I had great expectations for this story of Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes) and his mistress, Ellen Ternan (Felicity Jones), but found it stiff and formal. Ternan, an aspiring actress, was just 18 when she met the 45-year-old Dickens; he cast her in a play he had co-written, in Manchester. She was still living with her mother (Kristin Scott Thomas) and two sisters, while he was celebrity across the English-speaking world. It was 1857.
The film, with a script by Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, Shame) and directed by Fiennes, takes its inspiration from the book of the same name by Dickens biographer Claire Tomalin. Fiennes uses a flashback structure to contrast the 1883 Ternan, by then married and directing children in a Dickens play in seaside Margate, and the earlier version. It doesn’t help that Jones, though a fine actress, looks pretty close to the same age in both sets of scenes.
Mainly though, the relationship at the heart of the story seems relatively passionless except when the two characters are talking about his work, of which she had been a devoted reader. The film could use more establishing scenes and dialogue between the principals, more lust, and fewer pregnant pauses and lingering shots of domestic scenes. A music score might have been used more effectively to underscore the unspoken feelings. It is understandable that a young woman would be awed by a handsome, charming man whom she revered, understandable that he would be attracted to a pretty 18-year-old, but it’s not always apparent. The husband-wife relationship is clearer. Mrs. Dickens was a nice woman without an intellectual connection to her husband. I appreciated the way the film was sympathetic to all of its characters, but in some ways it makes them seem bloodless.
IMDb link
viewed 1/23/14 7:05 pm at Ritz Bourse; posted 1/23/14
Showing posts with label biography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biography. Show all posts
Friday, January 17, 2014
Friday, April 19, 2013
Renoir (***)
Not a biopic of Pierre Auguste Renoir (Michel Bouquet), this is more like a family portrait set in the great impressionist’s late career. Like a painting, the film is still but nice to look at. It helps that Renoir lived on the French Riviera in a large home with a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. (The director, Gilles Bourdos, also lets the camera fall out of focus a few times, making the screen look something like an impressionist canvas.) In contrast to a movie such as The Last Station, which similarly
follows Renoir’s contemporary Leo Tolstoy in his senescence, it is a movie of
temperaments rather than beliefs. Where a Tolstoy evolved to the end
and lived a personal life of some turmoil, Renoir liked
to think of himself as a craftsman who liked to “go with the flow” and
favored calmness. Though crippled by painful arthritis, he carries on as before, carried around on a chair by his female staff and working with the brush taped to his misshapen hand. Asked by his doctor what he’ll do if he cannot use his hand, he says, “I’ll paint with my dick.”
Red-headed Christa Theret plays Andrée Heuschling, Renoir’s last model, though Bourdos has set the story in 1915, a couple of years before she actually posed for for the old man. This allows him to set her arrival in the midst of the first World War and proximate to both the recent death of Renoir’s wife and the arrival of his son Jean (Vincent Rottiers), who is convalescing after an injury. Another son, though also injured, is still on the front, and the third, too young to fight, is still at home.
It probably helps to know that Jean, the middle son, would become celebrated in his own right, though not for painting. Here he has principle but not ambition. Andrée, known as Dedée, inspires and challenges him in the manner of many young women in many movies about many sorts of young men. She brings out old desires but no new changes in the painter himself. Through her, we see his personality and the way he worked and the way the other members of the household regarded him.
Renoir the man was an innovator. Renoir is merely competent. Not a great love story, it is simply a drama centered around the great man, whom even his sons call “Renoir.” Bourdos and Bouquet, who gives a fine performance, give us a man who obviously inspired deep loyalty, but whose family relationships lacked intimacy. (The youngest son calls himself an orphan.)
IMDb link
viewed 4/24/2013 7:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/24–25/13
Red-headed Christa Theret plays Andrée Heuschling, Renoir’s last model, though Bourdos has set the story in 1915, a couple of years before she actually posed for for the old man. This allows him to set her arrival in the midst of the first World War and proximate to both the recent death of Renoir’s wife and the arrival of his son Jean (Vincent Rottiers), who is convalescing after an injury. Another son, though also injured, is still on the front, and the third, too young to fight, is still at home.
It probably helps to know that Jean, the middle son, would become celebrated in his own right, though not for painting. Here he has principle but not ambition. Andrée, known as Dedée, inspires and challenges him in the manner of many young women in many movies about many sorts of young men. She brings out old desires but no new changes in the painter himself. Through her, we see his personality and the way he worked and the way the other members of the household regarded him.
Renoir the man was an innovator. Renoir is merely competent. Not a great love story, it is simply a drama centered around the great man, whom even his sons call “Renoir.” Bourdos and Bouquet, who gives a fine performance, give us a man who obviously inspired deep loyalty, but whose family relationships lacked intimacy. (The youngest son calls himself an orphan.)
IMDb link
viewed 4/24/2013 7:15 pm at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/24–25/13
Friday, March 29, 2013
The Sapphires (**3/4)
The novelty of its subjects, an aboriginal girl group who cut their teeth entertaining the troops in Vietnam, just barely raises this above showbiz cliché. Despite being (loosely) based on a true story, the prejudicial episodes generate more sympathy than a true understanding of Australia’s history with its native population. But this isn’t Rabbit-Proof Fence, nor the failed epic that was Australia, so it doesn’t need to do that, but only to function as a streamlined underdog story with musical interludes. Funniest moment: Chris O’Dowd, as the semi-alcoholic emcee who becomes the group’s manager, telling them to drop their Merle Haggard covers and embrace soul.
IMDb link
viewed 10/26/12 7:20 [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/30/12
IMDb link
viewed 10/26/12 7:20 [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/30/12
Thursday, March 1, 2012
The Conquest (***1/4)
The rise of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and simultaneous estrangement from his wife Cécilia are the subjects of this drama. Sarkozy’s (Denis Podalydès) wily maneuvers to pressure the man he would replace, Jacques Chirac (Bernard Le Coq), and circumvent his rival, Dominique de Villepin, will appeal to those who see politics through a cynical eye. But a more nuanced conclusion from this character study is that policy cannot be achieved without politics.
