The New Year Parade (***)

If you live in Philadelphia, where this drama is set, you know the parade in question is the Mummers Parade, where large string bands compete every year for prizes and prestige. Covering the twelve months in between the 2004 and 2005 parades, this somber feature debut by writer-director Tom Quinn looks at a parental breakup from the viewpoint of a musician and his teenage sister. Quinn makes a virtue of a low budget by shooting in a naturalistic style and making good use of South Philly location shooting. The actors, especially leads Greg Lyons and Jennifer-Lynn Welsh, match the low-key vibe. What the movie lacks in terms of fancy plotting it makes up for in authenticity and empathy for the characters, and although the fact that the father and son are members of a string band is not the only focus, it provides an element of novelty.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/5/09

The Damned United (***1/4)

I know little of soccer generally, or English football in particular, although from reading Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch I know that it stirs passions as deep as that of any American Fantasy Football league enthusiast. But I watched this movie, with a coach as its subject, because it represents another teaming of screenwriter Peter Morgan and actor Michael Sheen, the others being The Queen and Frost/Nixon. The director is different (it’s Tom Hooper, of the John Adams miniseries), but the sharp characterization, smart dialogue, and trim structure mark Morgan’s handiwork.

This is the story of Brian Clough’s attempt to remodel Leeds United, among the most renowned teams in England, in his own image, taking over from an equally renowned predecessor, Don Revie. It’s intercut with flashbacks of his first great success, transforming a second-division team from Derby. That Clough is far from a household name in America may limit the audience for the movie, but Clough in his way is as compelling a figure as Tony Blair or David Frost. Anyway, I felt glad not to know how the story would turn out. In Blair and Frost, Sheen portrayed highly successful yet somehow callow men who over the course of the film acquire a certain gravitas. Here he is a character seemingly fully arrived at the start of the film, confident that he can change a team of bullies into gentleman. “They wouldn’t have played that way if they were happy,” he says. Interviewed on television, he says he’s “not the best manager in the country, but I’m in the top one.” I have no idea if this line is Morgan’s or that of the real-life Clough, but it’s both witty and an embodiment of the sort of cockiness that even drew the attention of Muhammad Ali, who knew something about boasting.

The supporting cast includes three actors among whom at least one seems to show up in nearly every English movie. Colm Meaney is Revie and Jim Broadbent the Derby club chairman; they became Clough’s two nemeses. But it is Clough’s relationship with his second-in-command, played by Timothy Spall, that is at the heart of the film. It is not, after all, a film about soccer (on-field action features very little, in fact) or personal transformation, but a true-life, platonic love story.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 10/29/09

More Than a Game (***1/4)

Once upon a time, in Akron, Ohio, four kids befriended each other in elementary school and became the core of one of the greatest teams in high school basketball history. That’s the story told in Kristopher Belman’s debut documentary. That Belman came from Ohio too is what led him to talk to their coach about filming their story. That one of the players was future NBA star LeBron James is certainly the reason the film is showing up on large screens, but it has more to offer than the rags-to-riches tale of a famous athlete.

James was already attracting media attention when Belman began his project, but he focuses equally on the other players who made up the core of the team. Dru Joyce, whose football-playing dad learned to coach basketball just to further the boy’s interest in the game, and who became an excellent shooter while still under five feet tall, is an appealing underdog. The movie is neither geared to a sports junkie—i.e., there is no detail about playing tactics—nor able to completely transcend the sports genre. Big Games—a nearly won amateur championship for preteens, and the 2003 national high school championship game—bookend the film, as might be expected. What’s surprising, of course, is that these same players stuck together so long, and this became the basis for their collective success.

Hoop Dreams remains the benchmark of high school basketball documentaries. The profiles in that movie run deeper, and a sense of desperation runs through those stories that you don’t feel here, even when James recalls having to move from city to city with a struggling single mother. Still, the film is pleasant to watch throughout, and abundant game footage shows that James was capable of some amazing shooting well before he became a household name.

IMDB link

viewed 10/7/09 at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Society screening] and reviewed 10/16/09

New York, I Love You (**1/4)

This is something you don’t see so much but seems to be becoming a little more common. It’s an omnibus film, a compilation of short films built around a theme. Lately there have been a few where the theme is a city, a recent example being Tokyo!, a three-films-in one release. Actually, New York Stories did the same sort of thing back in 1989. But this is closer in conception to Paris Je t'aime; both feature parts crafted by a number of writers and directors, loosely strung together as a feature.

So you get eleven different credited directors, some of whom wrote the segments also. The film is dedicated to the late Anthony Minghella, who wrote a segment featuring Julie Christie and Shia LaBoeuf in which the actress plays a singer. Like many of the segments, there is a twist ending, though for the most part they feel kind of forced. Possibly worst is the opening segment, in which two randomly placed-together strangers turn out to both be brilliant pickpockets, hamming it up to impress a woman. Like the city at its worst, it seems smug and false.

Besides the singer, there are a painter, a photographer, a composer, an actress, and a writer. No one is a banker or a slum dweller or a celebrity (well, maybe the singer is), but a lot of real-life celebrities play the characters. Orlando Bloom is the composer, Ethan Hawke the writer. James Caan plays the father of a wheelchair-bound girl who pays a kid to be her date. Either funny or crude, it will probably divide viewers the most. Natalie Portman appears in a Mira Nair-directed segment in which she plays a Hasidic Jew who’s about to be married, and also directs one about a father getting mistaken for his lighter-skinned daughter’s male nanny.

