A Bigger Splash

A bigger cast could not have made me happier: Tilda Swinton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Dakota Johnson and Ralph Fiennes, stuck in an arid and steamy Italian island having rich white famous people problems. Apparently, fame is a bitch, so they are morose, ex-suicidal, bored out of their wits, or manically orchestrating fun.
I was not a fan of director Luca Guadagnino's stylish melodrama I Am Love, also with La Swinton, but this one I found more delectable, in the way that sea urchin is delectable: salty, sweaty, messy, sexy, with the longueur of an interminable hot summer afternoon in crumbling Europe. Decadence is so much fun, yet it is rarely found on movie screens nowadays. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, mostly for this reason, and because the four stars are such pros, it's a joy to watch them bask like lizards in the sun, all rotting inside, each one in their own way.
Tilda Swinton plays a rock star called Marianne, who is recovering from her lost voice with Paul, her beau and minder (Matthias Schoenaerts, the man who makes my knees, my heart and my soul quiver).  They make love, he takes care of her. It's Edenic, except that it is also sexy. All is good until her old flame shows up in the shape of Ralph Fiennes as Harry Hawkes, a devilish music producer, a manic louche with energy long past his impending expiration date, and his stunner of a newfound daughter Penelope, the sexy Dakota Johnson (who saved Fifty Shades Of Gray with her sense of humor).
Guadagnino is really good with atmosphere, and in particular, with the texture of the lives of spoiled people. You can tell his actors know this feeling in their bones. They lounge and laze about, colonizing the traditional island with their obnoxious fabulosity, Marianne wearing elegant nun-like clothes by Dior, Harry commandeering a little bar with karaoke, all of them appropriating the space around them with their extraordinary privilege.
I have seen most of Ralph Fiennes's movies, except for the ghastly Harry Potter series. He has never played a character like this before. He may not have been the first candidate to come to mind (I'm thinking Gary Oldman, less elegant; more rock & roll), but he makes up for it with an unsettling combination of desperate mischief and an equally desperate darkness that blossoms in Harry's rare moments of stillness. He is a middle-aged imp and the nonchalant way in which he disrupts people is careless, needy, and selfish. Yet, in the few moments where he settles down, he looks lost and devastated. He is utterly superficial, but he causes deep trouble. He is also not as bad as he could be. Penelope is worse. A quiet, lethal monster of self-involvement.
The whole thing is an unsavory menage a quatre, made particularly icky by Harry's inappropriate ways around Penelope. A backstory about how Harry basically ceded Marianne to Paul as if she were property to inherit compounds the incestuousness of it all.
At first, we think the movie is about Marianne, then we think it is about Harry. The four get a flimsy chance to show whatever ails them, but the movie is really about the obliviousness, the clubbiness and the sharp instinct for self-preservation of those who have it all.
Guadagnino spends three-fourths of the movie leisurely setting up the characters and their relationships, and one just sits there in the blazing sun waiting for things to disintegrate, which I found delightful. He subtly involves Italy around the edges with tales of immigrants dying to arrive at its shores; old-school, sleepy, provincial, Catholic Italy dealing with a harsh world by digging in its heels by tradition and exclusion. At the very end, bad things happen, not always credibly, but somehow powerfully.  Dark fun in the sun.

Hail, Caesar!