Curiously, neither the woman he defeated to become president, Ségolène Royal, nor the one he would make his second wife, Carla Bruni, appear as characters. (Royal is, however, the subject of a humorous imitation by a Sarkozy aide helping to prepare him to debate her.) But in Cécilia (Florence Pernel), we see a character who is prepared to assist her husband in his ambitions but, unlike so many wives of prominent politicians, not to surrender to them.
viewed 3/1/12 7:10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 3/10/12
Curiously, neither the woman he defeated to become president, Ségolène Royal, nor the one he would make his second wife, Carla Bruni, appear as characters. (Royal is, however, the subject of a humorous imitation by a Sarkozy aide helping to prepare him to debate her.) But in Cécilia (Florence Pernel), we see a character who is prepared to assist her husband in his ambitions but, unlike so many wives of prominent politicians, not to surrender to them.
viewed 3/1/12 7:10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 3/10/12
Friday, January 20, 2012
The Iron Lady (***)
This is perhaps two thirds of a very good biopic about the life of
Margaret Thatcher, British counterpart to Ronald Reagan, yet his
temperamental opposite. Unfortunately, the employment of a mostly
useless framing device — Thatcher (Meryl Streep) spends half a dozen
segments in the near-present day as she struggles with dementia and has
conversations with her late husband (Jim Broadbent)—mars it. Not only does it rob the narrative of some momentum with a storyline that
emphasizes the artificial nature of the medium—how could screenwriter
Abi Morgan (Shame), or anyone, know that Ms. Thatcher is turning
on her radio and other noisy appliances to drown out the sound of the
imagined husband she’s bickering with?—but it also uses up time that
would have better spent, say, showing us how a grocer’s daughter came to
such firm conservative beliefs that, even today, she is a controversial figure in her hometown in the English Midlands. Or how young Margaret Roberts became so determined to break into the nearly uniformly male field of electoral politics
in the 1950s. (Director Phyllida Lloyd depicts some of the sexism that
greeted her efforts, but wisely doesn’t make it the main focus; the visual statement of the pearl-necklace-wearing Thatcher among a sea of grey suits makes its own statement.)
Other than Thatcher’s landmark achievements as 1980s prime minister—the taming of the trade unions and the victory in the Falklands War—the film elides over her specific political policies, not to mention her four years as opposition leader, in favor of emphasizing her forcefulness and disinclination to yield. (The vehement opposition to her is also depicted without the film seeming to take any position on whether it was justified.) Indeed, American Tea Party sympathizers will find her an appealing heroine, and even firm liberals may fantasize about a President Obama who’s as unwilling to compromise.
Streep, of course, is entirely convincing; another actress, Alexandra Roach, plays Roberts/Thatcher as a college student, newlywed, and 1950s candidate for a seat in parliament. At least the makeup artistry that makes Streep look 80 can be admired. Broadbent is a fine actor, but not one who can be made to look young. So we see Denis Thatcher in the earliest scenes played by another actor; then he seems to age about 40 years to Thatcher’s 20. Oddly, Broadbent appears more as a ghost than in the scenes when Denis is alive. Although Denis was ten years the senior of Margaret and an archconservative, his possible role in shaping her political views is not explored.
For some reason, too many biographies of current or recent figures (e.g., J. Edgar) seem to insist on some sort of flashback structure so that the story is told from a present-day perspective. Yet less frequently is this done for those who died long ago. A Dangerous Method, for example, is perfectly content to dispense with the last 40 years of Carl Jung’s life in a brief epilogue. This would have done just fine to sum up the post-office life of Lady Thatcher. As it is, depicting the Iron Lady in her doddering dotage, possibly lamenting neglecting her husband and children, and the grandchildren off in South Africa, would seem to sentimentalize a woman for whom sentimentality would seem wholly inappropriate.
viewed 1/26/12 7:35 pm at Ritz Five and reviewed 1/30/12
Other than Thatcher’s landmark achievements as 1980s prime minister—the taming of the trade unions and the victory in the Falklands War—the film elides over her specific political policies, not to mention her four years as opposition leader, in favor of emphasizing her forcefulness and disinclination to yield. (The vehement opposition to her is also depicted without the film seeming to take any position on whether it was justified.) Indeed, American Tea Party sympathizers will find her an appealing heroine, and even firm liberals may fantasize about a President Obama who’s as unwilling to compromise.
Streep, of course, is entirely convincing; another actress, Alexandra Roach, plays Roberts/Thatcher as a college student, newlywed, and 1950s candidate for a seat in parliament. At least the makeup artistry that makes Streep look 80 can be admired. Broadbent is a fine actor, but not one who can be made to look young. So we see Denis Thatcher in the earliest scenes played by another actor; then he seems to age about 40 years to Thatcher’s 20. Oddly, Broadbent appears more as a ghost than in the scenes when Denis is alive. Although Denis was ten years the senior of Margaret and an archconservative, his possible role in shaping her political views is not explored.
For some reason, too many biographies of current or recent figures (e.g., J. Edgar) seem to insist on some sort of flashback structure so that the story is told from a present-day perspective. Yet less frequently is this done for those who died long ago. A Dangerous Method, for example, is perfectly content to dispense with the last 40 years of Carl Jung’s life in a brief epilogue. This would have done just fine to sum up the post-office life of Lady Thatcher. As it is, depicting the Iron Lady in her doddering dotage, possibly lamenting neglecting her husband and children, and the grandchildren off in South Africa, would seem to sentimentalize a woman for whom sentimentality would seem wholly inappropriate.
viewed 1/26/12 7:35 pm at Ritz Five and reviewed 1/30/12
Friday, January 6, 2012
A Dangerous Method (***
It’s probably a cliché to point out that being a good therapist doesn’t necessarily bring you closer to resolving your own conflicts. Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightly)
Viggo Mortenson, hardly recognizable with his thick beard, plays his mentor, Sigmund Freud, with whom he famously spoke to for 13 hours upon their first meeting and, even more famously, fell out with later.
