Omar (***1/2)

One thing that occurred to me when watching this was that, while I’ve seen plenty of Israeli films that have nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it’s hard to imagine a film about Palestinians that is not also, in some aspect, about the Israeli occupation. Omar (Adam Bakri) has to climb the giant separation wall that runs through the West Bank just to visit his girlfriend Nadia (Leem Lubany), a college student. In another scene, he is stopped and beaten by the Israeli security forces. The film certainly is from Palestinian perspective. But it would be a mistake to see it primarily as an anti-occupation film, even if its main characters, Omar and his two best friends, are involved in an anti-Israel plot. Instead, the film is about conflicting loyalties and self-preservation.

It’s better not to know much about what happens, but it involves the Israeli security forces trying to enlist Omar’s aid in capturing his friend. Omar doesn’t want to do this, but if he doesn’t he may never see Nadia again, let alone marry her as he wishes. Omar is the work of Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now), who gets strong perfromances from a cast of newcomers.
Despite the somewhat drab setting, the film is picturesque, with its shots of the giant wall and chase sequences showcasing narrow alleys; some of the most memorable shots in the film are those in which Omar looks in over the fence at the school his girlfriend attends, wondering whether he can trust her. It is such personal questions, not political ones, that dominate this film, right up to the shocker of an ending.

IMDb link

viewed 2/27/14 9:40 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 3/5/14

Gloria (**3/4) [screening]

Gloria (Paulina García) is divorced woman in her 50s who likes to sing old songs and dance to old disco music in clubs in Santiago. She meets a man there who seems kind, if too involved in the lives of his adult daughters and ex-wife. This sympathetic portrait of a woman trying to make a life for herself eventually coalesces into a story, but as Gloria’s life is fairly ordinary and the script doesn’t offer any great insights into middle-aged womanhood, it’s slow going until the central conflict finally arrives.

IMDb link

viewed 10/20/13 5:50 PM at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival] and posted 10/20/13

Labor Day (**3/4)

Some movies stand out for their plots, and some for their characters. This drama has a plot —a mother and son taken hostage by an escaped convict — that would tend to stand out, but what in fact makes the strongest impression is the character of Adele, played by Kate Winslet. Winslet has rarely played this kind of character. Adele is a fragile woman, certainly not the kind of woman who would cry out when a quietly insistent man (Josh Brolin) with a wound in his side coerces her into giving him a lift in a department store. This occurs in a small New England town in the year 1987, but a 1987 that seems very long ago, at least the way that director Jason Reitman has filmed it.

The story is not told from Adele’s viewpoint, though. Rather, adopting the approach of the Joyce Maynard novel, it is told as a coming-of-age story for her 13-year-old son Henry. Henry (Gattlin Griffith) is the sensitive, but mostly average, child, of a mother who, according to the narration of the adult Henry (Tobey McGuire), is not so much devastated by the absence of a husband as by the absence of love. Her ex-husband, not a man who knows how to deal with a fragile woman, or a sensitive son, lives nearby with his new wife. And so, as if ordered up for the purpose, the convict shows up to provide a life lesson for the boy and inspiration for the mother. Yes, the man ties them up, but then he cooks for them and cleans up. Of his incarceration, he says, there is more to the story. We learn the truth in a clever way, but if Adele ever asks, we do not see it. The story is told like poetry, prettily, but my non-poetic self asks, Why does she not ask? Why does a man who’s served most of his sentence break out of jail?

I’m of two minds about the use of the present-day narrator. On the one hand, the device provides adult perspective to the confusion of childhood and a voice to an inarticulate character. On the other, as a literary, rather than a cinematic, device, the interruption of the disembodied voice can rob a story of a certain immediacy, and allow us to forget that the present we experience was conditional, not pre-ordained. And it’s a slight-of-hand, placing events decades apart together, pushing the past and present together when in real life memories fade and people continue to chance. The poetic ending of this movie, along with the tough-to-believe plot, pushes it slightly too far into Nicholas Sparks territory. Of course, many people like Nicholas Sparks, the author of Dear John, The Notebook, etc., and if you’re one of them, you’ll probably like this movie also.