This movie is the sweetest bonbon: the Coen brothers' valentine to movies and to the old Hollywood studio system. If you are a movie lover, you'll get a huge kick out of their endlessly amusing treasury of references to different genres, movies and actors. If you are not familiar with the names Esther Williams, William Powell and Myrna Loy, Carmen Miranda or Walter Huston, you may still enjoy the trademark Coen silliness, framed by the gorgeous cinematography of Roger Deakins, the spectacular production and costume design, and the wonderful cast of thousands, which includes George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Scarlett Johansson, Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill and Ralph Fiennes, among others.
I hope the Academy waits to give Roger Deakins his long deserved Oscar for this movie. His cinematography, in 35 mm, no less, is a love letter to Hollywood films. It pays homage to every trademark Hollywood look of yore. He exquisitely and accurately recreates the sharp black and white of classic romantic comedies, the vibrant, primary Technicolor of musicals and epics, and he bathes Hollywood in a sensuous, warm and golden light, which was what made the studio moguls choose Los Angeles as the home base for their industry.
The plot, as Coen stories go, is a quirky caper about Eddie Mannix, a Hollywood studio enforcer (Josh Brolin) who has to fix everyone and everything so that the studio he works for, Capitol Pictures, functions properly. He's a straight arrow and a problem solver; and boy, is Hollywood rife with problems and people who are rarely any kind of straight. He needs to contain an Esther Williams-like star (Scarlett Johansson) whom the studio casts as an innocent and virtuous mermaid, and who is anything but. Because of casting problems, he has to turn Hobie Doyle, a country bumpkin cowboy movie star (the excellent Alden Ehrenreich) into a leading man for a Noel Coward-ish (Ralph Fiennes) drawing room comedy, except he sounds like a hick and can't act his way out of a paper bag. And then he has to contend with the fact that his hugest star (Clooney, always game for the Coens) mysteriously disappears from the set where he is shooting a movie about the appearance of Christ.
Nothing is like what the studio wants it to be, which is innocent and flawless. Only Mannix knows everybody's dirty little secrets and his job is to bury them. Everyone has a reality that needs to be transformed into wholesome fantasy, which in Hollywood, is a tall order.
That the movie starts with a looming crucifix and that Mannix happens to be a devout Catholic seems arbitrary, if not rather insane, but this is beautifully paid off, since this is a movie about faith, big stories, entertainment and the extraordinary feat of illusion that movies are, both on the screen and behind the scenes.
The zany plot involves disgruntled writers, communists, Herbert Marcuse (you heard that right), a dog, and two gossip columnists played by Tilda Swinton. It sometimes zips and it sometimes sags slightly, as it is sprinkled with cameos by movie genres.
Channing Tatum stars in a delightful tap dance number in the style of Gene Kelly's dancing extravaganzas. Scarlett Johansson dives into a gigantic pool of mermaids. Jack Huston banters with a dame in the back of a car, and Hobie Doyle goes from being an eloquently silent cowboy to the most maladroit leading man in film history.
In my favorite sequence, Mannix pays a visit to the editor of the studio, C. C. Calhoun (the one and only Frances McDormand) who is cutting a Thin Man kind of movie, in a moviola, while blithely smoking two inches away from highly flammable celluloid. The Coens lovingly render the clicking and hissing and spooling of film, spliced by her dexterous hands. They show how fragile a movie could be (and you'll find out just how dangerous). But the scene also shows in beautiful cinematic shorthand how a resourceful and embattled director (Ralph Fiennes, polishing his funny bone), and a good editor can turn a terrible actor like poor Hobie Doyle into a smoldering movie star with a few deft cuts and angles. Sheer movie magic.
Meanwhile, Mannix is being courted by the military industrial complex for an "easy" 9 to 5 job where he won't have to deal with egos and crazies all day long. He may be the ringmaster of an absurd circus but it is his circus, with his maniacs, and he can't turn away.
I kept wondering what does Jesus have to do with anything, but in the end, Hail, Caesar! is about two competing versions of faith and mythmaking: religion and the movies. If I understand this movie correctly, for the Coens, the movies are as good and as imperfect a religion as any, or even better. I'm with them.

