Hugo (***1/2)

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

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

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

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

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

The Father of My Children (***1/2)

One thing I like about certain (usually) foreign films is the way you don’t immediately know what they’re going to be about. For a would-be blockbuster, this is no good because that doesn’t lend itself to a very exciting description. For example, this can be described as the story of a French film producer (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), his money troubles, and his family. (There are a lot of films about actors, a fair number about writers and directors, but not too many about producers; The Aviator, the Howard Hughes biography, would be one.) What’s pleasing about it is all in the characters and their relationships. That’s not to say nothing happens—plenty does—but that the story isn’t entirely driven by what happens in the first ten minutes, which is the usual case.

After ten minutes, I assumed the movie was going to be about a workaholic who can’t stay off his cell phone as he tries to placate a free-spending Swedish auteur, a group of Koreans coming to shoot in Paris, and his impatient creditors. He is a workaholic—“human spam” to one of his daughters—but also an adored father and husband, and the proud creator of dozens of non-blockbuster films. He cherishes the freedom of being his own boss, but the freedom is threatened by the bank’s threat to pull the plug on his credit. The most significant plot point happens past the halfway point. The emphasis also surprisingly shifts from the filmmaker to his Italian-born wife (hinted at by the title) and his three daughters, the eldest of which is played by de Lencquesaing’s real-life daughter, Alice. A young adult, she has the most complicated relationship with her father.

The second film of the still-under-30 Mia Hansen-Love is a film that is sometimes sad, but isn’t sappy. The lack of melodrama is one reason why such a film doesn’t feel heavy or depressing. The other is that the characters are enjoyable to be around; after 110 minutes, I wasn’t ready for the movie to end.

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viewed 8/5/10 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 8/6/10

Exit Through the Gift Shop (***1/4)

I was pretty lukewarm about seeing this because I’m not especially into art generally or graffiti art particularly, and was not familiar with the work of Banksy, whose work was the impetus for the film, if not its subject. Graffiti art, or street art, is sort of the (semi-)respectable version of graffiti. Its creators use not only spray paint, but stickers, stencils, and other materials that they combine into images placed on walls, streets, and other public places. This documentary came about when Thierry Guetta, a Los Angeles-based thrift shop owner, decided to make a movie about the street art movement and the UK-based Banksy, who keeps his identity secret and his face hidden, even here.

If the movie is to be believed, Banksy took a look at Guetta’s footage and decided he could do a better job, and that Guetta was a better subject than he was. So the film is partly about Banksy and the street art movement, but mostly about Guetta, who is French-born but perfectly embodies the American ideal of the self-created man. Guetta had obsessively documented his entire adult life on video, so footage of him was readily available. He’d been filming street artists, notably Shepard Fairey (creator of the Obama “Hope” poster), without intending anything in particular. He’s quite the character.

Banksy’s art, though often considered vandalism, is often clever and fun, and so is this movie. It strikes me that graffiti art is the visual equivalent of hip hop music, “sampling” existing images, or existing ideas, and placing them in new contexts. Banksy’s art, not intended as commercial product, has now made its way into exhibits and galleries. As with rap music 30 years ago, street culture has started to become high culture, and this movie is in part about this phenomenon, and about the very definition of art. But—not to fear— it’s also a down-to-earth, reasonably conventional documentary (with narration by actor Rhys Ifans) that tells a story. The conclusion is unexpected and kind of hilarious.

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viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 5/12/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tokyo! (**1/2)

Three directors, three segments.

The first part, Michel Gondry’s “Interior Design,” is probably the best, and for most of its length the most conventional. The Tokyo Gondry (Be Kind Rewind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) portrays is cramped and expensive, like many large cities. (The segment was adapted from a graphic novel called Cecil and Jordan in New York.) The main characters are a filmmaker and his girlfriend, who’ve just moved to the city and are temporarily sharing a friend’s tiny flat. Just as the plot and characters have been developed, though, it takes a turn for the fantastic, with the ending ultimately too abrupt and unsatisfying.

