The entertainment business fascinates many people, and entertainment business fascinates entertainers, so there are plenty of films about it. But there aren’t so many films about the creative process, the implicit subject of this film. Olivier Assayas has made one with Juliette Binoche, star of Summer Hours, his best-known film. She plays an actress, Maria Enders, presented with an opportunity to star in a revival of a play she did when she was 18. Only this time, rather than playing a teen vixen, she is to play a businesswoman seduced by her personal assistant. Yet still she identifies more with the younger character.
Maria discusses this primarily, but not solely with Valentine, her own, younger assistant (Kristen Stewart), who runs lines with her, sets appointments, and so on. The two relationships —the one in the play and the one between Maria and Valentine, run in parallel, but are different. Neither Maria nor Valentine are lesbians, for one thing. And while Maria finds the businesswoman she is supposed to play to be pathetic and foolish, Valentine sees it differently. They also clash, humorously, over a sci-fi film they see together. Valentine likes it, but Maria finds the women in spacesuits ridiculous.
The film is smart without being pretentious, though it’s talky. But if you get a worn out by all the talk, and you may, there are also some lovely scenes of the Swiss Alps, where a good part of the film is set.
IMDb link
viewed 10/19/14 2:20 p.m. and posted 10/21/14
Showing posts with label age difference. Show all posts
Showing posts with label age difference. Show all posts
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Friday, June 7, 2013
The Internship (**1/2)
Essentially a
vehicle for Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson to do their shtick, this
high-concept comedy has them playing laid-off salemen who become the oldest
interns at Google. The plot is equal parts reality show — the interns
organize into teams for a series of
challenges — and Google infomercial. Vaughn gets a cowriter credit too, as he did on Couples Retreat.
It makes sense to pair Vaughn and Wilson, who have somewhat similar personae and successfully teamed up for Wedding Crashers in 2005. In most of their movies, they’re runny-mouthed schmoozers, or loud-mouthed bullshitters. Vaughn swaggers, giving off the air of someone trying to put one over on you, while Wilson squirms, like he’s trying to get out from under you, so they complement each other too. Depending on the role, they find that they can schmooze their way through things, or find that bullshit isn’t enough. This starts out in the first mode, switches to the second, teeters, and ultimately winds up somewhere in the middle, which makes it tolerable. That is to say, the movie doesn’t entirely elevate social skills over technical ones, even if it does make the latter seem easy to acquire over the course of a summer.
Vince/Owen (or Billy/Nick) wind up with a team of misfits, who nonetheless still look down on the old guys. Vince/Billy does a kind-of-funny bit where he tries to sell them on his idea for an app that’s exactly like Instagram. It goes on slightly too long, as does the part where the team (including the lone female) goes to a strip club. Actually, I could have done without that part altogether, but all comedies like this need a crazy-night-out scene. A villain also seems to be required, so director Shawn Levy (Date Night, Night at the Museum) makes one of the interns into a English-accented meanie, there solely to lob periodic jibes at the Vince/Owen team, though there’s no particular reason he’d be paying attention to them at all. Liberally applying social lubricant, the old guys gradually win over their nerdy coworkers. Owen/Nick has a perfunctory romance with one of the executives (Rose Byrne). She tells him, “It’s never going to happen,” which in real life usually means, “It’s never going to happen,” but hardly ever does in movies about runny-mouthed schmoozers. This is a perfunctory comedy, but it’s perfectly watchable.
IMDb link
viewed 5/30/13 7:30 at The Pearl [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/31–6/6/13
It makes sense to pair Vaughn and Wilson, who have somewhat similar personae and successfully teamed up for Wedding Crashers in 2005. In most of their movies, they’re runny-mouthed schmoozers, or loud-mouthed bullshitters. Vaughn swaggers, giving off the air of someone trying to put one over on you, while Wilson squirms, like he’s trying to get out from under you, so they complement each other too. Depending on the role, they find that they can schmooze their way through things, or find that bullshit isn’t enough. This starts out in the first mode, switches to the second, teeters, and ultimately winds up somewhere in the middle, which makes it tolerable. That is to say, the movie doesn’t entirely elevate social skills over technical ones, even if it does make the latter seem easy to acquire over the course of a summer.