Trainwreck

Some are complaining that this movie, written by Amy Schumer and directed by Judd Apatow, turns Schumer's irreverent and subversive humor into conventional comedy. I have less problems with having a happy ending in a romantic comedy, than with the movie trying too hard to appeal to both genders from Mars and Venus. Namely, I'm not interested in Lebron James, or Amar'e Stoudemire, or the NY Knicks, or any of the tepid, has-been celebrities who make undistinguished appearances for no purpose other than to satisfy fanboys. I'm interested in Amy Schumer, who is a sharp satirist and like many great comedians, is able to turn off-putting flaws into endearing quirks, and some seriously funny truth-telling.
I'm also interested in Bill Hader, who is funny and winning as Aaron, the celebrity sports doctor who falls in love with Amy. Besides, it's a sin to waste screen time on sports stars when it could be wisely spent on Tilda Swinton, doing an unrecognizable turn as a horrid editor, or the funny Vanessa Bayer, or Ezra Miller, upon whom one could gaze at for two hours without interruption. And I'm mostly interested in "Amy", a magazine writer and unapologetic slut with commitment phobia, and in how, to her chagrin, she ends up falling for Aaron.
The Knicks must have paid for the branded content, and Apatow and Schumer try very hard to weave them into the story. Except for a funny visual gag in which Hader plays a mano a mano with Lebron, and a droll cheerleading routine, the time we spend in the guys' corner (sports) is deader than a four day old dead fish. It's as if someone were afraid that guys can't laugh at a female character who loves to drink, sleep around and is mortally afraid of commitment. You have to give the guys something else, whether it is projectile vomiting, which I doubt any woman has ever demanded from a movie, or wooden sports stars. Don't we trust that Amy Schumer can carry her own high-concept film without this kind of help? Women rarely get their something else in most Hollywood flicks for guys. We just sit there through the endless chases, gun fights and explosions, our eyes glazing over.
Trainwreck feels schizophrenic, swinging between Schumer at her best, and a patchy script. Apatow likes to sprinkle his comedy with pathos. Alas, as gifted as he is for making good-natured comedies, Chekhov he isn't, and in this film the blend seems particularly forced, since Schumer is primarily a satirist, and satire and pathos rarely mix.
Amy has been given a family sob story. She has a nasty dad (Colin Quinn) who is losing his mind to Alzheimer's, and a sister (the lovely and adroit Brie Larson) who hates her dad. This means tears have to drop, and family reconciliations have to happen. Someone in the chain of command did not quite trust that Amy was sympathetic enough -- hence the melodrama. But what makes Amy Schumer sympathetic, even adorable, is precisely how unapologetic she is. I applaud a woman who makes a violently icky face at the news of her happily married sister becoming pregnant. I don't necessarily want her to be nice.
Schumer's satirical kind of sketch humor may be hard to translate to a full-fledged movie onscreen. Still, that doesn't mean that she has to go all gooey on us. The movie's concept, a woman who turns tables on men by behaving as caddishly as they do, has plenty of comedic legs. Unfortunately, Trainwreck does not totally deliver on the promise of Amy Schumer. The audience expects irreverence and subversion, not a paid commercial for the N.Y. Knicks, let alone a heart-warming story about family, spottily moving as it may be.