IMDb link
Viggo Mortenson, hardly recognizable with his thick beard, plays his mentor, Sigmund Freud, with whom he famously spoke to for 13 hours upon their first meeting and, even more famously, fell out with later.
IMDb link
Friday, November 11, 2011
Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life (**1/2)
There are ordinary biopics, careful to identify places and persons and dates, often with on-screen titles. They’ll advance the story by showing the subject mentioned in newspaper headlines, or seen on a talk show, or performing. They’ll start with formative childhood incidents and end with the character’s death, or with an epilogue telling us in a conclusory paragraph. Sometimes, they win Oscars for the leads, as with Jamie Foxx in Ray or Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. This impressionistic take on another French icon is another sort of biopic, something like the take on Bob Dylan in I’m Not There.
Serge Gainsbourg (Eric Elmosnino) is a little like Dylan in embracing a number of musical identities, and maybe, as this film would suggest, being hard to sum up. Outside of France he is best known for the steamy 1969 duet “Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus,” written for his paramour Brigitte Bardot but a hit in much of the world (save the United States) as sung with English actress Jane Birkin, who’s portrayed here by Lucy Gordon. We first meet Gainsbourg (né Lucien Ginsburg) a bright, cocky twelve-year-old (Kacey Mottet Klein) Jewish boy in a Nazi-occupied Paris whose mix of repression and licentiousness would inform his future work as aspiring painter and, later, composer and singer. He’s already smoking the cigarettes that will shorten his life and exhibiting his lifelong fascination with the adult female. This early segment is the most conventional, but also the most satisfyingly cohesive. Perhaps the very first scene, in which a girl refuses his kiss because he’s “too ugly” is meant to clue us in to the insecurity around women that mysteriously shows up later.
Fast forward about ten years and the soon-to-be-renamed Ginsburg meets the first in a succession of wives and paramours. Things get more impressionistic at this point. Writer-director Joann Sfar doesn’t do any of the flitting back and forth in time like that Dylan biopic, which, coincidentally featured Charlotte Gainsbourg, the singer’s daughter with Birkin. However, it features an annoying plot device of having a costumed, giant-nosed (even larger than Gainsbourg’s nose) alter ego goad him into his boldest actions, which usually involved seduction. Perhaps this device worked better in Sfar’s graphic novel, from which she adapted the film. Her movie version skips about with time passage little noted and characters barely identified. Gainsbourg first wife, a by-product of his art-school education, disappears with only the impression that Gainsbourg had tired of her. The second wife is there to object to his philandering. Bardot, a torrid, famous fling, gets a lengthy interlude, and Birkin, with whom he spent the 1970s, gets more.
The movie spends about ten minutes exploring Gainsbourg’s life as a public figure, mostly by showing the controversy around his recording a reggae version of the French national anthem. Here are some other things about him that are not in this movie: he acted in several films, and directed a few; he released a classic album, Histoire de Melody Nelson, in 1971 (the film alludes to the title); he played the accordion and harmonica as well as guitar and piano; he wrote a novel; he appeared shirtless on a bed with a sensually arrayed, 13-year-old Charlotte in the music video for a 1984 duet entitled “Lemon Incest”; he recorded two albums in New Jersey in the 1980s; he died in 1991. In general, the movie is shallow about his musical life and only fleetingly suggests his place in French pop music history. The music is there mostly as a pathway to the personal, and, without the music, the personal suggests aimlessness.
As for the personal, if you come away with any image of Gainsbourg, it’s that he was attracted to many women. Whether you come away with much else is an open question.
viewed 11/15/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/16/11 (revised 11/20/11)
Serge Gainsbourg (Eric Elmosnino) is a little like Dylan in embracing a number of musical identities, and maybe, as this film would suggest, being hard to sum up. Outside of France he is best known for the steamy 1969 duet “Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus,” written for his paramour Brigitte Bardot but a hit in much of the world (save the United States) as sung with English actress Jane Birkin, who’s portrayed here by Lucy Gordon. We first meet Gainsbourg (né Lucien Ginsburg) a bright, cocky twelve-year-old (Kacey Mottet Klein) Jewish boy in a Nazi-occupied Paris whose mix of repression and licentiousness would inform his future work as aspiring painter and, later, composer and singer. He’s already smoking the cigarettes that will shorten his life and exhibiting his lifelong fascination with the adult female. This early segment is the most conventional, but also the most satisfyingly cohesive. Perhaps the very first scene, in which a girl refuses his kiss because he’s “too ugly” is meant to clue us in to the insecurity around women that mysteriously shows up later.
Fast forward about ten years and the soon-to-be-renamed Ginsburg meets the first in a succession of wives and paramours. Things get more impressionistic at this point. Writer-director Joann Sfar doesn’t do any of the flitting back and forth in time like that Dylan biopic, which, coincidentally featured Charlotte Gainsbourg, the singer’s daughter with Birkin. However, it features an annoying plot device of having a costumed, giant-nosed (even larger than Gainsbourg’s nose) alter ego goad him into his boldest actions, which usually involved seduction. Perhaps this device worked better in Sfar’s graphic novel, from which she adapted the film. Her movie version skips about with time passage little noted and characters barely identified. Gainsbourg first wife, a by-product of his art-school education, disappears with only the impression that Gainsbourg had tired of her. The second wife is there to object to his philandering. Bardot, a torrid, famous fling, gets a lengthy interlude, and Birkin, with whom he spent the 1970s, gets more.
