Wild Tales (***1/2)

With so few venues for shorts, there should be more films like this. The aptly titled Wild Tales is a anthology film that brings together half a dozen stories, otherwise unrelated, that all stem from the brain of Argentinian director Damián Szifron. To be sure, some elements show up in multiple stories — revenge, characters turning smaller problems into larger ones, violent reactions, issues surrounding motor vehicles — but the only thing that truly ties them together is Szifron, whose penchant for creative plot turns and mordant humor makes this a tasty cinematic buffet.

Typical is the brief pre-credit story: A model meets a music professor on a plane, and it turns out they have a common acquaintance…but maybe that’s no coincidence. In a later episode, perhaps the most clever and visually arresting, a minor road rage incident also turns into something more. In each case, Szifron dispenses with lengthy set-ups and puts the viewer right into the story.

The plot twists and humor in each of them takes nothing away from the emotions of the main characters. Even if you wouldn’t go as far as they do to resolve their problems, you’ll identify a little bit with them, or at any rate laugh at them. One actor, Ricardo Darín, has also starred in Nine Queens and The Secret in Their Eyes, two other excellent Argentinian films.

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viewed 4/29/15 at Ritz Bourse and posted 4/29/15

Force Majeure (***1/2)

This slow-building Swedish drama (with a number of comedic parts) uniquely and subtly explores modern gender roles.  Tomas and Ebba (Johannes Kuhnke, Lisa Loven Kongsli) are a married couple who take their young son and daughter to a ski resort in the French Alps. They seem like, and are, an ordinary family. But a near-disaster the next day has the children frightened and their parents estranged over their divergent reactions in the face of an apparent emergency.

In depicting this estrangement, as well as the reactions of another couple, friends who hear what happened, writer-director Ruben Östlund asks, in the age of egalitarian marriage, whether fundamental differences remain between men and women, what they still expect in a partner, and how trust and respect can be regained when they’ve been lost.


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viewed 10/26/14 3:00 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival]

Laggies (***1/2)

A laggie sounds like it might be an affectionate British term for what Americans call a slacker, but it may just be an invention of director Lynn Shelton or her screenwriter, Andrea Seigel, referring to someone who has not made much forward progress in life. This would describe 28-year-old Megan (Keira Knightley), who is doing menial work for her indulgent father (Jeff Garlin) and hanging out with her old high school friends despite signs — signs too heavily underlined by the script — that they’ve grown apart. When her longtime boyfriend wants to move forward (by marrying her) and she catches her father cheating on her mother, she retreats.

She does this unconventionally, by hanging out with 16-year-old Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz) and her friends and lying to her boyfriend about her whereabouts. Shelton and Seigel make this unlikely scenario more plausible that it might seem, and work in themes of parental abandonment, infidelity, and teen drinking — and a pet turtle — while making the story cohesive. Sam Rockwell plays Annika’s divorced dad; while Knightley only has a handful of scenes with him, they’re charming enough to credibly set up the later plot developments.

Set in and around Seattle, this is billed as a comedy, and it is funny at times, but it seemed to have almost as much dramatic impact as Shelton’s last film, Your Sister’s Sister. In both cases, she pushes characters together in ways that surprise us —save for the cliché ending — and makes it work.

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viewed 11/7/14 4:15 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 11/7/14

Big Significant Things (***)

Craig (Harry Lloyd) is on a car trip. It’s not clear why, where he’s headed, or why he hasn’t told his girlfriend, who’s house-hunting for them across the country. He’s from New Jersey but spends most of the movie in Mississippi, frequently stopping to see roadside attractions. In many ways the movie’s as aimless as Craig’s journey seems to be. Sometimes it’s funny, and sometimes dramatic, but it’s better at establishing personality and mood than suggesting whatever existential dilemma is driving Craig away from his future. He has a few encounters, small and medium-size, with local people that keep the film moving, if not necessarily forward. The quirky locations appealed to me.


