The Woman in the Septic Tank (***)

The first ten minutes tell the story of a slum dweller who, unable to feed her seven children, sells one to a pedophile. Comedy gold! Actually, as the narration (“scene 36,” “Mila looks confused” and so on) makes us aware, these are characters invented by middle-class hipsters who think such poverty porn will be awards bait at Cannes, maybe even the Oscars. I should mention this all happens in the Phillipines.

The rest of the film follows the two guys making the film and their female assistant as they drive to  meet their potential lead actress (Eugene Domingo, playing herself as well as “Mila”) and scout locations around a notorious dump. Meanwhile, they debate casting, whether making the unfortunate sold child a boy would be edgier (and thus more likely to earn awards), and so on. We see the same story rerun with a different cast and in different styles — docudrama, weepy melodrama, even a musical, with pretty good songs. Ms. Domingo’s explanation of the “three styles of acting” is a highlight.

This is 87 minutes of lightly satirical fluff, especially enjoyable if you like movies. Even if it’s it in the service of comedy, all the storytelling variations gives a real perspective into fimmaking. I also enjoyed hearing the way the characters fluidly elided between English and Filipino. But everything else about this, a big hit at home, is a reminder that film is a universal language.

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viewed 10/28/2012 at Ritz Bourse [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 10/28/2012

Hugo (***1/2)

Though best known for violent tales such as Goodfellas, Raging Bull, The Departed, Martin Scorsese has made several movies in other genres, but this is the first one you can take the kids to, and should.

With his Aviator screenwriting collaborator John Logan, he’s adapted Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret into a film whose storytelling mostly equals its considerable visual impact. Unlike some other 3-D releases, the 3-D really does add an extra dimension to the production. Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a 12-year-old boy in 1931, is an orphaned boy who winds the clocks in a cavernous train station in Paris. (But everyone speaks English with an English accent.) Exterior shots of the city and interior shots of gears and wheels, give one a sense of traveling on a monorail. It’s obvious that much of this is created on a computer, but the slightly other worldly quality that provides works fine here.

The mystery relates to an automaton, a mechanical man Hugo’s late father acquired and repaired, but Hugo lacks the literal key that will unlock the mystery. Helping him solve it is the young grand-niece of an older man (Ben Kingsley) who sells toys in the station. Another mystery attaches to the old man and somehow links the girl to the boy. Hugo encapsulates most of what makes a good all-ages story: a resourceful hero (and heroine) with just the right amount of mischieviousness, a mystery, and a touch of the fantastic. Scorsese’s own love of cinema history plays into it as well. Hugo and his friend (Chloë Grace Moretz) sneak into a theater and watch a Harold Lloyd movie. The automaton recalls the robot in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. And an even older part of movie history lies at the center of the mystery, which is based on a true story, though the boy’s is fictional.

If I had any quibble with the movie it’s in the very self-conscious way it peddles nostalgia and braininess. Or maybe it’s trying too hard to be a “magical,” like The Polar Express. For example, it’s not enough that Hugo’s friend is a book lover, or uses fancy vocabulary, but you can almost see the ten-cent words underlined; when Hugo manages one himself, she actually says, “good one” to him. Yes, a quibble. Aside from making little kids fidget a bit—it’s better for those old enough to follow a scene in which the kids do some library research—the mildly highfalutin’ aspects of the film are overwhelmed by plain wonderful ones.

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viewed 11/22/11 at Franklin Institute [PFS screening] and reviewed 11/28/11

Broken Embraces (***1/4)

Pedro Almodóvar continues to give melodrama a good name with this sometimes lighthearted effort that also pays tribute to his love of cinema. I could have sworn that Harry Caine (Lluís Homar, of Almodóvar’s Bad Education), the name of the blind main character, was taken from an old Hitchcock movie. It’s not, but is a pseudonym explained, along with the blindness, in flashback scenes that form the bulk of the movie. Penelopé Cruz (in her fourth film for Almodóvar) appears as the mistress of a powerful older man who’s financing a film with her in the lead and with Caine (aka Mateo Blanco) as director. Blanca Portillo, who appeared with Cruz in Almodóvar’s most recent film, Volver, plays Harry/Mateo’s agent and confidant. Danger and duplicity fuel the unfolding mystery, about which saying more would detract.