The movie spends about ten minutes exploring Gainsbourg’s life as a public figure, mostly by showing the controversy around his recording a reggae version of the French national anthem. Here are some other things about him that are not in this movie: he acted in several films, and directed a few; he released a classic album, Histoire de Melody Nelson, in 1971 (the film alludes to the title); he played the accordion and harmonica as well as guitar and piano; he wrote a novel; he appeared shirtless on a bed with a sensually arrayed, 13-year-old Charlotte in the music video for a 1984 duet entitled “Lemon Incest”; he recorded two albums in New Jersey in the 1980s; he died in 1991. In general, the movie is shallow about his musical life and only fleetingly suggests his place in French pop music history. The music is there mostly as a pathway to the personal, and, without the music, the personal suggests aimlessness.
As for the personal, if you come away with any image of Gainsbourg, it’s that he was attracted to many women. Whether you come away with much else is an open question.
viewed 11/15/11 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/16/11 (revised 11/20/11)
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.
viewed 1/11/2012 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/11/2012
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.
viewed 1/11/2012 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/11/2012
Friday, March 25, 2011
Kill the Irishman (***)
You’d think they’d run out of true-life gangster stories to tell, but they never seem to. Just last year brought the excellent two-film French saga Mesrine, which isn’t that much like this one, but begins the same way, with someone trying to kill the title character, then flashing back a couple of decades to see how it all went down. Jacques Mesrine moved around a lot, but Irish American Danny Greene (Ray Stevenson) stays in Cleveland, his hometown. His rise from poor boy growing up to longshoreman to union boss is probably the best segment of the film and depicts the mixture of characteristics (a loan shark enforcer who worries about cholesterol—in the 1960s!) that made him such a force of nature. The second half of the movie covers the turf wars and deal-making that are typical of the genre.
As good at glad-handing as ass-kicking, though there winds up being more of the latter, the well-read Greene rose on both brains and brawn, as well as “brass balls,” a phrase that inevitably comes up in the film. With a suitably imposing screen presence and booming voice, Stevenson, of HBO’s Rome, is the other reason (besides the early part) to see the movie. Greene/Stevenson is so charismatic that he overshadows supporting roles played by better-known Vincent D'Onofrio, Val Kilmer, Tony Lo Bianco, and even Christopher Walken, although Walken is always memorable.
The beginning of the story is narrated by the Kilmer character, a police detective, and it seemed like the movie was going to be almost as much about the effort to catch Greene as about Greene himself. American Gangster pulled this off such a back-and-forth structure, whereas here director/cowriter Jonathan Hensleigh does the same thing as Ben Affleck does in The Town, making the lawman much less interesting. Kilmer’s detective does pop up now and again, evolving from a dead-set adversary into one with a somewhat clichéd grudging respect for him. The story skips ahead too much for this transition to be entirely convincing, and in the same vein, neither is the ending, which tries to give the Greene a kind of nobility that doesn’t quite fit with the fighting spirit he otherwise displays.
These and other scenes—for instance, the corny one in which an Irish-born widow-next-door (Fionnula Flanagan) gives Greene a lecture about Irish pride—gave me the sense of a miniseries that had been edited down to feature length. The movie is based on Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia, by Rick Porrello, and it’s typical that the “crippled the Mafia” part is pretty much relegated to an epilogue. Undoubtedly, there was enough material in the book to create a two-part film, as with Mesrine. As it is, Hensleigh largely maintains a realism (including period news footage) that should appeal to genre fans, but it’s not a must-see.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/22/11
As good at glad-handing as ass-kicking, though there winds up being more of the latter, the well-read Greene rose on both brains and brawn, as well as “brass balls,” a phrase that inevitably comes up in the film. With a suitably imposing screen presence and booming voice, Stevenson, of HBO’s Rome, is the other reason (besides the early part) to see the movie. Greene/Stevenson is so charismatic that he overshadows supporting roles played by better-known Vincent D'Onofrio, Val Kilmer, Tony Lo Bianco, and even Christopher Walken, although Walken is always memorable.
The beginning of the story is narrated by the Kilmer character, a police detective, and it seemed like the movie was going to be almost as much about the effort to catch Greene as about Greene himself. American Gangster pulled this off such a back-and-forth structure, whereas here director/cowriter Jonathan Hensleigh does the same thing as Ben Affleck does in The Town, making the lawman much less interesting. Kilmer’s detective does pop up now and again, evolving from a dead-set adversary into one with a somewhat clichéd grudging respect for him. The story skips ahead too much for this transition to be entirely convincing, and in the same vein, neither is the ending, which tries to give the Greene a kind of nobility that doesn’t quite fit with the fighting spirit he otherwise displays.
These and other scenes—for instance, the corny one in which an Irish-born widow-next-door (Fionnula Flanagan) gives Greene a lecture about Irish pride—gave me the sense of a miniseries that had been edited down to feature length. The movie is based on Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia, by Rick Porrello, and it’s typical that the “crippled the Mafia” part is pretty much relegated to an epilogue. Undoubtedly, there was enough material in the book to create a two-part film, as with Mesrine. As it is, Hensleigh largely maintains a realism (including period news footage) that should appeal to genre fans, but it’s not a must-see.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/22/11
Friday, October 15, 2010
Nowhere Boy (***1/2)
This drama begins with a chord lifted from the start of the Beatles song “A Hard Day’s Night,” whose title might be some sort of metaphor for the career of John Lennon. The song was released in 1964, during the height of Beatlemania. The next year, they recorded “Nowhere Man,” which obviously inspired this movie’s title. The song, though, is about a man with no “point of view” making “plans for nobody,” whereas Lennon (Aaron Johnson), though without direction as a teenager, had a cockiness and drive that made him the opposite of the nonentity in the song.
Lennon’s fame came well after the period memorialized here, saving the producers a bundle in music rights. Beatles aficionados may recognize the early originals “Hello Little Girl” and “In Spite of All the Danger,” which didn’t make it onto their proper studio albums, and “Maggie Mae,” a non-original that did. They may notice John riding by Strawberry Fields in Liverpool near the start of the film. And they will anxiously await the inevitable moment when he’s introduced to the 15-year-old Paul McCartney after a performance by Lennon’s band, the Quarrrymen. But ultimately, this is the story of a teenage boy, not the story of a rock star. Judged strictly on that basis, the movie is still surprisingly entertaining, even moving.