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viewed 10/26/14 5:00 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival]

Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (***1/2)

Everyone knows people they see all the time, often at work, but don’t know much about. What do those people do with their spare time? In the case of Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, who has had roles in Babel, 47 Ronin, and Pacific Rim), a 29-year-old Tokyo office assistant, she spends much of time alone, watching an old videotape of the movie Fargo. Her curiosity is not idle, because she believes she has pinpointed the location of a suitcase full of money that the Steve Buscemi character has buried in the film. This perhaps does not seem like a promising idea for a feature film, but David and Nathan Zellner (brothers, like Fargo filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen) make it work. Lars and the Real Girl seems roughly comparable.

Kumiko is a fish out of water in America, where she barely speaks the language, but also in Japan, where she lives a solitary existence. Kikuchi is in every scene of the movie and creates a character who remains enormously sympathetic even as her interactions with Japanese and Americans are sometimes very funny, even as she behaves deceitfully. There are a couple of nits I could pick with the plot, but the character is always believable. Besides the unique story, I enjoyed this film for its portrayals of infrequent film subjects: naiveté, language barrier, and snowy northern Minnesota. Only the ending was a letdown, but maybe because I wanted to keep watching Kumiko (and Kikuchi).


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viewed 10/25/14 7:15 pm at Roxy [PFS Film Festival] and posted 10/25/14

St. Vincent (***)

This is part of the subgenre in which a grouchy adult gets saddled with an unwanted kid. In the case of Vincent (Bill Murray, sporting a Brooklyn accent), the kid is not entirely unwanted, since he’s charging the boy’s mom (Melissa McCarthy, in a subdued performance) twelve bucks an hour for after-school babysitting, and Vincent needs the money. In addition to grouchiness, Vincent comes with a full complement of vices — drunk driving, smoking, gambling (on horses), petty theft, a poor fashion sense, and an ongoing acquaintanceship with what he describes to the boy as a “lady of the night” (Naomi Watts, sporting a Russian accent). The boy, perhaps ten, is a typically precocious movie kid whose trademark is calling adults “sir,” though he appears to have grown up in New York.

With this kind of movie is that the plot is always going to be about the kid bringing out the grouchy adult’s humanity, so the trick is to this without getting all sappy or making the adult into an entirely new person. Writer-director Theodore Melfi mostly does this right until the too-clean ending. The money problems conveniently disappear (or seem to) and the whole thing seems calculated to sentimentalize Vincent (see title) and make the audience cheer. Entertaining characters — grouches usually are in movies — save the day, as do good performances, including always ingratiating Chris O’Dowd as a Catholic School teacher. The Brazilian movie Central Station remains a standard-bearer for the grouch-unwanted kid film, or, for a more comedic example, Kikujiro.

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viewed 10/29/14 7:30 pm at Ritz 5; posted 10/29/14

Pride (2014) ***1/4

In theory, a good story is a good story, and whether it really happened shouldn’t affect whether it’s a good movie. But if you’d thought first-time screenwriter Stephen Beresford had simply invented a tale about a group of gay-rights activists who, all on their own, decided to raise money for striking rural miners, it’d have seemed rather unlikely and strange. The 1984 National Union of Mineworkers strike is well-remembered in Britain and were a marker of the changes that came to the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  But this Pride, which shares its title with a 2007 film about a Philadelphia swim team, is more likely to remind you of working-class underdog stories like The Full Monty and Billy Elliot than of a more overtly political film.

Beresford and director Matthew Warchus stick to the personal, showing the unlikely path by which a small group of London-based activists wound up in an out-of-the-way town in Wales. At first, it seems like the main character might be young, closeted Joe (George MacKay), but the other characters, especially loud-and-proud Mark (Ben Schnetzer), and spiky-haired Steph, the sole lesbian (Faye Marsay), get about equal attention. Despite plenty of humorous moments, the accent is on the personalities, not fish-out-of-water stereotypes. The men and women of the town exhibit the range of reactions you might expect, from deep hostility to unmitigated gratitude toward their unexpected benefactors. The ubiquitous Bill Nighy stands out as a man who seems deeply uncomfortable with all of this, yet remains unfailingly polite.

