The Grand Budapest Hotel (***1/4)

For those who know the films of Wes Anderson (Rushmore, , Moonrise Kingdom, The ), there is scarcely any point in reviewing them other than in relation to each other. You already know if you’ll like this, or you haven’t seen Anderson’s work. [A recent Saturday Night Live parody, in the form of a horror movie trailer, is hilarious and specific in a way that, say, a Steven Spielberg parody could probably not have been.] Whether set on a train in India (The Darjeeling Unlimited), in the poshest parts of New York (The Royal Tenenbaums), or inside animated tunnels (The Fantastic Mr. Fox), they all seem to take place in a half-real, half fairy-tale world of pastel colors, secret passageways, and Rube Goldberg-inspired plots. His heroes are the verbose but well-meaning, like the middle-aged concierge Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and his young protegé Zero (Tony Revolori) at the center of this period piece.

It does not take place in Budapest but in Lutz, a fictional city in a fictional Eastern European country where people mostly speak English in a variety of accents, but mostly English and American. It is supposed to be 1932, which only matters insofar as it conjures up a world in which conflict and even modernity lie ahead. Technically, it is the late 1960s; the story is told by an older man (F. Murray Abraham) to a younger one (Jude Law), and this only matters insofar as it depicts the 1930s elegance as having long past, the hotel in a long, slow decline, its past  as mythical seeming as a fairy tale, though the cavernous lobby remains.

Save perhaps the anti-climactic ending, the plotting here, involving the mysterious death of an elderly guest, is clever and fun. As always, the humor comes at odd moments and in unexpected ways. For me, one such moment was when Zero is surprised to learn that one way Gustave satisfied his elderly female guests was by sleeping with them. His mentor explains that when you are young “it’s all fillet steak…but as you get older, you have to move on to the cheaper cuts.” Gustave adds that he likes the cheaper cuts. There’s no meanness in Anderson’s heroes, though this movie has a pair of villains.

Anderson is apt to quickly jettison both heroes and villains from his story. For me, his previous movie, Moonrise Kingdom, had an emotional center that differentiated it from his other work, though perhaps that was an individual response. Maybe the tale of an old man recalling his long-ago mentor and long-ago life will bring a similar nostalgia to some people. For others, it will be another solid effort by one of Hollywood’s most distinct voices.

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viewed 3/26/14 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 3/26/14

The Well-Digger’s Daughter (***1/4)

This World War II melodrama comes by its old-fashioned quality in part because it’s a remake of a 1940 Marcel Pagnol film. Getting the period look isn’t so hard, but the movie’s strength is to remind us that it is values and culture, more than style and technology, that truly separates us from the past. The title character (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) is turning 18 as the story begins. She is “as kind as she is pretty” as her widower father and his younger friend agree. But, though she has spent time in Paris, unlike her four younger sisters, she is rather innocent. Her father (Daniel Auteuil) has only lived in the rural south and is rather traditional.

The story, which involves the debonair son of a prosperous shopkeeper, is not wildly original, but  the characters make a a strong impression. The showiest role is the well-digger himself, whose sudden changes of heart bring a measure of humor even as tragedy threatens. A lovely score by Alexandre Desplat captures the overall bittersweet tone. Auteuil, whose breakout role was as the star of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, adaptations of a Pagnol novel, here makes a strong directorial debut. With lush color missing from the original film, he brings out the bucolic qualities of the setting. Moreover, he allows the characters to emerge, especially in the crucial early scenes. Much of the tale hinges on the meaningfulness of two brief meetings of the girl and her young man. In lesser hands, this might seem corny. Mostly, it doesn’t.

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viewed 8/5/12 4:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/9/12

Hugo (***1/2)

Though best known for violent tales such as Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The Departed, Martin Scorsese has made several movies in other genres, but this is the first one you can take the kids to, and should.

With his Aviator screenwriting collaborator John Logan, he’s adapted Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret into a film whose storytelling mostly equals its considerable visual impact. Unlike some other 3-D releases, the 3-D really does add an extra dimension to the production. Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a 12-year-old boy in 1931, is an orphaned boy who winds the clocks in a cavernous train station in Paris. (But everyone speaks English with an English accent.) Exterior shots of the city and interior shots of gears and wheels, give one a sense of traveling on a monorail. It’s obvious that much of this is created on a computer, but the slightly other worldly quality that provides works fine here.

