Afternoon Delight (***1/4)

If you watch much comedy, there’s a good chance you’ll recognize Kathryn Hahn, but less chance you’ll know her name. She plays a lot of brassy women, like the ruthless campaign manager on Parks and Recreation, and she also has a supporting role in We’re the Millers. But she gets to headline this sometimes serious, sometimes raunchy comedy, playing the sometimes brassy but more frequently closed up Rachel, a Los Angeles housewife (and mother to a little boy) who can barely bring herself to tell her therapist (Jane Lynch) what’s bothering her, such as that she hasn’t had sex with her husband (Josh Radnor) in six months. (A little wine brings out the brassy, even raunchy, side.)

Into this story comes McKenna (Juno Temple), a stripper Rachel encounters on a visit to a local club. Something draws Rachel to her, and so Rachel seeks her out and eventually invites her to stay. I liked the character but she doesn’t fit in with the rescue fantasy Rachel but is also the sleazy gold-digger she might have been written as. Rachel is a tougher character to assess, a woman whose problem seems to be not being in touch with her problems. She might simply strike a lot of people as a spoiled rich woman with too much time on her hands, but the comedy, which is funny, tempers that, and I don’t think she’s meant to be entirely sympathetic. The way the plot resolves is not entirely the cliché it could have been, but the ending may be a little pat. Or maybe it’s subtle. I’m still not entirely clear on what leads Rachel to seek out the stripper; it seems maybe Rachel might have a kinky side, but this theme is explored in only the most tentative way, then tossed aside, despite a few nude scenes. In any case, a very good role for Hahn and a fairly promising feature debut for TV writer/producer Jill Soloway (United States of Tara).

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viewed 9/11/13 7:30 at Ritz Bourse and posted 9/11/13

Simon Killer (***)

The edgy title perhaps misrepresents a film that is largely a character drama, though of a dark character. The film is physically dark, too, making its setting, Paris, look much less appealing that in just about any film I’ve seen. American Simon (played by cowriter Brady Corbet) is hanging out there after a bad breakup. Now moping to his mother via Skype, now picking up a prostitute at a sex club, he’s both pathetic and a little creepy. It’s a curious combination; while Simon’s not a villain, I rarely found him sympathetic. This is as much an effect of the film’s style as Simon’s behavior. I was curious as to what would happen, but not sure what I wanted to happen. For similar reasons, the film may not appeal to a broad audience. However, it’s effective, and I did enjoy being surprised when I thought a plot point, such as the encounter with the prostitute, would take the film in one direction, yet would lead in another. The way director Antonio Campos handles the language barrier is also noteworthy. Simon speaks halting French, and so the dialogue switches between English and French in a way that seems realistic but is rarely seen in American films.

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viewed 10/22/12 7:15 pm [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed  10/31/2012

The Extra Man (**1/2)

Time marches on, but not everyone does. Some people seem to reside in the past, even if it’s true that a disproportionate number of them are characters in arty novels and independent films. Kevin Kline essays one such character in this self-consciously quirky comedy from Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, the husband-wife duo that made the splendorous American Splendor and the dire Nanny Diaries. Like Nanny Diaries, this is another adaptation of a novel (by Jonathan Ames) that uses a naive main character as a lens into a strange subculture. Kline plays a teacher/playwright whose “opus” was “stolen by a Swiss hunchback,” whose politics are “to the right of the pope,” and whose social life revolves around his part-time employment as an escort for elderly, wealthy women.

The teacher is called is Henry Harrison, which may be a nod to Henry Higgins, who in Pygmalion/My Fair Lady educates Eliza Doolittle in the ways of society. That this sort of society barely exists anymore does not deter Henry from educating his young roommate, Louis (Paul Dano), in its ways. This works because Louis too imagines himself inhabiting an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Like The Royal Tennenbaums, the movie exudes a certain deliberately anachronistic feel. The world it portrays is so quaint that one can apparently get fired as a prep-school professor for merely pretending to try on a bra, as Louis does before heading to Manhattan. A movie marquee places the time as 2008, but one of the few reminders that the film is set in recent days is a single call received on a cell phone. Louis gets a job at a literary magazine that is actually flourishing. His boss, miraculously, has no computer on his desk. Harrison writes on a typewriter.