IMDb link

viewed 10/25/13 8:00 pm at Prince Music Theater; scheduled to post 11/8/13; posted 1/31/14

How I Live Now (***)

This has all the hallmarks of a teen coming-of-age movie. Sixteen-year-old Daisy (Saoirse Ronan)—don’t use her given name, Elizabeth—is a New Yorker sent to summer with relatives in Wales. With mild-self-loathing (we hear this as whispered injunctions) buried under an obnoxious exterior, she’s the perfect candidate for a big learning experience under the guidance of her country-living relations, consisting of a mother and her three kids, and how convenient that the oldest is handsome, age-appropriate, and not actually biologically related to her. But wait, what’s this about a bombing in Paris, and the mother being an expert in World War III planning?

I didn’t mind at all the combination of sci-fi adventure story and teen romance. Do threats of martial law quash desire? Not at all. What was jarring was the way the story requires fresh Daisy to transform from snotty girl who can barely sit in a messy car to lovelorn teen to plucky self-starter in about a week. Perhaps Ronan is channeling her role as another Daisy, this one a teen assassin, in Violet & Daisy. I suspect, however, that the effects of compressing a novel (by Meg Rosoff) into feature-length movie account for the whiplash transformation, as well as the too-brief appearance of the mother character, whose job sounds rather interesting. Alas, we never learn what she was working on, or exactly why Britain may cease to exist. We do learn that the UK government will be pretty darn efficient at organizing things if the shit ever hits the fan. An intriguing premise, aided by director Kevin Macdonald’s great use of rural landscapes. At the end, we get the usual lessons-learned voiceover I was expecting.

IMDb link

viewed 11/14/13 7:05 at Ritz Bourse and posted 11/14/13

Blue Is the Warmest Color (***)

This film caused a sensation at Cannes, where it won the Palm D’Or, both for its storytelling and for the lengthy sex scenes featuring the two female leads, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. Also reported was the grueling shooting schedule to which director Abdellatif Kechiche subjected them, but he certainly got results. Exarchopoulos plays Adèle, the a teenage girl who meets the older Emma (whose dyed hair presumably supplies the film’s American title) and is lured by her confident attitude. With a characteristic open-mouthed expression, Exarchopoulos projects an combination of innocence, curiosity, and nervousness. Kechiche favors an improvisatory style that comes across as much in the introductory high school scenes, where Adèle gossips with friends and, briefly, acquires a boyfriend, as in the later, more intimate, ones.

The characters are stronger than the story, which simply carries the two women forward in time, skipping over some potentially dramatic turf, like anything much about the reaction of Adèle’s parents to either having a lesbian daughter or the older girlfriend. Mainly, the film is not about sexuality, but about the intensity of a first crush and the indelible stamp it tends to leave.

IMDb link

viewed 12/18/13 7:35 at  posted 1/24/14

Diana (***1/4)

If a UK film gets a wide release across the pond, it’s as likely as not that there’s magic or the royal family involved somehow. Or is written by Richard Curtis (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually, Bean), whose About Time is opening the same weekend as Diana. The American fascination with British royalty has always escaped me, but it would have been difficult to have lived through the 1980s and '90s and not been aware of the marriage and subsequent divorce of Prince Charles and the Diana Spencer, or of the car crash that killed Diana (Naomi Watts) on August 31, 1997. The movie, based on a book by Kate Snell called Diana: Her Last Love, is about the last two years of her’s life. I assumed that it would be about her relationship with Dodi Fayed, the wealthy Egyptian who died with her. In fact, the “last love” is not Fayed, but Hasnat Khan (Naveen Andrews, of NBC’s Lost), a Pakistani-born surgeon she met in a London hospital. At the time, Diana had separated from Charles, but not yet divorced.

The story the movie tells is a little like a real-life Notting Hill, the Richard Curtis-penned romantic comedy in which bookstore clerk Hugh Grant romances movie star Julia Roberts. Its best-known line, “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her” could have been dialogue for Diana, who is the pursuer in the relationship. Admittedly, such dialogue would be a bit florid for this movie, which is neither comedic nor so overtly romantic. We don’t find out if the Hugh Grant character gets tired of having paparazzi follow his movie-star girlfriend, but Khan has no interest in Diana as a celebrity, or in giving up his privacy. This is the central conflict in the film.