On the other hand, Leos Carax’s (Pola X) “Merde” was unsatisfying throughout. Featuring one of the most irritating central characters since Tom Green in Freddy Got Fingered, a crazy red-haired dude who comes up from the sewers and creates mayhem, it’s the only segment featuring non-Japanese characters. Possibly it is saying something about the country’s cultural homogeneity. Or not.

Finally, Japan native Joon-ho Bong (The Host, Memories of Murder) presents “Shaking Tokyo,” the shortest and simplest segment, about the paradoxical isolation big-city residents can experience. Its central character is a hikkomori, a hermit who survives on a parental stipend and delivered food. A chance event leads to his first human interaction in ten years.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/14/09

The Magic Hour (***)

This Japanese gangster comedy takes the premise of Bowfinger and reverses it. That is, instead of a film star not realizing he’s in a movie, the lead is a hammy bit-part player who thinks he’s gotten the role of his life. In a way he has; he’s impersonating a real hit man, and the “movie” is the ruse concocted by the “director” to save his own skin. (He’s been sleeping with the boss’s girl and can save himself only by arranging for a meeting.)

I didn’t care for Bowfinger in large part because I never really believed the scheme would have actually worked. I can’t really say I found this strictly believable either, but the scenes were crafted carefully and cleverly enough that for large stretches I was able to suspend my disbelief. The star’s mugging for the camera—not to mention his insistence on wearing makeup—translates into some behavior that’s pretty odd from the viewpoint of the very real gangsters, and pretty funny from the viewpoint of the audience. Overlaid on this is a gentle parody of old Hollywood, in particular the last scene of Casablanca. Even the setting, a town called “Sucago,” is an homage; it intentionally looks like a studio backlot. The intentional anachronisms and well-timed comic bits make strict believability beside the point. This is silly fun.

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viewed 3/28/09 at Prince Music Theater (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 3/29 and 4/16/09

King Kong (***1/2)

 Beauty and the Beast meets Jurassic Park in Peter Jackson’s remake that brilliantly updates the special effects while retaining the essence of the 1933 story.

I guess I’m in the minority who thought Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy pretentious and overlong. (Heavenly Creatures, his 1994 psychodrama is to me his masterpiece, and this comes close.) Though featuring the same screenwriting trio (including Jackson) as LOTR, Jackson’s remake feels altogether less serious, and that’s all to the good. For those who missed the 1933 classic, it’s the story of a New York City filmmaker (Jack Black) who hopes to shoot on an uncharted island that turns out to be inhabited by a huge ape. (The ill-regarded 1976 version made it an oil company that goes there.)

The epic (at 187 minutes nearly twice as long as the 1933 version) divides into three parts. There’s the part before they get to the island, mostly the tale of Black’s character, P.T. Barnum crossed with Cecil B. DeMille. He cajoles, lies, and bribes to get his leading lady (Naomi Watts), his writer (Adrian Brody), and the ship’s crew to do his bidding. Then there’s the longest section, the tale of beauty meeting beast on some sort of freak Galapagos island. (The black “savages” present in the earlier versions are there too, though they disappear as soon as they’re no longer necessary to the plot.) About an hour is pretty much an orgy of CGI effects at least the equal of Jurassic Park, of which you might be reminded.

Finally, there’s the climax back in Gotham, the tale of tragic romance. The smitten Kong, enraptured by Watts, spurns other women (“spurns” in this context meaning “flings to certain death”) and wreaks general havoc. He says, “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of a beast and a girl don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Okay, he doesn’t say that, and, as tales of problematic romances go, it’s not Casablanca, but is in its way touching. “We’ll always have Skull Island,” his computerized face seems to say. The decision to retain the 1930s setting (unlike the 1976 version) is wise, as it retains overtones of an old adventure film, and the story would be less believable set later on.

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circulated via email 12/22/05 and posted online 9/20/13