The mystery relates to an automaton, a mechanical man Hugo’s late father acquired and repaired, but Hugo lacks the literal key that will unlock the mystery. Helping him solve it is the young grand-niece of an older man (Ben Kingsley) who sells toys in the station. Another mystery attaches to the old man and somehow links the girl to the boy. Hugo encapsulates most of what makes a good all-ages story: a resourceful hero (and heroine) with just the right amount of mischieviousness, a mystery, and a touch of the fantastic. Scorsese’s own love of cinema history plays into it as well. Hugo and his friend (Chloë Grace Moretz) sneak into a theater and watch a Harold Lloyd movie. The automaton recalls the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. And an even older part of movie history lies at the center of the mystery, which is based on a true story, though the boy’s is fictional.

If I had any quibble with the movie it’s in the very self-conscious way it peddles nostalgia and braininess. Or maybe it’s trying too hard to be a “magical,” like The Polar Express. For example, it’s not enough that Hugo’s friend is a book lover, or uses fancy vocabulary, but you can almost see the ten-cent words underlined; when Hugo manages one himself, she actually says, “good one” to him. Yes, a quibble. Aside from making little kids fidget a bit—it’s better for those old enough to follow a scene in which the kids do some library research—the mildly highfalutin’ aspects of the film are overwhelmed by plain wonderful ones.

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viewed 11/22/11 at Franklin Institute [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/28/11

J. Edgar (***)

J. Edgar Hoover served the United States Department of Justice for over 50 years, the last 48 (1924–1972) as head of what was called simply the Bureau of Investigation when he joined. So it’s a daunting task to sum up that career in a two-hour film, as director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk) have tried to do.

Hoover may be better remembered today for clashing with Bobby Kennedy and trying to discredit Martin Luther King in the 1960s, or for his long relationship with his assistant, Clyde Tolson. But he also created the modern FBI and brought a professionalism to the task of catching criminals, even as the methods he sanctioned stirred controversies that reverberate in these days of warrantless wiretaps and detention without trial. Black and Eastwood devote considerable time to the anti-communist Palmer raids, which made Hoover’s name, and to the Lindbergh kidnapping, which, when solved, solidified his reputation as a crime fighter. A fictional device—Hoover is supposed to be dictating a memoir—frames the 1920s, '30s and '40s segments and gives us Hoover in decline (but still wielding power) while skipping over the 1950s entirely.

The hoary flashback structure doesn’t reveal any notable contrast in the older and younger man, aside from the almost-convincing make-up job on DiCaprio. (In that regard, I thought Naomi Watts, as Hoover’s longtime secretary, and Armie Hammer, as Tolson, were more convincingly aged.) Insofar as Hoover’s view of himself and law enforcement were concerned, he seems to have emerged fully formed in his 20s. Watching the ever-confident Hoover in action is engaging, but rarely exciting. I wonder if a musical score would have helped. Hoover most comes to life in the personal scenes. He seems only to have been close to two people, his mother (Judi Dench), who made him courageous, and Tolson. Tolson, as played by Hammer, humanizes the Hoover character, and even if you have contempt for the man’s self-aggrandizing and legally questionable tactics, the singular devotion of these men seems creditable.

Eastwood takes no clear view on whether Hoover was justified, mostly presenting Hoover as he saw himself. He takes a middle road as to the Tolson relationship. It can scarcely be doubted that these men who dined together, vacationed together, and had no other serious relationships had a romantic attachment, and Black’s screenplay assumes that. However, given how little is known about how they behaved in private, the period of Hoover’s adulthood being an age when privacy was granted to public figures, it shows wise restraint as far as sexual matters. The audience is allowed to assume what they will as regards this while it is suggested that Hoover’s upbringing, his nature, and the times would have made him disinclined to violate propriety. If there is one thing that unites Hoover’s anticommunism, his distrust of agitators like King, and his fierce approach to ordinary criminals, not to mention his careful habits of dress and speech, it seems to be a true distaste for disorder or change.