The best thing I can say about the movie is that it also has little interest in Diana as a celebrity. The director is Oliver Hirschbiegel, who made the excellent German films The Experiment and Downfall as well as the 2007 thriller The Invasion. Thus, Diana is worth watching even if you were not especially curious about its title character. The film also handles the death with subtlety, neither showing the accident nor addressing the possible role of the paparazzi in causing it. It does show Diana as having found frequently found the press a nuisance, but also willing to use it for her own purposes, both public (in her campaign to publicize the dangers of land mines) and private. That last bit is the least flattering aspect of the film’s portrayal, but it’s one of the things that makes her a real character, not just a princess. Both Watts and Andrews are a cut above the type of actor you’d have expected to be cast were this a cheesy celebrity biopic.

IMDB link

viewed  10/30/13 7:30 pm at Ritz East [PFS screening] and posted 11/2/13

Populaire (***)

For those who thought that the erotic possibilities of the manual typewriter had not been sufficiently explored in Secretary comes this tamer French film, set in 1959. Defying her father’s wishes for her to marry the son of the local mechanic, small-town Rose (Déborah François) comes to the slightly bigger town not for love, but to be a secretary. She proves to be a kind of a savant with the typewriter, but not so savvy at other office skills. But instead of firing her, the boss (Romain Duris) presents her with a flyer for a typing competition. When her four-fingered technique proves an impediment to achieving her greatest potential, he becomes her personal trainer, coaching her on the techniques of touch typing. (She types, he touches. Or wants to, anyway.) And so Rose blooms.

Thus this is as much a sports film as a romantic comedy. Director Régis Roinsard swirls the camera around like Martin Scorcese filming a boxing match. The tone is earnest, not satirical. It’s more amusing than funny. I’d have thought that the plot and setting would lend itself to screwball comedy, perhaps something like Down with Love, the Renée Zellweger/Ewan McGregor comedy that tipped its hat to comedies like Pillow Talk, also set in 1959. But François, while very good in the role, is a little too much of a nice girl, though espousing modern feminist sensibilities. And Duris, whose name suggests a French Cary Grant, actually plays a someone brooding character whose reticence supplies the requisite, though not altogether convincing, plot that allows the romantic and competitive portions of the plot to come together at once. The novelty of a typewriting contest and a general likeability counter the lack of originality of the last half hour.

IMDb link

viewed 10/2/13 7:00 at Ritz Bourse and posted 10/2/13

Ruby Sparks (**3/4)

Pity the artist who falls in love with his own creation. This is another take on the Greek Pygmalion myth, which inspired George Bernard Shaw. The artist in this case is Calvin (Paul Dano), a one-hit-wonder novelist with lots of acolytes, but no friends unless you count his dog (prominently featured), his brother (a wry Chris Messina), and his shrink (Elliott Gould). I’d thought maybe the writer’s block plot was inspired by the attempts of the film’s directors, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, to follow up their six-year-old hit, Little Miss Sunshine (whose zany tone is no guide to this). But no, it’s a first screenplay by the doll-faced lead actress, Zoe Kazan; her eponymous character springs fully formed (well, almost) from Calvin’s imagination, just as he wrote her, and, after the expected how-did-this-happen-is-she-real-am-I-crazy machinations made-to-order girlfriend.

Somewhat funny in predictable ways, the movie takes awhile to get to the more interesting part, where Calvin gets to a dark place and realizes he cannot have the perfect girlfriend when he himself is a narcissistic child. Compare a movie like Adaptation for a more original, twisted take on writer’s block. (Although, as plots about blocked writers whose stories come true go, it certainly beats the hell out of Alex & Emma, which succeeded only in convincing me that the main character was a hack.) Barring that, it would’ve been fun for Kazan to write more bizarre character transformations for herself. All Calvin has to do is type it, and Ruby becomes it, which is too much power for anyone, but Calvin’s a little too nice to truly exploit this plot point. Still, it’s fun when he/Kazan does. Not a gem, this Ruby, but a reasonable first effort for its 28-year-old screenwriter.

IMDb link

viewed 7/9/12 7:30 pm at Ritz East [PFS Screening with directors and stars in attendance] and reviewed 7/9/12

Magic Mike (***)

Steven Soderbergh has made dull movies, but never cheesy ones, and his drama about male strippers isn’t either. His star, Channing Tatum, may have gotten his big break in a dance movie, but this is a step up from Step Up, whose story was mostly a prelude to a big dance off. In fact, for those looking for something entirely fluffy with some male eye candy, this may not be not even be cheesy enough.