Vince/Owen (or Billy/Nick) wind up with a team of misfits, who nonetheless still look down on the old guys. Vince/Billy does a kind-of-funny bit where he tries to sell them on his idea for an app that’s exactly like Instagram. It goes on slightly too long, as does the part where the team (including the lone female) goes to a strip club. Actually, I could have done without that part altogether, but all comedies like this need a crazy-night-out scene. A villain also seems to be required, so director Shawn Levy (Date Night, Night at the Museum) makes one of the interns into a English-accented meanie, there solely to lob periodic jibes at the Vince/Owen team, though there’s no particular reason he’d be paying attention to them at all. Liberally applying social lubricant, the old guys gradually win over their nerdy coworkers. Owen/Nick has a perfunctory romance with one of the executives (Rose Byrne). She tells him, “It’s never going to happen,” which in real life usually means, “It’s never going to happen,” but hardly ever does in movies about runny-mouthed schmoozers. This is a perfunctory comedy, but it’s perfectly watchable.
IMDb link
viewed 5/30/13 7:30 at The Pearl [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/31–6/6/13
Thursday, December 25, 2008
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (**3/4)
Curious is Benjamin (Brad Pitt) because Benjamin ages backward. Screenwriter Eric Roth (Munich, The Good Shepherd, Ali) and director David Fincher (Zodiac, Panic Room, Fight Club) borrow this idea—and almost nothing else—from the identically titled F. Scott Fitzgerald story. Whereas Fitzgerald’s “Curious” is just that, a curious trifle, the film tries to be two things: a philosophical work, told in flashback excerpts of an old woman’s diary, and a love story of longing and separation.
Benjamin is born in New Orleans at the end of the Great War. In a concession to physical reality, he is baby-size and unlearned, but with the face, and arthritis, of an old man. Taken in by a black caregiver (Taraji P. Henson) at a nursing home, he grows larger, but not, seemingly, older. (Despite this setting and time period, racial themes are not prominent.) Time marches on, but Benjamin only grows more vigorous. Partly isolated from others by his condition, he forms mostly brief relationships. Only with his (adoptive) mother and the granddaughter of one of the nursing home residents is there a longer-lasting bond. (Fincher manages to depict the friendship of the “old man” and the little girl without it seeming creepy.) Eventually, Benjamin leaves New Orleans on a tugboat.
Except for some sexual frankness, the movie feels old-fashioned and timeless, which may be appealing. It’s beautifully shot and scored (by Alexandre Desplat). The make-up effects combine with Pitt’s elegant performance to make you forget he’s a movie star, or that the plot is outlandish. (However, I never quite understood why Benjamin assumes that he’ll regress into childishness and lose his adult memories to match his appearance. Given the way he starts out, couldn’t he as easily just look childish? I suppose the answer is that that outcome would seem more comic than poignant, as indeed the reverse situation is in the beginning, but it bothered me just the same.)
Having noticed that screenwriter Roth also wrote Forrest Gump, I realize that the two movies have a lot in common, structurally. Although comedy was more prominent in Gump, both movies feature the life stories of their central characters, and romances in which the strangeness of the hero creates a challenge. Despite this, I liked Gump a lot better. For all of the loveliness of this one, I felt unconnected to the story, and two reasons suggest themselves. The first is that, notwithstanding Pitt’s performance, Benjamin is not that memorable a character. Gump annoyed some people, true, but Button won’t annoy anyone because his only major characteristics are a certain reserved politeness, and his love for the girl, played as an adult by Cate Blanchett. Which brings up the other reason I didn’t love the movie. Blanchett is another fine performer, and her role has more personality to it, but when we first see her, I could not connect this hard-edged ballet dancer to the sweet child first encountered. There is too much separation in time and in character. And so I remained unconvinced, or maybe just unmoved, by the placid man’s reawakened ardor. I actually found Benjamin’s other romance, with an unhappily married Englishwoman (Tilda Swinton), a more compelling storyline, but it’s a much smaller part of the movie.
I’m not saying there was no poignancy at all in the way these two people can love but not grow old together, or in the way that the movie reminds us of how our connections with other people make us human. But I preferred the warmer tone of Gump, where the female lead is in some way like Blanchett’s—hard, but in a way that makes it easier to see the tenderness within. In fact, a more recent movie, Slumdog Millionaire, tells a very similar romantic tale, wherein the hero tries to reconnect with his childhood friend, now a toughened-up young woman. There too, I rooted harder for the couple than here. This is clearly a well-crafted movie, and so I know some people are going to like it a lot. But in my case, it just seems like an overlong curiosity.