It is the story of a somewhat rebellious teenager caught between two women. His magnetic personality seems drawn from his mother Julia (Anne Marie Duff), memorialized in a somber 1968 song of that name. But he was largely raised by his aunt Mimi, a hard woman portrayed with subtlety by Kristin Scott Thomas. In the movie version of things (a little simplified), Lennon barely knows his mother until he sees her at the funeral of his uncle, a surrogate father who dies at the start of the movie. It is the push-pull of these strong women that helps shape him. The one teaches him to play banjo, the other actually buys him a guitar. (Though in real life, Julia did both.)
Directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, Nowhere Boy is based on a memoir by Lonnon’s half-sister Julia Baird. The screenplay is by Matt Greenhalgh, who adapted another musical memoir in Control. That movie told the story of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, who committed suicide less than seven months before Lennon’s death. This movie, though, is full of life and worth seeing even for middling Beatles fans. Duff and Johnson capture the charisma and pathos of their characters. There is one solo Lennon recording, “Mother,” in the film. “You had me,” sang Lennon in the 1970 song, “but I never had you.” It plays over the closing credits.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 10/29/10
Lennon’s fame came well after the period memorialized here, saving the producers a bundle in music rights. Beatles aficionados may recognize the early originals “Hello Little Girl” and “In Spite of All the Danger,” which didn’t make it onto their proper studio albums, and “Maggie Mae,” a non-original that did. They may notice John riding by Strawberry Fields in Liverpool near the start of the film. And they will anxiously await the inevitable moment when he’s introduced to the 15-year-old Paul McCartney after a performance by Lennon’s band, the Quarrrymen. But ultimately, this is the story of a teenage boy, not the story of a rock star. Judged strictly on that basis, the movie is still surprisingly entertaining, even moving.
It is the story of a somewhat rebellious teenager caught between two women. His magnetic personality seems drawn from his mother Julia (Anne Marie Duff), memorialized in a somber 1968 song of that name. But he was largely raised by his aunt Mimi, a hard woman portrayed with subtlety by Kristin Scott Thomas. In the movie version of things (a little simplified), Lennon barely knows his mother until he sees her at the funeral of his uncle, a surrogate father who dies at the start of the movie. It is the push-pull of these strong women that helps shape him. The one teaches him to play banjo, the other actually buys him a guitar. (Though in real life, Julia did both.)
Directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, Nowhere Boy is based on a memoir by Lonnon’s half-sister Julia Baird. The screenplay is by Matt Greenhalgh, who adapted another musical memoir in Control. That movie told the story of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, who committed suicide less than seven months before Lennon’s death. This movie, though, is full of life and worth seeing even for middling Beatles fans. Duff and Johnson capture the charisma and pathos of their characters. There is one solo Lennon recording, “Mother,” in the film. “You had me,” sang Lennon in the 1970 song, “but I never had you.” It plays over the closing credits.
IMDB link
viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 10/29/10
Friday, August 27, 2010
Mesrine: Killer Instinct (***1/4)
The gangster film had already been around awhile when the early classics The Public Enemy and Little Caesar were released in 1931. These formed the template for countless films that followed the rise and, usually, fall of a would-be mob boss. Arguably, this formula reached its zenith with the Godfather saga, which also incorporated the trope of family conflict that is nearly as frequent an ingredient in these stories. But filmmakers still try their hand at making something original of the genre. Just a few months ago there was A Prophet, another French film that is superior to this, probably, though this does have a certain visceral energy to it.
These films vary in location, time period, criminal proclivities of the antihero, and so on, but the primary characters generally fall into two types. One is the type who under other circumstances might have done something else with his life, but learn the ruthlessness that underlies criminality. Michael Corleone in The Godfather and Henry Hill in Goodfellas are such characters. So is the hero of The Prophet, who starts off as a scared prisoner. This suspense drama, a true story, is of the other type. If Jacques Mesrine ( Vincent Cassel) was once an ordinary young man, it was at a young age. In an early scene the young Jacques, just back from fighting in Algeria, berates his father for cooperating with the Germans during World War II. "Do balls skip a generation in this family?" he asks. And that's about as much of an explanation as we get for the remarkable criminal résumé that Mesrine would amass, on two continents, in the 1960s and ’70s. It's a record so extensive as to have been compiled in two parts, of which this is the first. (Even with that, the film skips ahead and omits several of Mesrine's documented adventures.)
These films vary in location, time period, criminal proclivities of the antihero, and so on, but the primary characters generally fall into two types. One is the type who under other circumstances might have done something else with his life, but learn the ruthlessness that underlies criminality. Michael Corleone in The Godfather and Henry Hill in Goodfellas are such characters. So is the hero of The Prophet, who starts off as a scared prisoner. This suspense drama, a true story, is of the other type. If Jacques Mesrine ( Vincent Cassel) was once an ordinary young man, it was at a young age. In an early scene the young Jacques, just back from fighting in Algeria, berates his father for cooperating with the Germans during World War II. "Do balls skip a generation in this family?" he asks. And that's about as much of an explanation as we get for the remarkable criminal résumé that Mesrine would amass, on two continents, in the 1960s and ’70s. It's a record so extensive as to have been compiled in two parts, of which this is the first. (Even with that, the film skips ahead and omits several of Mesrine's documented adventures.)
What most gangster films have in common is the man who disregards all rules, and our fascination with that is why they keep making them. Attracting comely women and escaping from prison were among Mesrine’s talents, but it is sheer cockiness that propels him. Cassel is quite charismatic in the leading role. In terms of story, there is not much order to all that happens. Mesrine seems to have been an improviser, which is perhaps why he got caught and ultimately killed. No spoiler this, since it’s shown at the start of the film. The movie never returns to it, though. Instead, it stops in the middle, the story to be picked up in Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, whose title is an homage to one of its classic forebears.