The eye candy is there, of course. Besides Tatum, the major characters include the head cheese and master of ceremonies at the Tampa establishment, Matthew McConaughey, in a showy, tailor-made role, and “the Kid” (Alex Pettyfer), a new recruit that Tatum’s character takes under his wing. The Kid has a sister (Cody Horn). You can tell she’ll be a love interest because she wears a scowl, is smart, and doesn’t have casual sex like the other characters. The stripping scenes are there, too—no full monty, though—and they’re kind of funny, with different themes.

Soderbergh depicts Mike’s world as not really glamorous (odd, dark lighting effects contribute), perhaps a bit sleazy (with casual sex and drug use), but in most ways just another workplace in post-recession Florida. Mike (Tatum) has a couple of jobs and is saving his money. He’s kind of a stripper with a heart of gold, facing the usual fork in the road. He’s a believable character, maybe too realistic for those seeking fantasy. The crucial scenes that establish the rapport between Mike and the Kid’s sister really work, though, and the stripping stuff seems realistic enough, other than the absence of any gay men either among the strippers or in the audience. (No black folks either.) The realism might be explained by the fact that Tatum’s real-life experiences in the business were a basis for the screenplay (credited to Reid Carolin, whose prior credit was a documentary about the Rwandan genocide). In any case, the premise alone might draw a certain crowd, but the actual product is a little better than it needs to be.
 

IMDb link

viewed 7/12/12 7:30 at Roxy and reviewed 7/13/12 and 7/17/12 and 7/18/12

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (***3/4)

Movies involving the destruction of humanity — yes, the title is quite literal — compose a very small subgenre of films, but one among them, the 1998 Canadian film Last Night, is among my favorites in any genre. This is almost as good.

Last Night neither explains why Earth will be destroyed nor ever suggests that it might not happen. In this movie, an asteroid is the cause, and there is only the barest suggestion (in the behavior of some characters) that it might not happen. Last Night has an ensemble cast and explores the many different ways — hedonism, denial, despair — that different people might deal with this. This movie features all of those reactions, but is mostly about two apartment-dwelling neighbors who meet less than two weeks before the end.

Dodge (Steve Carrell) is an insurance agent whose wife has literally walked away from the marriage when the last hope for saving Earth has failed. Carrying his sadness around with quiet dignity, he has the demeanor of someone trying not to be a bother to anyone. (Of course, we never get to see what drove his wife away.) Penny is an emotionally expansive, but generally cheerful figure of contrast. And so, for reasons I’ll leave to the film, off they go.

One reasonable objection to this movie might be the relatively minimal breakdown in society. Some rioting (a key plot point) and some other odd behaviors are certainly seen. Yet very close to the end, roads are passable, a convenience store is open for business, most houses are undamaged, and a lonely anchorman continues to appear on television, which continues to be watchable. However, because Dodge and Penny’s behaviors seem real (in light of the , and because this was not a techno-thriller or docudrama, I was willing to forgive the perhaps too-rosy view of the end of days and the one or two scientific improbabilities. 

It may be that the contemplation of the end of humanity is such an inherently poignant circumstance that it biases me toward liking any movie with this theme. (I think here also of Lars von Triers’s Melancholia and Steven Spielberg’s A.I., at least its last segment.) However, there is a believability to the primary characters and the performances, particularly Dodge/Carrell’s slow emergence from his forced stoicism. Writer-director Lorene Scafaria (her most prominent credit being the screenplay for Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist) is an original talent, and I hope she’ll get to make other movies despite the unimpressive box-office performance of this one.

In stories such as this, there is always a tension between what the viewer will want to happen and what, dramatically and logically, ought to happen, though sometimes those are the same. I’m not sure if Scafaria gets it right or not, but in any case, she winds up in a similar place to Last Night’s ending, which sets aside the comedy and represents the poignancy of the universal desire for intimacy.

IMDb link

viewed 7/16/14 on HBO on Demand and posted 7/17/14

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (***)

“For the elderly and beautiful” reads the legend on the sign of the namesake hotel in this comedy-drama, whose cast amounts to an employment program for some British actors of a certain age. Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton are the married couple. Judi Dench is the recent widow. Celia Imrie is the man hunter, and the aptly named Ronald Pickup her male counterpart. Maggie Smith…is the bigot. Tom Wilkinson is the just-retired businessman returning to his long-ago home, which is Jaipur, India. Which is the home of the once-majestic, still exotic Marigold. And which is where all of these characters have come, even the bigot, because the living (and the medical care) is cheaper in England.