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viewed 8/29/14 10 am at Ritz 5; posted 10/9/14

The Skeleton Twins (***1/2)

Movies about adult brother-sister pairings intrigue me because they’re not that common but often good. (You Can Count on Me and The Savages, both with Laura Linney, come to mind.) In contrast to a movie about a romantic pairing, the plot does not hinge on the binary question, will they or won’t they end up together. A sibling is someone you’ll always be linked to, even if, like the siblings here, you haven’t spoken in ten years.

Maggie (Kristen Wiig) reunites with her brother Milo (Bill Hader) upon the event of the latter’s clumsy suicide attempt, an impulsive act signified with a note that reads, “See ya later.” Other such grim humor makes it into the movie. However, former Saturday Night Live comedians Wiig and Hader are playing it straight here, even if Milo is gay, and even if he and his sister share a subversive sense of humor. That, among other things, makes Maggie feel a distance from her nice-guy husband (Luke Wilson). In the end, it’s not entirely clear which sibling is struggling the most, the brother who left for Hollywood but waits tables or the sister who stayed behind (in upstate New York) and seems unsatisfied with her comfortable life.

The combination of  deep connections and long-simmering differences that arise in the course of the story make the story feel true. About the only thing that didn’t seem real was that Maggie and Milo, who care for each other, wouldn’t have spoken for so long. (The only possible explanation given in the movie would appear to have taken place in the characters’ teen years, too early to account, or account entirely, for a later estrangement.)

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viewed 10/1/14 6:00 at Ritz East and posted 10/1/14

Lucky Them (***)

Rock and roll is full of legendary figures who flamed out young, victims of their own success. This is one such (fictional) story, but told from the viewpoint of the girlfriend left behind.  Elly (Toni Collette), left with only a cryptic note, has had ten years to wonder whether Matthew Smith jumped off a bridge (the prevailing theory) or simply disappeared (hers).  She’s stayed at the same job, writing barely read stories about little-known musicians for a Seattle magazine in the Rolling Stone mode. To keep that job, she agrees to try to find Smith and write a story about it.

The resulting film is a mixture of road movie, comedy, romance, and character-driven drama, and most of that works pretty well. The love interest and charm is provided by actor-musician Ryan Eggold (The Blacklist). Thomas Haden Church, playing a wealthy eccentric that Elly once dated, supplies much of the comedy and road-trip repartee. An example of his eccentricities is his habitual drink order, a “clean glass,” a bottle of water, and a whole lime. Another is his broad distaste for music.

Smith, who has left behind one album (curiously, Elly has an LP, not a CD of it) beloved by a large cult, is the empty hole that Elly’s life, and the story, centers around. And we do, more or less, find out what happened to him, but you’ll know way ahead of time that this is one of those journey-not-the-destination kind of stories. It’s a very pleasant journey indeed with Collette and her costars, but the climax is still a bit underwhelming. When a movie is structured like a mystery, it’d be nice if we actually cared more about that mystery and found its solution satisfying.

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viewed 6/27/14 6:30 pm at Roxy and posted 6/28/14

Dom Hemingway (***)

The title character is not, as one might imagine, a wayward Italian cousin of Ernest Hemingway, but a wayward Cockney ex-con with anger issues and an oozing id. Not content to hunt down the man who took up with his wife while he was in prison, he also mouths off, hilariously, to the Russian crime boss who has the money he’s been owed for a dozen years. In the opening scene, spittle flows from his mouth as he spews a profane ode to his own member, and that is not the only scene in which that organ enters the plot. It’s a rather different role for Jude Law, who is entirely convincing as someone who might beat you if crossed. And, although he has a way with words — he’ll “gut you with a dull cheese knife and sing Gilbert and Sullivan while I do it” — he’s not really charming. Not unless it’s charming to compare one’s one face to an abortion, as Dom does after one of the scrapes he gets into in the course of the several days the film covers.
 

