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.

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

Kill Your Darlings (***)

Daniel Radcliffe has already played a number of non-Harry Potter roles, and his role as beat poet Allen Ginsberg should further assure that he won’t be typecast. I quickly forgot about wizards as I watched him essay the role of the Jewish, Paterson, New Jersey-reared Ginsberg, off to Columbia University to discover his literary talents and his rebellious side. There, during the war years, he meets Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), an impetus for both the creative and destructive impulses. And, possibly, a murderer. The killing in question may be known to those who know about Ginsberg (and, if you don’t, I suspect you won’t be seeking out this film) and is revealed at the start of the film, though not the victim, or the reason.

The first half of the film is jazzy, like beat poetry. In one scene, Carr and Ginsberg seem to magically stop time in a club. Director John Krokidas employs a lot of montage scenes to suggest the magical haze that enveloped the two young men. In some scenes, William Burroughs (Ben Foster) appears, weird and druggy, years before his own infamous involvement in a killing. Later, they hang out with a new friend named Jack who’s at Columbia on a football scholarship. This of course turns out to be Jack Kerouac, who’s been at sea but not, as yet, on the road. They pull pranks. They invent a new artistic movement (called “new vision” the term “beat” yet to be coined) before producing any significant work. Young Allen learns of the older man (Michael C. Hall) who has been pursuing Carr, and discovers his own sexuality. Late in the film, Ginsberg calls Carr a “phony,” but that was my own impression immediately. So I found him an annoying, pretentious character—no fault of DeHaan—and was happy when the film reached the more heavily plotted stage in which there is betrayal, heartbreak, and the killing. Allen has to decide whether to help his friend, who’s been arrested.

This well-acted drama is for those curious about the birth of a movement, or for those who like to be reminded that the men (women being bit players in this movie) who create the future were once unformed young persons playing at being adults.

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viewed 11/13/13 7:25 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 11/13/13 and revised 11/14/13

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.

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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.

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

The Spectacular Now (***)

There are basically two types of movies about high schoolers. One plays in multiplexes; it usually has a bunch of actors in their mid-20s, divides the kids into a bunch of types, usually sorted by popularity, prominently features a prom or other party as a major plot device, and can be summed up in a sentence. The other, indie-type feature is usually adapted from a novel, features more age-appropriate casting, a first love, more prominent parents, and main characters who are writers or artists. It can be summed up as a coming-of-age story. This one is a little bit of a mash-up. The main character, Sutter, is played by Miles Teller, an actor in his mid-20s who a few months earlier was in 21 & Over, in which he played a kind of obnoxious life-of-the-party type who drank too much. Here he begins as a kind of obnoxious life-of-the-party type who drinks too much and is busy trying to get his nerdier pal laid. Pretty conventional, as is the college-essay-question framing device and lengthy narration employed.

The other main character, however, is played by Shailene Woodley, whose angry-daughter role in the Descendants was as memorable as George Clooney’s lead. She’s every bit as good here in a completely different kind of role, a brainy girl who’s into genre novels and Japanese animé. She draws, too. Unfortunately, all of those characteristics are depicted in the very beginning of the movie and dropped thereafter. She is unfortunately mostly a character there so that Sutter can work out his issues. Still, in every scene she is utterly natural.

As for the story, it is kind of a first-love story (first for her — he’s getting over a breakup), in some ways a popular-guy-meets-unpopular-girl story, but also a coming-of-age story. The drinking issue is handled with subtlety. Sutter drinks too much, but he has other characteristics.

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viewed 8/21/13 7:15 at Ritz East and posted 8/21/13

Mud (***1/2)

Who’d have expected to see Matthew McConaughey in a thoughtful coming-of-age story set on the Arkansas/Mississippi border? The titles of Fool’s Gold and Failure to Launch might almost have been metaphors for his career, although he’s mixed in some good movies too. Still, with his turn as a male stripper in Magic Mike, his upcoming role in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, and even his small part in Bernie, he seems to a have been choosing a higher percentage of noteworthy projects lately. (The July/August 2013 Atlantic includes the actor in a list of “Once-Discredited Ideas Now Staging Comebacks.”) McConaughey is the biggest name here, and plays the title character, but not actually the main one. Instead, Mud becomes the vehicle through which an idealistic 14-year old (Tye Sheridan), Ellis begins to understand the complexities of adult relationships, and romantic ones.

