and clumsily directed by Eastwood, manages to make his story dull, disjointed, stiff and lifeless.
The film has many issues. It is directed by a man who does not have an ounce of inspiration in his body. He takes a script and stages it in the most unimaginative, workmanlike, literal way possible.
The script is needlessly baroque, with a back and forth structure in which an aged Hoover (Leonardo Di Caprio, looking like an exploding cauliflower) writes his memoirs and flashbacks to his beginnings as a young man. This drains the story of drama. A conventional chronological structure would have allowed us to see more clearly the arc of this strange, Shakespearean villain, from a stuttering sissy with a domineering mother to the most powerful, intimidating man in America. That would have been more daring. Instead we are needlessly dizzied by all the back and forth and horrified by a terrible make up job (don't be surprised if it is up for an Oscar. It still sucks).
The aged Di Caprio looks just like Jon Voight, so why didn't they get Jon Voight to play him in his old age instead? And Clyde Tolson, the love of Hoover's life and his second in command (a charming and excellent Armie Hammer), could have been played by Eastwood himself, instead of making Hammer look like a zombie out of a Christopher Lee movie.
How are we expected to believe anything this movie says about J. Edgar Hoover when the make up is so cheesily fake? When the director makes terrible choices in terms of casting characters that age many years in the span of two hours? Judi Dench could play a lamppost and get awards for it, and I always welcome her presence, because no one utters lines the way she does, but there is a preposterous scene when J. Edgar is a little boy, and instead of using a young actress (Samantha Morton, say) they give poor Dame Judi a terrible reverse aging makeup that makes her look ghoulish, and the movie amateurish. This is hack work. Had the script been linear, most of the make up problems could have been avoided because we'd have seen the exploding cauliflower/Jon Voight only at the end of the movie.
But let's say that you manage to look past the makeup debacle. The movie still fails to make a strong, clear point about a closeted gay man who was obsessed with secrecy, who spied on people and intimidated them by keeping secret files on them and let them know about it. The film fails to investigate how a man with an obsession for law and order, a man who created a modern, efficient and methodical FBI, was corrupted by power and abused his position to such an extent that he had eight sitting presidents trembling in fear of him, along many others. All that annoying back and forth fails to connect in a meaningful way how Hoover's queerness affected the creation of his law enforcement persona. Hoover could have been written as a character of Shakespearean magnitude, but the movie is cumbersome, corny and very superficial, and it wastes the opportunity to create an interesting portrait of an abuser of power. This J. Edgar could have been a man of invincible power yet vast reserves of weakness, cowardice and self doubt. Yet we don't really get to see the tension or the contrasts. And I don't blame this exclusively on the actor.
In a world where you would not need a movie star to bankroll a film, this role should be played by a great character actor, someone like Paul Giamatti, Steve Buscemi, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Peter Sarsgaard or even Joaquin Phoenix, who is a good looking version of Hoover (use your imagination). But in this world, the role goes to a boyish looking movie star who is not the character's type at all and becomes a distraction in it. Now, Leonardo Di Caprio is a consummate professional, and he clearly did his homework. He commits to this role as he does to all his work, with the utmost thoroughness. He nails the rapid speech (apparently the result of childhood stuttering), the stiffness of the era and of the man, and he even gets to act quite decently behind the clumps of makeup. They have him wear dark contact lenses that obscure his eyes, for crying out loud; if the poor guy gets an Oscar nomination it will be for acting in spite of all the obstacles against him -- bad makeup, bad casting, a clunky script and a hack director. Di Caprio delivers a very solid performance, but not a great one. Something feels mechanical and stunted. I think that the structure of the movie undermines the arc of the character, so while Di Caprio is sweating buckets trying to bring the guy to life, Eastwood and Black do everything in their power to make it hard for him.
J. Edgar Hoover was a nasty son of a bitch and this movie shows him that way. But this is the post Tony Soprano age, we are used to nasty sons of bitches that seduce or compel us to keep watching. I felt absolutely nothing for this character in the course of this interminable movie, no matter how much cheesy swelling music they added in the scenes that are meant to tug at the heartstrings. No hate, no love, no interest in this man. I blame it on the stiffness of the direction, on too many ridiculous scenes, like Hoover proposing to his secretary (Naomi Watts) at the Library of Congress five minutes after he's met her, or an over the top tantrum by Tolson as Hoover tells him he thinks it's time for a Mrs. Hoover. But mostly, one gets detached from the cardboard quality of the whole enterprise because of the lack of a livelier and deeper probing of Hoover's character. This movie is a bore.

Into The Abyss

2011-11-12T08:39:00.001-05:00

Werner Herzog starts his powerful, devastating new documentary about the death penalty and violence in America, interviewing clergyman Richard Lopez at a cemetery. Lopez is a priest who accompanies those sentenced to death as they receive the lethal injection in a death row jail in Texas. In this first interview, Herzog sets up his approach to the topic. At first we think he is going to mock or confront the priest about the seeming absurdity of the Church participating in such a ritual. But Herzog simply asks Lopez what it is exactly that he does at the death chamber. The priest explains that he is there to be with the convicts in their final moments and he is only allowed to hold the condemned man by the ankle. There is something at once childlike, primitive and biblical about this minor detail, and this is the kind of nugget that Herzog knows how to mine. Herzog does ask him quite skeptically about God's role in all of this, to which the priest answers that everything happens for a purpose, etc. Lopez starts talking about spending time alone at a golf course and observing birds and squirrels. He then breaks down in tears as he thinks how he is able to save two squirrels from getting squashed under his car but there is nothing he can do to save the convicts at the death chamber.
The camera gets closer to the crosses behind Lopez, which are all identical, and Lopez explains that those death row inmates who have no one to take care of their burial are buried here by the state, with a cross and only their inmate number -- no name. It is only then that we realize there is something strange about this cemetery and these crosses. It's as if the men were killed by the state but the state wants to act like they never existed. This is such a quietly outrageous image, that I still have trouble trying to understand how it is possible. Just the sight of this decent man, trying to do what he believes is God's work in a bizarre system, standing in front of a verdant field of endless numbered crosses, is devastating. Every question that Herzog asks from his subjects, begets many more questions in the viewer. Are these men alone in the world or have their families rejected them? Is it the state's business to murder convicts, and then bury them with nameless crosses? What is it about the US that disconnects people so much from one another?
This film does not pretend to be an "objective" look into capital punishment in the US. To make his point about the absurdity, the indignity, the wrongness of the death penalty, Herzog uses the capital case of two young white men in Texas, Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, who were teenagers at the time of the crimes. Shrewdly, Herzog chooses to focus on an air tight murder case that cannot be easily tainted by partisan politics or ideology. The men are both white, as are all their victims, in full possession of their minds, and the evidence against them is incontrovertible. He starts the film fooling the audience into thinking that what we may be about to see a gross miscarriage of justice, but then he slowly reveals the chilling circumstances of the case, which make the viewer feel like the two kids should fry in hell for all eternity. They committed a wanton and callous triple murder.
Herzog lets the facts of the case unfold as if in a mystery, but this is not a procedural or a criminal investigation. He layers the revelations so skillfully, manipulating them precisely against our assumptions or expectations, that he creates an exponential portrait of senseless violence. Both convicts accuse each other of the crimes; both are lying. Herzog is not interested in the minutiae, or in who did what. He is interested in the deeper mystery of why men commit murder and the devastating emotional consequences of such violence. This story, as told to him by the relatives of the victims, a police officer, the father and the wife of one of the murderers, a couple of acquaintances of the murderers and a man who used to work at death row, is a bottomless parade of human calamity, an abyss of pain that sears everyone connected to it, compounded by the crowning absurdity of the death penalty.
Herzog is too smart to sound superior, snide or impatient with the bizarre paradoxes of the moral vision of the state of Texas. This is not smartass agitprop a la Michael Moore. Herzog is an enormously skilled storyteller and a serious artist; he wants us to absorb the shocking contradictions and comprehend the scale of human suffering, and that is how he quietly, personally makes his political statement.
The movie is shot by Herzog's longtime cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, in simple but powerful compositions of the subjects in mostly medium shots in the foreground of the frame. I don't know how Herzog got the local police to let him use the footage they took of the actual scenes of the crimes, but he does, to remarkable effect. This is stuff that the public never gets to see, and it is horrible and surprisingly sad. One of the victims was killed as she was baking cookies. The police find the tray with the cookie dough and the TV on.
Herzog has an eye for the powerful image. He repeatedly films the empty death chamber, with the little cell that holds the prisoner in the last hours of his life a dozen steps away, a table laden with no less than four Holy Bibles in English and Spanish in front of the cell, and the actual chamber itself, with the lethal injection gurney and its many restraints. Everything looks antediluvian except for a state of the art digital clock inside the chamber. There is no need for Herzog to comment. He just trains his camera on visions of abject absurdity.
Herzog is usually an eccentric character in his documentaries, asking pesky questions and having contrarian opinions. In this case, he refrains from making comments or passing judgement. He allows the testimony of these people to create a heartbreaking tapestry of hurt and injustice.But he is a great interviewer: gentle, intimate and blunt at the same time. He asks the right and logical questions, and some slightly eccentric ones, and all of his subjects open up to him. It seems like they know, can sense or have been told that he is an important filmmaker and some of them address him with a formality that is very touching.
There is something about the way in which Herzog focuses on some detail in one person's story, that creates a whole reality without him needing to establish a lot of context. He interviews a friend of Jason Burkett who recounts how Burkett once held a gun to his temple for hours and then shot at him, and somehow the gun did not go off. The kid and Herzog talk about how lucky that was and Herzog somehow coaxes him to reveal that he learned to read and write in jail (most of the males in this film have been in jail). Herzog asks him how it feels to be able to read and write (awesome) and surmises that you have to be twice as smart as everybody else to function in the world without reading and writing. Herzog does not make a big deal out of it, but one wonders, is this the richest country in the world where you still have illiterate, impoverished adults? Why is everyone in Texas so hell bent on self-destruction?
By focusing on the personal on a small scale, he opens a vista of a United States that is deeply troubling; a place, Texas at least, where young, piss-poor people may not have access to education or opportunity but they apparently have unfettered access to guns, where entire families fester in jails and where the state kills people who killed other people, which makes the law and lawlessness look too much like each other.
The title of the film, Into the Abyss, sounds just like a nature documentary (it is a film about human nature). Its subtitle is A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life. Of life after senseless death and of life in spite of death, of bad lives, life in jail, lives that should by all accounts be less fraught with danger and hardship. Herzog ends hid film in a note of hope, with a woman pregnant by one of the murderers. Having heard his pronunciations about the cruelty of nature before, I don't believe he just wants to give us a ray of sunshine. I understand that the need to continue human life is just as strong as the need for some to end it, but I wasn't completely comforted by the thought of bringing a baby into such a world, After all, what is the future for this kid, whose father is up for parole in another 30 years? Yet, if anything gives you faith in human nature in this film it is that at least some of them, like Burkett's father, feel guilt, sorrow and remorse; others have a conscience, like Lopez and Fred Allen, a man who finally quits his job at death row after enduring too many executions.
A conscience, which is what the murderers lacked, is all we can hope for, all we need to ensure we don't descend into savagery.

Oscar in Crisis

2011-11-09T13:29:00.000-05:00

After saying publicly that "rehearsing is for fags", professional idiot and overcompensated Hollywood hack Brett Ratner predictably had to bow out of producing the 2011 Oscars.
Some people are having a zirotsky, mostly because of the gay slur. My interpretation, which is not a justification, is that none of this calamity would have transpired if he had said "rehearsing is for pussies", which I think is what he meant, and which is still offensively stupid. Rehearsing may not be for hacks of his caliber; it's for serious professionals.
Ratner was stupid and clueless enough to use "fags", a nasty slur for gays; a huge and talented contingent of which keeps Hollywood in business, not so much by buying tickets, but by actually working in it. Probably a huge number of the people behind the scenes in any Hollywood production and/or Oscar telecast is comprised of "fags".
Like that idiot Republican from Texas who used the phrase "Jew them down", unless you want the public to get a glimpse into the kind of schmucks you really are, learn to calibrate your language, fools.
I find Ratner's arrogance about rehearsals equally or more offensive. Is he so gifted that he can do away with professionalism? His movies are the garbage they are, among other things, presumably because he is too macho to rehearse them (although I doubt that he doesn't rehearse the car chases, explosions and karate chops involving Jackie Chan).
Just as you don't want your children hearing a successful Hollywood hack (a role model, in other words) use slur words against a particular minority, you don't want them influencing your children to be lazy, arrogant slobs. Saying that rehearsing is for fags is like saying that doing your homework and studying are for losers; a patently stupid thought. Rehearsing is for artists, consummate professionals and generally people who passionately try to do their very best with their creative gifts, whether big or small.
Still, this goes to confirm that Ratner's hiring was a very bad idea. And so instead of this being a calamity, it may actually be a good thing. It is almost inhumanly possible to imagine an Oscar ceremony worse than last year's. I have a feeling that Ratner was on the way to achieving that. Now we'll never know. It has even crossed my mind that perhaps Ratner wanted out of the whole bloated blintz and he knew exactly how to extricate himself from it, but that may be giving him too much credit.

Some people enjoy watching the Oscars as a ten car pile up from which you cannot avert your eyes. I'm not one of them. True, they are impossible to survive without copious amounts of alcohol or other painkillers; but every year, and despite an avalanche of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, one wishes it will be a fun, cool show with a gazillion movie stars (not TV, not internet, not reality show stars) and fairly apportioned prizes. This I know is delusional, but such is the pull they exert for some of us (or maybe only me).
We know the Oscars are ridiculous, moribund, unfair, vulgar, fake, clueless and horrifying, but they're the Oscars. I surmise this is similar to being a diehard Red Sox fan, except that the Oscars don't even deserve that kind of fan loyalty. So what is it about them that makes me park my ass in front of the TV set that Sunday or Monday in February or March or whenever it is and submit myself voluntarily to excruciating torture? Maybe that for about four hours I get to glimpse many actors and artists I love all in one room and to uselessly root for the movies I liked (and don't forget the dresses).
I actually scream at the TV screen on Oscar night (sort of like this guy).

Cinema Quote of The Week

2011-11-02T16:47:00.000-04:00

Anthony Lane knocked it out of the park this week.
This is why I enjoy reading him (bold letters are mine):

“Tower Heist” might nonetheless become a footnote in the history of cinema, as might Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” another new release. The two works have almost nothing in common, except that both show clumps of unlikable people behaving implausibly in confined spaces. More important, both are enmeshed in the squabble over video on demand, or VOD, which allows customers to view a new, or barely used, film in the nest of their own home. On October 5th, Universal Pictures announced a trial project, whereby “Tower Heist” would be available to half a million households in Atlanta and Portland, Oregon, three weeks after its appearance in movie theatres, at a cost of $59.99.
One’s immediate reaction to this news was: sixty bucks! For a Brett Ratner movie! It’s like one of those cafés in Weimar Germany where a glass of beer cost you four billion marks. The stakes were raised considerably by reports that NATO was incensed by this latest move in the battle of VOD. For one heady morning, I was under the impression that air strikes would be launched on Universal. Only then was it explained to me that NATO stands for the National Association of Theatre Owners, who regard the “Tower Heist” experiment, and similar ventures, as the thin end of a deadening wedge... Moviegoers will still watch movies; they just won’t go.
“Can you blame us?” they will cry. “Who wants to pay for a sitter, drive twenty miles in the rain, and sit in a fug of vaporized popcorn butter next to people who are either auditioning for ‘Contagion 2’ or texting the Mahabharata to their second-best friends?” And the answer is: me.

ME TOO, Anthony! Here is the clincher:

There’s only one problem with home cinema: it doesn’t exist. The very phrase is an oxymoron. As you pause your film to answer the door or fetch a Coke, the experience ceases to be cinema. ...One thing that has nourished the theatrical experience, from the Athens of Aeschylus to the multiplex, is the element of compulsion. Someone else decides when the show will start; we may decide whether to attend, but, once we take our seats, we join the ride and surrender our will. The same goes for the folks around us, whom we do not know, and whom we resemble only in our private desire to know more of what will unfold in public, on the stage or screen. We are strangers in communion, and, once that pact of the intimate and the populous is snapped, the charm is gone.

Read more for Lane's fun pan of Tower Heist and his pithy but quite accurate assessment of Melancholia.

For Your Halloween Consideration

2011-10-26T11:43:00.000-04:00

Don't want to dress up as Michelle Bachmann or an OWS camper this Halloween? Watch a movie instead!

Here's a list of spooky movies for your viewing pleasures. And some new additions below. I'm in the camp that humans are far scarier than zombies, ghosts, vampires or ghouls, so much of what you will find below qualifies as horror in my book.

Now Playing:

Martha Marcy May Marlene. I think this is a horror film. Period. And a good one too.

On DVD:

Requiem. A German movie about an exorcism, based on a real story. No turning heads or day-glo vomit, but creepy and disturbing nonetheless.

Eyes Without a Face. A beautiful French horror classic. Almodóvar's new film borrows liberally from this one. And this one is much better.

La Ceremonie. Evil unleashed in the form of a maid (Sandrine Bonnaire) and her nasty girlfriend (Isabelle Huppert). Pretty much anything with Isabelle Huppert will make your blood curdle, so consider watching The Piano Teacher as well.

The Butcher. Another disturbing little film from Claude Chabrol, a master of social horror.

The White Ribbon. The budding seeds of Nazism in a small, creepy German town. Gorgeous and frightening.

Dogtooth. This Greek movie will weird you out. I promise.

Black Swan. Relive the anorexic nightmare. I actually saw it a second time on a plane, and it held up.

Taxi Driver. Saw it again recently. Pretty horrible in the best way possible.

The Room should be required viewing every Halloween. You get to see the mind of a deranged person who thinks he has made a movie. Really scary.

The Skin I Live In

2011-10-23T00:25:00.000-04:00

Except for Volver, a movie I loved, I have not liked an Almodóvar movie in ages. He has become a parody of himself, and since I am not a fan of camp, his excursions into deliberately cheesy melodrama are not for me. The Skin I Live In is yet another contrived pastiche of a filmmaker who is now more concerned about paying homage to and namedropping the sources for his creative inspirations than at telling a compelling human story.
I am not as erudite about film as to list all the movies that this one pays tribute to or borrows from. The most obvious one, Eyes Without a Face, is a masterpiece of horror and it is echoed here in the secluded plastic surgery clinic where Dr. Robert Ledgard (a good Antonio Banderas) experiments to create artificial skin. But far from a horror movie, The Skin I Live In is more vulgar, convoluted, nonsensical and clumsily told than a bad Mexican telenovela. There is nothing remotely mysterious or suspenseful about it, but that is not the point, because the point is to be as campy and kitschy as possible, which, on me at least, has a distancing effect.
The only thing that kept me watching is the gorgeous, sensual cinematography by the great José Luis Alcaine. Visually, the movie is too polished for the crappy acting style and the stilted dialogue, but at least you can marvel at the pristine light and the rich color of almost every frame. The music by Alberto Iglesias is almost exactly identical to his music for Talk to Her, and just as lovely, although one tires of artists ripping themselves off so shamelessly. I also marveled at the amazing makeup worn by Elena Anaya, as Vera, the woman on whom the doctor experiments, and whose skin looks like Estee Lauder's wet dream. These things held my attention while I struggled to stop cringing in my seat.
I cannot abide the humorless Marisa Paredes, an Almodóvar regular, an actress who in Spanish would be called "una pesada", who plays the doctor's assistant and who also turns out to be his mother (big shock). I'm not giving anything away. The vulgar convolutions of the plot hold no mystery or suspense whatsoever. I was rather more shocked to find that in this movie Almodovar completely eschews his light touch in favor of exaggerated, clumsy bathos. I don't expect him to redo Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or Matador over and over again, but I do miss his fresh, comedic moxie and the days where his staging was lithe and playful. This present work is as light and as palatable as reinforced concrete. He used to be cheeky but never vulgar. Not anymore.
As in Talk To Her, I could care less about his admiration for Louise Bourgeois, or Cayetano Veloso or Pina Bausch. These inclusions of his favorite artists in his movies may be genuine fandom on his part, but they strike me as both pretentious and provincial.
There is one interesting idea in this movie, which is a theme that Almodóvar has touched upon before, and which is hidden somewhere in the middle, blooming only for a moment before disappearing among the bizarre, meaningless melodrama. There is a sequence, when the doctor, as a sort of Dr. Frankenstein, is turning a man into a woman, who then seems to fall in love with him, that communicates the idea that sexual identity and gender are fluid. That beneath the skin, deep inside, our desires, male or female, are far less distinct than we think. This is a beautiful idea well worth putting in a film, Alas, the rest of the movie is like a botched surgery, with the ugly bolts and stitches visible to the naked eye. The Skin I Live In is a movie of ideas, firmly ensconced solely in the director's self-referential head, which is why, in spite of all of the beautiful color, it feels utterly devoid of life.

