The Grand Budapest Hotel (***1/4)

For those who know the films of Wes Anderson (Rushmore, , Moonrise Kingdom, The ), there is scarcely any point in reviewing them other than in relation to each other. You already know if you’ll like this, or you haven’t seen Anderson’s work. [A recent Saturday Night Live parody, in the form of a horror movie trailer, is hilarious and specific in a way that, say, a Steven Spielberg parody could probably not have been.] Whether set on a train in India (The Darjeeling Unlimited), in the poshest parts of New York (The Royal Tenenbaums), or inside animated tunnels (The Fantastic Mr. Fox), they all seem to take place in a half-real, half fairy-tale world of pastel colors, secret passageways, and Rube Goldberg-inspired plots. His heroes are the verbose but well-meaning, like the middle-aged concierge Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and his young protegé Zero (Tony Revolori) at the center of this period piece.

It does not take place in Budapest but in Lutz, a fictional city in a fictional Eastern European country where people mostly speak English in a variety of accents, but mostly English and American. It is supposed to be 1932, which only matters insofar as it conjures up a world in which conflict and even modernity lie ahead. Technically, it is the late 1960s; the story is told by an older man (F. Murray Abraham) to a younger one (Jude Law), and this only matters insofar as it depicts the 1930s elegance as having long past, the hotel in a long, slow decline, its past  as mythical seeming as a fairy tale, though the cavernous lobby remains.

Save perhaps the anti-climactic ending, the plotting here, involving the mysterious death of an elderly guest, is clever and fun. As always, the humor comes at odd moments and in unexpected ways. For me, one such moment was when Zero is surprised to learn that one way Gustave satisfied his elderly female guests was by sleeping with them. His mentor explains that when you are young “it’s all fillet steak…but as you get older, you have to move on to the cheaper cuts.” Gustave adds that he likes the cheaper cuts. There’s no meanness in Anderson’s heroes, though this movie has a pair of villains.

Anderson is apt to quickly jettison both heroes and villains from his story. For me, his previous movie, Moonrise Kingdom, had an emotional center that differentiated it from his other work, though perhaps that was an individual response. Maybe the tale of an old man recalling his long-ago mentor and long-ago life will bring a similar nostalgia to some people. For others, it will be another solid effort by one of Hollywood’s most distinct voices.

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viewed 3/26/14 7:30 pm at Ritz 5 and posted 3/26/14

Trishna (**3/4)

Transplanting a novel like Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) to the present day might be problematic, since the cultural context is so specific. The rigid hierarchies of Victorian England no longer exist in modern Britain. But they do in India, where traveling from a remote village to a city like Mumbai is, in some respects, to travel in time as well as distance. In addition to altering the setting, Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation (his third Hardy-inspired drama) heavily abridges and alters the plot, but retains the emphasis on its heroine’s humble origins.

In the course of the story young Trishna (Frieda Pinto) travels from her father’s home in a poor village to Mumbai. The apt cliché is, you can take the girl out of the small town, but not the small town out of the girl. That, however, is both more succinct and more direct than Winterbottom’s script. He tells much of the story visually, and in the way his two leads act and speak. Trishna/Pinto, so deferential at the start of the film that it’s startling, changes as she leaves home. A young man (Riz Ahmed) makes this possible, the worldly, wealthy, son of an Anglo-Indian gentleman (Roshan Seth, playing the only secondary character of any interest). Eventually, the young man changes too.

Their relationship develops slowly, and the movie requires patience. I appreciated the subtlety with which Winterbottom depicts the diversity of modern India. Perhaps the strongest scenes, done with minimum dialogue, show the way Trishna’s relationship with her lover changes when the two leave Mumbai. At the same time, I felt that Winterbottom relied too much on the viewer’s knowledge of the lingering effects of caste. One knows it, but does not always feel it, which is crucial in understanding things as they develop. What should be devastating is merely sad.

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viewed 7/24/12 7:30 pm at Ritz East (PFS screening) and reviewed 7/25/12

Man on a Ledge (***)

For at least its first half, this fun little thriller kept one step ahead of me. Why has a guy (Sam Worthington) about to step out the 21st-story window of a New York City hotel wiped off his glass and silverware? Why has this ex-cop been sentenced to 25 years in prison (from which he escapes in an early sequence)? Why does he ask for a particular officer (Elizabeth Banks) to be the one to talk him down? What’s going on with the brother he fought with at his father’s funeral? And what does a rich real-estate mogul (a deliciously nasty Ed Harris) have to do with it?