IMDB link
viewed 12/1/08 (screening at Ritz Bourse); reviewed 1/25/09
Benjamin is born in New Orleans at the end of the Great War. In a concession to physical reality, he is baby-size and unlearned, but with the face, and arthritis, of an old man. Taken in by a black caregiver (Taraji P. Henson) at a nursing home, he grows larger, but not, seemingly, older. (Despite this setting and time period, racial themes are not prominent.) Time marches on, but Benjamin only grows more vigorous. Partly isolated from others by his condition, he forms mostly brief relationships. Only with his (adoptive) mother and the granddaughter of one of the nursing home residents is there a longer-lasting bond. (Fincher manages to depict the friendship of the “old man” and the little girl without it seeming creepy.) Eventually, Benjamin leaves New Orleans on a tugboat.
Except for some sexual frankness, the movie feels old-fashioned and timeless, which may be appealing. It’s beautifully shot and scored (by Alexandre Desplat). The make-up effects combine with Pitt’s elegant performance to make you forget he’s a movie star, or that the plot is outlandish. (However, I never quite understood why Benjamin assumes that he’ll regress into childishness and lose his adult memories to match his appearance. Given the way he starts out, couldn’t he as easily just look childish? I suppose the answer is that that outcome would seem more comic than poignant, as indeed the reverse situation is in the beginning, but it bothered me just the same.)
Having noticed that screenwriter Roth also wrote Forrest Gump, I realize that the two movies have a lot in common, structurally. Although comedy was more prominent in Gump, both movies feature the life stories of their central characters, and romances in which the strangeness of the hero creates a challenge. Despite this, I liked Gump a lot better. For all of the loveliness of this one, I felt unconnected to the story, and two reasons suggest themselves. The first is that, notwithstanding Pitt’s performance, Benjamin is not that memorable a character. Gump annoyed some people, true, but Button won’t annoy anyone because his only major characteristics are a certain reserved politeness, and his love for the girl, played as an adult by Cate Blanchett. Which brings up the other reason I didn’t love the movie. Blanchett is another fine performer, and her role has more personality to it, but when we first see her, I could not connect this hard-edged ballet dancer to the sweet child first encountered. There is too much separation in time and in character. And so I remained unconvinced, or maybe just unmoved, by the placid man’s reawakened ardor. I actually found Benjamin’s other romance, with an unhappily married Englishwoman (Tilda Swinton), a more compelling storyline, but it’s a much smaller part of the movie.
I’m not saying there was no poignancy at all in the way these two people can love but not grow old together, or in the way that the movie reminds us of how our connections with other people make us human. But I preferred the warmer tone of Gump, where the female lead is in some way like Blanchett’s—hard, but in a way that makes it easier to see the tenderness within. In fact, a more recent movie, Slumdog Millionaire, tells a very similar romantic tale, wherein the hero tries to reconnect with his childhood friend, now a toughened-up young woman. There too, I rooted harder for the couple than here. This is clearly a well-crafted movie, and so I know some people are going to like it a lot. But in my case, it just seems like an overlong curiosity.
IMDB link
viewed 12/1/08 (screening at Ritz Bourse); reviewed 1/25/09
Friday, January 19, 2007
Venus (***)
? An aging actor (Peter O’Toole) strikes up an unlikely friendship with a friend’s young niece, who’s just arrived in London.
+ I can’t think of another movie that looks at a relationship like this one. There are plenty of movies about May-December romances, but this isn’t about a romance. Not exactly. Although O’Toole retains enough of his looks, and more of his charm, to remind you of what a man about town his character must have once been, you don’t watch this expecting the two characters to hook up. Nor, I think, does the man himself, not that he wouldn’t want to. Clearly, her youth and looks are much of why he wants to be with her. His kindness is why she wants to be with him, and why his clearly expressed lust doesn’t come off as sleazy. Besides the obvious themes of age versus youth, the script touches upon his sophistication versus her inexperience, his carefree optimism versus her caution and suspicion, and so on, but not in a didactic way. In other words, it doesn’t make too much of these differences, isn’t a story of Eliza Doolittle turning into a fair lady, and hasn’t got a moral lesson. O’Toole, who earned his eighth Oscar nomination, and newcomer Jodie Whitaker are appealing. Vanessa Redgrave appears as the actor’s ex-wife.
- You don’t find many very young women hanging out with lecherous old guys, so the biggest hurdle for a movie like this is to get these two characters together in the first place, and, in terms of being entirely convincing, that was the weakest point. Overall, no one will watch this for the plot.
= *** Like its main character, this film isn’t too introspective. It’s a little film, a pretty pencil sketch rather than a full-on portrait, but a nice one all the same.
reviewed 2/16/07
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