Margin Call

2011-10-22T23:08:00.000-04:00

It looks like hype was looking for an Occupy Wall Street movie and found this one right on time. Its timeliness will no doubt help conceal the fact that it isn't a very good movie. It is entertaining and spottily enjoyable, a valiant but flawed effort by noticeably inexperienced writer-director J.C. Chandor.
David Denby has lost his last marble by saying that it's the best movie ever made about Wall Street. The screenplay feels like an early draft, the cinematography and the staging are mostly inept, and given that some of it does work, it squanders many opportunities to make its point, whatever it is, clearly and forcefully. If it is trying to do what Downfall did for Hitler, that is, give human dimension to these greedy bastards, it fails. There is a difference between having ambivalent or ambiguous characters and characters who act incoherently within the premise they have been set up in, which is what happens with most of the characters here.
As I could not clearly understand the point of this movie, I surmise that these are its two main premises:
1. The investment bankers gambling other people's money in their glass bubble above Manhattan did not fully know or even understand what they were doing, and the few that did looked the other way as long as the profits kept coming.
2. Huge piles of money are thrown at or withheld from these characters like carrots or sticks, and therefore, they feel they have no choice either way. All the characters are immobilized by greed, or the system, or the need for money, hence nobody has any principles.
The problem is, paralysis and general spinelessness may be true to life, but they are unsatisfying dramatic choices. Characters who know and fear the worst are much more exciting than characters who know nothing and just look stricken at the sight of a computer screen. You could have the most appalling villains and make the audience care for them if they have their own skewed integrity, but in this movie nobody rises to the challenge.
Paradoxically, documentary films about financial shenanigans like Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room or Inside Job feel more urgent and deliver more of a blow to the gut. The reason for this is mainly in the writing. Margin Call has lots of expository speeches but little action; hence, the stakes, high as they are, don't feel as urgent as they should. We are told the world of these investment bankers is about to collapse, but we don't see it happening to them, they just explain it to us. When Will Emerson (Paul Bettany), is asked how he can blow a yearly two and a half million dollar salary, he meticulously lists his budget: what goes towards taxes, the mortgage, the flashy car, the expensive wardrobe, restaurants, booze and whores, which he can deduct as entertainment. The enormous figures sound realistic, but it would be more compelling to see what is at stake for him, or at least to see how this has personal consequences. Yet nobody in this movie, despite sweating buckets at the sight of gnarly numbers, seems to have a personal stake or a reaction, except for maybe losing their jobs. They already have so much money, it's like bubkes to them. This might be realistic, but it is dramatically flaccid. If I held a gazillion stock options valued at $95 a share and the next minute they are worth 65 cents, I would have a big reaction, believe me.
The film begins tautly enough with a well executed sequence of massive layoffs at a prestigious investment firm, where two ruthlessly efficient female enforcers calmly tell Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) that he is now finished at the firm, all his communications with it severed. He leaves his unfinished files with junior analyst Peter Sullivan, who then does the math and discovers a financial catastrophe waiting to happen.Eric is fired and his attitude is one of resignation rather than revenge or indignation.
At the same time, Peter Sullivan is an actual rocket scientist who ends up working at this firm because the money is better than in academia. After two years in such a cutthroat place, he still behaves like a Pollyanna. Resignation, like innocence or timidity, are boring dramatic choices, and soon, despite a certain show of ambition that is not fully exploited, Sullivan's dramatic thread runs dry as well. So the movie jumps to Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), who is like the den mother and cheerleader of his floor, and has been in that place for over thirty years, egging youngsters on to give it all for the firm, surviving by stopping his ears to all the unseemly financial misdeeds. He's supposed to have feelings because his dog is dying (the cheapest way to telegraph humanity). Remember Hitler in Downfall? He was nice to dogs and secretaries, but the genius of that movie is that the more humanly Hitler was portrayed, the more of a monster he became. He might have been insane, but he was not an incoherent character. Sam (whom I am not comparing to Hitler) oscillates between humanity and ruthless efficiency. He seems to have a bit of a backbone, loyalty to the firm (which is over 100 years old and no one seems to give a shit), but then he acts spinelessly, and we do not quite understand why. The way the script is written, the stuff that needs to drive the action surfaces after the fact, (turns out he needs the money). This kills the dramatic tension. If we had known that Sam has a conflict between, let's say, his debts and his loyalty to the firm, we'd be hanging at the edge of our seats, but the way it's played, it doesn't so much feel like a betrayal but like a deflation. And so we are left with a hazy collection of characters whom we have trouble understanding. Their motivations, money notwithstanding, are not personal enough. Worse, nobody in this movie fights back, even for craven reasons, like greed or revenge. They all rather take the check, which is humanly credible but it flatlines the movie.
If Margin Call feels like a better movie than it is, it's because the cast is immensely enjoyable to watch, and several individual scenes work nicely. Chandor does a good job of keeping the entire cast at a very balanced, high level of performance. They all seem to belong to the same universe, which is quite a feat.
Jeremy Irons is over the top but mesmerizing as John Tuld, a Dick Fuld or some such megamaster of the universe type. Irons, like Spacey, is an actor who can do fifteen states of mind in one scene, and he nails the studied charm of the supremely arrogant. His scene in the boardroom is a roller coaster ride of imperiousness, coyness, false modesty, a man who is playing the part his underlings expect from him; a smorgasbord of acting. He goes to town, but despite his expansive performance, he is there to represent The Evils of Capitalism, but is not very believable as a flesh and blood character. And as much as I adore Irons, I have a beef with the fact that his character is British and not American, as he should be. The villainy we are all up in arms about today was mostly homegrown; why make it foreign? Why couldn't Irons do an American accent? To me, this choice undermines the story and makes it ring faker than it should.
Not even Kevin Spacey seems to believe the business with the dog. Still, what he is capable of communicating before he even opens his mouth is astonishingly precise, and he is equally sharp when he speaks. He's like a microsurgeon. He takes a line comprised solely of the word "what" and quietly turns it into a mini drama. And it is nice to see him playing a defanged shark, for a change. He is superb.
Demi Moore, who is excellent, is wasted in a role that has a huge turn that then goes nowhere, but she has one amazing scene in which her expression registers bitter regret at having pursued a life at the shark tank, instead of something more fulfilling. She's so good, one wishes she would abandon professional celebritydom and come back to acting. Simon Baker is very good but unexplored as an icy Jared Cohen. Paul Bettany is excellent but also left behind as a cold bastard who turns out to be not so horrible after all. And poor Stanley Tucci gets a potentially juicy role and has to settle with non-action. The actors deserve kudos for making much more of their characters than what they were given to play with.
There are some nice touches about the way corporations work: there is always the boss of the boss of the boss, all the way to God, while at the same time no one ever takes responsibility for anything. The layoff scenes are chilling in their use of proxies and euphemisms to soften the cruelty of being fired, and the uneasy camaraderie at such a poisonous work environment seems quite authentic. If only it had been directed by Sidney Lumet. He would have brought the genuine human messiness that this schematic movie lacks.

NYFF 2011: The Descendants

2011-10-18T14:19:00.000-04:00

I'm a big fan of Alexander Payne, a smart, independent-minded American filmmaker, in my view, an heir to great satirists like Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges.
His movies are about regular Americans and the messes they get into: Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, and the most heartbreaking segment in Paris Je T'aime. If Citizen Ruth and Election were more broadly satirical, Payne has been moving into more Chekhovian territory with his last three films. Even though his humor at the expense of his characters may be mordant, he is never mean-spirited or contemptuous of them, like, for instance, Todd Solondz or Noah Baumbach. His movies have great empathy for regular Americans who try to live their complicated emotional lives as best they can.
Payne doesn't have a flamboyant cinematic style, his movies about plain people look rather plain, but he does have an inimitable tone: the language of his characters is precise, hilarious, and peppered with regionalisms, and some of them, always deeply flawed, like Tracy Flick in Election and Miles and his friend Jack in Sideways, are unforgettable, not to mention total Oscar bait. His stories are full of comedy and heartbreak. That perfect balance between pain and humor is not easy to get right, and Payne has it down better than any other American filmmaker working today. He is a humorist and a humanist.
If Sideways explored the way in which grown men can behave like children, The Descendants is about a man who has to be mature enough to raise his kids by himself. George Clooney plays Matt King, a Hawaiian lawyer whose wife is in a coma after a boating accident and now he has to take care of two daughters, one aged ten (Amara Miller) and a rebellious teenager (Shailene Woodley). He is in the middle of finalizing the sale of some pristine Hawaiian land to developers and has no clue on how to raise his kids. This could be the premise for a stale TV show, but on top of everything, King learns some damning truths about his wife that send him reeling in pain. This is a bittersweet, funny, poignant film about marriage, love, death, infidelity and, especially, about family. Family can be a pain in the ass, but you better hang on to it, because it's the most important thing you have. (Lots of arty movies with a "family is all you've got" motif this year, including The Tree of Life, Melancholia, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and Shame).
The casting of Clooney as a clueless dad is as unconventional as the casting of Jack Nicholson as the most timid and conformist of Mid-westerners in About Schmidt. Clooney, sporting a bad haircut and Hawaiian shirts galore, is solid and believable as a Hawaiian lawyer, clueless dad and a man who takes some unexpected emotional punches. As in Syriana and Michael Clayton, Clooney does competence in pain well, and here he delivers a deadpan, relaxed and very natural performance.
The entire cast is pitch perfect, including a scene-stealing turn by Robert Forster as Clooney's hardass father-in-law. Some of the movie borders on cliche, like the surfer dude teenage boyfriend (a very sweet and funny Nick Krause) who tags along with the Kings on their adventure, but Payne and his co-writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rash dive head on into apparent cliche, and subvert it. There are no easy pieties and pat sentiments in this movie. Death brings chaos, anger, and pain, and yet humans are still funny. It's no wonder that Payne says he loves the Italian neorealists: he has a similar temperament.
What I loved most about this movie, besides the fact that Payne found an all-Hawaiian music soundtrack that doesn't drive the audience crazy, is that the movie does not shy away from what death looks and feels like to those who remain. People may have their rituals and say their goodbyes and talk to a comatose woman who may not be listening, but her death is presented without adornment or syrupy euphemism, and so are their feelings, in all their misery, frustration and grace.

NYFF 2011: The Artist

2011-10-17T11:48:00.003-04:00

I had no faith in this movie. I was afraid it was going to be a gimmicky, twee affair along the likes of Amelie (a movie I loathe), but The Artist, by writer director Michel Hazanavicius, is a disarming, inventive and charming love letter to the art of filmmaking, and it is a wonderful treat. It is technically breathtaking, flawlessly executed and it restores our wonder in the magic of cinema by showing us how it's been done since the beginning.
The Artist has the cheekiness of being a new silent film in black and white. What's more, it makes it a new and thrilling experience. In this age of shrinking screens, 3D, digital cameras and special effects (which it itself uses, subtly and brilliantly), it reminds us that cinema, the most modern form of art, has always been about technological advancement. From the very beginning people were inventing ways with which to better tell stories, whether with sound or with color, with the invention of the dolly or the cut, or better special effects. The art form has never stopped moving forward and hopefully, as long as it has affecting stories to tell, it never will. The first movies were shown on zoetropes or movieolas, little personal machines that you cranked up to see a spool of film achieve movement. Now that we can watch films in our phones, and that commercial movie screens have shrunk while TV screens have mushroomed, we are back to square one. This is not necessarily a good thing, but The Artist both asks us to restore our sense of wonder in the movies and admire the craft that goes into making a film, as well as to let go of our fears and embrace whatever is coming, for as long as a story is told that reaches our hearts, the art form will not die.
The Artist is also an elegy to an age where cinema was simple but grandiose. The stories were basic, the technology primitive, but oh, those sumptuous movie palaces with giant screens and live music! Now the movies have become enormous, expensive spectacles, most of them still telling some very basic stories, while the communal experience of moviegoing keeps shrinking; a tragedy, if you ask me. You could watch The Artist in Netflix, or even in your iPhone, but as every other movie except the bad ones, you need a big screen to fully feel the impact of the expressiveness of the human face, the gorgeousness of its images and the thrill of its lovely tale.
The story is simple: George Valentin (the excellent Jean Dujardin, who won the best actor award at Cannes) is a silent film idol, a dashing cross between Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino. He is a huge movie star, with a ravenous ego. He swashbuckles and rescues damsels in distress for a living. He lives in a mansion with his unhappy wife (Penelope Ann Miller, excellent) and his loyal dog (Uggy, very excellent), who also appears in his movies, and whom he dotes on much more than on his wife. The opening scene is a film within a film. We are watching people watching a silent movie. It is the premiere, and the actors and producers wait behind the screen to hear the audience's reaction, which we can't hear, but which we see in the triumphant expression of their faces as we gather that the audience loved it. Then it cuts to a silent shot of the audience applauding wildly. The music score by Ludovic Bource (deserves an Oscar nomination) is a pitch-perfect homage to movie music and it complements, enhances and underscores the movie gorgeously, focusing the audience's attention on what a great music score can do in a movie; basically, drive you to tears, fear, excitement and joy. The exquisite black and white cinematography by Guillaume Schiffman is also worthy of top awards.
Valentin basks in the adoration of the public, and on the street, while posing for photographers, he meets a pretty girl by accident (Berenice Bejo, wonderful). From there, it's boy meets girl, boy loses girl and, of course, boy meets girl again. She is a wannabe starlet who looks for work as an extra in a big Hollywood studio, and the movie chronicles her rising fortunes as Valentin's star ebbs (in a beautiful sequence where we see how her name appears in the credits of movies, from the very bottom and with spelling mistakes, to top billing as "Peppy Miller"). Valentin is getting on in years, and his producer (John Goodman, excellent), shows him the future: a sound test for the "talkies", which of course, we can't hear. Valentine laughs it off, as many did in its day, as a fad and a failure. Soon, he's out of work, because then, as today, Hollywood is always hungry for the new. The hero's tribulations and his love story are deeply affecting, aided by Dujardin's charming and wonderfully calibrated performance.
There are many ingenious moments in this fun, delightful film, which is so well done, and it has so many layers of creative ingenuity to it, in the use of the movie grammar -- sound, music, shots -- that I bet it could serve as a master class in early filmmaking techniques. It lovingly recreates every old movie cliche, both technical and dramatic; from emotional mugging in close ups, to a thrilling car sequence, to an Astaire and Rogers number, to a dog to the rescue scene. It also reminds us that film language tells a story mainly visually, and that it can make us experience all kinds of feelings with few words, if any.
The Artist, a great commercial work of art (by Hazanavicius, a guy who is mainly known for his French James Bond spoofs), works at several levels. Film fanatics like me are going to have a ball with all the fun meta movie stuff, which is prodigious, but the average moviegoer will not be immune to its charms, for it is funny, poignant and delightful. Its entire premise is to show that a silent film in black and white can still win people's hearts. And that the essence of movies, this magnificent, collaborative art form, is here to stay. It is sheer joy.

NYFF 2011: Martha Marcy May Marlene

2011-10-14T12:11:00.001-04:00

I just adore movies where evil happens in plain daylight. I have not felt so creeped out by a movie in a long time. Writer-director Sean Durkin's extraordinary film is a psychological horror story about Martha, the outstanding Elizabeth Olsen (sister of the celebrity twins), in a breakthrough performance, who escapes from a cult and goes back to her affluent sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson, also excellent). As she starts a new life at her sister's, certain innocuous moments trigger traumatic memories in her, and the movie goes back and forth seamlessly between the present and her life in the cult.
The cult at first looks like a naive commune of hippies, led by Patrick, a scrawny, not particularly charismatic guy (John Hawkes). But the bizarreness and the menace of controlled chaos, seep in instantly. People sleep huddled together on mattresses on the floor, the men eat first as the women wait (starving people is one method of mind control), people share clothes and supposedly try to start up a farm, but it is not clear how they make a living.
Patrick has an emissary (creepy Brady Corbet) who brings lost young women from nearby towns. They are received warmly, and at first it seems like a cool place to chill out from the demands of reality. Martha arrives because her good friend Zoe is already there. Durkin lets the details of life in the cult trickle steadily and become more and more disturbing as Martha becomes more unhinged at her sister's house. Durkin and his editor sustain the double helix of the structure with great fluidity, as they let the creepiness accrue without hurry. We see the daily dismantling of self at the cult, but to watch Martha being unable to behave normally once she is safe, is just as fascinating. She has been brainwashed out of the most basic social behaviors, and, as she does not confide in her sister, she and her husband have no idea why she acts so strange. She says she broke up with a boyfriend with whom she was living in the Catskills, something that seems to horrify her sister. It is completely believable that it would never occur to them that she has been in a cult. They know nothing about her.
Besides being a chilling trip into the dangers of falling victim to a cult, which for my taste is scarier than vampires, zombies, or ghosts, the movie is also about American social disconnection, which is also scary as hell. Martha has not been in touch with her sister, her only surviving family member, for two years. Magnificent Arepa and I were saying that if Martha were a Latina, she would not have lasted 2 days without her entire family going on a search and rescue mission. In the US, you are on your own: that's the American way. It is common for people to drift out of society. In the end, the lost souls who end up in bizarre cults are looking for an alternate family, and Patrick, an incestuous father figure, a serial sexual abuser, couches life in the cult in those familial terms. Through a hodgepodge philosophy of so-called freedom and enforced communal life, Patrick strips his charges from their moral bearings and their willpower, besides drug-enabled sex and other nasty mind games. Nobody ever stops around the cult compound to check it out. Evil can flourish undisturbed where nobody cares for their neighbor.
Lucy is married to a wealthy New York City architect (Hugh Dancy), and Martha stays at their country retreat in Connecticut, so spacious that Martha questions, not without a point, why two people need to have such a big place. The wealthy married couple are classic strivers, they want to have kids, they work their asses off and they enjoy the fruits of their wealth. They may be egotists, but they have functional egos. Cults deprive you of your ego in the positive sense of the word: they strip away who you are, your values, your integrity. Martha seems to have kept what little ego she had before she arrived at the cult: as opposed to others who are completely brainwashed, she bristles at incidents of cruelty, and there is a part of her that Patrick psychopathic ego can't touch, which is why she escapes.
Durkin's successfully expresses Martha's sensation of not knowing where she is, where she is waking up, how much time has elapsed, how close or far places are from each other, yet, this intelligent, disciplined film makes sure the audience always knows what's happening, even as we share Martha's disorientation. As far as I'm concerned, the chilling ending is what turns this movie, which could pass as a psychological drama up to that point, into a quietly devastating horror film.
The more I think of Martha Marcy May Marlene, the more it gives me the shivers.
It's a wonderful feeling.