This not-so-charming personality and his well-crafted dialogue — courtesy of director Richard Shepherd (The Matador) — are the primary appeal of the film, which cannot quite be called a thriller. Dom’s attempts to reconcile with his understandably estranged daughter (Emilia Clarke) do not measurably humanize the character, and the plot overly relies on coincidence and, I think, one big plot hole, namely why Dom is not re-arrested for severely beating a man before numerous witnesses within half a day of being released. 

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viewed 4/8/14 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and posted 4/10/14

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

About Last NIght (**3/4)

So…David Mamet writes this play back in the 1970s — Sexual Perversity in Chicago — that puts him right on America’s culture radar as a master of dialogue, up-and-coming playwright, etc. It’s about two couples, sexual politics, and the rise and fall of one relationship in nine weeks. In 1986, it becomes the movie About Last Night…. Mamet hates it, but it does well and help establish Demi Moore and Rob Lowe as Brat Pack elite. It keeps some of Mamet’s dialogue but adds a dusting of rom-com, multiplex potpourri and sets the drama over the course of a year.

Cut to 28 years later, and the ellipsis is gone from the title, and it’s set in the age of cell phones, in, unfortunately, Los Angeles, which removes the climatic visual element from the seasonally timed segments. But it mostly follows the earlier film’s template; not only Mamet gets a credit, but so do Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue, authors of the earlier screenplay. The primary couple, still called Dan and Debbie, are played by Michael Ealy and Joy Bryant. (In one scene, they fondly watch the Moore-Lowe version on video.) Kevin Hart and Regina Hall play the best friends/comic foils/cruder pair (Jim Belushi and Elizabeth Perkins in the 1986 movie).

Further removed from the Mamet pedigree, the movie comes across as perfectly ordinary and pleasant. While the play’s men vs. women 1970s sexual politics are probably dated, this only slightly updates the politics while keeping out any edge to the characters and moving further away from Mamet’s dialogue. (Perhaps this isn’t all bad. Having just watched the 1986 movie’s opening dialogue, which does come from Mamet, I thought it sounded exaggerated and artificial; the replacement scene is a slightly more natural, if more generic, mildly comic story of an extra-special blow job.)

Bryant is a joy to watch, pun intended, but her character is so nice that the inevitable tension that crops up in the relationship seems manufactured. Seriously, her vice is insisting that everyone uses coasters so as not to leave a mark on the table. In this iteration, the plot about the man wanting to hang out with the boys and not be tied down or told where to put his glass is both an annoying cliché and not convincing. The fraught-with-sexual tension relationship between the bickering secondary characters provides most of the humor, although it too is entirely predictable.


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viewed 2/5/14 8:00 pm at University City Penn 6; posted 2/6/14

August: Osage County (***1/2)

This is one of those stories about dysfunctional families coming together that usually take place over a Thanksgiving weekend or at Christmas. In this case, it’s a disappearance, but the elements are the same. Start with the mother, whose pain-pill dependence and freewheeling tongue provide another scenery-chewing role for Meryl Streep. Her husband (Sam Shepard) is a onetime poet who, oddly provides the opening narration, quoting T. S. Eliot, then goes missing. Soon after, the daughters show up. Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), the caretaker, has never left Oklahoma. Flighty Karen, the youngest, chattiest, and cheeriest, comes from Florida with her fiancé (Dermot Mulroney). Barbara (Julia Roberts), the eldest, is the one most resentful of, but most like, her mother. She brings her estranged husband (Ewan McGregor) and her daughter (Abigail Breslin). If we knew the future, she tells the 14-year-old , “we’d never want get up in the morning.”

The rich dialogue is among the pleasures of this adaptation of the Tracy Letts play; Letts himself provides the script, and it retains a certain play-like quality and structure, although a few scenes are set outdoors. This means lots of dialogue, well-crafted characters, and a lot of confrontational scenes, any of which, in some other movie, might be the centerpiece scene. Many of these are funny, which means the heavy themes — addiction, alcoholism, adultery, to take just the letter A — never seem ponderous. Instead, they provide just the right mixture of pathos and juicy revelation.