In hardly ten minutes of screen time — I didn’t quite get how it was arranged — they all manage to arrive into the same previously unoccupied hotel at the very same time. Whereupon the young proprietor (Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel, playing a similarly optimistic character) adds “Now with guests!” to the hotel’s sign sign. A bunch of English folk learning life lessons in a poor country is a plot ripe for cliché. These are not completely avoided—most obviously simplistic is the story of the proprietor, whose mother disapproves of his girlfriend, scoffs at his plans to revive the hotel, would prefer an arranged marriage to a Delhi girl, etc. However, the key to this kind of film is to be able to establish the several characters efficiently without making them into clichés, and this is done. Even Wilton’s character, the least likeable and most resistant to India’s charms, is sympathetic, at times, in her despair.

The script (from Deborah Maggoch’s novel) by Ol Parker (Imagine Me & You) is sometimes witty. The direction by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) highlights the colors of the Pink City and avoids making the old folks “cute.” (In this respect, I would contrast it with some of Richard Curtis’s work, like Love, Actually, which I found to be faux “adorable.”) The English seem to specialize in ensemble-cast dramedies, and this one is fairly good, if occasionally meandering.

IMDB link

viewed 5/2/12 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/3/12

Delicacy (***1/4)

It would be misleading to call this romantic comedy, because grief lies between the romantic segments, and about half the movie preceding anything significantly comic. Audrey Tautou, pixyish lead of Amélie, gets to demonstrate a wider range of temperaments as she reassesses her life and romantic possibilities following a tragedy. There is nothing unnatural about the transitions between these moods, or at least nothing more unnatural than it would be to anyone who has experienced such transitions. I didn’t care for the jarring music that marks some of them, but I did appreciate not knowing where the story would lead. In addition to Tautou’s very specific character, the film includes perhaps the best portrayal I’ve seen of someone (Francois Damiens, as the most awkward of her three suitors) who thinks that the woman he desires is out of his league.

IMDb link

viewed 3/25/2012 3:50 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/26/12–4/24/12

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

Like Crazy (**1/2)

I suppose in a perfect world everyone would have one all-consuming love affair, one that, much later, will be recalled in a gauzily lit, cineme verité montage of sexual euphoria, aimless conversation, and clear-skinned smiles. Soft piano music will be the soundtrack. It will seem much like the first half hour of this evocative romance from Drake Doremus.

The problem is, it’s never much more than evocative. The young L.A. college sweethearts (Anton Yelchin, Felicity Jones) seem nice enough, but Doremus employs the sloppy shorthand of taste as a proxy for actual character traits. That is, the fact that they both like a certain Paul Simon song (alluded to in the film’s title) doesn’t tell us anything much about these people. Nor does the improvised dialogue, although it’s delivered well. As circumstance requires separation—she has to return to her native England—I had no idea whether I thought they should get back together or not. Or maybe I didn’t care as much as I ought to have.


Doremus’s film also evokes, sometimes effectively, the way feelings fade with separation. As with the separated couple in Going the Distance—a more mainstream, yet actually more substantive, look at a long-distance relationship—technology fails to take the place of being in the same place. The [slight spoiler ahead] his-and-hers side relationships—his with a coworker, hers with a neighbor—that follow seem perfunctory, as if Doremus is trying to balance out things. We never actually see the early stages of these infidelities, where, presumably, the separated lovers try to resist temptation. Or maybe they don’t try. The alternative partners do seem in each case adoring, though they don’t share a taste for Paul Simon and fine whiskey. And taste is important, but, in the case of this tasteful film, isn’t always enough.

IMDB link

viewed 10/20/11 at Annenberg [Philadelphia Film Festival screening]

The Hedgehog (***1/4)

When someone asked me, before I saw this, what it was about, I said something like that it was about a middle-aged woman who blossoms. To which the reply was, isn’t that what every independent movie is about. Actually, this is a French movie, and while I have definitely seen French variations on that theme, in no case was the story told from the point of a precocious eleven-year-old who plans to commit suicide on her twelfth birthday.

This suicide plot point is lifted right from the Muriel Barbery novel the film is based on, and of course gives the story some measure of suspense. It’s something about how the girl (who’s a year older in the book) is disgusted by the banality of the adult world around her, specifically that of her parents, and sees their elite lifestyle as a trap best avoided by dying. Still, her apparent contempt for the bourgeousie who inhabit her posh Paris apartment building is tempered by the fact that she also seems intensely curious about them.