NYFF 2011: Shame

2011-10-11T13:20:00.000-04:00

The fruitful collaboration between director Steve McQueen (Hunger) and actor Michael Fassbender is starting to resemble Scorsese's with De Niro. Shame, their second foray together, is also about the mortification of the flesh but for opposite reasons to Hunger. Brandon, the protagonist of Shame, is far from a religious-political martyr who sacrifices himself with fearless discipline for a cause; he is a sex addict. Handsome, successful by the New York definition (he owns his apartment and has a job), he cannot control his sexual urges. He uses sex like other people abuse drugs. He masturbates in the office, watches porn there and at home, spends probably half his salary on expensive whores, and cannot stop. As is to be expected, this man whose mind is mired in filth, is an obsessive neat freak. His world is all smooth surfaces, steely blues and grays. He looks like money and women fall for him (who wouldn't?). The promise of sex with him sounds tantalizing, but just as he is mysteriously attractive, he is disgusting. He is disgusted with himself for being disgusting, so he goes deeper into more disgust.
The opening shot of this movie is Fassbender lying naked in bed, blue sheets covering his groin, looking like a supine Christ in a renaissance painting. McQueen is a renowned visual artist and, as in Hunger, every frame of this movie is masterfully composed and some are reminiscent (or is it just me?) of classic painting motifs, like pietas and annunciations. But the controlled aesthetics are in counterpoint to visceral emotions, and as in Hunger, McQueen does not shy away from the visceral. He doesn't go for the overly graphic either. He does not confuse that kind of shock value with art, as other more pretentious auteurs do (I'm thinking Bertolucci or Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny). The shock here comes from Brandon's terrible psychic pain and his joyless debasement of his body. Fassbender gives a brave and incredible, almost silent performance as a guy who is fighting with all his being against feeling emotional pain, by compulsively, almost suicidally seeking the release of sexual pleasure, but without the intimacy of human connection. It is a miracle he can keep this perverse act of self-loathing going on for as long as he does. I guess being a white male with money helps.
A woman leaves insistent messages on Brandon's phone. He never picks up. He works at a cold and angular job, all male assholes at the top, for a garrulous married boss that tries too hard to pick up women. Brandon, in contrast, vanquishes them like flies just by deploying devastating come hither looks. He can have any woman he wants in New York (including me). So why use whores? Why watch porn? Because sex is a wonderful way to feel everything but pain. It is a wonderful way to feel debased. He is self-medicating his shame with more of the same.
Spoiler alert, plot details ahead:
One day he comes home from yet another zipless fuck, as Erica Jong would say, to find music blaring from his stereo (the song: Chic's I Want your Love). He takes a baseball bat and bursts into the bathroom, where a woman (the excellent Carey Mulligan) is taking a shower. The framing of this scene reminded me of a Giotto annunciation. She reminds him she had keys. She is an emotional wreck with a bad dye job. Probably nothing thwarts a sex addict more than an unwanted house guest; even worse, a close relative. Later, we figure out that Sissy is his sister, but this is not a "here comes the Flying Nun to set her brother straight" story. She is a mess; a cabaret singer, with traces of self-inflicted damage on her wrists. These two are extremely damaged goods, from across the river in Jersey, which appears in the distance in several scenes, (as if the brother and sister had crossed the river Styx and still could not get rid of all that pain), and prior to that, Ireland. Probably Catholics, hence even more shame. At one point she says, "we come from a bad place, but we are not bad people". This is explanation enough. McQueen is not one for the American confessional mode. The point of shame is guilt and secrecy, not spilling the beans to anyone who will listen.
In contrast to her brother, Sissy expresses her pain by singing, (meaning: by being an artist) and by wallowing in big emotions. She embraces her mistakes so hard she almost smothers them with love. But she doesn't even have a roof over her head and asks to stay with Brandon for a while. She sleeps on the couch and Brandon can hear her, over the heavy breathing of his internet porn, crying and desperately begging a boyfriend to take her back, debasing herself for love and attention: it seems to be the family way. But does he go out and comfort her? Hell, no. He is at once heartbroken and disgusted.
At a nightclub, in the presence of her brother and his boss, Mulligan, photographed in a warm, golden light, sings the most depressing, ironic cover of "New York, New York". It may be her commentary on her own failure to achieve success (although if she made it to a swanky bar that takes reservations, she can't be so shabby), or on her brother's unconvincing veneer of success. He may fool everyone else, but he doesn't fool her. He sheds a tear when he hears her sorrowful voice, but is cold and stingy with his praise. His boss, however, charms her with deserved admiration, and soon she is fooling around with him in Brandon's bed. This is like taking the last baggie on Earth away from a desperate cokehead. He is furious: it disgusts him that she slept with his boss, and he knows this is the pretext he can use to ask her to leave, but he won't admit that she took over his space and now he cannot abuse himself in peace. She comes into his bed later to patch things up, but aware of his unbearable urges, he banishes her from his bedroom. Fassbender won the acting prize in Venice and is a huge contender for the big acting awards coming up. He embodies coherently and fearlessly the extreme contradictions in Brandon's character.
Brandon, unwilling to recognize his problem, just keeps getting worse. The fact his sister is there does not clean him up; it makes him feel even dirtier. His computer at work is taken and a massive cache of hardcore porn is found in the hard drive. His boss tells him that "whoever" put it there is a sick fuck. I guess this being a boy's club, they'd rather keep Brandon, who seems to be good at his job, even though he is always late, than fire him. Brandon feigns ignorance and just walks out of the room. Still, while Sissy lives with him, he goes on a date with a co-worker (Nicole Beharie, wonderful). He makes an effort. The date scene is intimate and awkward, and the waiter, armed with the pretentious spiel of most New York restaurant waiters, keeps interrupting the flow of a painfully labored conversation, and making it worse for Brandon, who is having a hard time trying to seem normal. He really likes this woman and leaves her hanging on the first date with nary a kiss good night. Lo and behold, he controls himself. This does not last long. In the office, on a whim, he takes her to the Standard Hotel (a good example of successful product placement, for once) in the meatpacking district, for a quickie. Unsurprisingly, he can't perform with her. Worse, he treats her like he treats his whores. The answer to which is even more debasement.
McQueen knows how to handle dramatic scenes, and he is a great director of actors. The key confrontation between brother and sister is shot in close up from the back, as the siblings sit side by side on Brandon's couch. She asks him to hug her and this unleashes a torrent of hissing cruelty from him. This scene is far more wounding than if it had been shot showing the actors arguing from the front. Mulligan's extraordinary work in this movie should also be recognized come awards time. I didn't know she had it in her to be so raw.
The third act is Brandon's spiral descent into hell. On his long dark night of the soul, Brandon looks for ways to hit bottom, one of which is to have a paid threesome. The music is Glenn Gould playing Bach, what Brandon hears in his iPod to calm his battered soul. But how does a serious film portray images of sex? The originality lies in that the scene, shot in an arty way that looks like what porn would look like if it had better lighting and a good cinematographer (in this case, Sean Bobbitt, who also shot Hunger), happens to be dramatically the lowest point of Brandon's existence. In contrast to porn, which refuses to acknowledge human feelings, this extended sexual sequence is there to portray the soul of a man in torment. The scene ends with Brandon's face striving painfully for the obliteration of orgasm and becoming monstrous, deformed.
The movie ends with a terrible catharsis. It takes something much worse than what Brandon has been avoiding all along, to make him come out on the other side.
I really liked Shame, but there is something about McQueen's disciplined style that I find confounding. This movie is about extreme emotions, but something feels cold at its core.

NYFF 2011: Melancholia

2011-10-09T21:03:00.000-04:00

My original review of this latest film by Lars Von Trier went like this:
"Wow".
But I owe it to my readers to provide slightly more illumination, so here goes:

My theory about Von Trier is that he is a madman with creative visions and what we have been getting from him lately are personal working outs of his inner demons on film. His first features were not about him, but about selfless love and Christian-like sacrifice, but lately he is using imagery to express a state of mind. Antichrist struck me as a petulant tantrum of self-indulgent excess: the artist in the midst of a nervous breakdown; whereas Melancholia, an exploration into the depths of depression, feels like the gift of an artist who has made peace, of sorts, with his demons. I don't think there is or will ever be a movie that depicts depression so accurately, so sensually and with such understanding as this one.
The movie starts with a stunning sequence of astonishingly beautiful images, accompanied by Wagner's Prelude to the Liebestod of Tristan and Isolde (in a nutshell, love and death, a major theme of the movie). Like Terrence Malick with The Tree Of Life, Von Trier proves that digital imaging can be used to extraordinary artistic effect in movies, not just for chases and explosions. Here, there are gorgeous shots of planets in the sky, strange visions of more than two moons, an orb coming towards Earth, as we see Kirsten Dunst dressed as a bride running in the mud, Charlotte Gainsbourg holding a small child across a sinking golf course, a horse falling in the forest, all in extreme slow motion. The extraordinary cinematography with the digital Alexia and Phantom cameras is by Manuel Alberto Claro.
Then the title comes in: not plain Melancholia, but Lars Von Trier's Melancholia.
Enter at your own risk.
I have a feeling that if Von Trier had not opened his big, idiotic mouth at Cannes, the Palme D'Or would have been his. Melancholia makes The Tree Of Life look like a Hallmark card. In the end, both movies are about grace, but Malick has a much more luminous, new-agey, faith-based view of life. Von Trier's film is about apocalyptic depression. No religion involved.
Opening scene: a ridiculously long white limousine gets stuck in one of the bends of a narrow country path. Inside are a beautiful bride, Justine (Dunst) and an even more beautiful groom (Alexander Skarsgard). It is a funny scene, as the bride and the groom, stressed out at being late to their own wedding, realize the humor of the situation and sweetly help the driver steer the wheel. Finally, they arrive at a gorgeous manor in what must be Vontrierland, because it sounds like it could be the US, except half the people are from Europe. Wherever it is, it looks like a fairy tale, a semi-castle with manicured grounds and an 18-hole golf course, property of John (Kiefer Sutherland, excellent) and his wife Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Claire is Justine's sister, even if they don't look anything alike and have completely different accents. Their parents are played by John Hurt, an old rascal who brings two women called Betty to the wedding; and a brittle, monstrous Charlotte Rampling as the mother of the bride from hell. So hellish is she, that she wears a tie dye shirt to the wedding, no makeup. John and Claire are furious because this extravagantly expensive wedding is going down the tubes fast. Udo Kier, almost having a nervous breakdown himself, plays the wedding planner. Fun!
Justine, having arrived at her own wedding two hours late, first has to go to the barn to say hi to her favorite horse. This is not the most auspicious beginning for a bright future (these people are loaded, they have not a care in the world). But the bride is dreamy and distracted, almost narcoleptic. She regularly abandons key moments in the meticulously planned ritual, like the cutting of the cake or the throwing of the bridal bouquet, to jump onto a golf cart or take a bath, saintly groom and wedding party be damned. Something is not right with this lovely young woman, and the way Von Trier depicts the superhuman effort she makes to make it seem like she's there, like she is happy, like she appreciates what people do for her, is harrowing and heartbreaking. Justine cannot get away from the pull of Melancholia. She is awash in depression. This makes her act erratically, and she can be sweet and unfathomably sad and fragile, but also irrational, inconsiderate and bratty. The only note that struck me as false in Justine's story was her relationship with her boss (Stellan Skarsgard). Apparently, she is a genius copywriter and right at the wedding he gives her a promotion, turning her instantly into an art director (as if!), as long as she comes up with "a tagline" that very night. He sics a young man (a good Brady Corbet) to pry the tagline out of her, apparently knowing that her precarious state of mind is conducive to bursts of brilliance. This is fake and absurd, but I assume it is meant to signify that Justine is a creative being, like the film's director.
The second half of the film is devoted to Claire and deals with the anguish she has at the prospect of the world ending tomorrow. As it happens, Melancholia is also a planet that is orbiting Earth and is predicted to come extremely close to it. Claire is afraid Melancholia is going to crash against Earth, and the scientific assurances of her husband do little to assuage her, for Claire has a young son and she fears for his future. Justine appears at Claire's home one day, barely capable to get in and out of a cab, sans husband. Claire takes care of her, with the help of her majordomo, a character improbably named Little Father and played with surly aplomb by Jesper Christensen (the Nazi from The Debt). Ridiculous in a classic Von Trierish way.
Since we are in high symbolism territory, the two sisters are opposites in looks and outlooks alike. Claire is a doer, a planner, a homemaker (perhaps she represents the practical side of Von Trier that allows him to direct films). Justine is in love with death. Paradoxically, Justine's half of the movie is rooted in reality and Claire's in science fiction. Justine, the madwoman, has to deal with the petty exigencies of earthly life; whereas Claire is concerned about the possible end of civilization, not something that surfaces as an actual possibility any given Monday. As Claire fears the collision of the beautiful planet, Justine actually bathes naked in its glow: the twin human impulses of life-giving and self-destruction.
Dunst's and Von Trier's interpretation of Justine's descent into the depths of depression is extremely powerful and utterly realistic. So even as there are planets hurling towards Earth, unlikely majordomos or ridiculous characters (Von Trier seems to have no interest in what goes on in day to day life), Justine's depression and Claire's anguish are totally emotionally true.
I would not want to give the end away, but Justine, having been nurtured with devoted patience by her sister, emerges from the depth of her despair to perform a final act of grace and redemption. In the end, love is the only bond that can heal fear and pain. With Wagner's music booming, I was overcome with emotion by Von Trier's audacity as an artist. He may be insane, but he is undeniably, enormously talented.
Melancholia is a visually rapturous movie. Like The Tree of Life, it is a cinematic experience best enjoyed in a theater with a big screen and an excellent sound system. Though I can imagine legions of moviegoers scratching their heads at this one, I urge them to surrender to its astonishing power and beauty.
Think about it as the artiest disaster movie ever.
.

NYFF 2011: A Dangerous Method

2011-10-07T13:09:00.000-04:00

Any movie that boasts of Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and Vincent Cassel in it, I don't care if it's good or bad, I'm there. Any movie that casts them as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Otto Gross, and is directed by David Cronenberg with a screenplay by Christopher Hampton, sounds quite promising. Unfortunately, A Dangerous Method is interesting but rather lifeless, like an impressive specimen pinned to a glass case. There is a lot of telling, and little showing. This tends to happen in biopics of great historical characters, but one does not expect it to happen in a movie by David Cronenberg, a director with a healthy, perverse penchant for the messiness of life. The characters talk in big ideas, and the movie feels stiff and antiseptic, too much inside its own brain, even it deals with human passions that defy reason.
The story is fascinating: Sabina Spielrein, a wildly hysterical Russian Jewish woman, (Keira Knightley), is committed to the Swiss mental hospital where Carl Jung is starting to use Freud's "talking cure". Hers is a textbook case of quaint hysteria: she juts her jaw out, acts up a frenzy, laughs and cries at the same time, and seems possessed by demons, because she gets sexually excited when her father beats her up. In short, a masochist. I wonder whatever happened to hysteria? Women like that today, if they exist, either fuck their demons out or they become workaholics. But poor Sabina, trapped at the turn of the 20th Century, surrounded by nothing but disapproving male authority figures, is gripped by suffering.
Jung takes a keen interest on her and helps her out, even allowing her to assist him in his experiments with free association. She turns out to be very adept at analyzing other people's psyches, including his. They have an affair. Jung is married to a very wealthy woman who keeps having his children. As played by Michael Fassbender, he is quite an iceberg. Fastidious, self-important, aloof, controlled. There is one scene that hints at Jung having big appetites, but Fassbender's performance, even in the throes of passion, seems one-dimensional. The words tell us that he thought differently, but we don't see how a prig like Jung could be such an imaginative and fertile thinker. It's hard to reconcile Fassbender's clipped characterization, no doubt based on lots of research, to the man who created the Red Book and all those fascinating theories like the collective unconscious, synchronicity, and more, which greatly expanded upon and departed from the philosophy of Freud, his mentor.
Viggo Mortensen fares much better with his portrayal of Freud. I totally believed his intelligence, his natural authority, his recognition of himself as a guru, his strong paternal aura and I even felt a Jewish heimishness, a recognizable warmth, exuding from him. He is excellent. Vincent Cassel is also charismatic as deranged Freud pupil and uncompromising hedonist Otto Gross, a dangerous seducer, who goads Jung into unleashing himself and giving in to his desire for Sabina.
This movie is about mind games being played by the people who invented a system to decode them. Freud is the father figure the lovers seek approval from and whom they fear. When Jung wants to end the affair, Sabina emotionally blackmails him by telling all to Freud and threatening to become his patient. This drives Jung crazy.
One aspect of the movie I really liked was the fastidiousness of period detail, the limpid, warm cinematography by Peter Suchitzky, the starched collars and stiff vests of the men, the virginal white lace dresses of the women. It was another time, and it took Freud and Jung to shake off those constraints and turn us into modern people.
We now live at our own turn of a century of neuroscience which has mostly abandoned Freudian psychoanalysis, even if it is still highly culturally influential. Some of his ideas today seem overly male-oriented (penis envy?), some quaint, but he changed the course of human society for the better and it is interesting to revisit his contributions in the light of what we believe now.

NYFF 2011: George Harrison: Living in a Material World

2011-10-06T16:55:00.000-04:00

This four-hour documentary by Martin Scorsese on George Harrison could have been awesome at half its running time. The first part, which chronicles Harrison's musical career beginning with The Beatles, is exciting and wonderful. Scorsese and his great editor David Tedeschi eschew the chronological route for a less straightforward organization of the generous amount of material they have. It's loosely organized by themes: post war Britain, Harrison's loving family, the mass hysteria the Beatles created, the ascendancy of drugs and psychic experimentation, George's dynamics within the band, his spiritual search. For those of us who love The Beatles, it is a moving trip down memory lane. It starts with great flair, with fun, creative cuts both of the images and the sound. A lot of the footage seems fresh and not the recycled Ed Sullivan or Shea Stadium stuff that everyone has seen to death. There are also plenty of reminiscing talking heads, including Harrison himself (from the many imterviews he gave through the years), and his many and sundry friends, including Paul and Ringo, both charming, Eric Clapton, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam, and other notables, most ghoulishly Phil Spector, who produced some of Harrison's solo work. The first part reminds us how huge and trailblazing The Beatles and how they rode the wave of their own age with agility and creative fearlessness. They were true artists; not content with delivering the same sweet pop formula that changed pop music forever, they delved deeper, experimenting and creating more sophisticated masterpieces with every album. It is also a window to their particular relationship, cemented, as Harrison comments, by so many times they had to hang out together because they simply could not enjoy five minutes out in the sun without creating pandemonium. They were bigger than God, made more money than God, and all that fame and fortune was a two-edged sword, that seems to have hit Harrison particularly hard.
As enigmatic and mercurial as those who knew George claim he was, he is not as flamboyant and extroverted a subject as John Lennon. The arc of his life, was rich but mostly inward-looking, and as spectacular as it was for him, is not as interesting for the audience.
The problem lies in the fact that the second part of the movie devotes an inordinate amount of time to Harrison's spiritual search. It gets really repetitive. As admirable and genuine as his spirituality may have been, in terms of a documentary subject it is as exciting as watching paint dry. Spirituality is tough to convey, sealed as it is inside people's heads, and it's like what it's said of some kinds of humor: for you to get it, you had to be there. We see endless repetitive footage of Harrison with Ravi Shankar in India and Hare Krishnas and tunics but one keeps hitting one's nose against the window of George's soul and we are not that much more enlightened by the end of the movie. To his credit, George Harrison remains an enigma.
Although Harrison composed a handful of nifty songs for The Beatles, his biggest hit was My Sweet Lord, a saccharine song I never liked. The movie omits the fact, a pretty big one, considering, that Harrison was sued and lost for unwittingly plagiarizing a melody for this monster hit. During his solo career he had a couple of good songs, just as Lennon had at most two handfuls of important hits, but nothing at the level of Don't Bother Me, Something, While My Guitar Gently Weeps or Here Comes the Sun, all of which are unique and indisputable masterpieces.
I appreciate Scorsese's intention to make this film more intimate and personal than didactic, but many questions are left unanswered that by the end accrue into a jumbled parade of milestones rather than a complex look into this artist's character. The Concert for Bangladesh, for instance, which was the first rock benefit concert ever, gets short shrift because no one bothers to explain what was happening in Bangladesh that made Harrison stand up for it. That Harrison was a trailblazer becomes clear: he helped introduce yoga and meditation to the Western world almost singlehandedly, at a time when the popular reaction to these pursuits was pretty uncomprehending and hostile. He created the concept of the benefit concert, he was a producer of quirky independent films through his production company HandMade Films. But as in the documentary about John Lennon, also produced in cooperation with the artist's widow (in this case, Olivia Harrison), even though it skims through certain dark sides of George such as his philandering, or his on and off drug use, there is too much reverence going on. Olivia is a charismatic woman with great presence and she delivers the best one liner in the movie, but I wonder if her guiding hand did not steer Scorsese too much into the spiritual. And as in last year's doc about John Lennon, although access to the spouse means access to fascinating material, both works could use less interested parties to tell the story.
It took five years to make the film and by the end it feels like a slog, like Scorsese lost the wind in his sails.