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viewed 1/19/14 1:00 pm at AMC Marple; posted 1/22/14

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (***)

James Thurber is said not to have been impressed with the 1947 version adaptation of his 1939 short story, which starred Danny Kaye. But then, the story itself is barely 2000 words in which Mitty fantasizes about being a flying ace, a brilliant surgeon, and a Navy Commander, all the while running errands with a bossy wife. It ends with Mitty facing an (imaginary) firing squad. Hardly enough plot for a short, let alone a feature. Kaye was well suited to playing Mitty, a “loveable henpecked dreamer,” as the ads for the movie put it, whereas Ben Stiller has usually brought a nervous quality to his characters. He is not a natural choice for the part then, but as the producer and director he had the luxury of casting himself. The screenplay is by Steve Conrad, who has managed to pen among the more creditable movies to feature Will Smith (The Pursuit of Happyness) and Nicholas Cage (The Weather Man).

Stiller gives a less-showy-than-usual performance in a character that is somewhat underwritten. The story is what most stands out. With Mitty re-created as a bachelor working for Life magazine in the computer-dating age, the only thing tying it to Thurber is the fantasy sequences. Oddly, these are the weakest aspect of the movie, clumsily integrated into the story and seemingly there to provide the special effects crew with something to to. In one, Mitty fantasizes about beating up his new boss (Adam Scott) in a mercifully short sequence that looks like an Incredible Hulk outtake. Fortunately, Stiller must have gotten bored with them too, and the second half of the film mostly ditches them as Mitty abandons his milquetoast ways in a quest to find a missing photograph that will adorn the magazine’s last print issue, meanwhile trying to get the courage to ask out a new coworker (Kristin Wiig).

The odyssey that transforms Mitty is not altogether convincing as to what the character would do (though we don’t know much about him), as to what the character could do, or as to cell-phone reception in remote places. But as the film takes a tone somewhere in the haze between fantasy, comedy, and adventure — with a little mystery thrown in — this isn’t too worrisome. Those expecting the movie to be a pure comedy may be disappointed that it isn’t funnier. But those looking for a departure from the loud fare that dominates the holiday season may well find in this a bit of Christmas cheer.

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viewed 11/26/13 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and posted 11/26/13

The Wolf of Wall Street (**1/2)

Martin Scorsese would seem to be the ideal person to tell the story of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo de Caprio). In movies like Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Aviator, he’s told stories of morally compromised men clawing their way to the top, often to be brought down by their enemies, or by their own flaws. Belfort, whose memoir was a basis for the film, was a New York stockbroker. Right in the opening voiceover, Belfort tells us about the drugs he takes, the prostitutes he sleeps with (five a week!), and the laws he breaks. Then we flash back to 1987, where, on his very first day of work, the younger version of Belfort (who looks the same as the older version) is taken out to lunch by his boss (Matthew McConaughey). The boss tells him two things: first, the goal is not to help clients, but to earn commissions; second, Jordan should masturbate more. Virtually every character in this movie is like this. No one pretends to have ethics, or inhibitions. Everyone curses, to the point where it seems unnatural. But the market is about to crash, and soon Belfort is out of a job.

So he settles for selling penny stocks out of an office on Long Island. An early scene has him, overdressed in a slick suit, delivering a silver-tongued stream of bullshit that leaves his motley coworkers slack-jawed, his target begging to invest, and, I think, the moviegoer quite entertained. Already, however, the rest of the story — the formation of his own brokerage, the wealth that quickly follows, the big house, the expensive car, the cheating (in every sense) — can be anticipated. As a character, Belfort is nearly fully formed. Unlike, say, Goodfellas, the plot moves quickly from struggle to excess. With a dorky-looking Jonah Hill as his equally amoral second-in-command, he trains a small army of white males to deliver similar spiels to the wealthy. Cue montages of vulgarity-laden speeches, strippers in the office, etc. Only vague threats of an FBI investigation and, one presumes, STDs, threaten conflict. The movie is also different from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, still probably the most famous movie about the financial industry, although at one point another character compares Belfort to Wall Street’s anti-hero, Gordon Gekko. Gekko, of course, is famous for the line, “Greed is good.” One gets the feeling here than Belfort has not even thought about the question. In his cinematic incarnation, he is a man of drive and desire, and nothing more.