By the time a crowd gathers on the street below, it’s clear that this is not an ordinary suicide threat, but not what it is. Only when that’s all clear do things slightly unravel, when action gets substituted for smarts, the hero pulls a couple of unlikely superhero moves, and weapons are discharged, though the violence quotient stays low. I could talk about a couple of plot holes, but I hate to spoil things, and they don’t mar the main plot, which maintains the tension even though, of course, the guy’s not going to jump and ruin the whole movie.

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viewed 1/4/12 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 1/4/12

I Served the King of England (***)

Here’s something I haven’t seen before. It’s the tale of a middle-aged man and a young man, separated by 30 years. The flashback structure is the most typical thing. Stronger on visual flair than plot, it begins with the young man in a faux silent-movie segment as a small-time, small-0f-stature huckster in Prague who works his way up to a big-time waiter by absorbing the lessons of a series of mentors. The man learns well, seeming to float above everything, including a series of women who wander in and out of the story. Like other characters besides the lead, some make an impression, but most go away soon. The tone is whimsical, slightly reminding me of Amélie, but with less romantic appeal. Still, even a blowjob (implied, not seen) from a hooker seems nearly cute as light classical piano plays in the background.

The server, who dreams of money, women, and little else, is a silent witness to the decadency of the prewar era, rendered with tapestries of banknotes, vivid color, and more exotic dishes than an Iron Chef marathon. What separates the young man from his older self, besides 15 years in prison and drab surroundings, is of course the war. Typically, this would be the part in which he wises up and realizes what’s really important, but not here; he sees only that the Nazis are being treated badly by the Czechs, and sympathizes with them. This is only one of the unusual things in the movie. Probably two hours is a bit long to tell the story, and only toward the end did I lose my own mild feeling of detachment. But the choreographed, slightly unreal way the story is told and the look of the film give it an originality than may make it worthwhile for the adventurous.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 9/8/08

Priceless (**3/4)

Here’s a French pastry of a comedy that has a mild throwback quality to it. Hotel bartender Gad Elmaleh meets professional seductress Audrey Tautou, currently trading her company for the financial attention of a wealthy older gentleman. The poor barman fools her into thinking he’s rich, but his becoming as mercenary as her is what finally wins her over. She lets him in on the tricks of her trade. For example, leaving a sentence unfinished is one way to leave a suitor wanting more, and thus eager to please. I liked the movie (shot in Nice and Monte Carlo), despite a faint believability quotient, but the story of gullibility and greed made for a romantic comedy without real romance.

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viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 5/7/08

Broken English (***)

Parker Posey stars in this modest film that splits the difference between indie drama and traditional romantic comedy. She’s Nora, a single, mid-thirties-ish New Yorker who’s become bored with her job as a hotel event planner. Early on, we take a tour of her love life, including a blind date set up by her mother (Gena Rowlands). Writer-director Zoe Cassavetes eshews the obvious parade-of-horrible-dates montage featured in such films as Because I Said So. These dates merely don’t work out, in one fashion or another. Cassavetes, daughter of Rowlands and of the celebrated John Cassavetes, deftly stages the scenes so that, rather than satirizing Nora’s date with an actor, there’s a slightly detached quality that seems to gently mock his mild self-importance and her overeager desire to impress him. Eventually Nora meets a French guy who’s suitably dreamy without seeming generic. Does Nora need a man, or merely to become wiser and more self-content? The movie, again, strikes a compromise and ends when to proceed further would be trite. Neither Pretty Woman fantasy nor Unmarried Woman statement, the younger Cassavetes’s debut feature is neither earth-shattering nor iconoclastic like her dad’s movies, but consistently pleasant. Parker Posey seems to specialize in playing weird characters, even in her mainstream forays like Superman Returns, but here she does a nice job in a sort of normal role. She’s a little neurotic, but not quirky. Sopranos murder victim Drea de Matteo as Nora’s pal also mixes it up.

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