NYFF 2011: Corpo Celeste

2011-10-05T11:37:00.003-04:00

This little gem of an Italian opera prima, directed with intelligence, compassion, echoes of Italian Neo-realism and a dash of Fellinesque absurdity by young filmmaker Alice Rorhwacher, is the coming of age story of Marta, a 13 year old girl who comes back with her mother and her sister to Reggio Calabria after living in Switzerland.
To judge from the movie's locations, this southern region of Italy is consumed by blight, poverty, abandonment and flying garbage. In this milieu, the Catholic Church struggles to protect its grip on the people. Problem is, its message and the way it delivers it, is mostly irrelevant. The Church does little for the people, though the faithful do a lot for the Church. Volunteer women organize events and processions, they care about ritual and community. Yet the poor teenagers like Marta who have to attend catechism class for their confirmation ceremony could not be less interested. The Church is fighting for their attention with much more compelling forces, like pop culture. Marta is experimenting with faith and she is open to catechism. She seems attracted by the mystery of it, and believes genuinely, in her own way. The devoted catechism teacher tries everything: disco songs, slide shows, dance contests and she even blindfolds the kids so they can experience some saint's blindness. She works her soul off with nary a word of thanks by anyone. She also happens to have a major crush on Father Mario, the frustrated parish priest, who dreams of getting out of that parish into a classier one. Even though he is a man of faith, he basically phones it in, but still has the time to collect signatures for the most conservative party at local election time. This practice goes unquestioned by the citizens. He also collects the rent of the apartment where Marta lives with her family.
Through Marta's relationship with the Church, Rohrwacher paints an increasingly damning picture of the inability and the indifference of the Church to addressing people's real needs. Marta finds a litter of kittens in the Church basement and discovers the reserves of cruelty and heartlessness that these figures of authority who adore Jesus are capable of. The incident with the kittens is so shocking that had Rohrwacher shot the Church burning infidels at the stake, it would have less of an impact. Marta correctly perceives a great discrepancy between what they preach and how they act, and she goes through a Christ-like journey of questioning of the faith that deeply disillusions her of the Church. I have not seen a better or more balanced exemplification of the essence of what is wrong with the Church: its arrogance, its disconnection to the tribulations of real people, its self-provoked isolation from the world, its indifference to real suffering, its incapacity for compassion. But Rohrwacher does not demonize the Church, she only illustrates, through the eyes of a child, the abyss that lies between true faith and an arthritic, outdated institution.

NYFF 2011: 2 Small Films

2011-10-04T12:40:00.000-04:00

Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet, a small film about romantic disillusionment, takes place in the wilderness of Georgia, Russia, and follows two young travelers, Nica, (Israeli actress Hani Furstenberg) and Alex (Gael García Bernal) as they go hiking in the mountains. There is very little incident. The opening scene shows her naked and shivering, waiting for him to bring her hot water for her bath. They are roughing it, and the camera takes an intimate look at what seems their budding relationship. There's lots of sex, silent walks in remote places, trying to figure out how to communicate with the locals. Some scenes suggest the possibility of peril (like dancing with drunk locals at a crummy little bar), but nothing ever happens. Alex is relaxed and good-natured and for a Mexican male, extremely confident in his woman. She has beautiful red hair and seems to be fit and a game traveler. We don't know anything about them except they seem to be having a nice time. Both actors are gorgeous to look at in a completely natural way. Loktev is great at capturing unspoken nuance, tiny shifts of emotion, which her actors handle beautifully. Furstenberg is a very charismatic presence, absolutely stunning in some scenes, and coarse looking in others; she has personality to fill the screen and then some. The camera adores García Bernal and he is particularly good at being inarticulate. He is a great silent actor.
As they traverse the landscape with a local guide (Bidzina Guiabidze), nothing much happens until a small but loaded gesture, a threatening situation, provokes a reaction in Alex that completely alters Nica's understanding of him and changes their dynamic irrevocably. If before they weren't talking because they were happy in each others' company, now they are not talking because they can't bear to be near each other.
The movie aims to be naturalistic, but Loktev's stylistic choices seem pretentious. She cuts abruptly in scenes between them and the locals, but then the camera rambles endlessly in open shots of them walking through the spectacular landscape. She avoids the feeling of travelogue, but at the same time it is frustrating that we don't quite get to see what they are seeing. It feels deliberately claustrophobic. The sparse music score is one of those ugly abstract compositions that call attention to how arty the filmmakers are but add little to the images.

But even though the subtle psychological dynamics of the couple cast a certain spell, since the characters seem to be abstract figures rather than real people with past lives and present quirks, it is hard to be invested in their journey or their conflict.
The movie tries the viewers' patience with long aimless scenes and a disjointed rhythm. Once things get worse, the film gets better. The rift in the couple makes the guide, a man that is between benign and taciturn, potentially menacing, sense an opportunity. The ending is a wash out. Loktev goes for a very stripped-down world and, mostly through the excellent performances of her actors, who do a lot with very little, it does have a certain emotional power, but the self-conscious style gets in the way of raw emotion.

In my view, the same thing happens with Aki Kaurismaki's Le Havre, although this is a far more complex work, with a lot of cinematic references. The Finnish filmmaker is known for his stylized, quirky deadpan. Shot in beautiful compositions with harsh light and primary colors against flat backgrounds, Le Havre is quite remarkable to look at but at the same time its style is starting to feel a bit old. It is the kind of thing that directors in advertising try to imitate when they want to give ironic edge to their commercials, except they rarely know how to pull it off as beautifully. Le Havre is a sweet, subversive little fable about racism and immigration. It takes the opposite route of weepy, truculent movies like Biutiful or Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, which approach the topic with indignant moral outrage.
In Le Havre, a dreamlike world that pays homage to old French films with its deliberately fake sets of a quaint France, the old boulangerie, the old corner bar, the little cottage where the protagonists live, in contrast to the realistic, ugly modern port, some old folks band together to help a group of African illegal immigrants that are trapped in a ship container. The protagonists, an old couple that go by the names of Marcel and Arletty Marx, no doubt a nod to old French cinema stars but also to Groucho and Karl, are poor but happy. He is a debonair gent who shines shoes and can't pay the bills and she stays at home and cooks. His friends patiently allow him to freeload. They seem to stem from a distant age of dignity and courtesy, but in complete opposition to the world today, they have great empathy for the plight of the illegals and organize to save one of them, a young boy named Idrissa, who escapes from the clutch of the police. The actors are deliberately wooden and speak clunky, mildly funny dialogue. The characters seem to belong to the world of film, including a police inspector dressed at all times in a black trench coat and a black fedora, perhaps an homage to Jean Pierre Melville's tough resistance fighters. The gang of friends may have been resistance members themselves, with their instinctive antipathy to the police and an organic tendency to altruism. The meanie who blows the whistle on the kid's whereabouts is Jean Pierre Leaud, Truffaut's alter ego in many films, looking ghastly and mugging for the camera. Kaurismaki has composed a little love song to his favorite French films, the ones full of esprit de corps and humanity, the Marcel Carne's, Jean Renoir's, Truffaut's, rather than the brainy Godard, Bresson or Resnais.
The film is gently funny and offbeat and it convinces once we realize that Kaurismaki is not being naive, but quite the contrary, he is being a contrarian. He asks what if instead of rejection, racism and intolerance, Europe would be warm and welcoming to those seeking a better life. He has enough studied quirkiness to make the liberal pieties less preachy, but my problem with this film is that the high style creates distance, it screams look at me, instead of bringing the audience closer to the characters. Even though I really like the idea and appreciate the execution, I find it difficult to feel passion or enthusiasm for this film.
When you see deeply humane films like Miracle in Milan, which Le Havre resembles in spirit, those films are steeped in human warmth and they open your heart. Le Havre might bring a smile to your face, but it does not reach your soul.

NYFF 2011: A Separation

2011-10-03T13:44:00.000-04:00

Out of four movies I've seen in the Festival, A Separation, an Iranian film written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, is at the top of the list so far. Compared to some of the more self-consciously cinematic films we've seen, A Separation is almost decadently rich in human complexity, while it shows no interest in genre or style. This is not to say that it is not meticulously made. It is an astounding directorial feat, extraordinarily acted and edited, and so powerful that you forget you are watching a movie.
A married middle class couple in Teheran is going through a painful separation. The wife wants to emigrate and take with her the couple's only child, a 12 year-old girl. She wants the husband to come with them. The husband will not go. His father has Alzheimer's and he needs to take care of him. We learn this at a brilliant opening scene, the couple looking straight at the camera, telling their grievances to a judge. Although we hear the judge's questions and admonitions, we never see him, but soon we are as involved as he is in the painstaking minutiae of marital recriminations, since we are watching from his point of view.
This simple separation sets in motion a spiral of consequences that affects far more people than this nuclear family. From the very beginning, we are asked to be the judges, and soon we will realize that it requires beyond Salomonic wisdom, patience and fortitude to figure out what is just and what is true. Life is extraordinarily complicated, and life under the current Iranian regime, makes it more so. This movie is probably the Iranian film that paints the most comprehensive, detailed look at life in Iran today, and it broadens considerably our limited notions of what that is.
This opening scene could be a spectacular short film in itself. People talk over one another, the judge seems either blasé or exhausted about the whole thing, but the law is that the child can't leave without the father's consent and that the divorce needs to have absolute mutual consensus. They are at an impasse.
Good luck to me trying to summarize the plot. I don't think I'm spoiling anything, since in this movie God is in the details, and I am grossly simplifying, but proceed with caution:
The wife decides to move out of the house until the issue is resolved, so the husband needs to hire a woman to come and help him take care of his father. It is evident that it was the wife who bore the brunt of the responsibilities at home, and neither the husband nor the daughter know how anything works in that house. The cleaning woman, who brings her adorable little daughter along, was not told that she had to touch the father, let alone clean up after his incontinence. This constitutes a severe religious problem for her. She can't even tell her husband that she is alone in a house with a man. So the employer lied to her, and she lies to her husband, because she is desperate for work. All lies seem to come from simple fears: the employer urgently needs this woman and is afraid she won't work for him because of her beliefs. The woman is afraid of offending God and her husband. One day, the guy comes home to find the woman and her daughter gone and his father on the ground, disconnected from his oxygen tank. The woman comes back from an errand and he is so angry that he fires her. As he fires her, he pushes her out the door, she falls in the stairway.
Anybody who comes from a country with deep economic divisions will immediately recognize the patronizing tone of the husband towards the cleaning woman, and the endless reserves of frustration and anger from her unemployed, debt-riddled husband towards the well-to-do and educated. We never think of Iran in those terms, because all we know about is censorship and religious rule, but even though this religious reality is essential to the plot, the topic at the heart of this movie is not that, but class warfare. It just so happens that the classes are divided in terms of religion as well: the rich are progressive and not religious, and the poor are devout to the point of superstition. They will be satisfied if someone swears on the Koran (but even they, in a pinch, are ready to bend the rules). The rich could not care less about these notions. You can imagine the clash of cultures.
Once the force of unexpected consequences is unleashed, you sit at the edge of your seat, listening to different people give their versions of what happened. The law deals with absolutes, but human life is mired in nuance and equivocation and ambiguity. This is the source of such unbearable, rising dramatic tension throughout the film that it is no wonder that A Separation is being promoted as a thriller. Rashomon has been mentioned in connection to this film, but the style could not be more different, starting from the fact that everybody is in front of the judge at once and there's a messy debate between the parties. Revelations unravel in an endless spiral of motivated, justified, complex lying. Other people are asked to give testimony and they too suffer the consequences of bearing witness to a simple conversation.
What is the purpose of the truth? Can it be bent? Can it accommodate human mistakes? Who is to blame? Is the law fair or impossible? Can ancient notions of honor coexist with life in a modern country? At one point the judge cradles his head in his hands and we feel his pain. Who could possibly mete real justice on such murky terrain? Even as he refrains from depicting the Iranian regime in simplistic terms, Farhadi's insistence on human fallibility is the strongest point he makes against a regime that governs through divine absolutes.
The wonder of this movie lies not only in that it has an incredibly complex and sophisticated plot, but that it never abandons the wisdom, humanity and the fairness with which it treats its characters, none of whom are purely evil or purely good, but most of whom are maddeningly self-interested, irrational, human. It deliberately leaves some of our questions unanswered. After spending such an intense time with the characters, we probably can come to our own conclusions. But it is much more than an incredibly compelling legal procedural. What makes A Separation enormously moving are the bonds between parents and children, the unbearable loss of family cohesion, for rich or for poor.

NYFF 2011: Miss Bala

2011-10-03T00:00:00.001-04:00

Although it is described as an action thriller, what Miss Bala does best is make palpable the feelings of fear, revulsion and violation that Mexicans have been grappling with since the dawning of era of the war on drugs.
Laura Guerrero, (Stephanie Sigman), lives in Tijuana with her father and brother and dreams of entering the Miss Baja California beauty contest. In a flash, her world is upended when her best friend Suzu is caught in the crossfire of Lino, a drug lord (Noé Hernández) who storms a sleazy nightclub and sprays everybody with bullets. Laura hides in the bathroom, but he nabs her and spares her life in exchange for criminal favors. Suzu has made acquaintance with some shady guy and that's how it all starts: you come near someone with "connections" and next thing you know, either you are dead or there is no way out. Written by Gerardo Naranjo and Mauricio Katz as a nightmarish version of Alice in Wonderland, and directed with panache by a much improved Naranjo (I'm Gonna Explode), Miss Bala portrays a country that is completely defaced by crime and corruption. Things are beyond outrageous, but that's how things are. Lino has unchecked power: he and his gang roam the streets of Tijuana armed and unimpeded, they close streets, plant bombs, massacre people dancing in nightclubs, have gunfights in plain daylight, buy their arms from a gringo on the other side of the border, and can even fix state beauty contests. Nothing is outside their purview of terror and nobody can refuse or resist it. What unfolds, is in fact, something that looks like an actual war. You would think you are in Baghdad, but this is the new normal.
Mexico is a surrealistic country and its particular war on drugs has Mexican surrealism written all over it (the cult of the Santa Muerte, narcocorridos, the grotesque violence). In the movie, as in life, bodies are dumped in front of the US consulate, strung from bridges. This movie is far less violent than what goes on in reality (decapitated heads appear in Acapulco beaches, people are burned inside casinos). Even though the movie feels tremendously violent, there is little graphic violence, a great directorial choice. Miss Bala depicts the ascendancy of the drug cartels as de facto rulers of Mexico through the point of view of Laura, showing it as the rape of the country that it is; for Laura Guerrero, in my view, symbolizes Mexico. One good day she finds herself in a gruesome nightmare and she has no idea how the hell she got there or how will she ever get out.
Everything outrageous that happens in Miss Bala is credible, and Mexicans will recognize this tragic state of affairs almost with a shrug. It is the realism of the surreal. There are a couple of plot points that strain credulity, chief among them the fact that no one in Mexico, unless they are five years old or just flew in from Mars, voluntarily goes inside a patrol car with a policeman. I could suspend disbelief because the movie establishes that Laura, who does this, is desperately looking for her friend Suzu, and she makes the grave mistake of asking the police for help. This particular cop works for Lino (who doesn't?), and soon she is spirited down the rabbit hole of the drug business.
The organizational skills of Lino's gang are amazing; I wondered if they ever actually had time to run the profitable side of their business, busy as they were killing other gangs, exacting petty but bloody revenges and orchestrating symbolic gestures of terror.
The movie works like a charm until the end of the second act, which takes place at the state beauty contest, with a scene of marvelous, piercing irony. Laura gets what she always wanted, though not the way she wanted it. The movie could have ended there but there is a final chain of escalating humiliations. Suddenly, we understand Lino's contest-fixing motivations (although the deals he makes are not entirely clear to me), and the war on drugs is uncovered to be an enormous farce, staged with the bottomless cynicism of those with power, for the duping of Mexican society and of our neighbor to the north, whose gargantuan appetite for illegal drugs is largely the cause of all this misery. I understand the filmmakers' decision to take the story to its natural and extreme consequences, which is to say that the war on drugs is a losing proposition because many of those who are supposed to be fighting it are actually abetting it. In terms of storytelling, however, it feels redundant, even as the bitter ironies of Laura's brush with the drug cartel keep piling on. In the end, although the story could benefit from more clarity, what boggles the mind and is very effective, are the endless layers and implications of moral rot of everything we just witnessed. Mexico is literally being raped and betrayed, and sinister forces are in cohoots to strangle it.
Miss Bala is being marketed as an action thriller, but a movie with a heroine who is forced to commit crimes in order to survive is not your typical action flick. Usually, films with passive protagonists are hard to watch because if the heroes are not the agents of change, it's hard for the audience to care. But Miss Bala works as a fable, because Laura is put in a situation in which she has do what Lino orders; otherwise she's toast and so is her family. Her dilemmas become existential. No matter how she slices it, she is drowning in rot. The suspense comes from wondering if Laura is going to summon some sort of integrity and stop being a slave to Lino, and whether this is even feasible. To the movie's credit, it steers clear from cliched heroics and wishful thinking. There is nothing that Laura or anyone can do to stop the putrefaction. When she does try, her motives are less decency or integrity than revenge, revulsion, and reaching the limits of human tolerance of humiliation and depravity. What happens to her embodies the sense of shock, revulsion and mainly of impotence that is gripping the country. Similarly, the drug lord's character summarizes the ambiguity that some Mexicans feel for the societal cancers that are the narcos. He seems to have protective feelings for Laura, but they are just his way of playing God. He can grant her life, riches, miracles, just as easily as he can send her to the lowest depths of hell, or kill her and her entire family. In the end, he is a user and an abuser, and there is nothing in him remotely approaching redemption, which is as it should be. Some Mexicans' admiration for the moxie of these barbarians is not only puerile, but tragic. Miss Bala makes clear that there is no sense of honor in these gangs, just unspeakable, depraved cowardice.
This movie poses an interesting conundrum: it aims to thrill and entertain, while at the same time it argues a sober message about the reality of the Mexican war on drugs. This is not in and of itself contradictory; a movie like The Hurt Locker is a perfect example of a great action movie that is also a serious anti-war movie. Yet in the case of Miss Bala, something feels amiss. Perhaps the titles at the end stating the number of victims and the billions of dollars reaped by the cartels are unnecessarily preachy. I enjoyed it very much as an acute and accurate metaphor of Mexico today, but I never felt I was watching a crime caper or an action thriller. It is way too tragic for that.