IMDB link
viewed 8/29/10 at Ritz 5
Friday, February 5, 2010
The Last Station (***)
Leo Tolstoy was the celebrated 19th-century Russian writer of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. And that is all I knew about him. But it turns out he lived into the 20th century, concentrating his energies on furthering his social philosophy, which is not deeply discussed but seems like an ascetic, Christian take on Marxism. His foremost ally in this was Vladmir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), a deadly earnest man seemingly more dedicated to Tolstoyan ideals than the great man himself. His foremost enemy was his own wife, played by Helen Mirren. Her attitude toward his ideals recalls a line in Mel Brooks’s History of the World Part I. Told that “the peasants are revolting,” Harvey Korman as the French King Louis XIV says, “You said it. They stink on ice.” But her real source of ire seems to be Tolstoy’s plan to rewrite his will to waive future royalties and leave his works to the Russian people.
The movie is based on a novel by Jay Parini, so there is also a love story, not that of Leo and Sofya, but that of a would-be Tolstoy acolyte (James McEvoy). McEvoy seems to have made a specialty of playing naive men undergoing learning experiences (that Idi Amin was evil in The Last King of Scotland, that life was unfair in Atonement, that he was a pussy in Wanted, and so on). He functions as the fulcrum between the two camps warring over Tolstoy’s soul (and copyrights), although Sofya is clearly the more sympathetic character. This is thanks in part to Mirren’s beautiful, emotional performance, but also because director Michael Hoffman pushes our sympathies that way. She may be a mercenary, but at least, he seems to say, she’s not a stick in the mud like Chertkov. As for Tolstoy himself (Christopher Plummer), he’s a kindly supporting character in his own drama.
IMDB link
viewed 3/3/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/?/10
The movie is based on a novel by Jay Parini, so there is also a love story, not that of Leo and Sofya, but that of a would-be Tolstoy acolyte (James McEvoy). McEvoy seems to have made a specialty of playing naive men undergoing learning experiences (that Idi Amin was evil in The Last King of Scotland, that life was unfair in Atonement, that he was a pussy in Wanted, and so on). He functions as the fulcrum between the two camps warring over Tolstoy’s soul (and copyrights), although Sofya is clearly the more sympathetic character. This is thanks in part to Mirren’s beautiful, emotional performance, but also because director Michael Hoffman pushes our sympathies that way. She may be a mercenary, but at least, he seems to say, she’s not a stick in the mud like Chertkov. As for Tolstoy himself (Christopher Plummer), he’s a kindly supporting character in his own drama.
IMDB link
viewed 3/3/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/?/10
Friday, December 11, 2009
Me and Orson Welles (***)
Some may know Orson Welles as the director of (an actor in) Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Touch of Evil, others as the man behind the 1939 War of the Worlds radio broadcast that panicked America, or even, as I first encountered him in the 1970s, as the rotund, bearded pitchman who intoned that “We will sell no wine before its time.” But this movie covers none of that, being set earlier. Welles (Christian McKay) is in 1937 merely known as a talented young radio and stage actor, as well as the director of the political operetta The Cradle Will Rock (whose presentation is recounted in a 1999 Tim Robbins movie of the same name).
But already Welles has the force of personality to match his obvious genius (and later physical size). Although the primary storyline is supposed to be about a young actor (Zac Efron) talking his way into the cast of Welles’s Julius Caesar and romancing Welles’s Girl Friday (Claire Danes), and the movie also represents a snapshot of the many things—staging, lighting, music, timing—that go into a theatrical production, McKay’s version of Welles is by far what makes the film most worth watching, the way Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin did in The Last King of Scotland. McKay, who played Welles in a one-man show, has few film credits, but digs into the role of the erudite, demanding, charming, cruel, womanizing Renaissance man that Welles already had become as he sought to establish his newly formed Mercury Theatre company in New York. So busy (or self-important) was Welles that he used an ambulance to whisk him across town to do his radio show. Efron, having graduated from High School Musical but not, in this role, from high school, is acceptable, perhaps a bit too modern, Danes is better, and James Tupper as Joseph Cotten leads a solid supporting cast, but it is Welles, in his youthful vitality, whose story is most memorable. (Both McKay and Efron look too old for their characters.) Director Richard Linklater (The School of Rock, Fast Food Nation) maintains a light comic tone in adapting a novel by Richard Kaplow.
IMDB link
viewed 12/7/09 (PFS screening at Ritz 5) and reviewed 12/10/09
But already Welles has the force of personality to match his obvious genius (and later physical size). Although the primary storyline is supposed to be about a young actor (Zac Efron) talking his way into the cast of Welles’s Julius Caesar and romancing Welles’s Girl Friday (Claire Danes), and the movie also represents a snapshot of the many things—staging, lighting, music, timing—that go into a theatrical production, McKay’s version of Welles is by far what makes the film most worth watching, the way Forest Whitaker’s Idi Amin did in The Last King of Scotland. McKay, who played Welles in a one-man show, has few film credits, but digs into the role of the erudite, demanding, charming, cruel, womanizing Renaissance man that Welles already had become as he sought to establish his newly formed Mercury Theatre company in New York. So busy (or self-important) was Welles that he used an ambulance to whisk him across town to do his radio show. Efron, having graduated from High School Musical but not, in this role, from high school, is acceptable, perhaps a bit too modern, Danes is better, and James Tupper as Joseph Cotten leads a solid supporting cast, but it is Welles, in his youthful vitality, whose story is most memorable. (Both McKay and Efron look too old for their characters.) Director Richard Linklater (The School of Rock, Fast Food Nation) maintains a light comic tone in adapting a novel by Richard Kaplow.