Ellis’s parents are threatening to split; for him, the primary meaning of this will be having to move from his home by the river and become a “townie.” A more programmatic plot might have made Mud into a wise father figure imparting wisdom. But wise men are not often found living alone on an island, where Ellis and his best friend find him. Why Mud is there, and what/who he’s waiting for, becomes clearer as the movie goes on, even as his true character becomes murkier. (His name stays mysterious.) Mud does impart wisdom, but subtly. The ending is probably less subtle, and less ambiguous, than I’d have preferred, but I suspect I’d be in the minority, and it’s certainly not awful.


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viewed 6/13/13 and reviewed 6/14–17/13

The Perks of Being a Wallflower (***1/4)

Stephen Chbosky’s coming-of-age novel as brought to the screen by Stephen Chbosky himself.

IMDb link

viewed 10/17/12 7:00 pm at Ritz East

Turn Me On, Dammit (***1/4)

Movies about horny teen boys are legion in Hollywood, but the subject of teen female sexuality (and, to an extent, female sexuality in general) seems the province of Europeans. Provincial Alma (Helene Bergsholm), nearly 16, narrates this Norwegian comedy. Here’s mountains, here's meadows, she says; here’s her dull town that could be a small town anywhere with mountains and meadows. Alma lives with her mother, fantasizes about a boy, and sometimes calls a phone sex line to aid her fantasies.

If there is any common theme among tales of sexual awakening, it’s humiliation; in this case, a sexual matter makes Alma the undeserved object of ridicule among her classmates. Frank but not crude, this adaptation of a novel succeeds with deadpan wit and the palpable awkwardness and longing of many an adolescent.

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viewed 10/30/11 7:50 pm at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/31/11

Boy (***)

Taika Waititi, whose earlier film, Eagle vs. Shark, a bit like a New Zealand sequel to Napoleon Dynamite, changes things up with this coming-of-age film set in 1984 in a rural Maori community. The eleven-year-old title character (James Rolleston) lives with his cousins—his mother died giving birth to his younger brother—and invents a glamorous history for his absent father, who’s apparently in jail. But then the old man shows up, leading a three-man “gang” and hoping to dig up the buried “treasure” if only he can figure out where it’s buried.

The father, played by the director, is more of an overgrown child than a gangster, and Boy initially accepts him as a cool new playmate. The movie is a drama, but in the father character especially there are at least hints of the goofiness of Eagle vs. Shark. Additionally, while the characters are not well off, there is something appealing about the way they have free run of the town’s landscapes, which include a lonely beach, and a certain self-reliance. Boy’s fascination with Michael Jackson is a reminder of the reach of global culture, yet this place seems a world apart. (For American ears, the accents may be a little tough to follow.) Boy lacks the pathos and depth that would make the film a classic, but it’s a winsome effort from Waititi.

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viewed 4/19/12 7:3 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/19/12

The Secret World of Arriety (***1/2)

In the beginning of this charming tale, Arriety, now turning 14, bravely ventures outside in daylight, returning with a huge bay leaf that her mother says will last a year. But she has also been seen by a boy, though he is around her own age. This will mean trouble, because the boy is a “being” while Arriety, living with her parents in a small corner of a basement, is a borrower. Borrowers, as introduced in the Mary Norton novel of the same name, are tiny people who subsist on what full-size people don’t need, or won’t miss. This is one of at least five adaptations of Norton’s novel, including a 2011 BBC version, but it’s the first to use another title and, perhaps surprisingly, the first to be animated. In this way, the story becomes as natural as a fantasy, one that is also a coming-of-age story, can be.

The look of the film should seem familiar to those familiar with the work of Hayao Miyazaki (Sprited Away, Ponyo), who adapted the novel but left the directing chores to Hiromasa Yonebayashi, one of his animators. It’s less frenzied and has few of the grotesque touches common to Miyazaki’s other work, but the colors are just as gorgeous, and there’s a warmth to it. (The dialogue of the adults, at least in the dubbed U.S. version, is similarly stilted at times.) Incidentally, while the larger humans appear to be Japanese, the borrowers do not. (Arriety’s dad, voiced by Will Arnett, seriously reminded me of a young Harrison Ford. Amy Poehler is the voice of her mom.) They are in a foreign land. Compared to mainstream American animation, this is not necessarily slower, but it’s much quieter, content to carry the story forward visually at times. The plot is simpler than other versions of the story; the tone is sincere, not comedic. (A mildly villainous human, voiced by Carol Burnett, does seem a little goofy, though.) Although it gently raises the subject of death, it should be enjoyable to beings of most ages.

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viewed 3/8/12 8:30 pm at Riverview and reviewed 3/8/12 (updated 3/18/12)

Pariah (***1/4)

As far I I knew, no one in my high school was gay. Nor did I suspect that anyone was.  This began to change ever-more rapidly in the last 20 years, so that someone can be out to friends, ambiguous to classmates, and closeted to parents all at once. That’s more or less the case with Alike (Ah-LEE-Kay) (Adepero Oduye), the heroine of this semiautobiographical first feature from Dee Rees.