Contagion

2011-09-20T14:06:00.002-04:00

I'm with the Japanese. I believe that at this point in human history we can relegate the hand shake to an ancient custom. We live in a time where you shake someone's hand and could get sick. So why don't we all greet strangers with a respectful little bow? According to Contagion, we could save ourselves a lot of grief.
The first half of this movie is pretty gripping. Nothing scarier than a natural disaster movie in which the killer is invisible, airborne and spreads by contact or by sneezing. The first sequence is a precise rendering of our modern fears. Someone shakes a hand in Hong Kong and dozens of people get terribly sick all over the world. Our cramped urban and flying quarters are hotbeds of infectious disease, and paranoia. The opening sequence includes many darkly fun takes of innocuous daily occurrences that become tinged with peril. A horrible death may lurk inside an innocent bowl of peanuts. Anybody who lives in a big city with a subway is going to get a perverse kick out of this film. The New York audience chuckled with delight at a scene in which a very sick guy is told to get off a bus and he touches absolutely every pole in said vehicle before he gets out.
The spread of contagion is seemingly initiated by Gwyneth Paltrow while having fun in Macao. By the time she gets home to Minneapolis, she looks like death. The initial symptoms are classic flu, and as we all know, that has never stopped anyone from doing whatever they need to do. But then it gets much worse. We don't know how she got it. Is it avian flu, pig flu, a stomach flu, or was it a night of forbidden sex? Soon the movie is talking about 25 million victims. The efficacy with which director Steven Soderbergh shows the world reacting and adapting to the pandemic is chillingly matter-of-fact and it's the best part of the movie. He lets the details tell the story. A sniffling passenger on a plane gets a glass from a stewardess, and there goes the global neighborhood, from normalcy to a state of emergency like from 0 to 60. Without much warning, the signs of society breaking down start appearing on the screen. The first sign of apocalypse is uncollected garbage everywhere (a perfectly normal occurrence in New York City, which may be the reason why the filmmakers chose San Francisco to shoulder the burden of chaos instead). I loved the visual scope of the movie. An enormous empty warehouse is found to quarantine the sick in the US and Kate Winslet, playing an investigator from the CDC says, "great, now we need four more like this one". A simple shot of a steep San Francisco street, strewn with garbage, is a perfect visual metaphor for a world turned upside down by a mysterious infectious disease. Forget about zombies, vampires or even evil Muslims. The bugs are much scarier (which may be the reason why this is the number one movie in America).
An interesting idea the film posits is: when something like this happens, how do the authorities react in order not to create mass panic and mayhem? Who can benefit from such massive distress? (Somebody will). And what is the ethical way to proceed if you have inside information about the disease? Like the virus, one word from an expert asking someone not to tell anyone is all it takes to spread panic among the population. What if that anyone is a good friend you ran into at the supermarket? How can you keep a secret like that?
As other critics have pointed out, Contagion makes clear, despite Republican protestations to the contrary, that no one but the government is equipped to deal with impeding doom of this scale. The Centers for Disease Control, which is the epicenter of the movie, its fictional budget hopefully un-slashed, goes in full heroic mode trying to contain, and find a vaccine for the disease. The head of the CDC is played with humane gravitas by Laurence Fishburne. I'm happy to see an African American actor in a role usually reserved for white stars. One of the most subversive aspects of the movie is, in fact, the casting. Most of the heroes are women: Kate Winslet, Jennifer Ehle, Marion Cotillard, they all play capable scientists trying to contain the disease. The always solid Matt Damon plays Paltrow's husband, yet his heroics are of a purely personal nature. He is relegated to keeping himself and his teenage daughter alive, which is no small feat considering that he needs to keep her away from her boyfriend at all times.
But as smart as Contagion is, it has some heavy handed aspects. Jude Law plays a blogger with a suspicious either cockney or Aussie accent, who spreads rumors and misinformation. He is such a nefarious villain that they even mar his handsome face with a rotten front tooth, an unnecessary choice, since Law relishes being despicable with no need for prosthetics. Although I liked that the movie made a forceful point against the kind of people who spread unfounded rumors about useful vaccines and idiotic conspiracy theories or who profit from widespread panic, I thought the filmmakers were too unfair to bloggers. We are in trouble when the blogger in the movie is even more conniving than the hedge fund manager. What about religious nutcases? I expected them to make an appearance as the usual cheerleaders of doom, always in time to celebrate an upcoming apocalypse, and I find their absence unrealistic. There is also a loathsome female bureaucrat. It wasn't clear to me who exactly she works for, but she is the kind of person who says no first, and asks questions later.
The movie is structured like Babel or Traffic, (they share the same editor, Stephen Mirrione, who has worked on many an unruly plot structure). This is both a strength and a weakness. This braided structure lends itself more naturally to this story of truly global repercussions. But then there's the problem of tying a bunch of loose ends by the messy final third of the movie, which is when the movie deflates. Soderbergh seems to be in total control of the narrative up to the midpoint or even later, but then characters that seemed to have an important role are promptly forgotten. Elliot Gould is introduced as a scientist who is growing live viruses in his lab and then he is unceremoniously dropped (you can do that to other actors, but not to him). Something unbelievable happens to Marion Cotillard while she investigates the source of the outbreak, but in the movie no one seems to care about her fate until the very last minute. This dilutes the concentrated, scary excitement that the movie builds while showing simultaneously the search for a way to stop the outbreak, the heartbreaking personal story of Matt Damon, the vulnerability of the first responders, and the general chaos, which is the most fun. Looting, forlorn airports, scarcity, mayhem, and key actors dying surprisingly soon. I loved that. The disease spares no one, even if they have won Oscars.
But the movie has a relatively pat ending that ties all the loose ends all too neatly and somehow belies its own thesis, which is that fighting infectious diseases that keep mutating is very hard and takes too long. Jennifer Ehle (who, to tug at your heartstrings, needs to be the daughter of another selfless scientist who is dying of the disease), spends most of her time on screen saying unintelligible scientific words with great assurance and looking very hard for a vaccine. She then ends up saving mankind, I will not disclose how, but I thought that it was too easy.
The movie starts at Day 2 of the pandemic and ends at Day 1, when we finally find out what made Gwynnie sick. I wish it would have shown more clearly that, ironically, it is our progress, the fact that we have built roads connecting distant villages and bringing better living standards to people, that allows viruses that have never lived outside non-human host to travel towards us in our shrunken world.
Still, as disaster movies go, Contagion is smarter than usual, and scarier.

Drive

2011-09-17T12:24:00.003-04:00

I don't know whether this noirish car chase movie should be taken seriously. There's much in it that has got to be tongue in cheek, although it's hard to tell whether director Nicolas Winding Refn and screenwriter Hossein Amini are dead serious or joking. Either way, if we can't be sure, something's not working. A.O. Scott, in his review, called it "conventional and timid". I would say that it is artificial and antiseptic, despite its ridiculously cartoonish bloodbaths. It feels like a extended music video, polished to within an inch of its life, full of scenes in slow motion with a bubbly 80's soundtrack.
Drive is the story of Driver, (Ryan Gosling) a man with no name, few words, and an inexhaustible reservoir of brutal anger, who does Hollywood stunts for a living and helps with the occasional heist. As much as I love Ryan Gosling, and as good as he can be, he's no Steve McQueen. He's no Clint Eastwood. He's too fresh faced and too expressive to fit the lonely, silent action hero type. At his age, guys like McQueen and Eastwood already looked like they had a lot of mileage. Gosling has good moments in this movie but he is not helped by a director who has no clue about what to do with characters and actors. I can buy the silent dangerous type who decides to redeem himself by falling in love with the single mother of a sweet kid. It's been done to death. But as played by Carey Mulligan, this woman is so beatific you almost expect her to sprout a halo. Turns out her husband (Oscar Isaac) is in jail. So Mother Theresa here seems to have a penchant for troublesome men. Problem is, there is nothing in her character that remotely indicates how or why. It would help if she wasn't this flat fantasy of female benevolence. Give her some sexy, some neurosis, some sense of fear, some danger. I find saintly mothers of cute kids as offensive a female stereotype as whores with hearts of gold, bridezillas and bitchy career women.
Gosling and Mulligan have some chemistry, but Refn deliberately misses the one moment where sparks could fly. Gosling is driving her around, and she chastely puts her hand on his. We never see their faces. There is no sex at all, except for a kiss in an elevator, which is the best scene in the movie and also the most ridiculously grotesque. These choices may be Refn's commentary about the puritanical pornography of violence in America, but this still does not help us care about the characters.
Drive looks great, sounds great and performs the requisite car chases with cool efficiency, but watching this movie feels like watching the chassis of a very shiny sports car. There is little there, and what little there is, is either too dispassionate, or very discomfiting. I was struck by the fact that if you do the math, in the social-racial arithmetic of this movie, the three "good" characters are white, (Gosling, Mulligan and Bryan Cranston as Gosling's mentor), she is married to a no good Latino, and the meanies happen to be two absolutely horrible Jews (Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman, both expertly chewing the scenery). Feeble lines of dialogue attempt to justify the motivations behind these two execrable people. In the case of Nino, played by Perlman with great panache, he's a wannabe Italian mafioso who bears a grudge because the guidos call him a kike; and Brooks is excellent as a businesslike crook who owns a collection of exquisite blades and knives with which he bleeds people (I assume mostly gentiles) to death. Those he likes, he bleeds more gently, and this is supposed to make him human. I was faintly reminded of medieval blood libels, but perhaps, being of the Jewish persuasion, I'm too sensitive. Still, I can't help but think how these kinds of toxic representations keep bubbling up in the collective unconscious. I'm not saying that there cannot be Jewish gangsters or evil characters in movies, as there are in life, but in a movie with only six characters, two awful Jews is a bit dispiriting, to say the least.
There is a difference between nihilism and empty cool. This movie looks like it wants to be some sort of an existential meditation on the vicious corruption of money, but it is too stylish, too controlled and too basic to really dig for the dirt. The violence is so over the top as to be risible. The characters don't have credible lives. Even if steeped in all the conventions of the genre, which can be quite fun, Drive is pretty lifeless.

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaucescu

2011-09-13T12:33:00.005-04:00

This provocative, bitterly sardonic documentary starts at the end of Ceaucescu's life, when the much diminished Romanian dictator and his wife Elena sit in a court refusing to answer questions. It is a shock to see a country's leader barked at by somebody who remains unseen. He sits there, impassively, in his expressionless default mode, but looks shrunken (if it were possible to further diminish a man so devoid of charisma). The first impression is of two ordinary elderly people. They'd look like ruddy peasants if it weren't for their ornery haughtiness. Power confers distorted stature to the most unlikely people. No Winston Churchill, Stalin, or Mao, this little party hack, who astonishingly ruled Romania for almost 25 years, was a terrible speaker and looked like a pudgy rodent. One spends the mesmerizing, sometimes frightening and sometimes mind-numbing three hours of absurd official footage that comprise this fascinating film wondering how in the world he managed to rule that country for so long.
The concept behind this darkly ironic movie, is as its title describes, to tell the story of this man exclusively from his point of view. It is a testament to the isolating magnetic field of power. The archival material is incredible; some of it, particularly the material in black and white, is beautifully shot. It must have been official footage, since the camera is always present to record tovarich Ceaucescu at every parade, every march, every speech, every tour. The endless barrage of official visits to factories and bakeries, party officials trudging through corn fields (!), communist harvest days, labor day parades, has an astonishing and prismatic cumulative effect. It probably mirrors what many people must have felt living in a groundhog day-like nightmare of relentless communist propaganda. At the same time, it is a study in the insanity-provoking effects of absolute power.
Crowds always applaud incessantly. Relentless, pointless, ridiculous applause. There is so much applause that I thought the CIA could use the soundtrack of this movie to torture prisoners in Guantanamo. Who are these people who applaud to no end? Are they true believers, or are they there faking happiness on the factory's time? There are always crowds lining the streets, waving flags, clapping, but the camera is seldom interested in selecting the individuals among them. They are, according to party dogma, the Romanian "people", a designation one should be very wary of. According to these images, Romanians are a happily communist bunch. But the scenes of a congress hall full of toadies, of robotically applauding apparatchicks, make one shudder at the thought of how easily the masses can be manipulated. How easy it is for many to feel safe in the anonymous embrace of acquiescence. Totalitarians know this and exploit it to no end. Yet watching this film didn't make me feel as smugly comfortable as I would wish with our own massive acquiescence in our so called democracy. We also have plenty of applauding sycophants.
Brilliantly, the film follows Ceaucescu's rise chronologically, and even though we never get to hear from anyone else, it gives a basic tour of his idiosyncratic brand of socialism. I had to read about him in Wikipedia, but pretty much everything in his entry is represented in the movie. The crucial thing that's missing is a different point of view. He started out as an anti-fascist fighter, the son of peasants, and rose through the ranks of the communist party. He was bold enough, as unprepossessing as he was, to defy the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He had an independent streak and courted Western nations. The Russians somehow put up with his antics.
As multitudinous parades go, it is easy to infer that the better the parade, the worse off the people. Hence, North Korea takes the cake when it comes to awesome displays of Communist apotheosic kitsch, followed by China, with Romania a close third. In a very absurd bit, we see the welcome he got in England, where the Ceaucescus were received by the Queen with more pomp and circumstance than anybody has a right to deserve. When he makes it to the US, back when Jimmy Carter was president, the American welcome is downright pathetic, compared to what he's used to. Sparse, unmotivated crowds, who do not do anything in unison, and a puny dais with ridiculous bunting. A sad affair.
After a zillion parades, and trips to Maoist China and North Korea, things seem to sour. Perhaps he was impressed with these countries astounding penchant for unbelievable displays of massive human calisthenics. But apparently after his visits with Mao and Kim Il Sung, he imported the cult of personality and a harsher Marxist-Maoist line. He then lost total contact with reality. There is a great scene in which he speaks to his congress about the creation of endless committees (something out of Ionesco, except he isn't joking). Pictures with his likeness start appearing, followed by his wife's as well. There's footage of him playing volleyball (he was worse than me, and that is saying something), presumably with the national Olympic team, and pursuing certain pleasures not quite in the spirit of Communist sacrifice, such as gruesomely hunting bears, and swimming very badly in some pebbly sea. As heads of states go, the Ceaucescus must win the prize for hillbilly unsophistication. But he must have been a formidable manipulator to last as long as he did.
Subtly, sinisterly, one starts feeling the cracks. Natural disasters befall Romania. A terrible earthquake, a flood. He visits and ungracefully waves his arms, as if decreeing nature to get its act together. He is creepily inexpressive throughout. He decides to build a megalomaniac avenue with megalomaniac buildings. The scale model itself is megalomaniac. Yet the few shots there are of the streets paint a different picture from the land of abundance that appears in all the government kitsch. Buildings look dilapidated, the place looks like a backwater. When it's time for the obviously staged footage of food stores grotesquely laden with obscene surpluses of food, one immediately knows that the moment he visits these bakeries and stores, people must be suffering terrible scarcity.
Then one single man dares confront him in Congress. You can hear his wife saying, let him speak, as if she is granting permission to some lowly servant trying to say a word in his own behalf. The comrade objects to the fact that Ceaucescu has deftly maneuvered the byzantine levers of the communist bureaucracy to reelect himself yet again, but he is promptly drowned out by the unanimous jeers from the entire audience. Truly frightening.
There are many pleasures to be gleaned from this approach that lets the narrative of the tyrant speak for itself. You recognize the same party hacks from the very beginning of the movie, getting senile but still in power. You see the changes in fashion and the increase in the grandiosity and absurdity of the Communist rhetoric.
We know the people revolted against his regime because in the end, he ran the country to the ground but this was not recorded for his posthumous autobiography.
We hear about Timisoara when he addresses the nation blaming the violence on foreign imperialist agents (who else?), and next thing you know, he and his deceptively mousy wife are sitting defiantly but clearly fearful, on the other side of an angry show trial. Then the screen goes black.

9/11 at 24 Frames per Second

2011-09-11T09:52:00.002-04:00

United 93 by Paul Greengrass

I wrote this article for a Mexican magazine five years ago. The translation from Spanish is mine.

Five years after the 9/11 attacks, the media asks whether the American people are ready to watch films about the topic, if it’s not too soon to reopen the wounds caused by that terrible day. If five days after the debacle, there were already people on the streets of NY selling souvenirs about the catastrophe, five years later should not be such an issue. We all knew that when the smoke cleared, Hollywood would put its machinery to work. The question was how. Those of us who saw what happened that day with our own eyes, without the filter of TV screens, know that the eeriest thing was that to the naked eye it looked exactly like a disaster movie. Looking towards the World Trade Center you almost expected Godzilla to appear from behind and crunch everything underfoot. The attacks were spectacularly cinematic. When wondering how the movies can recreate this event in an authentic way, the question arises whether the 9/11 attacks themselves could have been possible without the influence of movies like Armaggedon or Independence Day. Paradoxically, the challenge for filmmakers is to tell this story in a realistic and credible way, so it doesn’t look like yet another run of the mill disaster movie.

Which is why perhaps, to date, there have been an infinite number of TV programs and documentaries on the subject, but only a handful of commercial movies. None of them has been a sure-fire commercial hit. One of the most notorious ones is Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, a documentary satire of the Bush administration. As far as fictional recreations go, since there have been other attacks in Europe and elsewhere, and everybody now lives in mortal fear every time we go on vacation, people don’t exactly storm the box office to watch these films.

In my opinion, the best movie about the topic is Paul Greengrass’ United 93. It is a documentary-style recreation in real time about the fourth hijacked plane, which was apparently deviated by the passengers so it would not crash on the White House. It took me several weeks to find the courage to go see it. The real reason for my interest was Greengrass’ work at the time. Bloody Sunday, his movie about the Irish troubles, impressed me greatly. When I saw United 93 a few weeks after it opened, it had only made $30 million, a paltry sum compared to the box office of movies like Mission Impossible III or X-Men, which opened around the same time.

United 93, is in my view, the best disaster movie ever filmed. The mantra “it’s only a movie”, which one whispers in the dark to ward off heart pounding fear, serves no purpose in this film. United 93 is written and directed by Greengrass as a reverse paradigm of disaster movies. Dialog is pithy and direct, not heroic, not patriotic, symbolic or sentimental, but rather existential. There are no big speeches, or anything that sounds like words in a screenplay, only the urgent language used in situations of extreme crisis. The greatest virtue of this movie is that it is an existential drama, shot with unknown actors and real people. United 93 has no famous stars playing heroes. We completely identify with the passengers and those on the ground who try, unsuccesfully, to help: orphaned of artificial hopes, abandoned to the confrontation with the incomprehensible, without the consolation of a Harrison Ford ready to save the day. There are no satanic Arab villains either. The movie starts, quietly and shockingly, with the terrorists meticulously preparing themselves in their hotel. They shave, dress, eat, pack, pray in silence, which makes their next actions seem even more absurd: their humanity makes them truly sinister. The film also shows, without cheap political shots and in a hair-rising way, the ineptitude of the authorities in real time. In hindsight, one is flabbergasted at the incompetence of the government’s and the military response and at the incredulity of the authorities in charge that this could happen to the most powerful country on Earth. Greengrass understands that reality is much stranger than fiction. His realistic and rational style allow the passengers’ rebellion to be credible and logical, and hence truly heroic.

Oliver Stone's World Trade Center

In contrast, Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center is an emotional story about two real policemen who were trapped underneath the rubble. Stone, who served in Vietnam, identifies deeply with Americans who have risked their lives for their fellow citizens. One of his obessions is the American people’s lack of awareness about those who sacrifice their lives for their country (Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, Salvador). World Trade Center is not a political movie and does not bother with the terrorists or the historical context; it glorifies the bravery of the policemen and firefighters who tried to rescue people in those buildings. This is a big surprise for those who expected an anti-government screed from Stone.

The movie starts with Nicolas Cage, and his partner, the excellent Michael Peña, getting up at dawn to go to work as Port Authority policemen. From the first two seconds, we know we are watching a Hollywood production. Everything is a cliché, including a transvestite prostitute who shuffles around 42nd Street, before 9 am, where such beings have become virtually extinct since the Disneyfication of the area. What is admirable and powerful in the film is the extraordinary recreation of the towers, both from inside and from outside. Using extraordinary digital effects, Stone reinvents reality prior to and during the attacks with chilling authenticity. He has the good taste not to recreate the actual crash of the planes and he never shows the towers falling, which one is grateful about, although he does show over and over the images on TV screens, which were replayed that day and beyond ad nauseam. The recreation of the disaster area and the consequences of the first impact is totally genuine (bits of paper flying, smoke, and those infernal ashes). To see the halls of the mall beneath the towers and the subway stations as they were before the attack is shocking. It is also extremely sad.