Snowpiercer

The long awaited first foray of director's Bong Joon-Ho (The Host, Mother, Memories of Murder) into big budget filmmaking is here, and it is a rather interesting mixed bag. That Bong is gifted is clearly in evidence in this adaptation of a French graphic novel that depicts a post-apocalyptic Earth where the sole remaining humans are stuck in a very long train that is circling the globe. It is 2031 and because of our plundering of the environment, the Earth has been frozen and nothing can survive outside the train. This train is basically a spot-on metaphor for the difference between coach and first class in current commercial aviation and, more essentially, for the way we live now, with the poors stuck all the way in the back in dire oppression, while the one percent rides in comfort and luxury in the front, controlling everything and sharing nothing. In between, there are cars of armed goons protecting the wealthy from the hoi polloi. There are other fun details in the other cars that I won't disclose here, but as a metaphor, it is perfect for what goes on today. The downtrodden in the back want to get to the front. The one percent in the front will do anything in their power to keep them in the back. Life on Earth.
As fanboy action movies go, this is a darker tale than usual, and there are a couple of twists at the end that are anathema to the heroic tropes that are a staple of the genre. But, and this is a very big but, although the enormous skill and imagination of Bong are in full force, what made him such an exciting writer-director is missing in this film. I remember seeing The Host and being totally exhilarated by his mischievousness. At first it wasn't clear what exactly we were witnessing. A cheesy monster film with a giant fish that looked like a mean version of Charlie the Tuna, The Host was also a hilarious Korean social satire. The protagonists were a bunch of losers, and Bong's balancing act between mischief and real terror was a fresh, original marvel to behold. Mother, a darkly funny, harrowing movie about a monster mom, was also sharply satirical and critical of Korean society, full of mordant detail. This incisive playfulness, his assured handling of several dissonant tones is what makes Bong one of the best directors working today, yet his mischievousness is sadly missing from this film.
It is not altogether gone, harnessed by some mordant visuals, and in particular by  the amazing Tilda Swinton, who plays Mason, the envoy between Mr. Wilford, the owner of the train, and the masses. She is spectacular, and seems to be the only actor who is truly alive for the first half of the film. She brings her considerable chops to portray the sum of all ass-kissing bureaucrats, stern but morally dubious headmasters, the sum of all of those who do the dirty work for the more powerful. She is over the top, and hilarious. At times I thought she was channeling Emma Thompson at her most prissy, at times she reminded me of Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks, but at the Q&A after the film, Bong revealed that Swinton was channeling Margaret Thatcher. So that's who that was! Tilda Swinton rules, bless her irreverent, mirthful soul.
Because Snowpiercer takes place in a sci-fi world (the production design and special effects are awesome) a lot of the day to day human observation in which Bong excels is sacrificed in the name of keeping the giant machinery of the metaphor rolling. There are enormous holes in the story (screenplay by Bong and Kelly Masterson). A lot of it doesn't make sense. I never understood why the rich needed the poor, and that is just one of many headscratchers. To Bong's credit, I was able to suspend my disbelief because of the forward momentum of the story, and because he unleashes wonderful actors like little bonbons, one after the other.
I suspect that the exigencies of marketing may have played a role in the script. There are some cringe worthy lines from Curtis, the hero (Chris Evans, doing his best and still managing to be uninteresting) about his inability to be a leader. He repeats them over and over, and we finally learn why he thinks he cannot lead (another tired antihero trope that needs to be put out to pasture) in a convoluted speech at the end where he tells us everything that happened to him in the past. I cannot help but think this sounds like something added after focus groups. The result is that we don't care, because we didn't see it. Now, we don't necessarily need to see it, as it is a gruesome tale, but when the biggest twists are in the form of exposition at the end, the revelations sink as we never once saw any tension, or ambiguity at the beginning that may startle us emotionally. Tragic things happen, but they don't really connect, perhaps because the characters exist to service the concept, and as hard as the actors work, it's hard to care for them. Actors like Octavia Spencer and Jamie Bell are excellent, but are swallowed by the enormity of the mayhem and the lack of clarity in the story. Ironically, the giant engine of the plot seems to be as indifferent to the plight and nature of the characters as the giant engine of the train. This movie seems devoid of real emotion.