The building’s newest resident is of the same class as the others, yet that is tempered either by the fact that he is Japanese, or cultured rather than crass. And somehow, the girl, the Japanese man, and the middle-aged woman, who is the building superintendent, form a mutual bond. This is the sort of movie in which the superintendent happens to have seen a 50-year-old Japanese film but never eaten Japanese food and the pre-teen happens to be a knowledgeable player of Go, the chess-like Japanese game that she insists is nothing like chess, nor Japanese.

Even so, the idea that the girl really plans to kill herself is easily the least believable aspect of the story. Insofar as the rest of the plot hinges in some way on the planned demise, the story suffers, but not so much as you’d think. As elegantly told by the director, Mona Achache, the story is almost a fairy tale Where in Barbery’s novel the youngest character can merely seem like a snob, Achache emphasizes the kindness behind the diffident exterior. In embodying both, actress Garance Le Guillermic is a real find.


IMDB link


viewed 9/14/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 9/15/11–10/11/11

Beginners (**3/4)

It’s usually films about teens that get described as coming-of-age films, but some people wait longer than that to become their truest selves. Seventy-five-years old Hal (terrific Christopher Plummer) waits until his wife’s death to tell his son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) he’s gay. And, in a line echoing one that director Mike Mills’s father actually said to him, he doesn’t just want to be a homosexual “in theory.” And so he isn’t. This being set in post-homophobia Los Angeles, Hal’s sudden lifestyle change is only an issue insofar as it makes Oliver rethink his dad’s relationship with his mother. (Flashbacks show her too.)

Oliver, for his part, is 38 and also looking for love, but has a history of bailing on relationships. In the film’s other main storyline, set after Hal’s death though told in tandem, he meets a French actress played by Mélanie Laurent (Inglorious Basterds). In a terribly charming “meet cute” scene, she’s both disguised and mute. (It’s a costume party and she has laryngitis.) There are several other charming aspects to the movie, from the use of comic art to show Oliver’s thoughts (he’s an illustrator) to the subtitles showing those of his Jack Russell terrier.

Given the autobiographical nature of Mills’s film, the specificity and authenticity of even the whimsical moments makes sense. Having said that, after the bright beginning, there’s also a certain monotony. I started to notice sounds of saucers on tables and steps on wooden floors, that sort of thing, and the unvaryingly tinkly piano score. I think just altering some of the music to something jauntier would have improved the film a lot. Despite death’s significance as a subject matter, the film seems clearly intended to celebrate life, and yet the tone is a little too precious. That’s an especially subjective criticism, so I feel certain Beginners will be incredibly moving to some and quite dull to others, especially those used to the pace of more familiar Hollywood fare.

IMDB link 

viewed 6/8/11 at Ritz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/16/2011

Lebanon, PA (***1/4)

Ben Hickernell made a pretty good suspense drama called Cellar that never got shown outside of a few film festivals. But at least he got to make a second movie, and it’s also pretty good. Here, a Philadelphia yuppie with pro-whale and pro-choice stickers on his VW finds himself in a conservative small town following his father’s death. It’s a chance to get away from a marketing job he’s tired of and a girlfriend who’s dumped him. Charmed by a local schoolteacher (Samantha Mathis), he thinks of staying. But different values, and not just saying grace at supper, come along with the change of scenery.

The pro-choice message isn’t just a bumper-sticker slogan, as one of the two main plotlines involves the pregnancy of a high school senior who lives across from the father’s house. The other involves the charming teacher, who’s married. The screenplay is solid, though not penetrating. It’s a movie about a small town, but clearly from the perspective of the outsider. Yet the duel plotlines were enjoyable, and I wasn’t sure how either would end. Rachel Kitson makes a credible debut as the pregnant girl, whose dream of going to college at Drexel may be jeopardized.

IMDB link

viewed 10/15/10 at Prince Music Theater [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/15–16/10

The Princess of Montpensier (***1/2)

It took just under 350 years to make a film out of this tale by Marie de La Fayette, perhaps the first French novelist. De La Fayette wrote of a time still earlier, beginning her story in the midst of the religious wars that began in the late 1500s. Two prominent battle scenes, with swords and only the occasional gun, typify the attention to historical detail employed by director Bertrand Tavernier (A Sunday in the Country, Daddy Nostalgia). Perhaps even more noteworthy in that regard is the depiction of the wedding-night rituals apparently employed by the nobility. These are even less romantic than would befit the marriage of the princess, who has been pried away from her beloved in an arrangement economically suitable to her father.