I can’t say I liked World Trade Center. But it did shake me emotionally. Even though the dialog seemed simplistic, cliched and unrelated to real life, I have to admit I cried rivers of tears.

World Trade Center is an homage to the heroism of the police and the firefighters, but that is the reason why it lacks bite. In contrast to United 93, in which the suspense is unbearable (even though we all know the ending), World Trade Center moves back and forth between the trapped heroes and their families above ground with great emotion but no dramatic tension. The focus on the personal makes it lack conviction and indignation. The setting is recreated with great fidelity, but the characters feel made up, even if based on actual people. They sound like movie heroes. This is the trap that this event sets for those who want to retell it as fiction in moving images. It is hard to compete with reality.

The movie ends two years later with a happy ending, the heroes more or less recovering, their families grateful. The truth is that many people who survived the attacks have suffered from PTSD. A recent article in New York Magazine interviews several survivors and many of them felt alienated from their families, incapable of sharing their experiences, guilty about having survived and prone to panic attacks. The Village Voice told the story of three firefighters whose lives have been terribly affected by their work in the highly toxic rubble. Many rescuers now suffer from respiratory disease, cancer and other problems.

At the end of the movie, titles appear with the number of victims: 2792 civilians from 87 countries, 343 firefighters and 75 police officers. The film versions of 9/11 remind us that the world is not the same since then. Our reality is more unbelievable than any movie. What shocks is the innocence of terror in which we lived in the good old days.

The Debt

2011-09-07T11:07:00.000-04:00

An uneven, unconvincing film by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) about the story of Mossad agents on a mission to capture a horrible Nazi doctor, The Debt could have been a much more competent movie. As it is, one thinks one is going to see a Mossad caper, only to find out it's an interpersonal spy love drama about truth and lies. I'm curious whether the source material, an original Israeli film, was better at tying everything together.
Many things fail to convince in this film, the casting being first among them. For a convincing Israeli accent in English, the only movie that can serve as reference has got to be Adam Sandler's hilarious Don't Mess With the Zohan. Granted, the Israeli accent is heavily phlegmy, so Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, Jessica Chastain et al, come up with varying degrees of mittel-European that are daintier but not very authentic. Marton Czokas is the one who fares best in the accent and Israeli deportment category.
The Mossad agents are supposed to speak Hebrew among themselves in heavily accented English. They are on a mission to capture a Mengele-ish Nazi doctor in East Germany and bring him to trial in Israel. They also seem to be the most incompetent Mossad agents in history, because they bungle everything. At one point, the Nazi, (the excellent Jesper Christensen) who has been speaking German to them all the time, switches to English, which must mean he speaks flawless Hebrew. This is extremely confusing, distracting and ridiculous.
People are making much about the fact that Jessica Chastain doesn't look anything like Helen Mirren, who plays Chastain's character later in life. That didn't bother me as much as Sam Worthington, a kid whose stonefaced appeal totally eludes me, becoming Ciaran Hinds, or the very handsome Marton Czokas becoming Tom Wilkinson. I actually thought Chastain and Mirren were quite good as the same person. As good as he is in everything, I just can't see Tom Wilkinson as an Israeli. Furthermore, the movie is so clunky that even he and Mirren, who can usually do no wrong, seem unconvincing.
The actors seem as uncomfortable with the fake accents as they are with the tone deaf, grandstanding dialogue. But it is nice to hear them speak German and Russian (but no Hebrew). The best actor in the movie (and this is becoming some sort of terrible-fabulous cliche, what with Christoph Waltz, Ralph Fiennes and Bruno Ganz being fabulous Nazis in movies) is Christensen, who is chillingly, efficiently and humanly evil.
The gist of the movie, which is that these people lied for years in the service of national healing and of their own job preservation, is very interesting, but it gets lost in the piecemeal handling of personal drama, spy action and history lesson. There is a much smarter, tighter movie buried within the premise of The Debt.

On DVD: Network

2011-08-19T13:01:00.001-04:00

A truly prophetic movie about the debasement of popular entertainment and the noxious influence of TV, Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Sidney Lumet, is so timely right now that it should be required viewing for anyone who "is mad as hell and cannot take it anymore", which is pretty much everyone these days. Watching it, I had an epiphany. If we were to revisit the great American films of the seventies, we could just watch them and pretend that the downward spiral to moronic, corporate, hellish Hollywood movies never happened. There are so many good ones, we wouldn't miss a thing. They are newer, fresher, more brave and more original than anything we watch today. They are still surprising. In fact, they are surprising because they are so brazen, so free, so unencumbered by accountants and lawyers. I could not believe that MGM, a major studio, financed and distributed this movie, which basically spends two hours heaping damnation on companies like MGM. Network is sharp, and angry and it is basically Chayefsky's cri de coeur, his personal diatribe. It is theatrical, full of lengthy speeches, some of them the best expository writing in film; it is a freaking rant, is what it is. It stings and it bites and it warms the heart with divine vitriol and, as every Sidney Lumet movie, it is alive and crackling with energy. Lumet is the greatest master at casting character and background roles. Every person in Network is perfect.
I saw Network at the Plaza Satélite cinema with my friend Lani when were were about 15 or 16 years old. It rattled me, but I did not understand it. I thought it was over the top. I did not understand why Faye Dunaway would seduce an old man like William Holden or why that had anything to do with the story (three cheers for the loss of innocence!). I thought it was grossly exaggerated and bitter. I resented that it wanted to punish those of us who actually loved watching TV. Who the fuck did this movie think it was? There was something in its crankiness that I felt was valuable, I just did not now exactly why. But that is the beauty of revisiting the classics. You get a chance to redeem yourself.
The miracle of Network is that it is even more relevant today than it was when it was made. I imagine that this movie will never lose its prophetic powers, because things can and will only get worse. What seemed then an unhinged, crazy idea for a news show, with anchorman Howard Beale (Peter Finch) sharing the stage with a fortune teller and God knows who else, is not out of touch with the total debasement of the news today. Diana envisions a show about domestic terrorists who film their own attacks, which is totally prescient, not only about reality shows, but about people using cameras to document their every fart. There is a great scene where the network's army of lawyers are reading the contract for a TV show with a communist leader and the leader of some guerrilla group who are supposed to star in it. Both communism and the guerrilla pretty much go out the window at the mere mention of who's gonna make what money.
Five actors got Oscar nominations for this movie. But first let me say that having William Holden and Peter Finch in the same frame is, for film buffs, the equivalent of the 72 virgins in paradise for other people. You just can't believe you are lucky enough to be experiencing these two charismatic, masculine, awesome movie stars and great actors together at once. Finch won the Oscar, for his is the showier part, although Holden just kills, as Max Schumacher, a seasoned news producer, a relatively decent man, caught in the ratings frenzy, swept aside by younger, greedier, more ruthless people. Holden devastates. I miss him horribly.
The fabulous Ned Beatty plays a corporate titan and was nominated for one amazing speech in which he basically says there is no democracy and there is no America, there is only IBM, and ABC, etc. Only corporations rule. Beatrice Straight, won the best supporting actress Oscar, also for one scene as Schumacher's wife. Faye Dunaway won an Oscar for her excellent work as flinty, driven network executive Diana Christensen. In the excellent commentary he provides in the DVD, Lumet says that when he first spoke to Dunaway about the script, he told her: "I know what you are going to tell me, that there is no vulnerability in this role. There is none and if you give her vulnerablitly, I'll make sure to cut it out of the movie." She said something like, "let's get to work". This is called cojones, and this is why I love and miss Sidney Lumet.
Lumet says that everybody spoke of Network as a satire, but that for him and Chayefsky, who both got their start on TV, everything in the movie is sheer reportage.
I believe him.
He also mentions that he has never been a director of comedy, although he has a great sense of humor. To me this is the key to the disturbing dissonance of this great movie. It is an extraordinarily biting satire, but it is not directed as such. It is served with as straight a face as possible, and Lumet amps up the drama, which makes it far more dangerous than if it had been treated tongue in cheek.
Some of the dialogue in this movie only Paddy Chayesfky could get away with. Characters explain at length who they are and why they do what they do, but the language is precise, lethal and delicious and it is just a joy to hear it. It also brims with truth.
So if you are feeling angry, there is nothing more satisfying than checking out this awesome, bilious film.

The Help

2011-08-18T09:22:00.001-04:00

I don't know what is more offensive, the self-congratulatory wishful thinking behind this story: Skeeter, a white aspiring writer in Mississippi (Emma Stone) helps bare the truth about race relations between the black maids of Jackson and their white employers; or the dispiriting conventionality of this movie. This movie is so artless, in the crude sense of the word, so uninspired, so unimaginative, so doggedly conventional, so incompetent, that it actually makes the offensiveness of the white girl savior fantasy almost irrelevant.
This movie has the curious virtue of making one more annoyed the more one thinks about it. While watching it, one is mercifully distracted from the corny mess by some of the very game performers, who endeavor to lift it out of its own stiff, calculated phoniness. As the simplistic pap it is, (which I imagine is similar in the bestseller) it goes in easy. It just leaves a very unsatisfying taste in one's mouth.
The performances are all over the place. Among the better ones, my favorite is Sissy Spacek's, as the mother of Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) the arch-villainess of the story. Spacek is so at home in the place, she is the only person in the entire movie, with the exception of Leslie Jordan, the hilarious guy who plays a newspaper editor, that actually seems to belong in Mississippi. It's not only because her accent seems fine, (fahn), is that she is unhurried. She is laid back. She belongs to a place where time (tahm) is slow. Most everybody else seems to have driven from LA, gotten a dialect coach and played let's dress up and act like manic Delta queens. But Spacek is softly eccentric, and she does not overact. Her timing is impeccable. Jessica Chastain, on the other hand, goes all out. She plays a busty, giggly blonde with gusto. She is totally over the top, but she is excellent because there is a core of sweet, unconscious decency in her. The director, Tate Taylor, is so clueless that he chooses to leave in some of her more exaggerated reactions, but she is still very appealing. Of all the young women in the movie, she is the only one who seems to have a more dimensional character, even if it is a caricature. Allison Janney, as Skeeter's mother, is as always, funny and solid.
I really want to like Emma Stone, for she has the spark of a movie star, she is quirky in a good way, but as of yet, she has a limited bag of tricks. She plays a spunky, unconventional woman who wants to be a writer, but she seems to be the same person she is in all the movies I have seen her in (Easy A, Crazy, Stupid, Love, and this one). Skeeter is potentially an interesting character, someone who straddles conventionality and independence, which is a hard balance to master in life. Opportunities are squandered to show how she evolves emotionally to reject the culture in which she's been brought up, or how conflicted she is in not agreeing with her square friends, or how maybe a part of her would like to really belong to that clique. But she seems more driven by her desire to be a writer than by any pressing sense of injustice. This may be real, but it could be more interesting. Instead, it seems is that she is going through the motions of the plot. To be fair, none of the characters act realistically in this movie. They don't have a moment of human spontaneity, unless they're Sissy Spacek.
Only actors with a deeper sense of craft emerge unscathed from the broad strokes of corn and caricature the director heaps on the treacly story. Hence, Bryce Dallas Howard, playing Hilly, is so simply and stupidly evil, she is hard to watch. Her acting is at the level of drama club in high school. Someone with more chops could have infused something more complicated in the character, not just a caricature of ridiculous prejudice. It would have been interesting to feel sorry for a woman so benighted, so heartless, so convinced of segregation. After all, she truly believes the help is happier using their own toilets. But Howard is one step from twirling her mustache, if she had one. Reese Witherspoon would have known what to do with this role.
As for Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, the actresses who play the two main black characters, Abileen and Milly, they are both intensely committed. I have only seen Davis in Doubt, and she brings that same intense defiant dignity to both roles, but I happen to think she is a bit hammy. There is only so much dignified defiance one can take in an actor. Spencer has a wonderful presence, she is immensely likable, but she seems to reprise the stereotype of the folkloric, sassy black housekeeper, with as much panache as she can muster. The two actresses give it all they've got and they keep the audience awake, but they deserve better written roles.

The idea of asking "the help" about how they feel could yield a lot of extraordinary material in the hands of an insightful writer. As it is, it is nothing but sentimental pap that female audiences should know better than to accept: simplistic notions like "all the Black maids love the white children they raise" (as usual, all of them are paragons of goodness). Or, these black maids try to give better values to the white children they raise, but they end up being ungrateful racists. I think this is a bunch of hooey. These maids are too busy doing all the housework and babysitting all day long to be instilling lofty values on the kids they mind. They can be loving caretakers and the attachment to the kids is mutual, but idealizing their tough reality doesn't do them any favors. It just makes white people feel better for feeling bad about it.
I come from a country where maids are known as "the happiness of the home". I am extremely curious to know how audiences in Mexico will react to this film, because the help's situation in Mexico right now is way too similar to that of the help in Mississippi in the 60's, if you can believe it. In Mexico, many maids have maids quarters with their own bathrooms, they care for rich children and leave their own behind in their impoverished towns or villages. In Mexico, nobody sits to have lunch with the maid, unless it's the children. But reality is complicated and the justifications for prejudice and segregation are almost elegant in their compromise and denial. The wealthy are useless and need someone to do everything for them, and the poor need to eat. It is the status quo, intensely unfair, murky and codependent, and both sides abide by it in the interest of social harmony. I'm not saying this is how it should be, it's just how it is. People have been trying to unionize maids in Mexico for years. It ain't happening.
The Help at least has the good graces of not pretending that the civil rights struggle in the South was initiated solely by a curly haired white proto-lesbian and the two maids she coaxed into spilling the beans. The movie integrates the murder of Medgar Evers as a backdrop for raised consciousness on both sides. But what annoys and insults is the oversimplification. There are many moments of ridiculous triumph, in that pat Hollywood equation that if you do the right thing, you get amply rewarded. The busty woman learns to cook and makes the southern meal to end all southern meals all by herself (in one night!) and she and her husband sit Milly at the table. As if. Milly and Abileen come into their church on Sunday to, guess what, a stand up ovation (these should be banned from movies under threat of capital punishment; really, how low can you go?). Skeeter gets rewarded by her valiant efforts with bestselling success and a job at a publishing house in New York. Meanwhile, Martin Luther King was rewarded for his efforts with a bullet in the head.
If this movie were more honest, Abileen, instead of cheering Skeeter to go look for her life in NY, would tell her to get out of Dodge and never come back to that dump, but it's all a big Hallmark card of enormous back-patting. To add insult to injury, the pathetic and ill-advised inclusion of a song by Bob Dylan has a kind of a bull in a china shop effect, but in this case it is actual art, interrupting two hours of well-meaning, queasy kitsch.

On DVD: Taxi Driver

2011-08-15T20:14:00.000-04:00

I am taking a screenwriting class where we chose to read Paul Schrader's screenplay for Taxi Driver. It is a magnificent script that reads like a novel. I loved it even better than the movie because it is much more evocative, and although Scorsese created a great work of art with the material, the movie seems rushed and blunt in comparison.
When I first saw Taxi Driver I was in my mid-teens. I didn't like it. The music seemed horrifying, everything was terribly sordid and gruesomely violent and scary and dark and relentlessly ugly. I had seen movies about tough topics but I had never seen such an ugly, ugly film. Robert De Niro scared the shit out of me. The sight of Jodie Foster, who was about my age, as a prostitute, was too much for me to bear. I had a very visceral reaction to the film, as if I had been exposed to ugliness and moral squalor I did not expect nor welcome. I felt sullied by the film and I didn't understand why it was considered a great movie.
I saw the movie yesterday again for the first time in about 30 years. It's good to grow up.
For starters, I was shocked at how less shocking Taxi Driver seems today. Granted, this was the film that opened the door for very graphic and explicit violence in movies (more than Bonnie and Clyde which was cartoonish). It was the film that inspired generations of filmmakers to glorify the aesthetics of squalid violence and to let blood gush aplenty. Today Taxi Driver is not only a prescient film about crazy loner killers, (they really seemed to come out of the woodwork after it came out) but a thing of terrible beauty. The visual panache that became Scorsese's trademark is there. The cinematography by Michael Chapman is amazing. It really is devised to make you see what the immortal Travis Bickle sees and feels through his windshield. They actually shot inside the car and drove around, without a camera car. That is why it feels so real.
Robert De Niro's performance is so scary, so true, so quiet, that it may be one of the aspects of the movie that will still send shivers down your spine long after you find the violence almost quaint (it isn't, but it has become commonplace). All the parodies that were made of De Niro's channeling of Travis' crazy self-regard are monstrously exaggerated when compared to the seething calm De Niro exudes in the film. His violence is so deep into his body and his soul that he is scary without even yet lighting a fuse. It is not a show-off performance. He is stealthy, quiet, almost mousy, but you can feel the hatred and the confusion in him roil up inside his taut, rangy body. If you must know, the famous "You talkin' to me?" scene is not in the original script. It was De Niro's choice. He was so brutally handsome, sad pathetic, dangerous, and coiled within himself I cannot take it. He kills me.
Yesterday I understood Bernard Herrmann's crazy, adventurous score. One part of it is just brutal, nasty, scary, but then there is this weirdly jazzy sax melody that weaves in between and points to Travis' sick obession with porn, his loneliness and the side of him that is redeemable. It is really a very bold choice as musical scores go.
In the script, as in De Niro's performance, what I find most disturbing is the tender side of Travis Bickle. He is some sort of warped innocent, almost an autistic person, who barely understands the rules of social interaction, a loner truly trying to belong and connect.
The DVD includes a lengthy documentary interviewing everybody for the remastered version of of the film. De Niro, in his usually reticent mode, Harvey Keitel, who was supposed to play the Albert Brooks part, but asked Scorsese to play the pimp, Cybill Shepherd, Peter Boyle, Jodie Foster, Brooks, Schrader, Scorsese, and Chapman. Very cool stuff.

On DVD: Two Exorcisms

2011-08-01T17:52:00.000-04:00

I never saw The Exorcist when it came out. In those days I was a total film snob and refused to sully my arty track record with Hollywood dreck of mega-hit magnitude, even if it was blockbusters everybody talked about. That's the reason why I didn't see Jaws when it opened. When I saw The Exorcist for the first time on DVD, not too long ago, I was surprised at how effective it seemed. It is a very well made film and it spooked me, even if I can't give a rat's ass about the devil, Satan, the Catholic Church or any of that mumbo jumbo. Seeing the digitally remastered DVD for a second time, however, was extremely underwhelming. I love the cinematography by Owen Roizman, and Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield, and the visual, sound effects and the make up are great, even if the make up isn't aging all that well. But The Exorcist is literal, basic and pretentious at the same time. It never bothers explaining why the devil wants to invade a smurfy, unlikable kid like Linda Blair, and the movie feels rather silly and campy rather than scary. There is very little suspense. The acting is over the top. The Devil and Max Von Sydow are the best things in the movie.