There are long, sharply staged, extremely violent, cartoonish fight sequences, but I was not truly excited and amazed until the point in which the rebels finally burst into business class, so to speak. That is the really fun part. It is visually stunning and it deploys more of Bong's sense of humor. But in general, the exhilaration comes more from the set decor and the special effects rather than from keenly observed truths. Sadly, many potentially rich nuances of the characters' experience fall by the wayside.
This is a very ambitious movie, and as action movies go, far less inane and hypocritical than average, with a great subversive metaphor and a wonderfully ambivalent ending that somehow manage to survive an ideologically confusing exposition. I'd still rather get my kicks from a cheesy giant fish, a family of losers, a poisonous mother, or a hapless policeman, those fascinating people in Bong's down-to-Earth universe, than from high concept bells and whistles.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson is currently exploring darker, deeper territory than he ever has in The Grand Budapest Hotel, the most melancholy and sad of his movies, and although it looks like a gorgeous confection, I am not sure that the feelings it evokes and Anderson's ultra-refined style mesh smoothly. Perhaps his depth as an artist has outgrown his style.
It is, as usual, visually ravishing.The lovely cinematography is by Robert Yeoman. The costume and production design are spectacular.
It is also an intricate Chinese box of stories. A writer (Tom Wilkinson) remembers when he used to visit the decrepit Hotel Zubrowka, empty and decaying under communist rule, when he was young and looked like Jude Law. There he meets the once owner of the hotel, Mr. Zero Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham) who then tells the story of how he came to own it, when he apprenticed as a young lad (the charming and deadpan Tony Revolori) under the tutelage of the concierge to end all concierges, Monsieur Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes).
Gustave is the epitome of civilization and a bit of a louche. He seduces the guests, be they male or female, yet he is heroically polite and true to his principles, which he bends on occasion for mostly practical reasons. Fiennes inhabits this man with quicksilver subtlety. He either recites long strands of adorned dialogue and romantic poetry, or is curt, sharp and vulgar the next breath. He does not stoop to caricature; he is precise but not punctilious, polite but never supercilious. He creates one of Anderson's most dimensional characters. He carries the movie beyond the arch and twee and slightly nonchalant, and gives it enormous dignity. He also looks like he bears an incredibly sad burden under his cheerful aplomb. He is nostalgia personified.
There is a very complicated plot about a will left by an old widow (Tilda Swinton, unrecognizable behind massive wrinkles) and her evil, greedy family that craves her fortune. And a business about the destruction of civilization by a Nazi-like regime, brutish totalitarian thugs with no use for art, culture or refinement.
There is more horror than usual. The story is lovely, the undercurrent of loss truly profound and moving. The loss of home, family ties, the loves of your life, of a world, the loss of nostalgia itself, of old fashioned storytelling, of the past, the loss of the idea of Europe as the wellspring of civilization art and sensibility. This does not prevent Gustave from spouting some prejudiced generalizations about immigrants like Zero, in case anybody accuses Anderson of glorifying colonial empires.
I share with him the nostalgia for something we are both too young to miss. A sense of loss of something we will never see again. He gets the seventies communist decor right (although significantly less drab), he gets the Mitteleuropa vibe right.
The sad layers of lost worlds burrow under your skin.
I have always liked Anderson's style, his charming visual gags, his technical panache. Every frame is rich with little visual winks. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of a rich and luscious cake of many tiers. So much detail! But even as I marveled at the beauty of every frame, at the sly wit of some of the sequences, at catching some cute joke on the corner of the frame, I feel that Anderson's style has become a little stifling. It certainly gets in the way of rhythm and it makes the movie drag, although one is so busy drinking in the images and chasing all the details, that it barely matters. The chase sequences are twee but lifeless, an escape from prison unfolds painstakingly but with little suspense. A couple of plot jolts work better, reminding the audience that despite the eye candy, we are truly invested in the fate of the main characters. But the movie feels like it needs fresh air, perhaps because most of it is shot in a studio and is deliberately claustrophobic. The hotel, the rooms, the elevators, the jail, everything is in constricted spaces. Everything is a square inside a square. As Anderson is clearly a gifted artist, I wonder what he could do with circles. What would happen, now that he is deepening his feel for human emotion, if he lent his attention to other shapes, different textures, other less meticulously arranged landscapes?