That Alike is a black, lesbian teen certainly provides the dramatic hook, but in form it’s a coming-of-age tale. If Alike is a pariah—though she frequents a local lesbian club with a best friend—it’s as much because she’s introspective and shy as because of her sexuality. Her unexpected first romance is of less note than the relationship with her parents.

The tiny silver lining of the pre-don’t ask, don’t tell era was that, if you didn’t tell—and if you were in high school you almost certainly wouldn’t—no one was likely to ask. But though Alike’s mother (comedy veteran Kim Wayans, surprisingly capable) frets about her daughter’s “tomboy” phase, and her dad asks about boys, it’s apparent that they both kind of know the truth. If it’s true that their level of denial would seem a bit behind the curve were they white,  professional Brooklynites rather than black, working-class ones, it’s also true that this story has played out thousands of times among all sorts of Americans. But this is the first time I’ve seen it on film, and Rees tells it with authenticity.

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viewed 1/5/12 at Rave UPenn (PFS screening) and reviewed 1/12/12

My Week with Marylin (***)

In 1956, the 30-year-old Marilyn Monroe traveled to England. Then at the height of her stardom, she was there with her newest husband, Arthur Miller, to make a romantic comedy with Laurence Olivier, later released as The Prince and the Showgirl. Like Me and Orson Welles, this adaptation of diaries by Colin Clark is about a big star seen through the eyes of a young showbiz aspirant. But Welles was never uncertain of his own gifts, whereas Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams), at least as portrayed here, was confident in her stardom, but not of anything else. Welles tries the patience of his acting company with his arrogance, Monroe with her insecurity. She arrives late on the set and flubs her lines. Olivier (Kenneth Branagh), who’s directing the film, cannot hide his impatience, whereas young Colin (Eddie Redmayne), hired as a third assistant director but actually a gofer, can’t hide his infatuation. Her acting coach, Paula Strasberg, is there to prop up her confidence and further irritate Olivier.

Both Williams and Branagh are credible, which is especially good in Williams’s case because, without seeing Monroe as a star, one might simply see her as childlike and immature. Olivier is inclined to the latter view, though he recognizes her onscreen presence. As Colin puts it, Olivier is a great actor who longs to be a movie star, and Monroe is a star who longs to be an actor. Both have dramatic personalities that make this a pleasant, though minor, film.

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viewed 10/29/11 at Prince Music Theater [Philadelphia Film Society screening] and reviewed 10/29/11

Submarine (***1/2)

An affecting coming-of-age story set in Wales. The hero is teenage Oliver Tate, who like many an unpopular boy imagines himself the hero of his own movies. His object of affection (Yasmin Paige) is chosen, he tells us, for her own modest unpopularity, which makes her possibly attainable. She’s not the nerdy kind kind of unpopular but the edgy kind. They have a charmingly odd romance that involves lighting small fires and such, but, in the manner of many a teenage boy, it barely occurs to Oliver that there may be tender feelings behind her cool exterior. And so he hides his, which prominently involve worrying about his parents’ low-functioning marriage. The quiet, odd father is played by Noah Taylor, who long ago starred as the same character in a pair of equally good coming-of-age stories, The Year My Voice Broke and Flirting. The mother is always-good Sally Hawkins.

While maintaining humor throughout, director Richard Ayoade (adapting a Joe Dunthorne novel) evokes the drama of teenage existence with particularity as to character and setting (although the time, probably in the near past, is vague) and universality as to the feelings.

IMDB link

viewed 6/6/11 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 6/17/11

Living on Love Alone (***1/2)

Julie (Anaïs Demoustier), age 23 and just beginning her first grown-up at a Paris PR agency, is the subject of this drama. Although her looks attract men to her, in most ways she’s kind of an ordinary young woman, which I liked about the story. Probably had the job, or the people there, been a little different, it might have gone better. Perhaps in another life she’d have become the mistress of the 41-year-old guy she picks up in a club. Instead, there is another job and another man, one who provides an alluring and possibly dangerous alternative to the dull existence she sees before her.

The English title seems unsatisfactory, more suggestive of a romantic film, although the original French title, which translates as Of Love and Fresh Water, isn’t that helpful either. But what it suggests after seeing the film relates to the weight of reality and that adulthood is a series of choices, compromises, and consequences.