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viewed 1/11/2012 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/11/2012

The King’s Speech (***)

Seeing an important personage seeming ordinary is like seeing someone you know on television. Nothing really extraordinary about it, but watching familiar things out of context makes them twice as interesting. And for Americans, royalty itself has no context, which perhaps makes Americans pay more attention to the British monarchy than most other aspects of English culture. In any case, knowing that Prince Albert (Colin Firth) will become King George VI is what makes his chronic stammering especially poignant.

Albert, the second son of George V, neither expected nor desired to rule. He did only because his older brother Edward (Guy Pearce) abdicated in order to marry an American divorcée, a better- known story that’s here relegated to a subplot. But George is the more appealing character; when he reminds his speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) of their unequal status, you sense it’s mostly out of insecurity or tradition, not haughtiness. Logue not only insists on being called Lionel, but on calling his royal patient by the family name “Bertie.” [The historical accuracy of this point has been disputed.] An Australian-born failed actor, he became the prince’s therapist in 1925, following a disastrous speech at Wembley. It was George’s fate to not only become king but to live in the age of radio, when the ability to speak became of increased importance top a public figure. Firth masters the king’s manner of speech, not only the stutter but also the clipped, now-dated accent.

While the film, directed by Tom Hooper (The Damned United, John Adams) holds much the same “behind the scenes” appeal as the equally humanizing portrait The Queen, about George’s daughter, or Young Victoria, about his grandmother, there’s less that’s novel about it. The Queen, for example, has much more to say about the role of the monarchy in the age of democracies. (Both films feature evocative scores by Alexandre Desplat.) This is a story about friendship and overcoming adversity, and once that’s established things go along the lines one expects. It does tickle one to think, watching Albert play with his young daughters, that the younger one will become the now-elderly Queen Elizabeth, or that his wife (Helena Bonham Carter, as winsome as she is bizarre in recent Harry Potter films) turns into the beloved, widowed Queen Mother, who lived until 2002. Of note also are Hooper and screenwriter David Seidler’s sometimes-amusing depictions of many of the techniques that Logue used in his practice. Logue, for example, encouraged swearing, which tended to eliminate the stutter. Seidler (himself a stutterer) has mostly written telemovies (like Come On, Get Happy: The Partridge Family Story), though also 1988’s fine Tucker: The Man and His Dream. At its worst, this is like a very good TV movie, familiar but satisfying.

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viewed 1/20/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 1/20–21/11

The Good the Bad the Weird (***1/2)

I don’t think I’d seen a Korean movie until maybe ten years ago, but now I try not to miss the ones that manage to get theatrical releases. That was also pretty much none until recently, but in the last few years a spate of good to very good movies have made their way to American shores. Although some of these have been arty fare such as the lovely Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, most are of the type that would be enjoyed by exactly the sort of audience that would never think of seeing a subtitled movie. And although not a few of these were action films (e.g., Old Boy) one thing I hadn’t seen was a western.

As the title, a spoof of Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti western” The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, suggests, it’s a comic variation on the genre. A noodle western was the term applied to the Japanese movie Tampopo, and so this has been called a kimchi western. Yet that doesn’t mean it skimps on the action, at all. The opening sequence, in which not one, or two, but three bandits independently attack the same train, would be the envy of most Hollywood directors. (Director Ji-woon Kim is best known for the psychological horror film A Tale of Two Sisters.) This sequence sets up the rest of the movie, in which a lot of things happen, but which can be pretty much summed up as the different bandits all trying to possess a treasure map or, failing that, the treasure, though no one seems to know what it is. The map is a classic MacGuffin, a plot device whose main purpose is to propel the action—and the comedy.

The three bandits include the Johnny Depp-like Byung-hun Lee (G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra) as the baddest, and Kang-ho Song (The Host) as the weirdest, a likable bumbler who’s sort of tbe hero. A novel element is that the film is set in 1930s Manchuria, an area of China then occupied by Japan. Imperialism becomes a subtext to some of the story, though it’s mostly played for laughs. There’s a hilarious sequence with what seems like the entire Japanese Imperial Army chasing down, or being chased by, one of the bandits. If you don’t mind some scattered gruesomeness, this is altogether entertaining.