Cosmopolis

A valiant failure. It's no coincidence that no novel of Don DeLillo's has ever been adapted for the screen. One of the greatest American novelists and a master of language, DeLillo's books do not lend themselves to film easily. This did not deter David Cronenberg from adapting Cosmopolis, a novel DeLillo wrote in 2003 about Eric Packer, a young master of the universe who spends all day trapped in his limo, going to get a haircut, while the world implodes around him, in no small part thanks to his predatory bets on the markets. It is symbolism in capital letters, a dark fable about the tightening chokehold of unbridled capitalism. On paper, it may look like it can be made into a film. There is enough incident, allright. Meetings, sex, even a prostrate exam happen in the car, but then there is the question of the words. Don DeLillo writes sentences that cut like black diamonds, but he doesn't write in a language that anybody who exists in reality could ever utter. Cronenberg aims to be as faithful as possible to that sharp, terse, ironic DeLillo style, but, to do that, he would need the finest actors mankind has ever offered to say these lines without sounding like pretentious automatons. The only one to emerge triumphant in this verbose ordeal is the great Paul Giamatti, firing the words like a weapon at the very end of the film. Matthieu Amalric fares very well playing a pie throwing activist and Samantha Morton hangs by a thread as some sort of financial oracle, holding the screen with the sheer conviction of her luminosity. I would have loved to see la Swinton play the part.
The rest is a disaster, mainly because Cronenberg picked Robert Pattinson, a terrible actor, to play the leading role. He is in every frame, and he tries his best, but he is flat as a board. The character is supposed to be morally and emotionally vacant, but the actor playing him cannot be vacant himself. I don't think Pattinson knows the full import of some of the lines he utters. Not because he is stupid, but because he doesn't have the depth. Ryan Gosling would have been perfect. Alas.
Even worse is Sarah Gadon, who, to judge from her performance as Packer's wife, is a totally inexperienced and untalented actress. This makes me question Cronenberg's sanity. Do not give a role with De Lillean dialogue to someone who can't act. It will bring the movie down.
As we have said before about Michael Fassbender's wooden performance in Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method, it takes a rare talent to make him act badly. The same happens here but with Juliette Binoche, an even greater actor than Fassbender, sounding wooden and fake as an art dealer. I'm starting to think that Cronenberg is just not a great director of actors. He's beginning to like very wordy literary adaptations, and his last two films seem like the life has been punched out of them by so much unwieldy dialogue. He didn't use to be this way. His movies have always exploded with messy life.
Cosmopolis is stiff but much less corseted than A Dangerous Method. Some moments of Cronenbergian pizzazz wake the audience up. The scene with Amalric is wonderful; surprising, violent and funny. So is a moment where Pattinson uses a gun. The scene with the barber (George Touliatos, excellent) has a certain power, even if most everything in this movie looks like a cheap set. I expected the look to be as polished and metallic as in Cronenberg's Crash (a pervy movie that I love), but the light is harsh, which makes the surroundings look phony (as phony as the New York of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, a similar disaster, but made with much more money).
Imagine this movie had David Fincher made it. It would have been better. It sorely needs that Alpha male gloss. On the page, DeLillo's language reads like a trillion bucks: sharp, smooth, velvety, dangerous. But the movie dies trying to bring his style to life. There is not enough sharpness; not enough precision. Yet, as terribly flawed as it is, the endeavor to bring to the screen this dark fable about the collapse of our society is somehow quixotic. You cannot but root for Cronenberg, if you manage to make it to the end.