It’s a cliché, but the film adds up to less than the sum of its parts, with a so-what framing device sort of bringing them together. Except for the last segment, with Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman as a long-married couple walking in Brighton Beach, the movie doesn’t so much evoke the city as seem to serve as a clearinghouse for some experiments and small ideas by local talent. You can, in fact, make even a ten-minute segment compelling, but nothing here is anything more than mildly diverting.

IMDB link

viewed 10/13/09 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 10/27/09

The Boys Are Back (**3/4)

Clive Owen plays a sportswriter in this likeable, non-sappy adaptation of Simon Carr’s memoir about losing his wife and suddenly becoming a single parent. It’s partly about coping with loss and partly about finding his own parenting style as he makes a new life with his young son in south Australia. He also tries to bond with an older son from his first marriage who comes for a stay. Some tender moments, and some well-written ones involving a young mother (Emma Booth of Introducing the Dwights) don’t entirely make up for a storyline that mostly goes in expected directions.

IMDB link

viewed 10/1/09 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening]

Capitalism: A Love Story (***)

Michael Moore takes on his weightiest subject yet with this look at the mortgage crisis, the government bank bailout, and how things in the United States have deteriorated since his first documentary, Roger & Me. Moore returns, 20 years later, to his hometown of Flint, Michigan, which that earlier work focused on, and finds that it’s where foreclosure notices for much of the country are being mailed from, and that the banking industry has proven as shortsighted today as the auto industry was then. In short, he says, this is what you get from letting big business dictate public policy, and letting it get too big. Moore liked capitalism when it helped create the middle class as we know it in the 1950s era when he was born. But now, it has outlived its usefulness and has to go.

The movie follows the usual Moore recipe, one part investigative journalism, one part personal narratives, and one part populist agitprop. The investigative part reveals some facts and figures you sort of knew if you were following the whole financial meltdown in 2008, as well as a mini-history of how we got there. One bit he uncovers is about how Wal-Mart and other large corporations took out “dead peasant” life insurance policies on low-level employees, thus actually positioning the companies to profit from death. This is fascinating, but not much of a real indictment of capitalism, since the companies cannot really be making much profit out of this unless they’ve figured out how to get insurers to offer money-losing policies.

More helpful to Moore’s anticapitalist thesis are internal Citibank documents happily declaring the United States a plutocracy, as well as the saga of the now-indicted Pennsylvania judge who took kickbacks for sending petty juvenile offenders to a privately run facility. This is the sort of incentive created by allowing private companies to handle traditional government functions.

Moore uses the personal narrative of one Midwesterner as an example of how someone could lose a house they’d lived in for decades, and on the other hand shows how some individuals fought back, like the sheriff who stopped enforcing evictions notices in his jurisdiction, or the workers who occupied a closed plant to get their final paychecks.

The agitprop comes when Moore takes money bags around to big banks and tries to get them to give back the bailout money. These stunts are not often my favorite parts of his movies, and this one doesn’t really show anything. Many of the banks had already paid back what they borrowed by the time this was released, presumably not by filling bags with cash.

Besides that, the movie is generally entertaining, but the pros and cons of the capitalist system is much too large a subject for a single feature film. Films like Roger & Me, or Sicko, focused on a single aspect of that system, and resonated more than this. What Moore wants to replace capitalism is “democracy.” Presumably this means not to replace private companies with Soviet-style bureaucracies but to have power in the hands of consumers, not large commercial enterprises. However, while most people will agree that the current system has resulted in excess, the future he hopes for, and the steps to get there, remain hazy.

IMDB link

viewed 10/11/09 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 10/26/09

Bright Star (**1/2)

I have a confession. I don’t really like poetry. (Dirty limericks don’t count, do they?) Poetry is about saying things prettily or interestingly, and I’ve always preferred saying them directly. I know, I’m a Philistine, but there it is. So I will summarize this entire movie succinctly. Poor poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw, of Brideshead Revisited) dies young, but not before falling passionately in love with Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), a middle-class seamstress. Now, if you like poetry, there is plenty in the movie, actual Keats poems recited by both major characters, and metaphorical, visual poetry provided by director Jane Campion (The Piano), who also wrote some modestly intelligent dialogue.

The setting is England around 1820, but for once an English period piece is not dominated by considerations of class, costumery, and social convention, although there is the practical matter of money, of which Keats has nearly none. His friend and near-constant companion, who is only called Mr. Brown, is his main benefactor. Whether because of American Paul Schneider’s surprisingly good performance or because the character injects the only elements of both humor and real discord into the film, I found Mr. Brown more compelling than the leads. (Fanny, finding him crude, instantly detests him, and he delights in goading her.) Other characters, who are primarily the Brawne family, keep mostly to the background. The movie, as a whole, keeps to its subject, the romance. Of Keats’s early life, of English society at the time, of the larger movement of the Romantic poets, there is little. It is true, however, that Keats was somewhat apart from society, and not widely regarded in his lifetime. Also, the movie is told more from Fanny’s point of view.

The last half, in which circumstances conspire to pull the couple apart, is well done, but would have had more impact had not the establishing scenes of the romance seemed so dry. Full of longing and weeping and the pain of separation, but not so much of the stuff that shows us what falling in love is actually about, Campion’s film will certainly appeal to those who care for its focus on thwarted desire rather than desire itself. But for me it was not the tearjerker that, given the outlines of the plot, it should have been, although Abbie Cornish herself is a pro at crying, and at those moments I couldn’t be but moved.

IMDB link

viewed 10/6/09 at Ritz East and reviewed 10/8/09