IMDB link

viewed 4/10/11 at Ritz East [Cinefest 2011 screening] and reviewed 4/10/11 and 4/17/11

Nowhere Boy (***1/2)

This drama begins with a chord lifted from the start of the Beatles song “A Hard Day’s Night,” whose title might be some sort of metaphor for the career of John Lennon. The song was released in 1964, during the height of Beatlemania. The next year, they recorded “Nowhere Man,” which obviously inspired this movie’s title. The song, though, is about a man with no “point of view” making “plans for nobody,” whereas Lennon (Aaron Johnson), though without direction as a teenager, had a cockiness and drive that made him the opposite of the nonentity in the song.

Lennon’s fame came well after the period memorialized here, saving the producers a bundle in music rights. Beatles aficionados may recognize the early originals “Hello Little Girl” and “In Spite of All the Danger,” which didn’t make it onto their proper studio albums, and “Maggie Mae,” a non-original that did. They may notice John riding by Strawberry Fields in Liverpool near the start of the film. And they will anxiously await the inevitable moment when he’s introduced to the 15-year-old Paul McCartney after a performance by Lennon’s band, the Quarrrymen. But ultimately, this is the story of a teenage boy, not the story of a rock star. Judged strictly on that basis, the movie is still surprisingly entertaining, even moving.

It is the story of a somewhat rebellious teenager caught between two women. His magnetic personality seems drawn from his mother Julia (Anne Marie Duff), memorialized in a somber 1968 song of that name. But he was largely raised by his aunt Mimi, a hard woman portrayed with subtlety by Kristin Scott Thomas. In the movie version of things (a little simplified), Lennon barely knows his mother until he sees her at the funeral of his uncle, a surrogate father who dies at the start of the movie. It is the push-pull of these strong women that helps shape him. The one teaches him to play banjo, the other actually buys him a guitar. (Though in real life, Julia did both.)

Directed by Sam Taylor-Wood, Nowhere Boy is based on a memoir by Lonnon’s half-sister Julia Baird. The screenplay is by Matt Greenhalgh, who adapted another musical memoir in Control. That movie told the story of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, who committed suicide less than seven months before Lennon’s death. This movie, though, is full of life and worth seeing even for middling Beatles fans. Duff and Johnson capture the charisma and pathos of their characters. There is one solo Lennon recording, “Mother,” in the film. “You had me,” sang Lennon in the 1970 song, “but I never had you.” It plays over the closing credits.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 10/29/10

It’s Kind of a Funny Story (***)

For a comedy that starts with the lead character (Keir Gilchrist) contemplating suicide and set in a mental hospital, this isn’t as black as you’d think. Young Craig is a prep-school kid struggling with his desire to please his workaholic dad, his attraction to his best friend’s girl, and the pressures of school. He doesn’t really want to kill himself, but a short voluntary commitment seems like a good opportunity to sort things out.

Notwithstanding the setting, he manages to meet a girl (Emma Roberts). And a new friend, played by Zach Galifianakis. Galifianakis threatens to become the most unlikely household name since “Schwarzeneggar.” The burly actor isn’t much like the Governator, but his full beard and daft persona are nearly as distinct as Schwarzeneggar’s Austrian monotone. He played the oddest characters in both The Hangover and Dinner for Schmucks—which is saying something—but here for the first time is an actual mental patient. And yet here he’s relatively normal. A few of the other patients, like Craig’s catatonic roommate, border on “zany,” but the principal characters are fairly realistic. Gilchrist (of The United States of Tara) does a nice job and looks the age he’s playing. (He kind of also looks like Justin Long’s younger brother, but without projecting smarminess.)

The writer-director team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck previously made Half Nelson and Sugar, which had the odd laugh but were practically docudramas in terms of style. Those had original screenplays, but in this case, they are adapting a Ned Vizzini novel. Possibly for that reason, there is a lighter feel. Boden and Fleck incorporate fantasy sequences and even a bit of animation. The movie may annoy some with its glib attitude toward overcoming mental illness, a point actually addressed in the voiceover. Only in Roberts’s character (and occasionally with Galifianakis’s) do we get the sense of someone who is truly, and non-comically, wounded psychologically. But this is best viewed as a coming-of-age story with a novel setting and a few laughs. Not a bad thing, that.