Moonrise Kingdom

Gorgeous. Every frame a marvel to look at. Great style, exquisite taste. Drollness, panache, a sweetly deadpan sense of humor, great visual timing, a flat affect that belies a delicate sensibility, sweet emotion without histrionics; a wash of melancholy and unfulfilled longing for more in life: in short a Wes Anderson movie.
Moonrise Kingdom is a wonderful experience, the story of Sam, a troubled boy (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayward), who are in love for the first time and want out of their normal worlds where they are misunderstood. He is an orphan in a foster home where he is unwanted, she is the pouty daughter of two loveless lawyers (the great Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), and they elope, wanting nothing to do with a world with which they are at odds. It's a movie about children trying to grow up to be better adults than the existing ones, into people who can still love and dare and live life without making so many painful compromises. It is also, surprisingly, particularly for an American film, about the blooming of sexuality, about the age where a crush can become a romance and boys and girls become men and women. Anderson treats this theme with honesty and sensitivity, instead of crassness. It is so mature and refreshing, it feels almost European. Moonrise Kingdom is hopeful and sad and the most emotionally rounded and satisfying of his films to date.
It's also lovely fun. His quirky world includes a troop of efficient, much decorated Khaki Scouts, led by scoutmaster Edward Norton, and a storybook house where mom and dad communicate with the children and each other through a bullhorn. The look is a mix of faded color postcards, French films of the Seventies, Fifties style Americana, and that unique Wes Anderson framing which puts people at odd placements in the foreground and stages delightful tableaux vivants or intricate choreographies in the background. He is a great visual satirist and gets many chuckles out of the smallest details in the frame. Anderson's undeniably lovely aesthetic has more than a whiff of the obsessive compulsive, as he crams so much gorgeous detail into each frame. But he is also a gifted choreographer of sequences, and the movie is a mix of frames that almost look like snapshots and extraordinary flourishes of clockwork-like movement. A couple of these sequences take your breath away. A long pan through the scout base camp at the beginning of the film must have been aided by digital stitching, because it seems impossible to pull off in real time, and a wonderful sequence at the Scout Hullaballoo camp where everything is in twirling motion, with completely different things happening in the foreground and in the background - extremely refined visual slapstick. When the plot calls for spectacularly expensive action sequences, he goes whimsical and stages them with props, in a deliberately naive way, which gives the movie a storybook quality.
The cast is indispensable: Bob Balaban as The Narrator, who looks like a garden gnome, Murray, McDormand, Norton, Bruce Willis, playing against type as a sad sack, Tilda Swinton as a brisk entity called Social Services, who looks like a cross between a Salvation Army recruit and a Pan Am stewardess, and in a surprise cameo, Harvey Keitel as the boy scouts' supreme leader, which is surely the best joke in the movie. The two young lead actors seem new to acting and they have a stiffness that conveys the awkwardness of romantic entanglements at their age. They also have the kind of deadpan that perhaps could be difficult to coax from overtrained, hammy child actors. Sam fares better than the Suzy, who, although beautiful in a moody French gamine of the seventies kind of way, is really quite inarticulate in front of the camera. Even if they are the same age, or perhaps she is a little older, she looks like she is about to sprout into a full fledged young woman, while he still looks like a child, which is true at that age in real life. Anderson gets a lot of sweet comedy with his hero's nerdy look and big glasses, but all he can do with Suzy is regard her serious loveliness. It works nicely as a conceit but I had a wee problem: I did not feel that these kids were actually in love. It's a nitpick, because even without chemistry between the two, a sweet strain of romantic melancholy pervades.
Wes Anderson's multiple stylistic flourishes threaten to wear out their welcome, and the film sags a bit in the middle, but to his and fellow screenwriter Roman Coppola's credit, they always add lovely emotional twists that keep the audience enthralled. Moonrise Kingdom feels to me like the most melancholy, intimate and emotional of his films. The balancing act he achieves by combining so much artifice with emotion is very impressive.
As always, the musical score is poignant and exquisite. This time, he enlists the help of Benjamin Britten's "Young Person's Guide To The Orchestra" and "Noye's Fludde", to help convey the themes of how to go about your life step by step, and of the stormy turmoil of love, but the first work also resonates as a musical metaphor for the composition of a film, with all the different instruments/elements/departments coming into place to create a harmonious whole. The rest of the music is by Alexandre Desplat, the scouts' tom tom music is by Mark Mothersbaugh (formerly of Devo), and there are some wonderfully haunting Hank Williams songs as well.
Anderson, whether you like him or not, is a truly contrarian spirit in American films. He is a maverick, in his own quirky way. He has always bucked convention and I applaud him for sticking to his guns and making films with his unmistakable, and not easily replicated style. Actually, the style is ripe for easy imitation, and has been copied to death in commercials. What is not easily replicated is his sensibility, his wondrous command of tone, unsentimental yet moving, magical without being cliched, whimsical without being cloying, light yet substantive, which gently sways between arch, dry, funny, sweet, sad, and haunting.

Oscars Postmortem 2012

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, Arthur Laurents, 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.

We Need To Talk About Kevin

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?