What makes Gekko into an archetype is not simply saying it, but meaning it. We see how he justifies what others see as villainy. I think every powerful person needs such an internal justification. Without that element, this story feels empty. Certainly, Scorsese tells it with panache, and he and screenwriter Terence Winter, whose credits include numerous episodes of Boardwalk Empire and The Sopranos, give the movie a lighter, more comedic tone than I’d expected. I would almost call the movie a comedy, except that it’s three hours, and it’s not funny for three hours. (The comedic centerpiece, in which Belfort battles some vintage Quaaludes, is a ten-minute sequence that’s funny for five.) When Belfort has a worthy adversary, like the FBI agent played by Kyle Chandler, or, in a couple of scenes, his wife (Margot Robbie), it’s at its best. But, as for the rest, even if there’s no one better at depicting vulgar, misogynistic excess than Scorsese, the excess is…excessive.

IMDb link

viewed 1/2/14 6:30 pm and posted 1/7/14

Inside Llewyn Davis (***1/2)

The Greenwich Village folk music in the early 1960s scene serves as the backdrop for this Coen Brothers movie. In some ways, it functions as a citified quasi-sequel to O Brother Where Art Thou, the musical travelgogue that was inspired by Homer’s Odyssey. We follow Llewyn Davis on his own odyssey (a certain character name, revealed late in the movie, seems also to allude to Homer). As played by Oscar Isaac, Davis is a none-too-successful singer-songwriter whose gentle songs and soulful eyes are at odds with a somewhat prickly personality. Asked to play something at a dinner party held by university professor and his wife (they like having a bohemian friend), he protests, “I’m not a fucking trained monkey.”

 

Davis can’t help saying what he thinks, even when he can’t afford to. Some people will not want to follow him around for two hours, either, but it’s such idiosyncrasies that make him interesting. Alongside that, the film provides a look into the folk subculture just before folks like Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary became breakout stars. Davis himself would have fit in with Dylan, although he is less acerbic and is said to be based in part on Dave van Ronk, a semi-well known figure called the Mayor of MacDougal Street. Representing the sweeter side of that sound (something like Peter, Paul, and Mary) are a duo called Jean and Jim, played by Carey Mulligan and Justin Timberlake. Jean also may have been impregnated by Davis. And one of the funniest segments is provided when Davis has a recording session recording a novelty song called “Please Mr. Kennedy.”

This movie didn’t immediately impress me as much as some other Coen Brothers films. It doesn’t have the offbeat humor of Fargo or The Big Lebowski, save for a couple of scenes in which John Goodman plays Davis’s loud-mouthed road-trip companion. It doesn’t have the stark suspense of True Grit or No Country for Old Men. But, a couple of months after seeing this, the character sticks with me. As for the music, most it may be on the austere side for most modern audiences. But it’s well-performed and well chosen by T-Bone Burnett (who served a similar function on O Brother). Isaac, who has sung in his own band, has an excellent voice and gives a breakout performance.

 

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viewed 11/6/13 7:00 pm at Ritz 5 [PFS screening], posted 12/20/13; review added 1/8/14

Saving Mr. Banks (***1/4)

The name Disney conjures up beloved images for children everywhere, and for many of their parents. Yet the terms Disneyfication and Disneyization) are generally pejoratives, used, as  Wikipedia puts it, to “describe the processes of stripping a real place or event of its original character and repackaging it in a sanitized format. References to anything negative are removed, and the facts are watered down with the intent of making the subject more pleasant and easily grasped.” This usage post-dates the death of Walt Disney himself, and so would not have been used by P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson). But surely the words describe what she feared would be done to her Mary Poppins novels, which Disney (Tom Hanks) was keen to adapt into a musical.