IMDB link
viewed 12/7/09 (PFS screening at Ritz 5) and reviewed 12/10/09
Friday, October 23, 2009
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
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
Friday, September 25, 2009
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
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
Friday, August 7, 2009
Julie & Julia (***1/2)
A good movie can make you look forward to what’s coming even though you already know the ending. In this case, we know that Julia Child (Meryl Streep) will go on to teach generations of Americans to cook with her Mastering the Art of French Cooking and, later, her pioneering cooking show on public television. And we know that Julia Powell will more or less achieve her goal of completing all 542 of the recipes in Child’s book in a year, and blogging about it, or else they wouldn’t have gotten Amy Adams to play her in a movie, would they? Unlike some other movies that alternate storylines, I was equally happy watching either one of the two that form this Nora Ephron confection.
Ephron, who most recently wrote and directed the not-bewitching Bewitched (2005) has written the semi-classic When Harry Met Sally, but in follow-ups such as Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail has proven better at crafting dialogue than compelling characters. This is mostly remedied here, since the film is an adaptation of memoirs by Child and Powell. It also helps that Meryl Streep plays Child. To watch Streep in her previous movie, Doubt, and then this is to seemingly watch two different actresses. Streep is smaller than the six-foot-tall woman she plays, but nonetheless captures the gangly movements and unusual voice that would later become famous. Her dour nun in Doubt probably wouldn’t have liked Child, who clearly reveled in sensual pleasure. And not just of food, as the charming scenes with her diplomat husband (Stanley Tucci) show. Depicting their life in France in the 1950s, the movie shows something even rarer on film than in real life, a happy couple who, in the course of the movie, never even bicker. The conflict comes from trying to get her book published, even though we know she’ll eventually succeed.
Meanwhile, in the latter-day scenes, Powell struggles in a Queens apartment with recipes for forgotten dishes like aspic, with Child as her inspiration and muse. These scenes are sometimes funny without getting too cute. As the real Julia Child showed, mistakes happen in the kitchen all the time. Unlike most of today’s cooking shows, Child left them in, and that was part of the appeal. So it is here. I suspect many people will like the flashback scenes better, since Child was such an outsize personality, but both of these women are sort of inspirational. That’s a word that usually frightens me away from a movie, because the people so described are usually too perfect to truly inspire. Yet here are two women figuring out their lives and making mistakes. On the other hand, Ephron and her cast and crew make hardly any. It’s a near-perfect soufflé of a movie, light but substantive.
IMDB link
viewed 6/17/09 (screening at ritz Bourse) and reviewed 8/7–8/09
Ephron, who most recently wrote and directed the not-bewitching Bewitched (2005) has written the semi-classic When Harry Met Sally, but in follow-ups such as Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail has proven better at crafting dialogue than compelling characters. This is mostly remedied here, since the film is an adaptation of memoirs by Child and Powell. It also helps that Meryl Streep plays Child. To watch Streep in her previous movie, Doubt, and then this is to seemingly watch two different actresses. Streep is smaller than the six-foot-tall woman she plays, but nonetheless captures the gangly movements and unusual voice that would later become famous. Her dour nun in Doubt probably wouldn’t have liked Child, who clearly reveled in sensual pleasure. And not just of food, as the charming scenes with her diplomat husband (Stanley Tucci) show. Depicting their life in France in the 1950s, the movie shows something even rarer on film than in real life, a happy couple who, in the course of the movie, never even bicker. The conflict comes from trying to get her book published, even though we know she’ll eventually succeed.
Meanwhile, in the latter-day scenes, Powell struggles in a Queens apartment with recipes for forgotten dishes like aspic, with Child as her inspiration and muse. These scenes are sometimes funny without getting too cute. As the real Julia Child showed, mistakes happen in the kitchen all the time. Unlike most of today’s cooking shows, Child left them in, and that was part of the appeal. So it is here. I suspect many people will like the flashback scenes better, since Child was such an outsize personality, but both of these women are sort of inspirational. That’s a word that usually frightens me away from a movie, because the people so described are usually too perfect to truly inspire. Yet here are two women figuring out their lives and making mistakes. On the other hand, Ephron and her cast and crew make hardly any. It’s a near-perfect soufflé of a movie, light but substantive.
IMDB link
viewed 6/17/09 (screening at ritz Bourse) and reviewed 8/7–8/09
Friday, May 8, 2009
Tyson (***1/2)
I admit I only saw this because I was invited to. But James Toback’s documentary was an unexpectedly revelatory portrait of the boxer who, after taking the heavyweight world by storm, increasingly came to seem like a human cartoon. Toback, known for features like The Pick-Up Artist and Black and White, built the film around five lengthy interviews with Mike Tyson. Aside from extensive footage of Tyson’s bouts and some news footage, chronologically ordered segments of these interviews form the entire film. But while the movie is in no sense objective—and Toback is Tyson’s longtime friend—it doesn’t seem like hagiography either.
While the champ, who became the youngest heavyweight champion (aged 20) in 1986, isn’t exactly articulate—his recounting of the time he performed “fellatio” on a woman in a toilet elicited snickers—he is able to speak with a perspective on his past that he lacked at the time. He chalks up his celebrated, brief marriage to Robin Givens to mutual immaturity. He dismisses Desiree Washington, of whom he was convicted of raping in 1992, as lying “swine,” while admitting to other bad sexual behavior, such as the “extracurricular” activity during hs marriages. The infamous ear-biting incident involving Evander Holyfield is also addressed. Yet the less sensational moments, such as the worshipful way he speaks of his first manager, Cus D’Amato, are most revealing. Whatever you think of Tyson, this unexpectedly fascinating film turns the cartoon into a human being.
IMDB link
viewed 3/29/09 at Ritz East (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 3/31/09
While the champ, who became the youngest heavyweight champion (aged 20) in 1986, isn’t exactly articulate—his recounting of the time he performed “fellatio” on a woman in a toilet elicited snickers—he is able to speak with a perspective on his past that he lacked at the time. He chalks up his celebrated, brief marriage to Robin Givens to mutual immaturity. He dismisses Desiree Washington, of whom he was convicted of raping in 1992, as lying “swine,” while admitting to other bad sexual behavior, such as the “extracurricular” activity during hs marriages. The infamous ear-biting incident involving Evander Holyfield is also addressed. Yet the less sensational moments, such as the worshipful way he speaks of his first manager, Cus D’Amato, are most revealing. Whatever you think of Tyson, this unexpectedly fascinating film turns the cartoon into a human being.