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viewed April 11 at Prince [Philadelphia Film Festival Spring Preview] and reviewed 5/9/10

Brideshead Revisited (***)

Set vaguely in the period between the world wars, this adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel not only tackles the usual British period drama themes of class, wealth, and nostalgia, but religion too. Successfully working these into a two-hour feature must have been a daunting task, considering that they provided enough material for the acclaimed 1981 BBC miniseries, which ran eleven hours.

Even as pared down, director Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane) has kept the major plot points. Callow Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode) and fey, drunk, wealthy Sebastian (Ben Whishaw) meet cute at Oxford, and soon Charles finds himself involved with the entire clan, including sister Julia, a self-proclaimed hedonist, and their prim mother (Emma Thompson). Whishaw seems diffident, not attractive as he is apparently supposed to be, but the other performances are very good. There is too much here; though it’s never confusing in terms of plot, the switch in thematic focus can be jarring. Ryder transitions from being the audience surrogate to the ultimate subject of the piece, and Catholicism, touched on earlier, comes to the fore in a surprising way.

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viewed 8/1/08 at Ritz 5

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (***1/4)

Londoner Winifred Watson, who died in 2002, lived to be 95, but not quite long enough to see her 1938 novel hit the silver screen. The novel would have already been 36 years old by the time the movie’s co-star, Amy Adams, was born, but you wouldn’t know it by her Carole Lombard-esque turn as the flouncy American actress/singer whose simultaneous romances with three men stun and appall her new “social secretary” (Frances McDormand). She also shines in the duet of the (very) old Ink Spots hit “If I Didn’t Care.”

McDormand, for her part, nails the London accent, and the provides the counterweight to Adams’s fluffy (though engaging) performance. Truth be told, the screwball comedy parts don’t work nearly as well as the aspects of the story emphasizing her down-on-her-luck housekeeper. In her, you are reminded of the England still emerging from the Depression, and the desire still in the hearts of women too old to be the subject of romantic comedies. And yet, that’s what this is, in a way. Although the actual romances here are of the traditional Hollywood type (and only slightly more risqué), the real story is about the whirlwind affair between the flighty-but-kind actress and the prissy-but-kind Miss Pettigrew.

And to those who plead that this rags-to-riches-to-romance story cannot happen in a day, or possibly not at all, and that I have criticized other movies for the sins of this one, I have no defense, other than to say that it works here.

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viewed 3/6/08; reviewed 3/9/08

Water (**1/2)

The plight of the widow in India, the particulars of India’s caste system, and the promise of change brought by Gandhi are certainly excellent subjects for a film, but this Water doesn’t really move, in any sense.

Set in 1938, Deepa Mehta’s Water follows an eight-year-old as she’s sent to an ashram, a place where widows are sent to live and worship together. Because the movies deal with antiquated female-oriented social systems, and start the same way, with a child being unwillingly taken from her home, I was mentally comparing this with Memoirs of a Geisha. Where the geisha system simultaneously exploits and empowers women, the ashram is portrayed as essentially a dumping ground for used-up women who are expected to mourn their husbands forever, even if they were child brides who’d never met them. Notwithstanding the use of scripture to justify this arrangement, the most attractive of the widows, Kalyani (Lisa Ray), is expected to prostitute herself for the good of the group. The film slowly, very slowly, introduces us to the diverse women in the ashram, and to the particular customs of their social arrangement. The modern point of view is represented by Bollywood star John Abraham’s character, a university-educated fan of Gandhi who’s not only incredibly enlightened but seriously handsome to boot. He is therefore instantly attracted to Kalyani. For all that Memoirs of a Geisha represented a triumph of style over substance, it still had a more substantial plot than Water, which follows Mehta’s Fire and Earth in critiquing India’s rigid social structures. Water is sometimes beautiful to look at, but its romance is not touching when it’s supposed to be, and its portrayal of the culture fairly shallow. I did get into the story eventually, but until then it this was some slow-moving Water.