Almodóvar’s recent films radiate a kind of joy even when the situation is melancholy. It’s as if by giving voice to his characters’ emotionality he is celebrating humanity. In this case there is also the joy in moviemaking. He has seemingly stopped making full-on comedies—the film-within-a-film here operating as a sort of tribute to the old Pedro—but humor makes its way into this story too, as well as jealousy, romance, regret, and redemption. Balancing the dark themes, it’s figuratively and literally colorful. Broken Embraces isn’t particularly deep, but Almodóvar has a vivid way with his characters and stories, whose only formula seems particular to their creator.

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viewed 1/23/10 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 2/7–3/1/10

Nine (**3/4)

A look at the principal cast—Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Sophia Loren, Kate Hudson, and Fergie—might lead one to suspect that the title refers to how many Oscars they’ve collectively received, but that number is actually seven. (The late Anthony Mingella, who co-wrote the script, won one as a director.) The title is a play on 8½, the classic Federico Fellini film adapted first into an Italian play, then a 1982 Tony-winning musical with songs by Maury Yeston. There are a dozen songs, including three new ones by Yeston.

It took me ten minutes to recall that it was Day-Lewis in the role of Guido Contini, a great Italian director modeled on Fellini, and not some Italian actor. (He speaks English, like everyone else, but with an accent that even comes through when he sings.) Contini is a vastly popular figure who has, however, had a couple of recent flops and can’t come up with a story for his newest film, despite the fact that pre-production is already well under way. Cotillard has the second largest role as his sweet, cheated-upon wife. Writer’s block is the storyline, but the theme is all of the women in Contini’s life: his mother (Loren), his mistress (Cruz), his leading lady (Kidman), his costume designer (Dench), his childhood object of lust (Fergie), and an American journalist (Hudson). All of them appear in the first musical production, a fantasy sequence involving a bevy of skimpily clad women on what’s supposed to be a film set.

Nine follows the sci-fi films 9 and District 9 into theaters in ’09. It would be unfair and too easy to say that Nine is “by the numbers,” but the storyline feels overfamiliar, or at least the infidelity theme does. It is more correct to say that the film is “for the (musical) numbers,” which are elaborately staged and surprisingly well sung by the actors, who are generally not known for singing. Of course, Fergie is the exception, and belts out “Be Italian” with fervor. Yeston’s songs are wordy rather than clever or elegant, but are very descriptive of the storyline. A couple of them stuck in my head. All in all, though it might be obvious to say, this is a movie for lovers of big, fancily costumed musical production numbers. I am not such a person, but I still loved director Rob Marshall’s previous musical adaptation, Chicago. That was, in a way, just as much about moviemaking as this, since it was really a parody of a gangster movie, and the clever songs worked well with that kind of storytelling. Here the mixture of frothy production and serious themes tends to underscore how little is actually being said.

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viewed 12/26/09 at Ritz East and reviewed 1/2/1o

Dangerous Parking (***1/4)

This is about a film director, and so it’s both narrated and shot as if from the view of its vulgar and sometimes-funny protaganonist. The director in the movie is played by the director of the movie, Peter Howitt, whose last two jobs were the romantic-comedy Laws of Attraction and the lame Bond-Inspector Clouseau mélange Johnny English. This is another affair altogether. Profanity-spewing and cantankerous for much of the story, he’s an unconventional movie hero whose drunken misanthropy is only partially redeemed by his self-loathing. If anything, the movie could use a few more scenes of redemption in the early going. After all, he’s supposed to be charming enough to be a ladies’ man, even if he chalks it up to his status as the enfant terrible of the British cinema. But we don’t see much of his professional life either. What we do see is binge-drinking, trip to rehab, doctor’s admonishments, and courtship of his cellist wife (Saffron Burrows), all cleverly mixed up in time in a way that becomes clearer. The movie’s about more than alcoholism and sickness. It’s about the human connection that is the only thing that can replace alcohol for its main character, who is apparently based on Stuart Browne, the writer whose novel Howitt adapted. Clearly the movie was a labor of love for Howitt; the specificity of the story’s details and the character’s personality strongly suggested to me a work of biography. These details give a power to the film, though it’s possibly too long.