IMDB link
viewed 3/29/09 at Ritz East (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 3/31/09
Friday, March 20, 2009
The Great Buck Howard (**1/2)
John Malkovich plays the title character, a fictionalized version of the Amazing Kreskin, whom those old enough to watch Johnny Carson may remember. However, the story is set in the present day, when Buck travels from mid-size city to mid-size city, playing to half-empty theaters, doing an act that hasn’t changed in decades. It’s like The Wrestler if Mickey Rourke had played a mentalist, only told from the viewpoint of his new assistant, played by Colin Hanks. (Colin’s dad Tom plays…his dad in a couple of scenes.) The assistant wants to be a writer. Later, he meets a girl (Emily Blunt). He’s a likable but generic character. Malkovich’s Howard, more interesting, is a temperamental sort, full of peculiarities like his (and Kreskin’s) roundhouse, arm-pulling handshake, but after you’ve seen him onscreen for ten minutes, there’s not much else to be learned. And no, you don’t learn how he does his tricks. Not one. The implication is that there is none. But the movie could use a few.
IMDB link
viewed 3/18/09 at Ritz Bourse (screening) and reviewed 3/19/09
IMDB link
viewed 3/18/09 at Ritz Bourse (screening) and reviewed 3/19/09
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Valkyrie (***)
It is 1943, and Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise), a Nazi colonel severely wounded in the North Africa campaign, takes charge of a plot to kill Hitler. A dozen such plots have failed before, but they didn’t have Tom Cruise—sorry, Stauffenberg—in charge.
Cruise brings his usual cockiness to the role. He seems too modern, and too American, but as the role is written, it suits his usual mien. The colonel rarely even bothers with the “Heil Hitler” greeting, which makes you wonder why the fuhrer’s loyalists weren’t onto him. He is, in fact, a fairly one-dimensional character. This dovetails with the general lack of moral ambiguity in the story. The conspirators who urge caution are made to seem as foolish as the colonel is heroic, so that I was slightly worried the filmmakers would change history and have the plot succeed. There are several other characters, played by good actors like Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, and Tom Wilkinson, but they didn’t stick in my memory. (Cruise’s wife, incidentally, is played by Carice van Houten, who got to show off far more range in another Nazi-era thriller, the superior Black Book.)
Still, the thriller thrills. Director Bryan Singer uses sound cues like the hum of teletype machines to convey a sense of urgency. The script, co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, who collaborated with Singer on The Usual Suspects, precisely reveals the way the plotters planned to turn an existing Nazi emergency plan—Project Valkyrie—against the regime itself. The climax, in which it becomes unclear whether the Führer is dead or alive, is a reminder that information and belief are—as much as weapons—the tools of power. Yes, this is a fairly well-crafted thriller, but not more.
Perhaps it was felt that we needed no reminder of Nazi horrors, but without knowing that history you could actually watch Valkyrie and wonder what the plotters hated about Hitler and the Nazis, except perhaps a growing feeling that they has already lost the war. Valkyrie does remind us that not all Germans supported the Nazis, although you could forget that with the mixture of English and American (Cruise’s) accent. (Using a clever device I remember from The Hunt for Red October, Cruise begins speaking German and then segues into English.) What could have made the movie more compelling, though, is a look into why these men—even Stauffenberg himself—came to oppose the Reich. Other than the setting, and the ending—no, history is not altered—little distinguishes the movie from a good, but generic, Hollywood suspense drama.
IMDB link
viewed 12/9/08 (screening at Ritz 5); reviewed 12/9/08 and 1/26/09
Cruise brings his usual cockiness to the role. He seems too modern, and too American, but as the role is written, it suits his usual mien. The colonel rarely even bothers with the “Heil Hitler” greeting, which makes you wonder why the fuhrer’s loyalists weren’t onto him. He is, in fact, a fairly one-dimensional character. This dovetails with the general lack of moral ambiguity in the story. The conspirators who urge caution are made to seem as foolish as the colonel is heroic, so that I was slightly worried the filmmakers would change history and have the plot succeed. There are several other characters, played by good actors like Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, and Tom Wilkinson, but they didn’t stick in my memory. (Cruise’s wife, incidentally, is played by Carice van Houten, who got to show off far more range in another Nazi-era thriller, the superior Black Book.)
Still, the thriller thrills. Director Bryan Singer uses sound cues like the hum of teletype machines to convey a sense of urgency. The script, co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, who collaborated with Singer on The Usual Suspects, precisely reveals the way the plotters planned to turn an existing Nazi emergency plan—Project Valkyrie—against the regime itself. The climax, in which it becomes unclear whether the Führer is dead or alive, is a reminder that information and belief are—as much as weapons—the tools of power. Yes, this is a fairly well-crafted thriller, but not more.
Perhaps it was felt that we needed no reminder of Nazi horrors, but without knowing that history you could actually watch Valkyrie and wonder what the plotters hated about Hitler and the Nazis, except perhaps a growing feeling that they has already lost the war. Valkyrie does remind us that not all Germans supported the Nazis, although you could forget that with the mixture of English and American (Cruise’s) accent. (Using a clever device I remember from The Hunt for Red October, Cruise begins speaking German and then segues into English.) What could have made the movie more compelling, though, is a look into why these men—even Stauffenberg himself—came to oppose the Reich. Other than the setting, and the ending—no, history is not altered—little distinguishes the movie from a good, but generic, Hollywood suspense drama.
IMDB link
viewed 12/9/08 (screening at Ritz 5); reviewed 12/9/08 and 1/26/09
Friday, November 28, 2008
Milk (***1/2)
A fine biopic about Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), the murdered San Francisco city supervisor.
IMDb link
viewed 1/14/09 at Ritz 5
IMDb link
viewed 1/14/09 at Ritz 5
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