As played by Thompson, Travers is the embodiment of the term “no-nonsense,” or possibly rude. In an early scene, Travers tells her London solicitor that she does not like being treated like a “neonate,” and Thompson is among the actresses who can most credibly utter such a phrase. However, the solicitor points out that her royalty checks may not be enough to maintain her comfortable home, and so, against instinct, she agrees to work with Disney, who had pursued the rights to her work for two decades. So anxious is he to make the movie that she is allowed script approval, providing her with a gigantic bargaining chip. In a boon to her future biographer, she insists on recording her sessions with screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and songwriting brothers Robert and Richard Sherman (B.J. Novak, Jason Schwartzman).

Battles over matters great (would the film be a musical?) and small (would the titular Mr. Banks character have a mustache?) provide the drama, and some comedy. For the pathos, interspersed with the 1961 Hollywood sequences are several sequences set in 1906–1907 Australia, with Colin Farrell as the doting father of the future author. Left out is virtually everything in between. I’m not crazy about facile links between adult behavior and indelible childhood circumstances. The script seems to imply that adult Mrs. Travers can’t abide the sight of pears simply because she associates them with an unpleasant memory over 50 years earlier, which seems false to me, but to its credit it’s usually less heavy-handed. Still, the most entertaining sequences are the ones that pit the proper Mrs. Travers (a running thread is the her annoyance at being called “Pamela”) against Disney, the writers, her gregarious driver (Paul Giamatti), and the occasional airline employee.

It’s perhaps ironic that what Travers feared would happen to her greatest character would happen to her as well. In reality, though indeed a spinster, she was a woman of many enthusiasms beyond tea, the only one she appears to admit to in this film. What art owes to history is another debate, and knowing that Travers adopted a twin (refusing to take his brother), a fact obliquely referenced in the film, does not alter its quality one way or the other. However, a film about a curmudgeon who finally succumbs to the charms of a cartoon mouse is a different film than one about a complicated woman who so rues her Hollywood experience that she never allows a sequel. Saving Mr. Banks is the first kind of film, but makes enough nods to being the second type that it does not seem sickly sweet. To paraphrase a song made famous by the film, it merely provides a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

IMDb link

viewed 12/24/13 7:30 pm at Roxy; posted 12/26/13

Nebraska (****)

Alexander Payne’s first two films were about young women, but since then he’s become a great chronicler of the difficult man. Probably Will Forte’s character, a mild-mannered stereo saleman, is the lead role here, but Bruce Dern’s grumpy old man dominates the story. And he’s so difficult that it becomes easier for his son to drive him from Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, than to convince him that he hasn’t really won a million-dollar prize like the piece of paper says. (Think Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes.) He’ll walk to Lincoln to claim his prize if necessary. If this sounds like a road movie, or a comedy, it is both, but it’s a lot more too.

If you are lucky, and paying attention, there will come a point in which you recognize your parents as autonomous individuals who had lives before you came along. This recognition is at the heart of the movie. Your parents may be nothing like the ones in this film, your life nothing like that of the son, and your home far from the Midwest, but there is a kind of universality in this story that is only set in relief by the non-universal, peculiar details.

 

As noted, Dern dominates the film, with the showy role of an ornery, bickery alcoholic, but equally good is June Squibb as his long-suffering wife, though she’s apt to strike most viewers as mean-spirited. Neither of them is especially likeable, but as the film goes on they become understandable, and Payne, collaborating with screenwriter Bob Nelson, elicits a compassion in the viewer. It’s a cliché to say that an old person feels the same inside, but you don’t see it often depicted on screen. For example, so often when you hear an old person talk about sex it’s supposed to be cute, but when Squibb’s character starts talking about the men who once fought over her, it’s not cute — though it’s funny — because you hear the way that experience remains with her.

Another of Payne’s trademarks is to set his films in places usually ignored on screen and to makes those places — the Hawaii of The Descendents, the California wine country of Sideways, key to the story. Nebraska most resembles About Schmidt, which also takes place, in part, in Payne’s native state, though the pace is a notch tighter.  An important part of the story takes place in a small town, and both because of the plot and because this town hasn’t changed much, the movie deeply evokes a forgotten past. It is a reminder that, whether we know about it or not, each of us is influenced by the people and places that have gone before us.