But perhaps I felt this way because I saw it right after I saw Requiem, a German movie from 2006, about a real possession case that happened in Germany in the 1970s.
Requiem has no effects. There is no green bile, no turning heads, no obscene bloody stigmata. No one dies. It's about Michaela, a young, devout Catholic college student, (the incredible Sandra Huller) from a small country town in Germany, who suffers from Grand Mal epileptic seizures, which make her hear voices. In her case, because she is a rather obsessive Catholic from a very devout family, she is obsessed with the idea of suffering and martyrdom, and ends up believing she is possessed by demons. Requiem is the most rational approach to the idea that a person can be possessed by outside evil forces. What satanic possession is to some, mental illness is to others. Here, the approach is dispassionate and barely ambiguous. The movie does not believe in demonic possession. But it believes that faith taken literally can trigger horrors of irrationality that can seem positively satanic, yet they are all in the mind. Watching Michaela destroy herself is super creepy. Seeing the actress teeter between total normalcy and lucidity and stubborn belief is super creepy. She is a very sympathetic character. A nerd, a fish out of water, she has a stone cold, controlling mother who wants to keep her from hurt but under her thumb, and an understanding father (Burghart Klaussner, the clergyman from The White Ribbon) who wants her to live her life. At school, far away from home, her epileptic episodes become tinged with religious overtones. She believes she is incapable of touching a rosary, then incapable of praying. She thinks demons lurk inside her. Her young friends want her to seek psychiatric counseling, but she refuses. The family, being devoutly Catholic, also frowns on horrid-sounding diagnoses from the doctors. No one wants to believe their child is mad. Michaela stops taking her pills. She gets worse. What is terrifying in this small, effective film is how isolating her madness is, but also how willful. Her willfulness envelops everyone around her, like what she probably assumes is what charismatic saints do to other people. Instead of going to a shrink, she goes to her parish priest. Surprisingly, he tells her that the devil and the miracles and all those tropes of good and evil are not to be taken literally, but as symbols, and that what she needs is a shrink! But she doesn't listen, so another, younger, creepier priest steps in and wants to perform an exorcism. Since she refuses medical treatment, she makes this the only option available to her. She is hell-bent in believing she is possessed, therefore she is. I find this not only enormously disturbing, but more terrifying than buckets of cheesy Hollywood make-up. Whatever demons she has rest solely in her psyche, which can be the most terrifying place of all.
There are a couple of scenes in this movie that are the same in the American movie. The scene where the mother is bathing her in the bathtub and the scene where the priest first confronts her demons. They could not have been achieved in more opposite ways, but Michaela's reaction is very similar to Regan's: she screams hysterically, she curses the priests, she gets completely out of character -- you'd think she had the devil inside her.
In the end, a chilling title informs us that Michaela died of exhaustion after 12 exorcisms. This is the stuff that makes the hair at the back of my neck stand on end.

Crazy, Stupid, Love

2011-07-31T13:48:00.000-04:00

Much better than Eat, Pray, Love. Or at least more genuine. This movie by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (the more bracing I Love You Phillip Morris) is fun and entertaining and has some game performers in it, but in the end I found it unsatisfying. A movie about the complications of wilting, unrequited, budding, painful, and/or loveless love, it starts out by looking into several characters and their love problems, but by the third act it becomes so conventional and contrived it seems to contradict its own thesis. You can't spend most of a movie saying that love is complicated, that love comes and goes, that it hurts so much it is "for assholes", and then give the audience the usual theory of "the one" and the "soulmate" (a concept I loathe). It's sweet, but a total letdown. It's also untrue. Some people are lucky to think they found "the one", others are content with being with the closest thing to "the one" they'll ever find, others think they've found "the one" and then are disappointed when it becomes "the none". This movie is fun as long as it shows how hard love is. Divorce is horrible, unrequited love is painful, fear of loving is the pits. But its treacly, over-staged, ridiculous ending does it a huge disservice, and Ficarra and Glenn, who are capable of great mischief -- these are the pair who wrote Bad Santa -- seem oddly restrained by all the well-meaning romance.
Steve Carrell does his usual effective turn as a clueless everyman who is kind of bland, passive aggressive and deeply wounded by his impeding divorce. He's funny and affecting. There were hordes of women at last night's show and they all let out a collective gasp of awe and wonder when Ryan Gosling took his shirt off. There is a bedroom scene in which the camera makes love to his torso, a nice change from the usual fixations of the male gaze. Gosling, excellent actor that he is, plays his lothario character straight and makes him totally believable. A bit of a cad, but a charming one at that. Of course every woman that lays eyes on him is going to follow him home (get in line).
Of the women in this movie, the one who impressed me the most is the lovely and funny Analeigh Tipton, whose teenage love pangs for Carrell are both funny, embarrassing and very touching. She does the flustered adolescent really well. Emma Stone is the closest we have today to a Rosalind Russell type, a smart firecracker. I just wish she had the confidence to mug a little less. She has a beautiful, expressive face, no need to scrunch it at all times. Julianne Moore brings her quasi-hysteric touch to Carrell's ex-wife. She's pretty good, but maybe someone less high-strung would have been better. Marisa Tomei is good, but rather broad, in her role as a recovering alcoholic teacher and jilted woman. In general, the gals seem to be working much harder than the guys.
Crazy, Stupid, Love is sharper, and more realistic than most Hollywood romantic comedies nowadays, but this bar has been set very low for ages.

Sarah's Key

2011-07-26T14:32:00.001-04:00

The Holocaust Film Studios, aka The Weinstein Company, bring us yet another movie on the topic. This one, I must say in some disagreement with the ornery review from the NY Times, is not as grotesquely offensive as Life Is Beautiful or The Boy in The Striped Pajamas (just the trailer offended me). It is at times powerful, at times corny. But it is effective.
Sarah's Key is a Holocaust movie with a twist. In this case it's the French government, not the Nazis, who are the epic villains. The focus is on the deportation to concentration camps of 76,000 French Jews by the French government in enthusiastic solidarity with the Nazis.
This is a twist that works. At this point, the sight of sadistic but stylish Nazis barking in German at all times has become a cliché. But sadistic French flics? The paragons of enlightened reason rounding up their own citoyens with less pity than they afford cattle and sending them to their deaths? This is nouveau in a country revered by its legacy of democratic ideals, liberté fraternité egalité, etc.
This French movie, directed by Gilles Pacquet-Brenner, is based on a bestselling novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, and it has the contrivances of such. I bet it's the Weinsteins candidate as the French entry for the foreign film Oscar. It's not good enough to be Oscar material, but stranger things have happened (i.e Life Is Beautiful). A clown in a concentration camp: give me a break.
Kristin Scott Thomas plays Julia Jarmond, an American journalist who is married to a French architect and lives in Paris. Scott Thomas is one of the three actresses who currently speak both English and French without an accent. They could have gotten Julie Delpy, but maybe Scott Thomas is more of a marquee name. Charlotte Rampling is the third, but she is long in the tooth for the part. Scott Thomas doesn't even try to imitate an American accent, but since she's such a classy actress, one doesn't care. Julia works for some implausible invented magazine run by expats, which is the weakest and less believable part of the movie. The clumsy, expository scenes consist of three bad actors and Scott Thomas gamely trying to rescue them from total failure. The present is interwoven with scenes of the Starzynski family, emigres from Eastern Europe, who are taken from their apartment in the Marais, now chic as hell, but in those days a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, like the ancient Lower East Side.
In the Summer of 1942, over 12,000 Parisian Jews were violently rounded up by the French police and put in a velodrome to swelter, starve and fear for five days (today the site houses the Ministry of the Interior), in an action that Julia describes to her young, ignorant cohorts, as ten thousand times worse that the Superdome after Katrina. The 10 year-old Sarah Starzynski, the impressive Melusine Mayance, a tiny dynamo with great presence, hides her little brother in a closet as she and her parents are rounded up by the French police. Then she has to live with the consciousness of her decision: did she save him or did she doom him? The story of this family, even if fictionalized, is very similar to thousands of stories that happened in reality. The scenes of deportation are strong and emotionally harrowing. Once again, one wonders how this could happen in the modern century, in the supposedly civilized continent, only 70 years ago.
The review in the NYT complains that the weaving back and forth between past and present looks demurely away from the horror, but I was relieved to have been spared the most morbid parts. Gilles-Pacquet is unsparing in the wrenching emotional reality of the characters, which has a stronger effect than a regurgitation of the images of mass dehumanization we all know all too well. The focus on Sarah and her family make the historical reality more traumatic.
Julia investigates the provenance of the apartment her family is moving into at the Marais, which turns out to be the Starzynski's home. Julie has marital problems of her own, and she is furious with her husband's family for what she assumes was their complicity. Her story did not bother me because it is complicated. She is a crusader for the truth but her obsession with the story takes a toll on her personal life. I know this sounds like the biggest cliche, but somehow I bought it. Perhaps it's the dignified, quiet resolve of this actress that makes it believable.
I'm sure there were a lot of nasty people like the wife of the concierge of the building, who was happy to give Jews away and get the keys back. Or like the woman who screams to the Jews that they had it coming. There were also many French citizens who fought the Nazis and actively saved Jews, like the peasant family in the movie, led by the always wonderful Niels Arestrup, who doesn't want trouble but cannot but be moved to help a child in distress.
Still, the ending of Sarah's Key is a bit of a cop out when it turns out that the family she married into was actually on the right side of things. They "didn't know" they were occupying the home of deported Jews, and they felt guilt and shame for many years after that. It would have been more interesting, if bleaker, to confront a family who did know, and looked the other way, or maybe even profited from the Jews' ordeal.
Fact is, after its defeat, Vichy France collaborated with the Nazis, to its everlasting shame. It took the French government until 1995 to recognize this, apologize and make some restitution. Now there are plaques all over Paris pointing to the buildings, kindergartens, schools and businesses that French Jews were expelled from. Of the 76,000 French Jews sent to the Nazi camps, only 2000 survived. However, 250,000 Jews survived in France, by their wits and with the help of some of their fellow countrymen. As opposed to Germany, where there is much hand wringing about the Nazi past, there are not many French movies (considering how prolific their film industry is) that deal with this dark hour.
Still, as Holocaust movies go, even in its maudlin present moments, Sarah's Key struck me as being slightly a cut above the typical Holocaust kitsch. It explores the burden of being Jewish and the burden of complicity, and even if it has a reassuring ending, it is more complex and less trivial than some of the other Holo-corn out there.

On DVD: Dog Day Afternoon

2011-07-26T09:06:00.001-04:00

Warning: You are about to read an unfettered, crazy mad rave about this movie, which I believe is a moral duty to see. There are spoilers ahead and I don't care.

As yesterday was the day gay marriage laws took effect in New York, what better tribute than this American masterpiece by Sidney Lumet, which is about everything: the Vietnam War, social injustice, powerlessness, sexual and racial politics, prejudice, love, loyalty and crowd control. This is the greatest movie about everything going wrong, and one of the greatest underdog movies ever.
I had not revisited this movie since I saw it in my teens, when by the end I was utterly bereft and crying like a banshee. Dog Day Afternoon is one of the saddest movies ever made. And it is about a bank robbery. It is very funny, taut and gorgeously well made. Lumet is the closest thing in American cinema to the Italian Neo-Realists. But since this is sort of a heist movie, it has a racing pulse too. Written by Frank Pierson, it is a masterpiece of tone.
Dog Day Afternoon is the quintessential New York movie, breathtaking in its spunk, its chutzpah and its humanity. Probably the best movie about New York, period. Forget about Woody Allen and his romantic, sanitized version of uptown. The opening sequence of Dog Day Afternoon with garbage strewn streets, the masses cooling off in Coney Island, 1970's New York in all its decay, is a true love poem to the grit of this town.
Everybody is incredible in this movie. Lumet was one of the greatest directors of actors. He had a gift for the authentic and watching his movies is like chomping on a great pastrami sandwich at Katz's, so spicy and juicy and satisfying.
The first time I saw it, I was so affected by John Cazale's performance as Sal, that I had forgotten that he barely speaks in the movie. His is one of the greatest silent performances in film. And when he opens his mouth, he is genius:
Sonny: "What country do you want to go to?"
Sal: "Wyoming".
According to Lumet, this was improvised. He claims that he burst out laughing so hard when he heard Cazale say it, that he was afraid he had ruined the take.
Charles Durning, as the police detective, is awesome. Chris Sarandon, as Leon, Sonny's (Al Pacino) "wife", super awesome (whatever happened to him?). The women and the manager at the bank, awesome.
I love the spicy language, which is not just random, pointless profanity -- Lumet had the ear of a gifted rapper. I love the details: A policeman snickers when Leo is brought in to the command center. After many hours waiting the police munch on food. The framing of tiny, bathrobed, Leo, hidden behind a policeman as he speaks to Sonny on the phone. The head teller who says matter of factly: "we are having a bank robbery". The girl who chews gum who seems to be thrilled to be part of it all. The way she plays with Sonny's rifle, feeling right at home in the company of the bank robbers. The crowd that cheers Sonny when he performs for them and throws money at them, but boos him and taunts him when they find out he's gay.
Pacino is unbelievable in this movie. If the people who hate him today (you know who you are) want a refresher on why he is one of the greatest American actors ever, they should see him in this.
What a character he creates. Sonny is a bit of a psycho and one of those people who has a knack for stirring up trouble. He is mercurial and somewhat delusional. He's a Vietnam Vet, and married to two people, a chubby loving wife and to Leon, who wants a sex change operation, which is the reason why Sonny robs the bank. But Sonny is like a human grenade of chaos. It's not evil chaos but the chaos of desperation. He has his ideas about justice, and he is not wrong, but he is also somewhat grandiose, goodhearted, but a loose cannon. Pacino is so expressive, he devastates just by using his eyes. He is funny and on fire when he works up the crowd, surprising even himself at their reaction ("Attica! Attica!"), enjoying his moment of glory when he has the police at his feet, for once in his life getting what he wants. But he breaks your heart in the scene where Leon is ungrateful and exhausted with him, and even more when he watches the hostages walk away without even looking at him one last time. You can see it in his eyes when he becomes conscious of the mess he is in. In one look there is an entire reckoning of his crazy, vain mistakes, of all the stupid shit he's done throughout his life. It is astounding.
As he says to his mother "I am a fuckup and an outcast". And so it is. A hero for all fuckups.

Tabloid

2011-07-14T15:14:00.000-04:00

In his documentaries, Errol Morris is fascinated equally by interesting human subjects, the thin line between fact and fiction, and the slippery nature of the truth. Oscar Wilde's dictum, "The truth is rarely pure and never simple", which should be the motto of this country instead of "In God we Trust", is a recurring motif in Morris' films. As opposed to other documentary filmmakers who use the genre to tell "the truth", Morris explores whether the truth exists at all. In his films there is not one truth, there is no objectivity, everything depends on the perspective of the subject and the truth is extraordinarily relative. I think he is a genius.
He has explored serious subjects in excellent documentaries like The Thin Blue Line, in which he so effectively challenged the findings of a murder trial in Texas that the case was reopened and the accused, exonerated; The Fog of War, about Robert McNamara, Standard Operating Procedure, about the photographs of Abu Ghraib and the soldiers who took the fall for them, and, my favorite, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred Leuchter, about the guy who invented the lethal injection, who also happens to be a Holocaust denier. Tabloid, his much anticipated latest film, is about a much flimsier, lightweight subject, yet Morris handles it, as usual, with great intelligence. It is still about the nature of truth and the thin line between fact and fiction. And in this case a bit tangentially about the nature of tabloid news, and how they are manufactured, both by the subjects and the press.
Morris unearths the long forgotten story of Joyce McKinney, who, for a brief time in the Seventies, captivated the public with her bizarre amour fou for a Mormon man. Joyce is a charming, vivacious and histrionic raconteuse, a motherlode of Southern eccentricity. I'm not even sure if her there is an official classification for her behavior in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. People with some of her traits, like narcissism and mythomania, but without her sunny disposition may be classified as sociopaths.
Joyce tells us her version of how she went to London to look for her beloved Mormon fiancee after he vanished from her, according to her, abducted by a Mormon cult. How she did this is what landed her in the tabloids and on the wrong side of the law, and it is such zany, bizarre fun, you'll have to see the film for yourself. Suffice it to say that for the British police what she did could be construed as kidnapping and rape, but to her, in her own words, it was "a honeymoon".
Morris is not interested in the facts of the story. He is interested in the retelling by Joyce and other competing narratives. We also hear from two British tabloid journalists, from a gay ex-Mormon, who explains some of that religion's oddest tenets and from the pilot who flew Joyce to England (Joyce couldn't just fly across the Atlantic like the rest of us; she had to hire a private plane, take a bodyguard and bring recording equipment and a bottle of chloroform).
Once the British press gets word of her exploits, Joyce, a world-class tease, becomes an overnight sensation and enjoys her fifteen minutes, until a competing tabloid, in order to sell more papers, fishes out nasty details about her past. When she realizes she cannot control the narrative anymore, she officially goes nuts (as opposed to being just her bubbly, creative self) and tries to jump out a window. She reminds me of Princess Diana: another gifted manipulator who loved to have the press on her lap, as long as it told the story she wanted to tell, but complained bitterly when she could not control the narrative. The problem with tabloids is that they control the narrative, and people are incredibly naive if they think they can do anything about it. The recent news about the News of The World and the phone hacking tabloid scandal in England could not be a more dramatic reminder of this (and could not have come at a better time for this movie).
Joyce's story is not as tragic as Di's, but it is very sad. She seems to have great reserves of spunk and optimism, and she literally shines now that she is in the spotlight again. There is something touching, almost innocent, about her relationship with the tabloids, in comparison to what goes on today. In our age of reality shows and tabloid news on TV, regular fame-seeking schmoes understand the racket and they enter it willingly and with premeditation. They are already calculating all the ancillary benefits, products, endorsements, and exposure they can get even before they know exactly how they are going to embarrass themselves in front of the entire world. As Sacha Baron Cohen showed in Bruno, mothers are willing to subject their babies to anything as long as they can get them on TV. Joyce is not like that. She is so kooky, she invariably ends up making headlines on the tabloids. In the Eighties she landed there once again, for totally unrelated but equally bizarre reasons, providing this movie with one of the funnier twists I've ever seen in a film. My impression is that she didn't do what she did with the intent to become famous. I believe her when she says she wanted her Mormon lover back. I think she's so crazy that she can't keep her eye on the money ball, unlike other more business-oriented tabloid fodder who parade themselves mercilessly to keep the cash rolling in (Kardashians, Paris Hilton, etc). Joyce gets distracted by her own romantic view of herself and forgets to cash in. What moves her is not greed, but her own self-mythologizing. Fame finds her.
Tabloid is a very entertaining and funny movie, but Joyce's story is very sad. She has been writing a book about her story since it happened forty years ago and it is still a work in progress! This is heartbreaking and somehow heartening at the same time.

Rapt

2011-07-11T11:55:00.001-04:00

A very timely French thriller by writer/director Lucas Belveaux, this gripping, intelligent film is about Stanislas Graff, a big French industrialist (the excellent Yvan Attal, husband of Charlotte Gainsbourg and my new crush), a major shareholder of a huge conglomerate, who gets kidnapped for money. He has a wife, two young daughters and a dog he adores and he lives in rarefied splendor in Paris. Once he is abducted, the dilemmas of paying the ransom and involving the police or not become entangled with the fact that his behavior prior to the kidnapping is not as pure and perfect as it should be for a man in his position. Sound familiar? He happens to be of those now ubiquitous, seemingly unimpeachable powerful men who tend to have a knack for taking secret risks. Pretty much everybody knows what goes on with him but, as long as their interests are protected, they look the other way. And so he is eerily and satisfyingly reminiscent of DSK. This movie was made in 2009, long before the DSK case, and I wonder if DSK saw it. In Graff's case, he doesn't do anything illegal. He loses a lot of his own money gambling and he has serial affairs. This is nobody's business until a 50 million euro ransom is demanded. And then everybody all of a sudden has qualms about him. The press pounces, the government winces and frets, the police meddles. We are dealing with the highest sphere of French society where big business is cozily in bed with politics and so this movie is less about the action film mechanics of a kidnapping, but about money, power and entitlement. At first I thought that Hollywood may want to look into the rights, but there's a hitch. Graff is not precisely a good guy. And if they want to make him into one, then they are going to ruin the movie. I've been crying in the wilderness about my despair and boredom with Hollywood's insistence in Arthurian heroic quests for every single movie, from thrillers to Pixar. Rapt is a perfect demonstration of a gripping thriller with no exaggerated heroics.
Belveaux is an actor as well and that may be why all the actors in this movie are excellent. Attal is incredible. When he is in captivity, one keeps waiting for him to exhibit what we always see in American movies, some amazing ingenuity for escape, or at least some cunning repartee with his captors. But he barely speaks. He is quiet, afraid, and totally obedient. He is realistically doing everything he can, which is to attempt no silly heroics, to preserve his life. For most of the movie, Attal is in non-verbal survival mode and he is transfixing. But later we see his real character, and the transformation is shocking. The movie has a great, controlled chase (no screeching tires, no explosions, no shootouts) a great twist, and while we are looking for culprits and conspiracies, Rapt is less interested in this than it is on the way people who only care about money, handle it, value it, negotiate it and gamble it. Rapt is clean, methodical and crisp: a very elegant fable about values and about the intoxicating power of money.

