Seymour: An Introduction (***)

The title of the movie may grab J. D. Salinger fans who know it as the title of one of Salinger’s better known short stories. They’ll be disappointed to learn that, while the movie too is a character sketch, it’s of the wholly unrelated Seymour Bernstein, a successful pianist turned piano teacher and composer in New York City. This Seymour gave up the limelight for contentment, and it’s that sentiment that strikes you in Ethan Hawke’s documentary.

Hawke includes conversation with others in the film, but it’s the footage of Bernstein, nearing 80, interacting with his younger students that is most captivating. These students are advanced, already capable of playing the right notes, but if you’ve wondered what things make the difference between a very competent musician and a truly excellent one, you get some idea here. Listening to one student chop away at the keys, Bernstein notices not the student’s hands but his shoulders. Placing his own hands on those shoulders, he has the student play it again, now more relaxed. It’s these kinds of small observations, but also his manner, that must make Berstein a fine teacher. He is the opposite of the teacher in Whiplash, inspiring with calmness, confidence in the student, and even a little humor. “Not all notes can be passionate,” he say after hearing one loud performance.

But Hawke is not a piano student, and it’s not the technical skills that drew him to his subject. Both acting (notably in the partly improvised films of Richard Linklater such as Boyhood, Tape, and the Before trilogy) and in interviews, he’s struck me as someone who is maybe thinking too much, who never seems relaxed. Maybe he envies Seymour Bernstein, who strikes me as someone who is thoughtful but not overthinking; he’s gained wisdom with age and simplified the things he prefers not to think about, like where to live. (So he’s been in the same apartment his entire adult life.) Whether you are a music fan or not, he may inspire.

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viewed 3/26/15 7:30 pm [PFS screening] and posted 3/30/15

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

Big Eyes (***1/2)

Tim Burton is the distinctive director of heavily art-directed films like Edward Scissorhands, Alice in Wonderland, and Sweeney Todd, but sometimes (Mars Attacks!, Corpse Bride) his kinetic/frenetic style can overwhelm substance. However, here he’s collaborated again with the writing team (Scott Alexander, Larry Karaszewski) responsible for Ed Wood, one of his best films. Both of them are about real people whose careers began in the 1950s, though Margaret Keane (Amy Adams), unlike Wood, is one of Burton’s most conventional lead characters. Only her paintings, and her story, were unconventional.

A divorcée struggling to make a living in beatnik-era San Francisco, Margaret met Walter Keane (Christoph Waltz), also an aspiring artist, and within a few years her paintings, most featuring children with oversized eyes, were widely seen and bringing in thousands of dollars. Only everyone thought that Walter painted them. His eventual unmasking is both funny and cathartic, making a satisfying ending that happens to also be a true story.


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viewed 1/7/15 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 1/8/15

Rosewater (***)

You might not expect a comedian-turned-TV host, even the host of a news parody show, to make his directorial debut with a drama about an journalist arrested by the Iranian government. But Jon Stewart’s Daily Show played an odd, indirect role in the story of Maziar Bahari, whose memoir was adapted by Stewart. Being an American film, it’s almost all in English, though in real life, presumably, most of the speaking would have been in Farsi.

Bahari (Gael García Bernal), a Newsweek reporter covering the 2009 elections in Iran, was arrested and accused of spying. His interrogator relied partly on an interview Bahari had given to Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones in which Jones had asked, in the show’s mock serious way, if Bahari were a spy. (Modestly, Stewart doesn’t refer to the show by name.)

The film depicts Bahari’s reporting on the election and, primarily, his subsequent detention and interrogation. (For the squeamish, the violence is fairly minimal.) Though Stewart briefly shows us scenes involving the interrogator and his superior, almost all of the movie is from Bahari’s point of view, understandable given that it’s based on a memoir. This means, though, that the biggest mysteries — did the Iranians truly think Bahari was a spy, what did they expect to accomplish by holding him, and so on — remain so. Instead, the film is a window into the mind of the captive, wondering what he should or can do to save himself. Stewart uses flashbacks and imagined discussions between Bahari and his late father and sister, who had also been held captive, both to depict Bahari’s backstory and to reveal his thoughts while in solitary confinement. At the time of his captivity, the Iranian-born Bahari was based in London, where his wife was pregnant with his first child.

Stewart’s debut is an entirely credible effort, well done but without that many surprises, kind of what you might expect from a film on this subject, if not from this particular writer-director.


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viewed 11/10/14 7:00 pm at AMC Loews Cherry Hill and posted 11/10/14

The Theory of Everything (***1/4)

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This movie is probably slightly better if you don’t know about Stephen Hawking (Eddie Redmayne). For those who do, the story should seem familiar. Covering roughly 25 years, it can only sketch in broad outline Hawking’s major life events — the diagnosis (ALS), the dissertation (on black holes), the debilitation, and the devilishly difficult bestselling book (A Brief History of Time) that made him a household name. Perhaps less familiar will be the love story that director James Marsh focuses on. The movie is in fact based on Jane Hawking’s book.

It’s a story that truly begins after a typical romantic story ends. The scenes in which Stephen, a doctoral student at Cambridge with some unexplained physical lapses, courts Jane (Felicity Jones) are charming — Stephen’s offbeat posture, sly wit, and (later-useful) economy of expression are already apparent — but a prelude. It’s one thing to pledge fidelity to a sick man and another to become the sole caregiver for an invalid who almost literally cannot lift a finger to help around the house.

In all long-term arrangements, the romantic must make room for the domestic. This is that ordinary story, combined with the extraordinary intelligence of Hawking and the fact that time, Hawking’s special area of interest, is not his friend. His speech increasingly slurring, his movements increasingly limited, he yet defies the survival odds. It’s thus an inspirational story that, nonetheless, suggests at once the horror of such a disease and the magnitude of the gift Jane gave him. Marsh, gently eliding over the decades, doesn’t peer deep into the souls of his characters but movingly portrays the way their relationship changes with time, perhaps not as expected. The actors are very good, with Redmayne utterly convincing in evoking the entire range of Hawking’s physical decline, then using his eyebrows to convey emotion and thought. Those interested in more than the barest outline of Hawking’s ideas will want to turn to his books, or Errol Morris’s documentary version of A Brief History of Time, but this is a fine general-interest drama that avoid the clichés of disease movies.

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viewed 11/5/14 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 11/6/14

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