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posted 8/21/13

Ask the Dust (**3/4)

Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek are well cast as wary lovers in writer-director Robert Towne’s artful adaptation of John Fante’s 1939 novel. Towne beautifully captures the feel of the time and place, a Los Angeles seething with multi-ethnic newcomers, but the couple’s interactions have a stiff, literary quality.

John Fante’s autobiographical 1939 novel was languishing in semi-obscurity when writer Robert Towne first thought of turning it into a movie. That was over 30 years ago, before Towne cemented his reputation with his script for the 1974 classic Chinatown. Meanwhile, the novel’s reputation grew, and Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek grew up and got cast when Towne finally secured financing. For Towne, it’s a return to an older Los Angeles, though the characters in Chinatown probably wouldn’t know the ones here. Newcomers like Farrell’s Arturo Bandini, a struggling, Italian American writer, or Hayek’s Camilla, a Mexico-born waitress, formed a diaspora in the desert that swelled the population by a million in just 20 years. The way Towne artfully conjures this long-gone L.A. (filming was in South Africa) is as much a reason to see the movie as anything else. Camilla is a step below Arturo on the racial hierarchy of the day, and this makes a difference. Nowadays, we see period dramas, like The Notebook, where the characters feel too modern. These don’t. They casually insult one another’s ethnicity; they rent by the week; they suffer from TB. This is what I liked about the movie, plus the actors. But there’s something too literary about the adaptation. The verbal battles between Arturo and Camilla struck me as stilted, even as I admired the snappy dialogue. And the sudden intrusion, and equally sudden departure, of a third (or fourth) character in the drama, seemed unnatural. The couple’s halting romance lurches to a resolution that’s heart-rending to the extent you’ve bought the characters. I was about half way there.

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posted 9/9/13

 

Mrs. Henderson Presents (***)

Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins buoy this “inspired by true events” comedy of a widow who opens London’s first theatrical revue to feature nude women.

What’s with the English and comedies about stripping? Following on The Full Monty and Calendar Girls comes the “inspired by true events” tale of a 1930s widow (Judy Dench) who opens London’s first theatrical revue to feature nude women. Actually, for all that this is the thing being used to sell the film, the movie really doesn’t make much of a fuss about it. If anyone but a government minister or two got upset about this assault on propriety, it’s not shown here. Perhaps Londoners were too worried about Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombing the crap out of them to trifle over such things. The widow Henderson is self-assured and snobby, but likeable. Of India, from which she has returned following her husband’s death, she says, “There was always somebody to look down on.” Dench’s matter-of-fact-delivery of this pronouncement is one of the reasons to see this. Unpretentious elitism is something you don’t se a lot on film. Bob Hoskins is her match as the equally strong-willed manager of the theater. (Will Young, the first UK Pop Idol, also makes his acting debut.) Briskly directed by Stephen Frears (High Fidelity), this is a charming movie with a slight plot and strong characters.

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posted 9/17/13

Memoirs of a Geisha (***)

With softly lit sensuality, this beautiful version of Arthur Golden’s novel outlines the place and function, only partly sexual, of the geisha in Japanese culture and builds a decent plot around their conflicting desires, jealousies, and fears.

I’d kind of expected this adaptation of Arthur Golden’s novel to play on the stereotype of a stoic, selfless Asian, with the heroine bravely rebelling and trying to assert her individualism against a conformist culture. Happily, it’s not so. Directed by Chicago’s Rob Marshall, it replaces that film’s kinetics and quick cutting with softly lit sensuality, set to a quiet John Williams score. It begins with the tale of a girl sold by her father, and the people she came to know as her new family in prewar Kyoto. Zhang Ziyi plays the girl as an adult; her Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon costar, Michelle Yeoh, plays a mentor, and China’s biggest star, Gong Li, a nemesis. Though missing the ritualistic detail of the book, the film outlines the place and function, only partly sexual, of the geisha in Japanese culture. While the people in the story are not particularly deep, they are more than types, and they are different. Their conflicting desires, jealousies, and fears are the basis of the plot. You may not even notice that this plot is built around the thin edifice of a single meeting of a girl and a man (Ken Watanabe).

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circulated via email 12/29/05 and posted online 9/20/13