IMDB link

viewed 9/16/10 at Ritz 5 [PFS screening] and reviewed 9/17 and 10/8/10

Never Let Me Go (***3/4)

It is 1978. Life expectancy in England had exceeded 100 years in the previous decade, and this had changed things, although, for three young people at an isolated boarding school, there was little sign of that. (Think of Hogwarts without the eccentric professors, or the magic, or Harry Potter.) The first third of the drama (adapted from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel) takes place at the school. Director Mark Romanek (One Hour Photo) and screenwriter Alex Garland carefully telescope years of experience into brief scenes. A girl’s friendship with an outcast boy. The jealousy of her friend. Nothing confusing, but something mysterious there. Children who are afraid to leave the school grounds for fear of disappearing. This beginning is suggestive of a certain type of psychological horror film, and indeed this can be regarded as such, although it is not at all “scary” in that sense. Talk of “donors” and “carers” in Carey Mulligan’s introductory voiceover is another hint that something is amiss. (We learn what fairly early on, but it’s better not to know.)

The rest of the film takes place later, when the three children have become young adults, played by Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield. By then we already know, mostly, the paths their lives will take. Although the plot is nothing like that of Remains of the Day, the Ishiguro novel previously adapted into a film, the same feeling sticks with me. Both stories are of people whose lives are circumscribed by both their own natures and the roles in society. They are stories of longing, and lost years, and sadness. In each case, they are told with a kind of economy of expression. I felt I knew these characters, even though the film is brief and skips forward in time.

I’ve deliberately downplayed the science-fiction aspect of the story, because that is not the kind of movie it is. As Romanek admitted in a recent interview, those looking for a conventional sci-fi film will be disappointed. There is no explanation of why things are as they are; there is no suggestion that the characters will rebel, or that doing so would be effective. I would enjoy seeing a more sci-fi/action take on the same story. (Screenwriter Garland has, in fact, written movies like that—Sunshine and 28 Days Later, both directed by Danny Boyle.) But the absence of these aspects didn’t annoy me, because it seemed like they were beside the point. The point is not how the world got to be that way, but to observe the behaviors of these characters in their situation. Though its spareness (not slowness) may not suit all tastes, Never Let Me Go is like a sad song so beautiful you that you still want to hear it.

IMDB link

viewed 9/20/10 at Ritz East [PFS screening]

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)

How to Train Your Dragon (***)

Staples of kid-film plots—the underdog/non-conformist who must prove himself (rarely herself), the kid who’s smarter than the adults, and the boy who must prove himself to his dad—come together with the novel element of dragons. The particulars are that the kid (called Hiccup and voiced by Jay Baruchel) is a brainy, scrawny Viking in a society where brainpower is not prized and the dad is a burly behemoth (Gerard Butler) who would prefer a son like himself. Loosely adapted from the first in a series of kid novels by Cressida Cowell, the plot has Hiccup forced to learn the old Viking ways, but quickly discovering that those ways are wrong. (Cowell’s a Brit, but the Hiccup and the other kids sound American, while the adults have Norse accents.)

It’s probably because the movie was shown in 3-D that it made me think of Avatar, but it also shares the theme of humans treating the unknown with fear and violence. The dragons are not an alien race, but nor are they the threat the adult Vikings assume. Given that the plot that had seemed to be about condemning mindless slaughter, the destructive conclusion to the story (not present in the book) seemed wrong to me; it also makes no sense if you believe in the theory of evolution, but never mind. The most entertaining scenes are watching Hiccup learn the ways of the dragon and, on a visual level, watching the dragons soar against a backdrop of mountains and sea. The 3-D effects, as good as I’ve seen, seemed more prominent than in Avatar.

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viewed 3/4/10 at Bridge [PFS screening] and reviewed 3/28/10

Fish Tank (***1/4)

This coming-of-age drama is, very roughly, the poor girl’s version of An Education. In that film, the teenaged, Oxford-aspiring heroine sees a romance with a man in his 30s (Peter Sarsgaard) as a way to escape her own dull life. Fifteen-year-old Mia isn’t dating the older man—her mom is—but if Sarsgaard’s character represents the lure of finer things to a middle-class girl, then Connor (Michael Fassbender) represents the lure of middle-class life to her. Katie Jarvis, a non-actress plucked from a train station in Essex, England, by writer-director Andrea Arnold, plays Mia with a minimum of artifice, and Arnold writes her as such. (The accents in the movie are not those of posh London and make some of the dialogue tough on American ears, although Fassbender at times sounds sort of American.)

Mia’s mother looks more like an older sister and acts more like a nasty roommate who drinks too much, but she’s presented more as a lousy parent than a villain. The housing project she and her two daughters live in seems tolerable. Still, Mia is an angry girl, and a loner, and Connor’s affability throws her at first. While the story becomes more provocative, Arnold avoids sensationalism. Her point is to show, not to shock. Mia won’t be going to Oxford, but she too winds up with an education.

IMDB link

viewed 2/20/2010 on pay-per-view ($7.99) and reviewed 2/21/2010