The earliest part of the drama is slightly confusing—it took me a bit of time to figure to ascertain the allegiance (in the war) of the (more or less) male lead (Lambert Wilson), who is neither the princess’s beloved nor her husband, but the count who mentored her husband in the art of war and has now, disgusted by battle, laid down his sword. The princess (Mélanie Thierry) is a comely young woman with a keen mind, and the attention she draws, and her own thwarted desire, propel the action of the latter half of the film. This is more straightforward, but elegantly plotted. (Notwithstanding the setting, the course of action could easily be transplanted into a modern drama, or even a farce, though it’s not told that way here.) Of necessity, the philosophical elements of the novella are only present in small amounts, but the narrative and location filming make this adaptation a case of much better late than never.

IMDB link

viewed 4/28/11 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 4/29/11

Blue Valentine (***)

Commenting on contemporary fiction in The Atlantic, literary conservative B. R. Myers laments that “[c]haracters are now conceived as if the whole point of literature were to create plausible likenesses of the folks next door.” Mainstream cinema veers between fantasy characters and ordinary characters in fantastic situations, but only independent usually looks at regular people in regular situations. Here, Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling play Dean and Cindy, a couple living in northern Pennsylvania with a preschool-age daughter whose relationship may be starting to deteriorate.

The movie is not as depressing as it might be because about half of it is flashbacks relating the tender courtship—the charming high school dropout wooing the young medical student. Gosling reminded me of his breakthrough role in The Notebook in a scene in which Dean threatens to jump off a bridge if Cindy won’t tell him what’s on her mind. (In The Notebook, Gosling’s character vows to jump off a Ferris wheel if Rachel McAdams’s character won’t agree to a date.) The Notebook is the fantasy version of a romance, and it’s notable in skipping from marriage right to death. I wonder what either of its character would have said if a granddaughter had asked, as Cindy asks her grandmother, “How do you trust your feelings when it can just disappear like that?” Of course, charming courtship scenes look at little different when that thought hangs over the drama.

In flitting back and forth a few years, I’m not sure director Derek Cianfrance really shows the path from blind love to malaise, but he excels at evoking it. In an early scene, Dean lightly scolds Cindy for giving tasteless oatmeal to their daughter, and she gets upset at his encouraging her to eat off the table. Dean’s attempt at arranging a romantic weekend getaway constitutes much of the drama, and eventually brings things to a head, but the ending is typically low-key. Cianfrance doesn’t use handheld cameras, but the music is minimal and the voices are often miked far away, so the movie comes off a little lo-fi. It’s film of small details, like another Michelle Williams film, Wendy and Lucy. I’m not sure Myers would approve of this kind of film, but even he allows that “a good storyteller can interest us in just about anybody.”

There was some controversy about this movie because the producers successfully challenged the initial NC-17 rating. There are a few intimate scenes; Williams is shown topless, and Dean is shown orally pleasuring her, but you can’t directly see that. All in all, the notion that such a film would be considered for the harshest rating and mainstream films with torture scenes would not is, to my mind, an indictment of the ratings system and/or American values.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 3/10/11

Leaving (***)

Lots of non-English-speaking actors make the move to English-language roles, but Kristin-Scott Thomas has found success going in the other direction. The English actress is excellent in a supporting role in this year’s Nowhere Boy, but her most-acclaimed recent role has been as an ex-convict in the French film I’ve Loved You So Long. (She’s also done other movies there.) She plays another morally compromised character in this psychological drama.

The story begins with her rising from her marital bed in the dark, then (apparently) firing a shot. It then reverts to six months earlier, but that beginning portends the darker direction in which things will turn. Scott Thomas plays a housewife planning to return to work, and Sergi López (Pan’s Labyrinth, With a Friend Like Harry) plays the laborer helping to renovate her house, and with whom she unexpectedly finds herself spending time. Their relationship develops in perfunctory fashion, but the film is not about that so much as the depths to which she—and her doctor husband (Yvan Attal)—will go in the name of love, or maybe passion. Arguably, neither the beginning—the suddenly arising feelings—or the end, where we find out what that shot was about, are entirely convincing. And some viewers may not want to follow the disloyal housewife, but it is the morally ambiguous conduct of all parties that fascinates.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 12/6/10