 

IMDb link

 

viewed 12/10/13 at 7:00 pm at Ritz 5; posted 1/9/14

Blue Highway (**3/4) [screening]

This comedy-drama is nice, and I wanted to like it more. It’s a road movie, and I kind of like road movies. Not only that, but it’s writer-director, Kyle Smith, took the trouble to actually drive to all the locations his lead characters do. His lead characters, Dillon and Kerry, are played by his friends Dillon Porter (who resembles Seann William Scott) and  Kerry Bishé, whose experiences on a long car trip inspired the script. So it has a very realistic feel to it. The fictional Dillon and Kerry are twenty-something friends making a cross-country move from Richmond, Virginia, to Los Angeles, in and old jalopy without a radio. Perhaps inspired by William Least Heat-Moon, whose bestseller Blue Highways told the story of a trip through small-town America, they’re staying off the interstates. (Talky Dillon seems like he might have read it; Kerry definitely hasn’t.) The reason for the move is briefly mentioned, but it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters.

So that’s the plot. I think one thing a movie ought to do is accurately portray a reality, even if that reality is a fantasy. But also, a movie ought to make that reality interesting. This movie so accurately simulates what these particular characters might experience that it may leave you with the similar feeling of wanting to get to wherever you’re going. Or at least take the faster interstate. It’s not all bad. There are some funny scenes as they make brief pilgrimages to places where different films are set, meanwhile quizzing each other as to which movie is being paid homage to. But they mostly find no trace of the former sets, so these scenes too are often set on ordinary stretches of highway. (Texas: long, flat, dull.) Dramatically, there is one very well-done scene, toward the end of the film where we discover more about the relationship of these two characters that in the rest of the movie put together.

IMDb link

viewed 9/19/13 7:45 pm at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival] and posted 9/19/13

Don Jon (***)

A word that is never used in the movie, and is often regarded as derogatory, will nonetheless, I suspect, quickly come to mind for many people watching this movie. It’s title character (Joseph Gordon-Levitt — macho, fit, masculine, Catholic, Italian American, living in north Jersey — fits every stereotype attached to the word guido, except maybe that he talks a lot about masturbation — at least in the copious, but often funny, narration. And in the confessional booth. Not so much to his pals when they’re trying to score some female companionship. He talks, in voice-over, about porn a lot, and, for example, how annoying it can be when the camera suddenly focuses on the guy when you’re about to…you know.

Truth be told, Jon likes porn better than real women, despite his skills at attracting them. Naturally, he meets the one woman (Scarlett Johannson) who might be the exception. This leads to a wave of shame, and lying, and, for a change, self-reflection. He’s also helped along by an odd, unhappy woman (Julianne Moore) he meets at one of his college courses. She’s what I call a convenient character, one whose appearance in the story seems useful to the plot, in this case to provide a contrast to the other woman. Moore’s terrific, funny and sad, in the part; I’m just not sure I found it believable the way she gloms onto him. I’m also not sure that sex addiction is necessarily a manifestation of some deeper hole in one’s life, as suggested here, but maybe sometimes. I did like the way the story develops, and the family dynamic, worthy of a sitcom. Tony Danza and Glenne Headly plays the parents and there’s a sister (Brie Larson, of the concurrent Short Term 12) character who never takes looks up from her phone, or says anything — until it counts.

The performances are good all around. Gordon-Levitt might have made his mark in the innocuous show 3^rd Rock from the Sun, but has gone for more unusual, sometimes challenging characters as an actor, and here he has additionally made his debut as writer and director. It’s not the serious work one might have expected, but I found it more interesting than 2011’s sex-addiction drama, Shame. (Sex addicts also feature in another 2013 comedy, Thanks for Sharing.

IMDb link

viewed 6/4/13 7:30 pm at Ritz East and posted 9/26/13