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viewed and reviewed 4/6/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival

Pistoleros (**1/4)

A whole mess of Danish gangsters double-cross and kill each other over a cache of cash hidden after a botched heist…as told to a couple of aspiring Copenhagen filmmakers. Director Sparky Gonzalez comes off as a low-rent Guy Ritchie (Snatch, Revolver), though with some spaghetti western touches, like the soundtrack. Without Ritchie’s sense of style, and a script that’s less clever than convoluted, the whole thing comes off as contrived.

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viewed and reviewed 4/4/08; screened at Philadelphia Film Festival.

Mr. Bean’s Holiday (***1/4)

Clever visual humor makes this in most ways superior to the first Mr. Bean movie, and partly atones for star Rowan Atkinson’s lame attempt to merge Bean and James Bond in Johnny English.

Mr. Bean started out as a silent TV character before Atkinson appeared in the aptly named Bean in 1997. Here he wins a trip to France and travels from Paris to Cannes. Unlike in many American films, France here is depicted as a French-speaking country, which works out well. The language barrier plays into Bean’s natural disinclination to speak. Also, the new setting accentuates the fish-out-of-water feeling and provides a good platform for Atkinson’s Chaplinesque oddness. He’s an absurdist everyman, repelling with his facial expressions, endearing via his essential harmlessness, and solving a series of problems, largely of his own making, using his childlike sense of logic. The humor isn’t subtle, but it’s low-key. For example, the film has the same gag as one in Wild Hogs. The hero accidentally spills a drink on a laptop computer. Unlike in Wild Hogs, it was realized that having the computer catch on fire and extending the joke for twice as long would not make it funnier. Director Steve Bendelack favors long takes and long shots that allow us to watch the humor slowly unfold. A highlight is Bean’s desperate attempt to raise money via a karaoke street performance, using one song after another until he finally finds the right one.

Becoming entangled with a boy who’s lost his father (due to Bean's inadvertent mishap) and an actress, Bean becomes, sort of, a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival. Willem Dafoe amuses as a pretentious American film director. Old-fashioned yet timeless, with appeal for all ages, this was a pleasant surprise.

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reviewed 8/28/07

Avenue Montaigne [Fauteuils d'Orchestre] (***1/4)

? Along a posh Parisian boulevard: an ornery TV actress wants a movie role; a concert pianist wants to shed the trappings of his profession; an aging art collector wants to sell; and a perky waitress, crossing the paths of all these important persons, wants only to earn enough to pay for a flat. American director and occasional actor Sydney Pollack plays a director for whom the actress hopes to play Simone de Beauvoir.

+ You don’t see too many of these ensemble-cast movies coming out of Hollywood, and most of the recent examples are heavy works like Crash or Babel, but I always like it when I see this sort of multi-character comedy-drama done well. The waitressing job (she does room service too) is a nice device to have the poor pixie interact with all of the ritzier characters, who have a lot but want something else. The story does a nice job of introducing all the angst of these people while keeping the tone light. Other pluses are the cast (especially Valérie Lemercier as the actress, the most full-bodied character, and Cécile de France as the waitress), the piano playing, and some fabulous views of the Eiffel Tower.

- The movie is sometimes serious, but rarely deep. Not a great flaw, as it’s not striving to be.

= ***1/4 This charmer isn’t really a romantic comedy, but it has elements of and feels like one, so it’s worth a look for anyone who enjoys that genre. Lemercier’s and Pollack’s half-in-French, half-in-English discussion of whether de Beauvoir was sexually repressed is a seriocomic highlight.

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