This is one of those movies that doesn’t really make you laugh but aims to keep you amused via the constant oddness of its main character, a would-be aristocrat who nonetheless can barely make ends meet, drives a clunker, and thinks himself clever for mastering the art of peeing in the street without being seen. Nor can he seem to avoid disagreements, petty and large, with ex-roommates, colleagues, and the women he escorts. In case Henry isn’t odd enough, he’s got a downstairs neighbor who looks like a homeless man but talks like a lady.

Henry is a fine role for Kline, no doubt his most eccentric since winning an Oscar for A Fish Called Wanda. Dano, of There Will Be Blood, has the mild-mannered, eager-to-please thing down. Even Katie Holmes, playing Louis’s coworker, was a surprise; her character doesn’t simply function as a love interest for Louis. But there is just too much self-conscious weirdness here for the movie to sustain the weight of its collective pretensions. You can probably get away with one character as eccentric as Kline’s, but too many schnooks spoil the froth, and that is the case here. Henry is supposed to be both a tragic hero and a figure of fun, but borders on being tedious.

IMDB link

viewed 8/17/10 at Ritz 5 (PFS screening) and reviewed 9/6/10 (based on previous notes)

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

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

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

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

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

IMDB link

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

The Chaser (***3/4)

Watching this Korean action-thriller makes you realize how many ways there are to do this kind of film other than the ways Hollywood has gotten people used to. The sort-of hero is a surly pimp who does most of the chasing on foot. The killer is an ordinary-looking guy with no special powers or elaborate apparatuses. His victim is a demure-looking prostitute with a young daughter. And the police range from competent to crooked to inept, but most often the last.

There is infrequent but realistic brutality, yet also some humor that does nothing to diminish the parts that are serious and even tender. (A very good music score sets a melancholy mood at times.) I kept waiting for the predictable tropes of the genre to show up, but they don’t. Even though the whodunit is established in the first fifteen minutes of the movie, there’s more real suspense than in half a dozen typical thrillers. The sure-to-be-inferior American remake awaits.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz East (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 3/30/09

Finding Amanda (***1/4)

Addiction and prostitution are the topics for this indie comedy starring Matthew Broderick and Brittany Snow. He’s the not-too-wise uncle who volunteers for an ostensible rescue mission when he learns she’s been making a living as a Las Vegas hooker and also been using drugs. However, as a recovering alcoholic who still hasn’t given up his penchant for betting on horses, or lying to his wife (Maura Tierney) about it, there’s a real question as to who needs rescuing more.

Writer and first-time feature director Peter Tolan, whose television credits (Murphy Brown, The Larry Sanders Show, Rescue Me) outshine his movie ones (Analyze This and Guess Who, but also Stealing Harvard and Just Like Heaven) draws on that TV experience by making his lead character a TV writer. As the co-creator of Rescue Me, Tolan also knows something about realistically blending drama with comedy, and about portraying addictive behavior. This may emphasize the comedy more, but there’s rarely a false note.

Snow, best known as the teen heroine on TV’s American Dreams, is a variation on the hooker with a heart of gold, but that’s oversimplifying it. Both characters are more than the sum of their problems, and hers is not a victim. Notwithstanding her profession, she’s a not-atypical 20-year-old, albeit one who seems entirely too perky talking about blow jobs. Actually, she seems perky talking about almost everything. Telling her uncle about a man who was “cut in half” by a train, she comments, “That would suck.” Snow and Tolan do a good job in making her more than a caricature, though.

The portrait of prostitution is somewhat benign—it’s a comedy—but not entirely so. Tolan introduces one too-convenient (but comic) plot twist that prevents the story from becoming too dark, but also comes up with a smart, realistic ending that prevents it from becoming too light.

IMDB link

viewed 6/24/08 (screening at Ritz Bourse); reviewed 6/26/08