Larry Crowne: I'll Tell You Why It Bombed

2011-07-04T16:42:00.001-04:00

These days, $13 million in opening weekend means bombing, when movies like Transformers swallow every movie screen in the world and make $162 million domestically only. But one look at the trailer of Larry Crowne, another movie I do not intend to see, and you can tell they must be dreaming. Tom Hanks has not aged well. He is charming and gifted and a good comedian, but he has become some sort of lifeless icon of American toothlessness (some sort of downgraded James Stewart) and he may be a huge movie star but he is not and never has been or will be a romantic leading man. To be one of those, it helps not to have a double chin and to have a modicum of sexual frisson about you. Fail on both counts. Plus, anybody who played Forrest Gump needs to be immediately disqualified to be a leading man, ever.
As for Miss Roberts, the only time I've ever seen her have chemistry with someone other than herself was with George Clooney in one of the Ocean's movies, don't ask me which. Perhaps with Richard Gere in Pretty Woman. Or with Clive Owen in Deception. Or in Eat Pray Love with Javier Bardem, who has chemistry with a wall. Point is, give her someone handsome enough and watch her blossom. Who can blame her? Yet there is something brittle about her. It's as if she is pretty on the outside and rather thorny on the inside. This is not necessarily bad. She's good when playing edgy roles. But she is not an effortless charmer and no amount of marketing fireworks can convince anybody that she and Hanks have any chemistry whatsoever. Then the storyline sounds like homework: A guy loses his job at some sort of Wal-Mart and he goes back to school, falls in love with the teacher? Boy, I'm sitting on the edge of my toilet seat.
This may work on an indy film scale with medium sized stars, not mega watt constellations like Hanks and Roberts.

Eric Rohmer's Le Rayon Vert

2011-07-04T09:46:00.000-04:00

The unlikely heroine of this lovely, wise, delicate romantic comedy by Eric Rohmer is Delphine, a young single Parisian woman whose vacation plans are suddenly cancelled and now she is alone and with no Summer plans, which in Paris amounts to a slow and painful death. Parisians would rather be guillotined at the Bastille than remain in the city with the hordes of tourists and tout le monde away on vacances.
Delphine is nursing a broken heart (a certain Jean-Pierre, who haunts the movie like a ghost) and she is terrified of spending the Summer alone. Soon we learn that despite her understandable panic, she doggedly insists on being lonely. Delphine is a bit difficult, ornery, a bit passive aggressive. She thinks she is open minded and easy going, but she is a bit of a pill. Anywhere she goes, whether alone or with friends who try to cheer her up, whether the countryside, the beach or the mountains, she's shrouded by a fine mist of misery. There are many wonderful scenes of Delphine in her cloudy bubble, surrounded by people. She cries frequently and prefers to take lonely walks. She doesn't go sailing because it makes her seasick, she doesn't eat meat, she doesn't pluck wildflowers; she tries very hard to enjoy herself but is so uncomfortable in her own skin that every time she goes somewhere she tends to cut the time short and is back in Paris long before the holiday is over.
Rohmer trains his camera on the leisurely conversations that reveal her to her friends and to us, and little by little perhaps to herself as well. His movies are famous for their garrulity, but the conversations are natural and unrehearsed, they have the rhythms and the texture they have in life. She comes in contact with different people who shed light on her painful status and sometimes make it even sadder, as it is usually when one has the blues. One roots for her, almost goading her to go to the Alps, join her friends at the beach, go out at night, have some fun. We feel as desperate as a concerned mother or a good friend as we watch her retreat farther into her stubborn ways under Rohmer's wise and gentle hand. This is about profound sadness, yet Rohmer finds a lot of sweet and knowing comedy in Delphine's testiness.
When she finally changes, when our patience and sympathy are almost at a breaking point (out of true concern, not out of contempt), it is a complete and dramatic turnaround, yet it takes place as she sits quietly in a train station. This is equivalent to someone in another movie climbing Everest or discovering a new planet. That despite her nature she is willing to give it a go is hugely touching and feels like an enormous victory.
Enjoying the pleasures of an Eric Rohmer film feels like spending a lazy Summer afternoon shooting the breeze, chattering with friends about someone. But it also feels deeply true. Rohmer creates characters so real that you feel their pain in your own skin. You know people like Delphine. People who in their unassuming way bring their own dark, neurotic cloud to a sunny day. You've been there too, not only nursing a breakup, pretending there is still hope, but feeling horribly uncomfortable around people who seem to be having the most relaxed and happy time. Miserable in company and miserable alone. Who hasn't been there?
The humor is biting but very delicate, and very sympathetic. There is no cruelty in this movie except Delphine's own harshness to herself. The tone of the movie reminds me a bit of Chekhov's cranky, miserable characters whose hearts ache with unrequited love and self-loathing. Rohmer leads Delphine through a quiet, sweetly funny and profound epiphany and as difficult as she is, she is a huge heroine for having the guts to confront herself.

WTF With The Tree of Life

2011-07-03T18:01:00.000-04:00

The movie is a bit oblique, for sure, but I don't understand people who demand their money back or find it so impossible to digest that Salon magazine has to print a guide to it. You don't have to like it, you may find it pretentious, but try for a second to experience a movie that, contrary to what you are used to, does not masticate everything for you in a formula that you already know by heart so that you don't have to actually use your brain for two hours.
The Tree of Life is not pretentious in an intellectual way. It does not demand a whole lot of brain activity. Sure, it does not feel like it has a three act structure, and there is very little dialogue, and there are no robots destroying mankind, or women desperately looking for males, or heroes conquering something or other. It is a personal meditation on faith and nature. It requires that you surrender to its images, to the feelings it evokes and let the flood of visuals and moods wash over you. I think it is meant more as an emotional and aesthetic experience than an intellectual one. It is not pretentious like say Godard's films are intellectually pretentious. If there are any references in it, biblical, literary or otherwise, you don't lose the power of the experience if you don't know them. It's not the kind of movie who makes you feel like a fool by being erudite and pedantic or by name dropping cultural references. If you approach it with an open mind, and more, an open heart, you may get a lot of beauty out of it.
So stop the whining. Be truly adventurous and experience a different kind of film.
It's not gonna kill you.

Review of a Movie I Ain't Gonna See: Transformers 3

2011-07-03T16:59:00.001-04:00

What I find most offensive of all is not the millions of dollars spent in morally debased, deliberately stupid and neuron-killing entertainments such as this one, or that seriously good actors like John Turturro and Frances McDormand sully themselves by eating from this trough (I never begrudge actors their job choices, but there should be a limit). What I find incomprehensible is who decided that Shia LeBoeuf is a movie star. The man looks like a surly and maggot encrusted version of the Pillsbury Doughboy, with the difference that the corporate mascot has more charisma. LeBoeuf is not only a blight to look at, but has no discernible talent. Why would anyone believe that women want to be with him? Or that he is heroic? That Steven Spielberg/Michael Bay are enamored of him is unfathomable to me, and my theory is that sometimes directors prefer toothless leading men because they offer no real competition in the quién es más macho department, or they confuse "everyman" with what my friend Rebeca used to call tofu ice cream, meaning people of extreme blandness (remember Mark Hamill in Star Wars?). The only thing that made Star Wars palatable to me was Harrison Ford, for he seemed to be the only sentient being with personality in the entire franchise (except perhaps for Yoda).
Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Harrison Ford, George Clooney, Shia LeBoeuf? If anything goes to show how far we have fallen in Hollywood's rejection of urbane, sophisticated, mature, sexy manhood, he has to be it; he and tofu ice creams like Robert Pattinson, Ryan Reynolds and that blob of ground meat with eyes called Taylor Lautner. Are Hollywood machers afraid of bona fide movie stars with a soul and an edge, charisma and charm, because the 15 years old at the mall can't relate? It's the end of the world and you know it.
Of course not even a resurrected William Holden would make me want to sit through a Michael Bay movie, which leads me to my second point. Computer graphics as deployed by Hollywood today remind me of the Nazi Party. Technically admirable, extraordinarily effective and impressive to look at, perhaps, but soul crushing in their heartlessness.
Hollywood seems to be following the wrong instinct (they are laughing all the way to the bank, and if they were to read this sentence they would be crying with laughter, but still). We humans have a deep, primal and unique instinct for storytelling, but movies like Transformers are not telling stories any more. They are so debased in their quest for profit supremacy, in their appalling conquest of every movie screen known to man, that they are not even formulas anymore. They are as much storytelling as reading a supermarket list. They are just crunching numbers. You might as well look at the box office receipts and get your movie adventure hard-on right there.

Two by Nicolas Roeg

2011-06-27T13:03:00.000-04:00

Actually one and a half. On Netflix, I got John Schlesinger's Far From the Madding Crowd, based on the novel by Thomas Hardy. Cinematography by Nicolas Roeg.
Check out this astonishing trifecta: Peter Finch, Alan Bates and Terrence Stamp. The three of them in one movie is too much for the heart to bear. And they are all in love with Julie Christie! She says no to Alan Bates (impossible), perhaps to Peter Finch (probably the most charismatic human being ever) and she falls for Terrence Stamp, the worst choice of the three, but the most handsome one. It's a great story and it is gorgeously, stunningly shot in wide lenses and long lenses by Nicolas Roeg. There was a time in the sixties and seventies in Britain when they were making adaptations of English classics like this and the excellent Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, 1963). They told classic period pieces with modern panache, and Far From the Madding Crowd is not a dusty, fusty period piece, but a sensual feast for the eyes. It invites you to dwell in the life of the country with its harvests and storms and natural dramas. It is also one of those big epics where they have a musical overture and an entre'acte (so you can go buy popcorn or smoke in the lounge in style). Very recommended.

The next night I saw The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976) at Film Forum, which was directed by Roeg but shot by Tony Richmond. This cult movie is deeply strange. It's hard to reconcile the flawless cinematography of Far From The Madding Crowd (or even the elegant Don't Look Now, also directed by Roeg and shot by Richmond), and the experimental cheesiness of this one and think they come from the same visual mind.
It's a bit of a disappointment but well worth seeing just to bask in the glow of some truly insane seventies camp.
Some of it is hypnotizingly poetic, some of it is incoherent, vulgar and gratuitous. The actors are mostly campy. Bowie plays an alien who comes to earth to save his planet from drought (this we learn as the movie is ending). So he watches several TVs at once to try to understand humans. There is not much point in trying to summarize the plot, but there is a lovely sadness in an alien who claims that he is incapable of hate and gets corrupted by gin and tonics. He becomes a lush and doesn't fight back the evil humans who thwart his homesick desire to go back to his family. Bowie looks as elegant as Tilda Swinton, with amazing red hair and fabulous clothes. He is a great choice for an alien and has the high cheekbones of a true movie star, without the acting chops. Everybody else looks like shit. And then there is Rip Torn, who shows up, growls in his macho sarcastic way and steals the show. He's the only one who seems to know he is in some strange wonderland that doesn't make much sense and he doesn't give a shit. He's so much fun to watch. He feels like danger.
There is a plot, but the movie decides not to stick too closely to it. Roeg's predilection for intercutting scenes that happened in the past with the present, and his avoidance of narrative coherence gets a bit tiresome. There is some graphic and campy sex, but it is more shocking for the fact that it makes you realize that in movies nowadays the naked human body only seems to be comprised of the upper torso.
Some of its powerful images have been borrowed by people with bigger budgets (like The Truman Show). I also have a feeling that this movie was very influential to people like David Lynch and Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant. It's a frustrating movie, but on occasion quite transfixing.

The Trip

2011-06-12T10:27:00.019-04:00

The Trip is a hilarious, but also delightfully discomfiting journey through the north of England's wintry countryside with the brilliant Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, one of the most excellent, if reluctant, comedy teams around. Coogan is supposed to be writing about fancy restaurants for The Observer and he asks Brydon to come with him, despite the fact that he spends the entire movie pretending to barely tolerate him. As they did in director Michael Winterbottom's also excellent Tristram Shandy, A Cock and Bull Story, they play themselves, but it is not entirely clear if Steve and Rob are exactly like this in reality. It's like Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the layer of real versus real-but-pretend adds great richness to the journey.
The two actors are a hoot. They are both extremely funny in very different ways. Coogan plays himself as a cold, withholding, competitive, jealous, insecure narcissist with a terribly acid tongue. Brydon is sunny and cheerful but he likes to upstage Coogan. He is a compulsive entertainer and he has great one liners. He is the least horrible of the two, but he is a rather lazy explorer and not much of a risk taker, while Coogan at least likes adventure. It's bad enough when they are alone together, but it gets much worse when they are with other people. The movie is not just a collection of funny bits, but a great study in contrasting characters. No writers are listed in the credits, but I'm sure this movie was written by someone, and very well.
Brydon is a masterful mimic and he doesn't tire of making impressions of famous British and American actors, something that Coogan does equally well but decides that it is below him. They get into some hilarious dueling impersonations of famous thespians. Both have magnificent voices and since they talk a blue streak, this movie is also a feast for the ears. When Brydon recites poetry (often with someone else's voice), one remembers how beautiful the English language can be. But another interesting aspect of the movie is the investigation into the craft that their comedic talents require. They observe in painstaking detail exactly how the other actors talk and gesticulate, and it becomes clear that they are keen scientific observers of others. They are artists obsessed with their craft. But it's not all about impressions. The fact that they both converge in a Range Rover in exactly opposite periods of their lives is darkly funny too. They get on a roll with some really inspired improvised bits in the car, and Coogan gets to deliver the eulogy he would (reluctantly) give in case of Brydon's death. After all, comedy is serious business. These are two middle aged men at different points of their careers. Brydon is happily married and the father of a rosy baby, but one wonders when he chides Coogan for his freewheeling ways, and then wants to have phone sex with his wife, is he not a little jealous himself. He is, however, clearly content with his life. Coogan, divorced and still on the bachelor circuit, is miserable because he feels fame eludes him, and time is getting on. He is brutal with Brydon, but Brydon knows how to get him back where it hurts (anything mildly critical you say to a narcissist is bound to hit a raw nerve).
In the end, The Trip turns out to be a philosophical movie that explores fame, middle age, unhappiness, and friendship. Michael Nyman's melancholy music is an understated counterpoint to the hilarity. The Trip is also the most comprehensive exploration of comedic oneupmanship yet on the screen.
And how refreshing to be able to laugh heartily without vulgarity or bodily grossness. How mature! Coogan has been underused by Hollywood because he is too dry a wit and he is not an overgrown child, he is just a nasty adult (I do hope that the real one is not as bad as the one onscreen). He is justly admired by Hollywood comedians, but here they barely know what to do with him (I'm not sure that the 15 year-olds who live in our malls would get him). Brydon is a born entertainer, but he's also quite sophisticated. I think they should both stay where they are, not sell out and keep doing films together on he other side of the pond.
The Trip was originally conceived as a series of episodes for the BBC and you can find them in You Tube, but I really recommend that you go see the whole movie if it's playing near you. It is as rich and satisfying as one of those sumptuous meals Coogan and Brydon enjoy in their trip.

Beginners

2011-06-05T11:48:00.000-04:00

A case of terminal preciousness from writer-director Mike Mills, Beginners is a rambling, repetitive, faux charming movie about Oliver, a young man (Ewan McGregor, yum) whose father, Hal, (Christopher Plummer) comes out as gay after years of living a lie, and then dies of cancer. I'm not giving anything away; this happens in the first five minutes. The rest is a back and forth between the present, with Oliver, in mourning and deathly afraid of relationships, and Plummer, giving a saintly, restrained performance as a sick old man living it up before he dies. The best thing in the movie is Cosmo the dog, one of the best canine actors I've ever seen, playing Arthur the dog. He is funny and serene and I don't know if he put his costars through hell at the shoot, but he seems to be a consummate professional.
I have very little patience with twee, whimsical, independent movies like this one, where adults pushing forty refuse to grow up and act too preciously for words. Beginners is proof that some independent films have already become a tired cliche. It tries hard to avoid the conventionality of clear emotions (even if they are confused, they should be clear) and stays away from conventional dramatic exchanges. It's like mumblecore without the mumbling.
Oliver is an illustrator, and he draws deadpan illustrations of his sadness. He is asked to do a record cover for a band (the kind of band that exists in a movie such as this, as hipsterish as it is humanly possible), but instead he draws the history of his sadness. McGregor is lovely and tries hard to be soulful, but he spends half the movie watching his dad and his new gay friends in benign incomprehension, and the other half cautiously falling in love with Melanie Laurent, who plays Anna, a French actress. Most of the time he opens his eyes very wide and looks very, very sad. Laurent is not particularly charming. She lays on the French gamine shtick a bit thick (I will never stop resenting the way French women can put up their mussed up hair and look like they are eternally rolling out of bed and good at the same time). It is not understood why Anna and Oliver, who have a quirky romance in which they roller skate through the carpeted halls of her hotel, and do other immature things like write graffiti on walls (the movie takes place in LA), can't get their act together. It is all ascribed to Oliver's aloof and eccentric mother, and there is some allusion to a dark father on Anna's side. I never understood if he had committed suicide or he was threatening to do so. The little drama there is, however, is rather muffled, because it seems to be a convention of the genre that the characters should be emotionally unintelligible.
Now, a note on hipsters. Some of my best friends are hipsters. Seriously, I have some friends who could be described as such, many of them young, talented, smart and living in Brooklyn. None of them behave like the people in the movies who are supposed to be like them. They don't do cute. If they did, they would probably not be my friends (or I theirs).
For a movie about such a tremendous loss, Beginners failed to move me, and I think the reason is that the main relationships are sketched rather than fully realized, particularly between Oliver and his father. Oliver always keeps himself at a safe remove from his dad, which may be psychologically believable, but it doesn't make for an interesting character. He is rather passive and morose, and as much as McGregor infuses every moment with quiet emotion, it is hard to care for him as he does not allow anyone, including the audience, to know him. This I blame not on the actor, but on the writing and direction.
The movie uses up its meager reserves of charm quite soon after it starts and then repeats itself with precious tropes over and over. Oliver shows his apartment to Arthur the dog, then he shows it to Anna, then Anna shows her hotel room to Oliver, and so on and so forth. It's good to have recurring themes once in a while, but they are not supposed to sound like a broken record.
Let me point out that going in, I had nothing but good faith for Beginners, since I didn't know much about it. Had I known, for instance, that Miranda July was mentioned in the acknowledgements, this would have been a huge red flag for me. Beginners has plenty of her kind of smartypants shtick, although unlike her films, it does not set out to provoke. Quite the contrary, Beginners is too well intentioned to be interesting. I lost my patience at the emotional incoherence in the writing and the navel-gazing je ne se quoi of it all. The movie is more alive whenever Plummer is around. I'm not a super fan of his, but he has undeniable chops. Still, there was something about his final days, the corny camaraderie of his multiculti gay friends and the puppy love of his too cutesy boyfriend (Goran Visnjic) that seemed fake to me. Terminal illness is not only sad, it is quite often horrible. Hal is invaded with cancer, but he looks none the worse for wear. There may be amazing people like him, who have the best attitude and never show an ounce of bitterness, anger, frustration, or regret, but I found the entire situation bathed in too much golden light, so to speak. It would have been more interesting if Hal had not been such a saint. The same goes for Oliver. A dutiful son, an uncomplaining, befuddled guy, he doesn't seem to harbor complicated feelings other than sadness.